the Bodega Weed spot and growing up smoking Nickle bags

before there was personal home delivery services in NYC , there were several ways to score a "Nickle" bag of funk. My first purchase, when i was the tender age of 13, was from a guy hanging out at Needle park. Needle Park is now the quaint park adjacent the new 72nd street train station entrance. The park was a very sketchy little spot, called "needle" not because it is the shape of a needle tip, but because you could find somebody shooting up there.

But as my friends and i started smoking ganja more and more often, we found out about the Bodega spot system. these were little Bodegas that fronted as regular stores but were actually weed spots. some of them really sold regular stuff, but some of them had a doorbell, so they only let in people they trusted, and inside, they only had like one can of soda and some candy. The guys were usually kind of ill looking and you wanted to just get the bag and dip on out. some spots, like Deborah's on 102nd and Lexington, gave you candy with the purchase just in case a cop stopped to you to see what you bought.

the kind of weed and the size of the bag varied wildly and it was always exciting to find a new spot with a better deal or stronger weed. the nickle bags were the perfect size because as a kid, i never had all that much money and smoking with your friends usually meant rolling a blunt, which was usually one to a half a bag. so you could chip in like a buck with four other guys and get lifted on a stoop. often the spots labeled their stuff some random name that made it sound better, like Machine Gun Funk, with little guns printed on the baggy.
there was one spot, on 106th and Columbus that we called Tabla. it was a little tiny pitiful looking bag. like a few dirty looking crumbs that were very damp and DEFINITELY sprayed with some kind of "extra"...my guess is PCP or something evil like that. because no matter how small the amount was, everybody who took a drag started spinning. it was so harsh that we would be passing it around and at any point in time about 3 of us would be doubled over, hacking and coughing up spit and snot. it was...AWESOME. i can't even imagine the damage thousands of blunts of that mystery meat did to my body and brain cells.

there was one time, when a guy who we went to school with suddenly decided he wanted to hang out with us all the time. he was a cool guy and was even bold enough to do murals with us on the "ledge". but one thing he wasn't prepared for was the Fuerza of Tabla. we smoked him out on the last day of school senior year. we had smoked near the school and were walking back to the Quad when all of a sudden his eyes kind of glazed over and he started lurching at me like a wild zombie in 28 days later. naturally a backed away from him since he was a huge guy and he continued walking or lurching towards school. we knew that he needed to NOT go to school but it was too late. so we hopped in our car and left school for the last time ever. that's how i last saw my highschool, running away from a friend who was clearly O.D.ing on Table. he ended up falling down a grassy hill in the middle of our school and into the arms of our dean. apparently his first words to our dean were "I smoked weed with Zen2, Zar, and Self"...our dean really didn't want to see us anymore so he pretended he didn't here that. our friend ended up getting into a lot of trouble with his college, but worked his way out of it. I still feel kinda bad about running away, but we were SO close to the finish line and i couldn't get involved in that noise.

Other odd uses of Table were that we used to smoke it to get pumped up for a bombing graffiti mission, and usually, it would just scare the shit out of me. because going bombing (writing graffiti all night) was scary enough without the induced paranoia of an illegal substance...plus a black cat ALWAYS crossed my path as i started. but that's another story.

One place that i will never forget was the Pope of Dope spot down in the meatpacking district. this fat guy, the Pope of Dope, who was one of the main characters behind the annual Pot Parade. It was a "comic book store" that had exactly one comic taped to the window. once you got in through the front door after being buzzed in, you were faced with a lone desk sitting in the middle of the room. the fat pope of dope would ask "how many?" and then he would count out the "Nicks" and hand them to you. he put the weed in envelopes for some unknown reason. he was one of those things that just made the Village a "different" kind of place back then.