Two men prepare for life after drug court

The confident strut, the dark khakis and the blue tie do little to hide the smile Devin Schneider is proudly sporting this morning. His swagger is unchanged by the metal detector. It is an important day for him, a day he said he’ll remember for a long time. He is drug-free and has been for a whole year.

Roughly a year ago, Schneider was arrested for possession, though he won’t tell a reporter of what,  while studying at the University of Mary Washington. He pleaded guilty and was admitted to the Charlottesville/Albemarle Drug Court Program, where he was held responsible for his behavior and his sobriety. He submitted to daily drug tests, made weekly court appearances, attended intensive substance abuse rehabilitation and got a full-time job.


Devin Schneider graduated today from the Charlottesville/Albemarle Drug Court Program.

Schneider struggled at the beginning, getting sanctioned for relapsing into alcohol use, thus prolonging his stay in the program. But one night, as clichéd as it may sound, his life changed.

“Jimmy and I were in the same treatment group, and he needed a ride home, so I drove him and we just clicked,” says Schneider. James E. Crenshaw III is a fellow graduate of the program, but unlike Schneider, he was an inspiration to drug court officers from the start.

Crenshaw’s stellar performance was attributed to his determination to be a good father and son. His drug court officer shared his journey, praising his courage to admit he felt isolated and alone and his plans to go back to school and get a degree in computer science. “I plan on staying out of trouble and catching up on my child support,” says Crenshaw.


James Crenshaw was a model drug court participant with no relapses during the program.

Today, they both stood tall in front of a packed courtroom receiving praises from Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Edward Hogshire and featured speaker, Bob Gibson, former Charlottesville reporter and current president of the Sorensen Institute.

Gibson has covered the local court system for 31 years, attending many drug court graduations, meeting many former addicts and writing about them in The Daily Progress.

“This program allows people the opportunity to change their lives and gives us a chance to celebrate life,” he said. “The only job advice that I can give you is to work at what you like doing, do what you have a passion for.”

The drug court program is an alternative to incarceration, a more successful one at that, says Jeff Gould, drug court administrator. Schneider and Crenshaw were among the four graduates of the program, which enrolls 45 to 50 people. Gould is proud to say the program is not only more efficient in recovery rates than incarceration, but also in its cost: the state spends on average $22,000 on a year of incarceration versus a quarter of that in drug court. “This has a significant impact on tax payers too,” he says.

After graduating, Crenshaw and Schneider walk out of the courtroom hugging family, friends and dreaming about the future. Crenshaw’s mother holds Schneider close and looks him in the eye. “You gonna stay out of trouble and stay clean, you hear?” Schneider smiles and dives into a warm hug.

Both graduates are already planning their future. “I am going back to Mary Washington and [will] study economics,” says Schneider. “But my dream is to be a sports journalist.” Crenshaw’s dream, on the other hand, involves traveling—if not physically, at least in his thoughts. “I want to go on an island and hang back in the sun.”

Tired of evictions, Albemarle Sheriff Harding hopes letter will help

Albemarle County Sheriff J.E. "Chip" Harding announced today that the number of evictions in the county has risen 40 percent since 2006. By this time two years ago, there were 203 evictions, compared to 264 at this point last year and 285 this year. Most of those evicted are renters.

"In the Sheriff’s Office, it makes us feel terrible evicting people," says Harding. "How can we help?"


County Sheriff Chip Harding says his office will give a letter with information on emergency resources to those being evicted.

In his statement, Harding credits the current state of the economy for the leap in evictions and expects the numbers to continue to rise. "I think we’re seeing more and more evictions as the economy continues on this down swing," he says. Of the people the department ends up evicting, some are just “down on their luck" and "need somebody to give them a one time injection."

To that effect, Harding says many foreclosures and evictions could be avoided if residents are knowledgeable of the local resources, and his office will start giving residents a letter with information on those resources when it begins the eviction process.  The letter has contact information for organizations that provide short term financial assistance, such as Love, INC, MACAA CARES and the Salvation Army. Piedmont Housing Alliance has counselors specially trained in assisting with foreclosures.

But if all else fails, Harding has a clear message: "If you need help, call me." He can be reached at 972-4001.

Kluge-owned eateries close, file for bankruptcy

Locally-connected billionaire John Kluge isn’t immune to a weak economy, at least in the sense that some of the restaurant chains he owns have had to close. According to the New York Times, the national chains Bennigan’s (an Irish pub sort of place) and Steak & Ale (beef and beer, we’re guessing) are facing dire times. Bennigan’s was shuttered Tuesday and has filed for bankruptcy, and Steak & Ale will also close.

Kluge owns a business conglomerate of which Texas-based Metromedia Restaurant Group, the parent company of Bennigan‘s and Steak & Ale, is one unit. Another unit is Metromedia Steakhouses, which owns Ponderosa and Bonanza and is not covered in the bankrupty filing. (As C-VILLE reported last week, though, our local Ponderosa has indeed closed.)

The Times quotes a restaurant industry expert, Amy Greene of Avondale Partners, who explains that with the minimum wage going up along with commodity prices, restaurants have rising costs that they can’t pass on to consumers—since those consumers, in turn, are being squeezed by gas prices and grocery-bill hikes. Also, the Times piece suggests, the fact that the country has so freaking many of the same kind of restaurant—your basic fake-nostalgia-decor, fried-appetizer, flair-in-a-parking-lot kind of place—that, as the economy tightens, some chains and locations will inevitably get pinched.

Having billions to your name doesn’t insulate your Bennigan’s from a chilly economy.

Chef to the governor wants to watch you chew

We’re all about local food—you know that, people—but when the governor’s personal chef invites Virginians to send him videos of themselves playing locavore, we start to hear a distinct beeping sound from our silly-detectors.

According to WCAV-19, Governor Tim Kaine’s personal chef Jason Babson has issued an official challenge to all us citizens of the Commonwealth: Choose a day during Farmers Market Week, August 3-9, and eat only foods grown or produced in Virginia for the whole day. So far, so fabulous. It’s the "fun and participatory" add-on that makes us giggle: as CAV’s website puts it, "you can make a video of what you ate, where you bought it and how much you enjoyed it."

Well, actually, you can do that any day of the year, but Babson is actually inviting all y’all to send the videos in to VDACS (the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services) so they can somehow choose a winner, based on something unspecified (shiniest bacon? fullest mouth?) and set that lucky person up with a big old prize pack and the thrill of seeing their video on the VDACS website!

We’re guessing that including scenes of "how you eliminated it" in videos sent to the good folks in Richmond are not likely to be winners.

Anyway, says we, go buy a local tomato and enjoy—with or without the cameras rolling. After all, both virtue and freshness are their own rewards.

Open wide: People in high places want to see what you’re eating.

Categories
Living

August 08: Design, living a trends for home and garden

 

Basket cases

Although we might not be as resourceful as Depression-era grandmothers with hand-made flour sack aprons, we love the feeling we get from reusing things that look like trash. Baskets and containers from the farmers’ market are a pretty way to organize in the kitchen, bath or office. You’ll find your berries and tomatoes come in very useful woven wood, cardboard and pulp style baskets of various sizes.


Farmers’ market baskets as free organizers for all your loose stuff? Hey, it beats driving to Tysons Corner and spending money at the Container Store.

How to make the most of them? Remove contents when you get home so produce doesn’t bleed into the container or start to break down. Market containers are not meant for rugged use. Pint or quart sizes catch all the small things that get lost in cabinets and drawers, like batteries, eye drops, and sponges under the sink, or loose ends in the office like paperclips, sticky notes and phone chargers.

Use a bushel basket with a handle as a waste bin for sorting junk mail, to contain unwieldy craft supplies like yarn, or as a caddy for cleaning supplies. (If you’re not lucky enough to snag one, craft stores often carry them.) Four-quart-sized baskets can work well for organizing mail or bath supplies. As for containing your enthusiasm for a well-organized home, well, that’s a taller order.—Sarah Jacobson

Scottsville on stage

When The New York Times went on a nationwide search to find great homes listed for $700,000, it was a cabin in our very own Scottsville that made an appearance among two other houses in Arizona and Florida. We agree it’s a sweet place: 2,083 square feet on 45 acres of land, extensive cedar wood work on the siding and staircase, oak beams cozying up the ceiling and a grand stone hearth to finalize the undeniable comfort of this lodge-like getaway. I’m about to drive out there and offer up my own down-payment.

Virginia’s lack of palm trees or saguaros aside, we made a good showing; and if a house-hunter, New Yorker or otherwise, had $700,000 to drop, she’d certainly have a raft of local options.


This house in Scottsville recently had its 15 minutes of fame.

At this moment on the market, you’ve got your 1,807-square-foot Wintergreen condo with three sizeable bedrooms and an equal number of full bathrooms (huh?), plus a killer view of the slopes. Or there’s a charming colonial in the heart of Charlottesville, where $695,000 buys a super-convenient location, four bedrooms and four bathrooms, all on a one-level floor plan with a terraced slate patio. Tea and closing documents, anyone?—Suzanne van der Eijk

Tile trek

In this month’s retail news, there’s one downer Downtown: Christine Magne Antiquaire has closed. 

On a happier note, Virginia Tile has picked up shop and moved to Zion Crossroads, a burgeoning retail center about 17 miles east of Charlottesville. Its old location off Harris Street was charming but cramped. While the new spot will feel more than slightly off the beaten path for Charlottesville customers, they should be pleased with the larger, streamlined facility. Owner Bruce van der Linde says the new showroom is more “self-directed and seamless, with lots more vignettes and displays.” 

While the move is still in progress, those who visit now will find plenty to peruse (including heated tile floors in the bathrooms�"�feel free to de-shoe). Van der Linde says the relocation was prompted by mounting congestion in town and the fact that “[Zion Crossroads] could be the next Short Pump,” as he puts it. 

Van der Linde hopes to keep his Charlottesville customers coming, but complaining commuters won’t get his sympathy: “I live in Earlysville.” 

If you’re thinking of dropping in, van der Linde recommends making an appointment: 817-8453.—Kathryn Faulkner

Power move

What if you want to get your main electrical service line moved to a different point on your house? At our place, this move was necessary because a previous owner had built a second-floor deck right underneath where the powerline swooped from a pole at the edge of the yard toward the house itself. This created a bit of a situation: Anyone standing on the deck could reach out and touch—or walk right into—the service line. This, in the words of our home inspector, was “the most outrageous safety violation I’ve ever seen.” Dubious distinction, to be sure!

After calling our power company to find out what the requirements are for a safe place to attach the line—it has to be a certain height from the ground and a certain distance from the deck—we located a new spot for the so-called weatherhead (the hardware that attaches line to house). From here, the line could run under the deck: safer and less of an eyesore.


Whereas before, the main service line swooped dangerously over the deck, it now attaches to the house beside the deck and travels safely underneath.

Next step: Hire an electrician. This is one of the few projects we D.I.Y.-ers weren’t willing to take on by ourselves. We got two estimates and were glad we did, since one was quite a bit lower. (Luckily, we wouldn’t have to move our meter box. If we had, we would have been paying for a lot more of our electrician’s time.) We also learned that the electrician would have to schedule the power company to turn off the juice, then turn it back on once the work was done. Oh, and there’d be still another party involved: the county building inspector, who’d sign off on the work before the power could be restored.

Bottom line? The electrician was at our house for about six hours and billed us around $500. And we feel much, much safer standing on our deck.—Spackled Egg

Breaking news

This month’s surfer: Paige Mattson, owner of Blue Ridge Eco Shop

What’s on her browser: treehugger.com

What it is: Dubbed the green CNN, treehugger.com is the center for sustainability information. Whether you’re a newbie and think green’s just a color, or you’re president of the neighborhood recycling union, you’ll find something useful among the site’s plethora of news, solutions and product information.


Paige Mattson

Why she likes it: Paige says it’s nice to find a site that is non-biased. Apart from all the up-to-date information of what’s going on in the green community, such as issues coming before Congress, it also provides links to useful resources, like places to buy green.

Categories
Arts

The festival express

This isn’t the best place for arguing semantics, but what the heck is a festival, anyway?

We have our fair share, to be sure—the Dogwood Festival and the Charlottesville Vegetarian Festival come to mind, as do the annual Virginia Film Festival, the Festival of the Photograph and, my personal favorite, the Fall Fiber Festival and Montpelier Sheepdog Trials. Of course, we also have parties, mobs, clubs, groups, carnivals and fairs. (By the way, if you haven’t yet, make plans for the Albemarle County Fair, which opens on Tuesday.)

A festival, however, carves a more specific place for itself. Festivals seem to look over a shoulder at some history or tradition as they move forward in celebration—neither as aimless as an aggregation nor as solemn as a congregation.


Traveling carnival: Matt Burris (left) and Ross McDermott will spend a year on the road, documenting offbeat festivals around America and funding their trip through selling their photographs.

Yet to hear photographers Ross McDermott and Matt Burris speak about festivals is to realize just how antiquated or provocative, how damned bizarre, such events can be. The pair, former roommates during their undergraduate days at the Pratt Institute, came up with the idea of roadtripping to a handful of American festivals and documenting their travels more than a year ago. Now, with a bit of funding, a Dodge Ram converted to run on waste vegetable oil and a 1969 Airstream trailer transformed into a darkroom, the pair plans to hit their own circuit of events, dubbed “The American Festivals Project,” in the middle of September to turn out the country’s forgotten pockets.

“We’ve planned for about 60 festivals at this time,” says McDermott, who previously presented The Generations Project, a photo-and-audio documentary in which local high school students interviewed residents of local nursing homes, at The Bridge/Progressive Arts Initiative. “I imagine we’ll hear about some more through word of mouth.”
 
Stringing together a network of fests in a Dodge is a quick way to run up costs. McDermott and Burris received a “Young Explorers Grant” from National Geographic in December, a fund that awards between $2,000-5,000 to projects created by anyone between the ages of 18 and 25. The National Geographic website, however, makes it clear that the fund is set up as a supplemental grant; McDermott says that the money is supposed to fund a three-month project, but that he and Burris would like for their trip to last a year.

To extend their trip and encourage a bit of interactivity, the pair plans to sell prints from their travels on the project’s website (www.americanfestivalsproject.com). Starting on August 1, the website will launch and begin accepting pre-orders for photographs to be taken by McDermott and Burris and developed in the homemade darkroom in the belly of their silver Airstream; prices, says McDermott, will range from $100 for an 8" by 10" print, and $200 for an 11" by 17" print.

“If people are paying money for a print,” says McDermott, “they’ll be watching the website throughout the year to see where we’ve been and what we’re shooting.” McDermott and Burris plan to accept pre-orders from August 1 until mid-September, and mail the prints at the completion of their project.

C-VILLE Playlist
What we’ve been listening to

“Mercy,” by Duffy (from Rockferry)

“Constructive Summer,” by The Hold Steady (from Stay Positive) — Like driving a ’79 Chevy Nova down a Western Pennsylvania back road, with a bottle of whiskey on your breath, a full tank of gas and the principal’s daughter strewn in the passenger seat.

The Rite of Spring, by Igor Stravinsky

“No Quarter,” by Led Zeppelin (Live at Sports Arena, San Diego, March 14, 1975)

“Shake Appeal,” by Iggy Pop and the Stooges (from Raw Power)

So, what does the itinerary look like so far? How about starting with the Key Underwood Coon Dog Memorial Graveyard in Alabama? That’s where a collection of nearly 200 buried coon dogs are commemorated with a celebration, a liar’s contest and, maybe, a reading of William Ramsey’s official “Coon Dog Eulogy.” (Sample line: “If you have known the music of coon hounds on a trail…you know there has to be a God to make an animal like that.” Full text at coondogcemetery.com.)

Burris and McDermott name a few more festivals: the world’s largest Machine Gun Shootout, in Knob Creek, Kentucky; the annual Rattlesnake Round-Up in Sweetwater, Texas, including a rattlesnake parade and a snake charmers pageant; Ocean City, New Jersey’s Quiet Festival; the Little People of America convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and, a bit closer to home, the International Water Tasting Competition in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.

“There’s the Middle of Nowhere Fest,” adds McDermott. He pauses. “I don’t really know what that consists of.”

McDermott says that the first few months of the project are the most demanding, schedule-wise; the pair plans to leave plenty of time to follow tips on other, lesser known festivals. In the meantime, check out the American Festivals Project website starting August 1.

Speaking of festivals…

It should be noted that the fellows in Sons of Bill are some of the most charismatic dudes to pick up Telecasters. What you may not know is that these guys manage to translate their front porch scholar magnetism into writing. (Find their travelogue for C-VILLE Weekly on c-ville.com.) While looking for more info on local festivals, I found a link to the band’s brief review of sets by Metallica and Kanye West at Bonnaroo, the music festival produced by associates of Starr Hill Presents. Also worth a read: the short tale of how former Drive-By Trucker Jason Isbell nearly hustled SoB bassist Seth Green.

Sons of Bill guitarist Sam Wilson played a scorcher of a show with Paul Curreri at Gravity Lounge recently. For photos of the event, check the Feedback music blog.

Categories
Living

Always too early

My previous column focused on the most common sexual problem for women: low libido. Now I will address the most frequent male concern: rapid or premature ejaculation (PE). About 30 percent of men climax earlier than they want. For some it only happens once in a while or only with a certain partner; for others it occurs every time they have sex. Usually, the more anxious men get about the problem, the less control they have, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. The good news, however, is that it is often possible to make a clean break and start anew.
 
Until recently, PE was diagnosed when a man could last no longer than two minutes. This arbitrary definition did not work very well, and now he is said to have PE if he ejaculates or comes earlier than he intends to, no matter how long he lasts.

Coming early is not always an issue in a relationship. In fact, some men have told me that they have always been quick to ejaculate, and it was never a big deal with a past partner, but that with their current partner, the problem can’t be ignored.
 

Each case is different and I spend a lot of time asking questions, not because I am nosy, but because I need the information to give specific feedback and advice.

When did the PE start happening? Does it also happen during masturbation? Is it only a problem with a certain partner or with all sexual partners? Can he obtain another erection and last longer the second time? Does he have any specific thoughts before it happens? What does he think about when it happens?

When I get to the latter two questions, a lot of guys say that they think about baseball scores to distract themselves in order to last longer. This is actually the completely wrong thing to do. Instead of trying to distract themselves, they need to start focusing on their sensations and learn to monitor their arousal and how close they get to ejaculating. Easier said than done, maybe. It’s a skill that’s usually not acquired overnight, but one that’s indeed possible to learn.

There are different techniques to treat PE. The one I prefer is called the “Start–stop technique.” It’s a masturbation exercise where a man learns to monitor his sexual arousal more closely. He starts masturbating but stops stimulating himself when he has reached a point near ejaculation. Once he has “cooled down” sufficiently, he starts masturbating again, then stops again, and so on. Let me emphasize that sex therapists and sexuality counselors only talk to clients about assignments, which they then practice at home. There never is any nudity or touching in the sessions—that would go against our ethical guidelines and professional boundaries.

I often start with a reading assignment. Bernie Zilbergeld’s book The New Male Sexuality is a great resource. His first chapter, “The making of anxious performers” goes right to the heart of the problem. And the second chapter, “It’s two feet long, hard as steel, and will knock your socks off: The fantasy model of sex,” takes it a step further, explaining why so many men have unrealistic expectations about their sexual performance. Zilbergeld devotes an entire chapter on developing ejaculatory control.

Another good book, by Helen Singer Kaplan, called PE: How To Overcome Premature Ejaculation, is unfortunately no longer in print, and is difficult to find. But Michael Metz and Barry McCarthy’s Coping With Premataure Ejaculation, which I recommend, is readily available.

I always invite the female (or male) partner to join our sessions. Even though it may seem as if the problem is his, it obviously affects both of them and it takes understanding from both partners to address it. The partner can take a real active role in some of the assignments I give them. And most importantly, the more relaxed and reassuring she is about the PE, the better. The less he stresses about it, the easier it will be to let him develop confidence and eventually better control his ejaculation.

Categories
News

Blunt truth: marijuana dealers are people you already know

He isn’t nervous yet, because there isn’t any reason to be.

Is there?

Nothing in the car. Nothing in his pockets. Expired tags. Just popped into the office to grab something, his wallet with his ID left at home.

A cop asks him to step out of the car, please, sir.

Another officer says he smells pot and asks if they can search his person. Yes you can, officer, because he knows he’s got nothing on him. Can we search the car? The car is a mess, boxes of stuff from the move, clothes all over the place, it’ll take forever for them to go through it. No, you can’t search the car. It’s Saturday. He works full-time. Wants to get home and enjoy his weekend. The cops take their sweet time filling out the ticket and as he’s signing it, a K-9 unit pulls up. The dog sniffs around outside the car and then sniffs around inside. When it gets to the back, it starts to paw at the seats, scrabble, scrabble, skritch, skritch, and so now too bad, sucker, we’re gonna search the trunk. And they find a backpack and look inside.

Shit.

A half-pound of weed and a half-ounce of mushrooms, the irony being the shit in that bag was well over 18 months old, so moldy it was useless, couldn’t smoke it or sell it, and he’d been meaning to throw it out. But he’d forgotten. So now he’s handcuffed and seated on the curb and they go through everything in the car while a tow truck is called an

d it starts to get dark.

He’s taken to the drug task force office, Mirandized and interrogated.

 

Name and address?

My name is ___________, and I live at ___________.

Got any priors?

 

A misdemeanor possession charge in Richmond. Not gonna say anything else without a lawyer present.

And, like, eight cop cars drive over to his apartment. Please don’t knock the door down, BAM! Too late. Guns drawn, bulletproof vests secured, 12 cops spread through the rooms, CLEAR, CLEAR….

And lo…a big ol’ bag of weed, digital scales, another bag of weed, and another, and another. We got ’im! And about $1,700 cash, and he is processed, photographed a

nd locked up in jail with the late night drunks for two days.
He is 26 years old and has been selling weed for over 10 years.

“Mr. Dealer” grew up in Charlottesville, bought and sold and smoked weed in Charlottesville, and got busted in Charlottesville. He is a soldier in the War

on Drugs, specifically the war on marijuana, which the U.S. has been officially fighting for over seven decades.

Around 69 million Americans 12 and older have tried marijuana at least once. Last year, 356,472 kilos were seized nationwide, nearly 174 

 

of them in Virginia, with almost nine kilograms of processed marijuana and 486 plants taken by Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement Task Force (JADE) in our area. So far this year, JADE has confiscated just under 3 kilos. In 2007, 34 percent of Albemarle High School students admitted to having smoked pot, according to the Albemarle County Youth Risk Behavior Survey.

Seems like a lot of us are buying weed. So I ask you, how well do you know your dealer? How well do you know what he goes through? (How much do you really want to know?)

 

Buying harder drugs is furtive and illicit and feels a little dirty. Coke dealers often don’t do coke and despise the very people they serve. Some dealers dabble in everything. What do you want? Coke? Pot? X? Pills? Those dealers tend to have very short careers. They rent a hotel room every weekend to serve the parade of unknown users. Those dealers see you only as a source of cash.

But pot dealers are somewhat different. They sell to their friends and smoke with their clients. There’s a ritual to it.

Sometimes buying drugs isn’t that different from buying coffee. You bring a little gossip to the counter because you want the barista to think of you as more than just “Double Americano with room for cream.” And you want your dealer to know that you’re not just some stoner.

So you chat a little bit.

You hang out before exchanging money. Make awkward small talk.

Pot deals have a weird vibe of familiarity between rank strangers. If you’re a frequent smoker, you see your dealer with some regularity, know his name, maybe where he lives, maybe even a little bit about his nondealing life. But you’ve probably never visited when you didn’t want something.

When it comes to drugs, how well does anybody know anybody?

Mr. Dealer, (friends call him “D”), started smoking weed when he was 13. He was in eighth grade, at a county middle school, driven by life situations he needed to escape. Growing up with divorce, growing up poor. Driven by a general teenage sense of rebellion. In the ’80s, when I was going through the local schools, it was rare to find kids smoking weed, but by the ’9

0s there were definitely stoners amongst the “Saved by the Bell” set. You usually got your weed from somebody’s older brother, maybe the wealthier kids living out in Forest Lakes or Farmington. The STAB kids always had a lot of weed. So did the hippie-spawn who pinched it from their parents’ stash.

“I had a friend whose parents smoked,” Mr. Dealer says, “and he figured out where their stash was and when his parents would leave we’d run up to their closet.” It was mostly weekend smoking, and strictly scrounging—“no one was peddling at school or like, you know, selling dimes in class or anything like that.”

Just the same, someone wrote a letter to the assistant principal naming names, and Young D was called with 10 or 12 others into the office and grilled. It was then that his mom began to be suspicious, but he said, ”No, no, I only tried it once. It hurt my throat…”

It’s a’right, ma, I didn’t inhale.

He did inhale, of course. So did Mom. Rifling around in her glove compartment one day, he found an envelope down in the bottom all rolled up. “I wonder what this is?” he thought, and opened it. A week later his mom and her boyfriend have every door in the car open, and the contents spread out on the ground and they’re searching through it like mad.

When she finds a bag of pot in his closet, she picks him up from school and sits him down for a serious talk.

“Think carefully before answering me, young man. Where did this come from?”

“Your car.”

She grounds him for two weeks.

By ninth or 10th grade, Mr. Dealer and the childhood friend with whom he’d begun smoking were running out of sources of free pot and beginning to buy it. “Initially we’d just buy $10 worth, just enough to roll up and smoke that afternoon. But you know a month or two after that it was kind of like, ‘Well I don’t have $10 to spend on this shit.’” Both lived with single mothers and weren’t exactly rich: “We were the kids at the bottom of the barrel in terms of, you know, the brand-name clothes.” Somewhere along the way the realization came that if they were to buy a little bit more, they could sell some and pretty much smoke for free. “So we throw together, you know, $25, buy a quarter of schwag and break it up into as many dimes as we could muster out of it and sell that to make the money back. And then whatever we had left over we’d share, smoke for the afternoon.”

At Albemarle High School, plenty of kids were getting high. “Looking back, the only kids that didn’t smoke were, like, the kids that only did schoolwork and were in the AP classes and were, you know, like, really into consciously trying to advance themselves for college.” Not that D wasn’t doing well. He was an honor roll student throughout high school, but by 10th grade he was also smoking every day, before school, after school and on weekends. So many people he knew smoked, and needed weed, that, well, how could he not sell it? “It went from buying a quarter and selling a couple dimes to, like, throwing in on an ounce.”

Things began to escalate.

D needed more than he could get from his old friend. He was looking for two or three ounces now. He met a new friend whose cousins lived in town and could get them what they needed. “We kind of formed a little partnership,” D says, “and that just opened the floodgates.”

Yeah, so now Mr. Dealer is the man at AHS. His new friend had gone to another middle school, so when the stream of kids got dumped into Albemarle, well, between the two of them they had a lot of acquaintances eager to become customers. Not that they were the only dealers around. Wealthier kids had access to better weed, buying and selling kind bud to those who could afford it. D and his buddy were selling schwag and they sold it mostly to middle- or lower-class kids who just didn’t know where else to go.

Once or twice a week they’d drive to Orangedale, where the friend’s cousins lived in the projects, and they’d buy weed, starting with a quarter pound, two ounces each—cheap enough to make good money on.

Things began to heat up. They started buying half-pounds.

“Hey,” the cousin said, “next time you can just take a pound. Buy the half up front and I’ll front you a half with it and you can work that.”

At 13, his mom told him he had to pay for things on his own—even, like, dental bills. Selling weed began as a way to pay for what he smoked, but it easily and quickly became a way to make a little money as well. He wasn’t rolling in dough. The cousins down in Orangedale, selling in much larger quantities, made better money. D was buying a pound of not-so-great weed for $1,100 to $1,200, and selling it for $100 an ounce. That doesn’t pay for diamond pendants or tricked-out rides, “but I mean when you’re 16 and you’re making $6.50 an hour at the mall, it’s a considerable help.”

It’s always tempting, however, to spend it if you’ve got it. Mr. Dealer bought a big down-filled winter jacket for, what, 200 some bucks, and his mother found the receipt in his room and began to wonder.

“How’d you get the money for that?”

“Well, you see, that receipt was from me and my friend buying stuff together, and they put it all on one receipt. He bought the coat.”

“Uh huh. We’ll see about that. ‘Hello, my son has this receipt for a $200 coat, and I was wondering…’”

“Yes ma’am, I remember him….”

“So, where are you getting this kind of money?”

“ …”

And it’s Suspicion City from then on out. Checking up, poking around, not fully trusting you. Kids aren’t exactly criminal masterminds, and it’s inevitable that Mom finds another bag of pot. She makes him flush it down the toilet. She gets really watchful.

She finds digital scales and a whole lot of empty plastic bags. She takes him to the Juvenile Court to try and head off disaster, get him drug tested regularly, scare him straight. But then she finds a quarter pound of pot and so she calls the cops on her son and has him arrested.

He’s 16, bigger and stronger than the child she used to know. Her son, this drug dealer. The cops ask him if he’s angry with his mom, if he resents her invasion of his privacy.

Yeah, he does. He’s pissed that she entered his room and rooted through his stuff and then turned him in.

But he’s not going to hurt her, if that’s what you’re thinking!

Jesus. She’s his mother.

Before the court date, he’s sent to Region Ten for an after-school drug treatment program. The threat of random testing looming, he manages to stay clean for a while. But spring break rolls around and his buddy lights a joint.

“Now, you know you don’t have to smoke this.”

“…”

“But if you want to you’re more than welcome.”

“…”

“…”

“Fuck it. I don’t have to go in for a week!”

He fills a Poland Springs water bottle with his fresh, clean piss. He’s stoned for the rest of break.

And the piss trick works for a while. You take a pocket hand warmer, and during the 10-minute break at the meeting you rip it open and shake it and rubber band it to the little squeeze bottle of piss. They call you for the test, and you go into the bathroom with this guy who stands right behind you while you unzip your pants, reach in, pull out the little squeeze bottle and aim the warm stream into the cup. And then you tuck it back inside and hand over the cup like you got nothin’ to worry about.

Mr. Dealer washes his hands. The guy is just staring at him in the mirror, and he’s still staring when D turns around, just standing there still holding the cup.

“I think I’m going to need another urine stream from you.”

“What are you talking about? You know I just peed in the cup. Obviously I don’t have to go to the bathroom again. I’ve to be at work in 30 minutes.”

“If you leave right now I’m going to mark you down as dirty.”

“How are you going to do that? I just peed in a cup for you.”

“If your urine was this warm you’d be dead.”

“Oh, fuck.”

A few weeks later he does coke for the first time and tests positive for that, too.

Defense: He has voluntarily entered drug treatment, your Honor. He is a promising young man. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
Prosecution: He tested positive for marijuana. He tested positive for cocaine. QED and Boo-ya.

Things are not looking good. The judge, unhappy with the lack of seriousness with which Mr. Dealer is taking this whole thing, sends him to juvey in Staunton. He has just turned 17.

”You go in, you’ve got to strip in front of this guy, you know, hold your balls and cough and make sure that you’re not trying to smuggle anything in or whatever. I was there for two or three nights and at some point during that time I think my mother just felt so bad about the situation…I don’t think that she thought it was going to go that far.”

Yes, well. Things escalate.

The War on Drugs was taking hold at Albemarle High School. Gates popped up to keep students from leaving during school hours and cops with dogs came in to sniff around the parking lot. By the time Mr. Dealer got to 11th grade, students were regularly doing coke on weekends, and the school seemed to have a good-sized population of drug users. D made no real effort to hide the fact that he had become a drug dealer, despite the beefed-up security. He wore a pager openly and did crazy shit like packing dime bags in the middle of class, hidden in the Kangaroo pocket on the front of his jacket.

The Teacher is at the blackboard.

“Yo.”

“… the quadratic equation. Let’s try it with this…”

“Yo! B____!”

B____ turns around and the small bag of pot hits him smack in the forehead.

Gasps and giggles ripple through the students.

“…and so what is the value of X in….”

Another bag goes whipping at B____’s head. He ducks this one and scrambles to pick it up, looking to retaliate.

The Teacher turns around, sensing a disturbance in the force.

“What is going on here? B_____, do you have something you’d like to share with the class?”

Or maybe something the class would like to share with him…

Before Mr. Dealer graduated, he was buying his weed from another kid over in Mallside, the neighborhood across Rio Road from Fashion Square. So there’s D, a white kid dressed like a dealer—baggy clothes, pager—walking through the house with his black friend, and he’s introduced to his friend’s mom and she rolls her eyes as they walk through the living room. She knows exactly what’s going on.

D heads off to college in Richmond. “O.K.,” he thinks, “I’m going to get rid of the last of what I have and then I’m going to be a college student. I’m going to go to school, going to learn and get my degree. And then I’m not going to have a reason to have to do this anymore.”

Richmond seems flooded with weed. It doesn’t take long for D to find someone in his dorm, this hippy kid, who’s selling better shit than D ever did, shit that D’s old customers can’t get back in Charlottesville, and it doesn’t take long before Mr. Dealer is back in the game, selling the better weed to people making the hour drive down I-64, and about two pounds or so a week starts moving through Charlottesville because of D and the Phish phan.

Eighty percent of the marijuana that Mr. Dealer sold came from New York City. There might be, every once in a while, a shipment brought cross-country from California or Oregon, five or even 10 pounds maybe, but the risk involved was too great. Better to stick with the long-established and steady connection between the Northeast and the South, deeply rutted like ancient wagon trails, the path of all East Coast vice: New York, Philly, D.C., Richmond, Florida.

The hippy kid would drive his ghetto mobile with tinted windows and big rims, happy, hippy music blaring, up to New York and bring back 25 to 30 pounds of pot, sometimes as much as 60.

It took two to three weeks to move it all, and not wanting to keep that much weight at his house, he started paying D to store it for him.

Mr. Dealer begins to see this as a serious business.

“I really kind of remember being surprised that he would be willing to pay me that much just to keep shit at my house. …For every pound that he was going to leave there he would pay me 50 bucks for the first night…and then $25 per pound for however long it needed to stay there after that.” Twenty-five pounds times 50 bucks. That’s $1,250 for a night’s work, maybe $2,500, depending. “And, you know, it adds up.”

At college, much more so than when he was in high school, it felt to D that he was living two lives, or at least concealing a large part of his one life. He was a student, going to classes and doing his work. And like a lot of students, he smoked pot. But he was also a professional drug dealer and his dealing was a much larger part of his life than his education.

Graduation. D moves back to Charlottesville. Finds a full-time, legit job and an apartment.

(He’s still got the job. That’s why you can know his story, but you can’t know his name. At work they know his name, but they can’t know his story.)

In fundamental ways he was different than his peers. The character traits a drug dealer needs to thrive were deeply ingrained in him, a unique set of survival skills.

Secrecy, an underlying paranoia, mistrust.

“It was becoming more and more clear to me,” D says, “that a lot of who I had become was going to be detrimental to pursuing anything in the real world.”

It was a strange transition for a 25-year-old, one that few, if any, of his co-workers could have understood. “I wonder,” he thought, sitting in his cubicle, “if it’s obvious that up to this point, I’ve only sold drugs to support myself.”

He was still dealing, but was trying to operate at a lower level. More people knew him, however, than he would have wanted. Walking down the street, friends of his friend’s younger brothers would come up to him and say, “Hey, I remember when so-and-so’s brother was driving to Richmond to see you…” Or people he barely knew would see him in the restaurant where they worked and say, “Hey, do you think you can help me out?”

And if he said:

“Yeah, I can help you out.”

Then the next time they would say:

“I’ve been buying extra for a friend. Maybe it would be better if he just met you….”

But he really didn’t want to meet your friend, didn’t want more customers or more risk than he already had. He wanted things to no longer escalate.

“I don’t want anything to do with you,” he said when the scene got too sketchy.

“I don’t want you to know who I am. I don’t want you to know my name. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want you to talk to anyone I know.”

This was not an attitude common around the office.

Risk is a funny thing. It can be calculated only so far. By it’s very nature, it’s uncertain, unknowable in its entirety. When he moved back to Charlottesville, he brought with him a large amount of weed that hadn’t been cured properly, and was unsellable. It was too much to just toss in the trash, so he decided to deal with it later. He threw it in a backpack, and that backpack sat, forgotten, on a shelf at a friend’s house where he crashed for a while, and then got stuffed, with a bunch of clothes, etc., in the trunk of his car.

It’s Saturday.

He wakes up in the afternoon, throws on some shorts and a shirt (forgets to grab his wallet) and runs over to the office to finish up a few things. On the way home, he’s pulled over for expired tags, and the lack of a license and the way he’s dressed, makes the officer ask him to step out of the vehicle, please sir. The car’s a mess, filled with shit from the move. He isn’t nervous yet, because there isn’t any reason to be.

Is there?

Marijuana Possession with Intent to Distribute. Psilocybin Possession with Intent to Distribute. Both felonies in the State of Virginia.

Mr. Dealer, D, had been smoking weed every day, multiple times a day, since he was 16.

He got a lawyer.

Fighting the charges would have cost, like, over two grand. And he still might have lost.

A deal was offered. Plead guilty, and the marijuana charges are gone. The Intent to Distribute on the ‘shrooms is gone. He takes a simple possession charge on the ‘shrooms. Four years suspended sentence, 18 months probation, five years good behavior, and a felony on his record.

He took the deal.

“I was never into sports. I wasn’t one of the jocks. I didn’t have that kind of close-knit group of like teammates. I kind of hated all those kids for that because they were all a bunch of pompous asses anyway, or so I felt like at that time. You know, [dealing] kind of gave me a one up on everybody else… it allowed me to kind of pick and choose who I wanted to be accessible to. …I think during that time in my life, there was a lot of things going on in my personal life, in my family life, that I didn’t have any control over and [dealing] gave me this definite sense of something that was all mine, that I was in complete control of.”

After that real bad Saturday night, Mr. Dealer came home one day to find a girl he knew standing at the top of his stairs, staring curiously at the recently busted-down door.

“Oh, hey,” she said, “did someone break into your apartment?”

“Yeeaaah, um….”

“I’ve been trying to call you, but your phone’s been off.”

“JADE broke into my apartment and they took my phone.”

Her face got that deer-in-the-headlights look.

“Oh. O.K., well, I was just stopping by,” she said, and bolted down the stairs and out the front door.

“This was someone who used to come by and sit around for, like, 45 minutes to an hour just to buy an eighth,” D says, “and we’d shoot the shit about work and life. Just talk about what had been going on in our lives a few weeks earlier when we last saw each other, whatever. There was no, like, ‘Oh, god! I’m so sorry, are you O.K.?’ It was like, ‘Oh. Cool.’ Voooom! All those kind of clichés like, ‘You’ll see who your friends are.’ It’s all true.”

“There’s a certain relationship, a certain ceremonial aspect of smoking weed,” D says, “a level of bonding with someone…seeing eye to eye on art and music and kind of opening up that sort of lateral thought process that isn’t really as awake when you’re not high.”

The light, dim now that it’s evening, insinuates itself through the venetian blinds as we sit in Mr. Dealer’s apartment. His girlfriend, young and pretty, hovers protectively behind us. I feel like she doesn’t really approve of all this interviewing.

Does he still get high?

“Am I going to smoke while I’m on probation? Hell no! It’s not worth four years of my life.”

Will he ever sell pot again?

“I’d like to say no, but once I’m in the clear, and I don’t have this sort of storm cloud looming over my head all the time, I may feel differently about it. If I were to go back to that, it definitely would not be anywhere near what it was before.”

He laughs.

“The, sort of, cardinal rules of the game that I’ve found myself lectured on so many times recently—don’t keep it at your house, don’t travel with it, don’t give them a reason to pull you over—obviously would be adhered to more strictly.”

“I’d been doing this shit a long time, and I got really comfortable. Free use, always having money in my pocket, never having to question dropping $30 to $50 dollars on clothes or food. It creates a very, sort of, ingrained thought process.”

(And as he talks, it comes to me that interviewing D about selling drugs feels eerily similar to buying them. We are co-conspirators, sharing his secrets. He has shared a lot of his life with me, but the real question is, once I get his story published, will I ever visit his apartment again?

How well do I know Mr. Dealer?)

“Ever since this happened, its been like, ‘What do you mean I can’t buy a $3 latte on the way to work every morning?’”

He stubs out a cigarette.

“You stock up on the beans, you wake up, you grind some, you make a pot, and take it in a thermos to work, just like everybody else.”

Categories
Living

We Ate Here

We considered a mere take-out pastry to fuel up on a recent Wednesday morning, but instead went for the gold: a real sit-down breakfast in which we stuffed ourselves to the gills with Bluegrass’ Number 5. It’s a groaning plate of scrambled eggs generously stuffed with spinach, tomatoes, green peppers and cheese, accompanied by good coffee and potatoes with the skins still on. The real star here, though, are the biscuits. We’ll mention the cakey texture and earthy whole-wheat taste, but we can’t truly explain how good, good, good those biscuits are.

Categories
News

Captains of this ship

With a crowd of more than 150 people tossing about like salt-lipped waves and Jay Purdy, lead singer of The Extraordinaires, baring the whites of his eyes and shaking his beard like Ahab on the hunt, one wonders: “What do you do with a drunken sailor later in the evening?”

The beauty of The Extraordinaires is that the group has become so adept at steering through a stormy set of rock that catching the band live is more like a trip through the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Walt Disney World than an Atlantic cruise. Everything is vivid, almost cartoonish, in detail and sound, and would feel silly if the crew of the S.S. Extraordinaires weren’t so committed to their ship. The only way for an audience to enjoy itself as much as the members of the band is to commit whole-heartedly to their fantastic narratives, which is precisely what last Thursday’s enormous crowd at the Tea Bazaar did.


The Extraordinaires packed the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar for a night of memorable madness last Thursday.

Of course, there’s an ocean of difference between being earnest and buying in. Staunton-based opening act Nelly Kate and her guest Wes Swing ran through a handful of entrancing, somber pop songs and a few Eastern-tinged incantations, but many of the songs fell under two minutes in length—catchy enough to command attention but too short to gratify it. Swing and Kate are exceptional at pairing potent lyrics with the gauzy atmosphere of cello and acoustic guitar, but the promising pair’s songs invited more attention than they could reward.

Second act Tavo Carbone was quite the opposite, a songwriter that repopulated early blues tunes and country waltzes with unsavory characters and sang with a voice that owed as much to Bessie Smith as Bobcat Goldthwait. Following one song, an audience member turned to me and asked, “Isn’t that what Tiny Tim sounds like?” Yet beneath a voice that might’ve seemed repellent were endearing lyrics about uncomfortable people, including a girl that “laughs in a way that drives lemmings from a cliff” and a second that danced “like a dog in May/ When the hydrants are out of range.”

I spent The Extraordinaires’ hour-plus set perched in my crow’s nest atop a chair while the most massive crowd to witness a concert in the Tea Bazaar swayed, swelled and burst at the group’s command, often at the provocation of focal point Jay Purdy. Wearing an airbrushed Batman t-shirt and a hairdo from Eraserhead, Purdy opened the set clutching his classical guitar—painted and amended to resemble a blue swordfish—with one arm and conducting his crew with the other, guiding the vessel of the Tea Bazaar through songs of lazy exploration (the riotously paranoid “The Neighborhood Watch”) and violent retribution (new tune “Man Versus the Whale”).

The Extraordinaires do right by their narratives of demons, cacti, ghosts and war, digging through genres like tackle boxes and finding nothing but hooks. Live, each chorus was simple enough to attract attention and each melody, drawing on everything from Beach Boys and Boston to The Unicorns, was familiar enough to command it. The Extraordinaires’ final anthem, “The Warehouse Song,” felt like finding land, the validation of some ill-planned, wildly entertaining journey launched long ago: “We never do a single dish./ We like our house the way it is.” So do we.