Conartist Manifesto (rough edit)

This is the preface to a book that is a collaboration between myself and a friend of mine that is like a brother. There is a lot more where this came from...

I remember murky darkness and the point of impact. We weren’t going all that fast, the airbags didn’t even go off. Nobody got hurt thankfully. Except the truck that is. My parents decided that I should have a new truck for my first vehicle. I remember being embarrassed for some reason, as if it were a status symbol. I felt undeserving and inadequate which I later proved to be. Everything beautiful and innocent that I encountered ended up in shambles. My capacity for destruction hadn’t been fully realized, but it was on its way. I was 18 and full of life, trying to burn it out. You know how people say "these are the days of our lives"? F**k those people.

The truck was pretty mangled in the hood and frame. It was arced into a semi circle. The perfect fit for, say, a wooden telephone pole. I came out of my blackout immediately upon impact. I knew exactly what was happening and I knew to get us out of there. My instincts never failed me for it was the mind that corrupted the soul, not the other way around.

"S**t, man! We gotta get the f**k off the road." Tommy yelled in my ear. I remember feeling that terrible guilt that settles right in your gut when you know you fucked up good and proper.

"I know, I know. Is everybody alright? I’m sorry about that, had some technical difficulties. This burn cruise is f*****g over." I grumbled and grinded through the gears and stomped the clutch like some maddened trucker on a four day meth binge. The truck made gut wrenching sounds that matched my inner soundtrack. I’ll never forget how lost I got us in the dark drunken stupor of 3am on a Thursday night in Johnson, VT. It took at least another hour before I got us back to the dorms; luckily no police interfered with my wreckage.

I had already come up with a story for the insurance agents in the morning. I was running it through my head over and over to make it sound as authentic as possible. Where had we been? What telephone did we hit? Was there paint on it? Did anyone see us? Whose lawn were we blowing donuts on? These things I didn’t know. But I did know the conversation in the dull hangover morning sun went along the lines of,

"I was the designated driver for my friend. On the way home last night, a deer leaped out in front of me. I veered off to the right to miss it. The road had been recently grated (it had). I lost control over the rear end and over corrected into a telephone pole." It was perfect. I even believed the story. Insurance fraud was a white collar crime, sure, but I approached it with that eager blue collar swagger I’d learned from the greatest hustlers I knew. Of course, my excuse was the most basic of lies. Every sad sap that hit a pole while drunk was avoiding a deer and had only "one beer".

But I made that lie my own. It wasn’t hard. It’s all about acting candid. You just have to approach the person on a level that you can both identify with. By being a genuine human being and relating to people you can manipulate and twist reality. Suddenly lies become truths and sinners become saints. You know how people say "no rest for the wicked"? F**k those people. They clearly have never heard of Xanax or Oxycontin.

Prior to the drunken buffoonery, Tommy and I had just turned our money around. We each had $200 to start with. He had court fees to pay and I had beer to drink. I was sick of having no money; I needed my ganja and my malt liquor. We decided to make a trip up to Burlington to see what we could procure. We met up with my friend Blake who was a pure junky. I revered these types. I didn’t know why, I decided it was because I saw too much of myself within them. It was animal instinct masking true vulnerability. The cold stare behind the eyes mixed with a dedicated fixation on primal needs; it was disgustingly human. I prided myself on intellectual capabilities and I refused to be broken down into an animal.

Blake knew everyone in town and for a fee he would plug us in. We started off selling capsules of Mali(MDMA). I knew little about this drug beyond its documented empathogenic psychedelic/stimulant effects. I was a drug nerd, but I had little personal experience. I was a greenhorn in black market drugs. I had a good handle on which pharmaceuticals I enjoyed. They are arguably better; chemically sound, manufactured in a clean environment. But there was still a certain allure to distributing and consuming unregulated black market drugs. They required a certain know-how that was learned through personal experience. This was how you could make the sale. By relating to the customer through personal experiences, you could push whatever you had as long as you had the product to back it up.

We weren’t some Scarface types. We had our own fantasies to fulfill and dreams to masturbate to, but we were never anything more than a couple of dime-a-dozen college dorm hustlers trying to make a buck to get drunk and high for free. We were bums, but people liked us. We weren’t a******s and we were fair. I could never understand why the other weed dealers wouldn’t break up their quantities for someone that only had $7 in laundry quarters. Money is money. I’m not above it; I had a scale and a calculator. If anyone in those buildings needed a $7 bag of weed, they knew where they could get it. The American Dream… it sounded nice.

Tommy and I took our $400 and grabbed a handful of this white flakey powder and split it out into a pile of tenths of a gram. Into the vitamin capsules it went and off to the parties we walked. All it took was one party and the word was out. We took our $400 and made it into $800. And we got to sample the product. It was good. I drove us back to Blake’s apartment in Burlington and this time we got a handful of Mali and a fat sack of stinky weed with a funny name… something like "dreamweaver". Kids ate that s**t up in no time. We anticipated the anticipation so I got us a bottle of Hennesey for celebration. We made our $800 into a cool $1500 and partied hard.

I remember the taste of victory and brandy on my lips. You know those people that say "more money, more problems"? F**k those people. Because they’re goddamn right.

 

 

 

Now I was still in high school when I knocked on the doorstep of my first telephone pole. It was probably the first time my family had left me alone at home when they went away and it felt great to have that time to myself. Do what I wanted and did I ever. I remember my father saying "I’m leaving the keys to the Honda, but I’m trusting you won’t make any poor decisions." Poor decisions would be a recurring theme in my life from here on out. I didn’t have my license yet, but he had given me that car when I got my permit and I had already decked it out with a leather steering wheel wrap and a sweet shift knob so it was totally supped up right? I decided I needed milk. Despite living around the corner from a gas station with a freezer full of milk undoubtedly, I figured I’d take the car across town on a little independence cruise. Why not, it’s just milk and I’m a good driver. So I hopped in and started up my little white Civic and off I went. I got to the road in our town that had the most badass name, it was something like "Rattlesnake Run" and it got its name from the serpentine curves it had. I mashed through gears, downshifting on the turns and pulling hard in and out of them like Travis Pastrana on a rally course he was getting paid to drive. I hadn’t thought about the fact I was doing this on tires so thin they could have been on bicycles and in a vehicle better suited for idling than driving across town, let alone at speed. I got to an uphill ninety degree turn and I thought I could really feel the G’s on this one, so I downshifted into oblivion. I instantly lost control and the rear of the car was off the road in the pine needles sliding out from under me like Charlie Browns feet when that b***h yanks the football. I tried to correct myself, and although I managed to get the car traction and back onto the road, it happened to be directly through a telephone pole which promptly split in two and lay waste to electrical wires now lying on the ground like so many dead anacondas. I jumped out of the car and looked around, it seemed no one saw… Wait, here’s a SUV pulling up " a man yells from the drivers seat "You okay?" I had my phone out and somehow I managed to say "Yea all good, already calling it in!" He didn’t think twice, he turned around and left. I called my best friend, who gave me what I thought at the time was the best advice I’d ever got to date. He said "Get the f**k out of there." I hopped in the car which now had a telephone pole shaped void in the right front quarter panel " but it started right up. Somehow the airbags didn’t deploy so I had a regular steering wheel and no facial burns or broken nose. I put it in gear and off I went, screeching and shrieking with bent metal rubbing against tire tread all the way to my house, where I parked it hidden from view and commenced freaking the f**k out. I called an older friend who I thought could offer some reasonable advice at a time like this and she said "Dude, you gotta call your parents." That’s what I was afraid of. I don’t remember if I even got the milk, but I remember saying to my father "Dad, I made a really poor decision…" And that was the first time in my life I truly understood what "f*****g up" meant. My family covered for me, my father had the car given to a friend across the country so it basically disappeared. Nothing ever came of that incident, but looking back on my life from where I am now I can’t help but think perhaps a little legal intervention early on would have changed a few things. Maybe could have changed everything.

Fast forward to my first day of college. I abandoned my mother and father for a brat pack of freshman that were already living off campus, and smoking the requisite amount of weed for a newly minted Burlington Vermont college student. I went to their house while my family was at my orientation and I got super baked. Through our incredibly philosophical conversations over a column of smoke passed about, they had deemed me so cool as to name their band after me. The band "Ed" was formed and I instantly had a reputation as a good guy to party with, someone that had "it" figured out. Someone that gave off that kinetic energy everyone was thriving to mooch a bit of and turn it into their own thing. What they didn’t know is I was just the best bullshit artist they’d ever encountered and in fact, I had quite literally, nothing figured out.

It didn’t take long for me to establish myself in the drug trafficking circles of Champlain College. I was prescribed three twenty milligram Ritalin everyday and those were ubiquitous on the college campuses. It was basically like gold, I could trade and barter my way with almost no cash needed. But I did in fact have cash. One of my roommate’s was a rich kid. He was one of the guitarists of this band that had been given my moniker. I noticed him taking hundred dollar bills from a bank envelope and casually putting it back into a drawer whenever he needed drinking money, or money for weed, or munchies… whatever. He certainly didn’t seem to be counting them so I took one to see if he was. Nothing happened, so I took a few more. I turned a few hundred bucks of stolen cash into what I thought was an empire. I bought an ounce of weed and 8thd it out. I made my money back plus 100 bucks and I had enough for my head. This was how I learned dealing drugs was more about forming and cultivating relationships than simply providing product. You could sell anything if you could find the common ground where you and your customer held court. It was there that you would find your profit, it was there you would make your nut. As I became more involved with more substances time passed and before I knew it I had graduated college. The day I graduated was the day I gave myself permission to stop living up to anyone else’s standards. I gave myself permission to completely indulge every sense I had a desire to. And so it was writ, Ed begat Leatherface. And with Leatherface came the times of overabundance. These were trying times…

Trying everything that came across my plate, trying any sex act that I was flexible enough to perform, trying to be as brazenly genius in thwarting the attempts of the powers that be to slow me down or figure me out. When I became Leatherface, I was openly and quite loudly a much more sadistic, manipulative and somewhat evil entity. Although I never lost my belief in the true benefit of spiritual growth and upheaval through psychedelic and pharmacological exploration, I also used my in depth knowledge of keynote substances like LSD, DMT, and psilocybin to maintain an enigma of uncertainty amongst my peer groups. Looking back, I have a feeling it gave me a lot more freedom to act out with little to no repercussion or backlash from those who were closest to me at the time. I mean, who wants to f**k with a guy who has enough of a certain chemical on hand at any given time that could quite literally f**k your brain into a full scale war with your own psyche. They had seen the proof that I would use chemical warfare in the drug underworld. They didn’t need to make me prove I’d do it again…

Author's Note

This is a rough edit. Content only.