Chapter 52: Dealer's Choice

My main focus was living my dream owning a cannabis grow op. Leo and I started making edibles regularly and would sell them at the events secretly without Mistress Azule knowing. Leo showed me all his secret ways of making butter and tincture. He had brought over a giant crock pot and several containers and mason jars. He was often already slow cooking some type of cannabis extract when I arrived for the day.

I kept pitching the idea to somehow make cannabis drinks. Eventually Leo found a recipe on a cannabis message board online. We ended up creating a new method for making cannabis tincture using food grade vegetable glycerin as a base.

Traditionally most tinctures are made with alcohol and can take minimum two weeks to ferment. They were also harsh and hard to swallow like drinking 100 proof alcohol.

By using vegetable glycerin, we could speed up the process to 12 hours, and the end product was no longer harsh like alcohol. Our tincture was smooth and tasted like candy.

We would pour the tincture in mini pipettes Leo stole from the grow store and sell them as one hitter shots for $5 each. It was just the right amount to get a nice head change. People loved it. I sold out almost every night.

Sometimes I would invite a small group of trusted friends to hang out in the office in the mullet after events and smoke weed.

Despite owning a grow op, I still made Sara drive me to the dispensary every other week. They treated me like a big shot and would let me skip the line. They even had a dab bar where I could usually get a free dab or two. I was starting to get more and more into concentrates and dabs.

Leo and I frequented the grow shop next door to talk weed and exchange seeds. The guys from the grow shop thought I was kind of a snob as far as the weed I smoked. They were always trying to offer me good prices to buy weed from their personal gardens. They claimed to have the best setups money could buy. I was still willing to pay more for the stuff I got from dispensaries and they knew it.

I was still a valuable source for finding the trendy strains. One day I was doing some work around the grow op and Leo brought some random guy inside our office. He was apparently in the grow shop talking about some new strain he grew up north. He pulls out an ounce of some weed that is like dark purple with orange and golden hairs. It literally resembles the Samoa girl scout cookies. He says the strain is called Girl Scout Cookie.

No one had ever heard of the strain at the time.

He offered to sell us the ounce and some clones for our grow op. We bought about 30 clones and split the ounce between us.

We showed some of Leo's coworkers at the grow shop the clones and they ended up buying a few off us.

Then a few days later, Leo brings in this guy who managed several dispensaries in Los Angeles. Right away I recognized his T shirt as the brand for a shop I had been to in the past.

"I have been to your shop years ago; it was on 17th in DTLA?" I asked our guest.

"You know your stuff." the man replied.

Leo was always impressed with the way I took dabs regularly. He would often ask me to get the bowl heated up or demonstrate my superhuman smoking abilities to friends.

"Show this guy how you smoke that hash, what did you call it again? Dabs?" Leo asked.

"Sure thing, you guys each want one?" I asked as I heated up the bowl.

"You should pay this guy to come teach your employees how to do this shit. You will make tons of money at your dispensaries." Leo told our guest.

After watching me take a few dabs and taking one of his own, the guy was interested in paying me to come to his dispensaries and teach his employees to setup dabs. He asked me to help them purchase the right tools and give all his employees a 101 on using the torch.

Dabs were still relatively new. For those who do not know dabs are essentially a concentrate made from cannabis that resembles the consistency and appearance of ear wax or honey. It is made through various extraction methods but was ten times more potent than regular weed. It was slowly becoming very popular at the time.

To properly smoke wax or take dabs you needed a special bowl piece that could be heated up to high temperatures. To reach those temperatures you had to use a blow torch or cigar torch on the side of the specialized bowl piece. Once it was the right temperature you added your wax to the bowl using a special tool that resembled something a dentist might use. The high temperature would create a vapor instead of traditional smoke. The vapor was less harsh and more flavorful. It also got you significantly higher.

Most people still just sprinkled wax and hash on their bowls of weed. It got you a little extra high, but it did not match taking a proper dab with a torch.

In the end I gave the manager of the dispensaries a lesson on how to take dabs properly and safely for an eighth of decent weed he handed over on the spot.

While he was hanging out at our grow room, we showed him the Girl Scout Cookie clones, and he ended up buying some of our plants as well. Girl Scout Cookies became a very popular strain throughout Los Angeles for years to come. I like to think I had a hand in its discovery and popularization.

When you purchase good quality weed from a dispensary it is rare for you to find a seed. Most shops and growers do not want to share their genetics and go to great lengths to remove them.

The chances of finding a viable cannabis seed that can be still germinated successfully were not high. Leo had taught me the key to identifying usable seeds was to look for a dark tiger stripe like pattern on the seed itself.

One of the dispensaries I regularly visited had a strain that won High Time’s best Strain. The strain was called Charlie Sheen. Charlie Sheen was my favorite strain for years. I bought the strain so many times I had actually gotten extremely lucky and experienced the rare occurrence of finding a usable seed.

Using Leo’s help, I was able to get the seed to germinate and grow. Of all the plants in the grow op this was my personal and favorite plant.

I really loved the mullet and tried to spend as much time there as I could.

Unfortunately, there was no bathroom in our grow op so you would have to use one in Sammy's warehouse. It was at the end of a maze-like pathway through the machines and old boxes. This would not really be an issue, but Sammy's wife had a dog, and that dog was mean as fuck.

The dog was a poodle named Mickey. It was named after Sammy's wife's favorite cartoon character Mickey Mouse. This dog was nothing like Mickey Mouse.

Mickey would bite anyone it got close to. Not like a friendly playful nibble. This dog would viciously latch onto you like some kind of demon beast. It had managed to bite Leo once.

Leo left in a rush. Then he later told me he ended up getting stitches, but I was not sure if he said that just to mess with me.

I always was able to outrun or outsmart Mickey on the way to and from the bathroom. You see Mickey was older and almost blind. So, if you were quiet, sometimes you could make it all the way to the bathroom before his other senses detected you. Once inside you could close the door to safety.

Sometimes Mickey would wait outside the door for you so whoever was in the bathroom would have to call Sammy or whoever else was around and get them to make noise to distract or lure Mickey to another side of the warehouse.

Once Mickey was distracted you had to make a mad dash from the bathroom back to the grow op through the maze of Sammy's junk. It felt like an obstacle course.

Sara would be hanging out with me in the mullet and need to use the bathroom.

"You guys have a bathroom back here, right?" Sara asked.

"Yes, but there is a vicious dog that will attack on you the way there. I would go up to Safehaven and use the bathroom there instead if I were you." I replied.

"No way, you must be exaggerating. Dogs love me." Sara replied.

Sara went into Sammy’s warehouse. I was sitting there expecting her to come back screaming about the dog any minute.

I got worried so I decided to check on Sara. I carefully go in and creep around the boxes quietly. Finally, I find Sara knelt down petting Mickey, Mickey is laying on his back wagging his tail letting her touch his belly.

"What are you talking about? This dog is a sweetie!" Sara said laughing.

Suddenly Micky somehow hears or smells me and turns in my direction and growls. Then continues to let Sara love on him.

I just went back to the mullet and shut the door waiting for Sara to return.

Chapter 52: Video game Vixen