"Well, you're the ambassador, Max," says Grant.
"He's got a point," says I.
"Dammit guys! Okay, I'll do it." And so the next day when her parents are away, and Irene is helping us map out roughly our adventures through the city, Max slides in to say, "Oh, by the way love, you wouldn't know where we could get some weed around here do you?"
She laughs short at the affront, but she takes it in stride with a smile and a bat of the eye. "Actually," she says, "my older brother sells weed. He lives just a couple of blocks away. Shall I call him for you?"
Personally, I'm caught unawares. Really? Isn't your father a prison guard? But whatever, who cares. "Yes, please," I say.
"Really?" asks Max. "That's just the sweetest thing."
"Yes," she says matter-of fact-ly, smiling because she certainly feels us all in the palm of her hand. She calls her brother and tells us he'll be over shortly.
"How much is it?" asks Grant. She asks her brother in Spanish, and in English tell us that it's five euros a gram and asks us how much we want.
"Five euros a gram, huh," torts Max, but the seriousness in his voice isn't reflected on his face, or on any of ours. There's a child-like wonder in all of us, like kids at the toy store and all the toys are half off. It's no longer a question of if we're getting something, but rather how much or how many somethings should we decide to get. The prospects are tantalizing, but our wallets are light.
"How's about ten?" suggests Grant. "It's a good round number. And we're not going to see prices like this anywhere else. We might as well stock up."
"Sold!" I say.
"Sounds good. That should hold us through Paris," says Max. "Ten grams it is, Irene. You little bundle of awesome."
She tells her brother. "He'll be over soon," she says, "Look out for the red M5"
"He drives a red M5? Baller." At least he's subtle. We're all waiting on the balcony and he comes flying down the street and pulls half-way up the apartment driveway before getting out. There's a gaudy pair of sunglasses over his eyes. They're on his head when he comes inside.
"What's up guys! Where you all from?" he greets us.
"California," we say.
"Oh! California Girls! I love California," he says. "And this is for you." He hands us a package of tinfoil about the size of a football and we open it up to find our ten grams of weed, like in some giant baked potato wrap that we can't wait to eat. Irene's brother hangs around for a while to ask us about Los Angeles and movie stars before jetting off to other businesses, leaving us to decide on how exactly we were going to transport all this weed in our bags.
"It'll all fit in my bag, I think." I'm quite confident. We wrap it back up in the tinfoil and squish it down, and it squeezes into the bottom of my pack comfortably, wrapped in clothes and towels. And by this time, we're already high. The weed's not great (it's brown and light and still on the stem sometimes), but hey, what we didn't have in quality, we certainly made up for in quantity, and it gets us there. And we're going.
