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The Birth of Triangular Diplomacy

By this time, Terry and Jerry had found a new hook up for weed. Terry had dumped his young girlfriend and was entertaining a new female every other night which meant he needed lots of weed. This was back in the day before roofies, where half-attractive boring dudes had to resort to getting their dates stoned and wearing them down through pointless conversation. Terry’s new hook up had a lot of weed and a sense of perversity to match; he told us the guy had offered to give him pound of weed in exchange for some original amateur college porn. Now, Mark didn’t really want to have anything to do with this because when you’re talking about that kind of weight in dope, you’re talking about jail time. I tried to explain to Mark that the real concern with that sort of activity is when money was involved. Magistrate business involved no exchange of money—goods and services were what we bartered in—the cornerstone of all free trade.

Bart owed us a big favor and he was still banging that little Italian broad left and right. I suggested to Mark that we combine all circumstances and allow everyone to profit. The plan was to set up a camera in Bart’s room, in a hidden location, to film various sexual acts between him and his little Italian. Bart agreed to record ten sessions over three weeks. We would then allow Terry to broker the deal for the porn tape with his hookup in exchange for a quarter pound of kind bud, this would be the birth of phase two growth for the Magistrates.

The new plan was to supply small quantities of weed to individuals in exchange for favors to be cashed in at a later date, when needed.  These small, no charge transactions, would only take place after an interview with the client by Mark and myself, to ascertain what exact attributes might be useful (or if they were Narcs).

Notes were taken and Goat, in exchange for free weed, agreed to use his superior computer prowess to concoct a program that would cipher the notes we took on each individual in case they should fall into the wrong hands. Tim, Darren, and Malcolm weren’t in on it at this point because there was no need for them to be but we’d all be balls deep by the end of the semester.

By this time, the sub-structure and foundation of the Magistrates had been established. We were officially a campus Cosa Nuestra, trading favors for favors, dealing in drugs, pornography, and vicious beatings, all without one cent of money changing hands.

In theory we were untouchable but the difficulty always comes with the application.

This is the Business We Have Chosen

We were serious business by Halloween, with weed heads, chronic trouble makers, small claims bullshit, and a strong-arm network working together to make the lives of the Magistrates as comfortable as possible. I had acquired a kick ass stereo system from a kid who was about to fail out because his second English class assignment had received a no pass grade. I rewrote his paper and did his final project in exchange for his stereo system, a $500 Aiwa shelf deal with surround sound and we were now kickin’ it in Dolby Digital. Things were good, smooth, until we got the rape case, that one Mark took personal.

The little girl came to us the weekend after Halloween. She had been at a fraternity party near Kohl Hall and was walking back through the alley, the house located off campus because of a prior rape charge (go figure). While in the alley, she was accosted by two kids from the fraternity coming back from the bars, around 2:45. They ripped off her party pants, her thong underwear, and sodomized her behind two large plastic trashcans on wheels. She didn’t look either one of us in the eye when she told us the story.

Mark asked her if she knew who did it and she nodded. She had met both of them earlier that night, before they went to the bar, and she stayed at the party, their names were Ron and Jason. They were seniors graduating at the end of the semester—they probably thought she wouldn’t recognize them. Ron had a Playboy bunny earring and Jason’s little finger on his right hand was minus a fingertip, both of these character traits blazed into her memory. Mark hugged the girl and told her we’d do what we could. She winced at his touch.

He knew her from his Criminal Justice class, helped her study for their last quiz. He was pissed and told me he wanted to handle this one alone. As soon as he said this, I knew he had a thing for her and the vengeance was going to be ugly. I consented but begged him to constrain himself.

Mark didn’t tell me what happened, didn’t want to make me an accomplice, but I heard rumors. The kid with the missing finger was found in the same alley he raped the girl in, beaten so bad they had to take him to the ER and drain his leg of fluid. He was in the hospital for three days and, although I didn’t see the doctor’s report, I’m sure the words several harsh blows with a blunt object probably appeared on there somewhere.

The other rapist was in even worse shape when they found him a week later, caught coming out of the rec center, just as he got to his car, which unfortunately for him was parked in the outer rim of the parking lot no-man’s land. He was hit on the head and knocked unconscious. When he woke, his arm was broken and one of his testicles had been smashed from a brutal nut stomp without reservation of force. He’d be lucky if he could father children.

When I heard what happened, I felt a kind of Old Testament justice descended upon the campus. People who lived their lives sucking off the tit of apathy had better watch out because the Angels of Justice now held dominion over the raped, the abused, and those just wanted a little marijuana in their lives.

The pot would be free and the penalties always more severe than the crimes they followed.

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That Old Love Challenge

I thought the Magistrates were dead until Bart came to Mark’s room the night he picked up Death Row’s Greatest Hits, seven 40 caps twisted off on the floor and Bart begging us to help him with his impending dorm trial over the girl in the bathroom, this was two days after the copy of his write up had been passed around the floor. Bart said, I hear that you guys can get things done?

Mark, slipping back into power mode, said, We might be able to help. What do you need?

Bart said, Well, I need some help with this bathroom thing.

I immediately thought there was no fucking way we can help this kid with this but Mark said there might be something we could do, and asked Bart to give us a couple days to figure it out. Bart left the room, satisfied that his fate was in the hands of professionals. I packed up the rainbow-sheen two footer graphix bong I had picked up at Phil Man’s in Dayton the previous summer and asked Mark how the fuck we were supposed to affect a dorm trial. We both knew Bart was desperate for help and the payoff was sure to be tremendous in the long run. Mark had inside knowledge of this RA who wrote Bart up, that she came from the same hometown as Snowplow. Mark had spoken with another RA on the second floor about the Bart situation as he sat on the smoke bench the previous night. When they got to the part where Bart said he’d go down on her for a pardon, the other RA told Mark that the girl wouldn’t have accepted that offer from anyone but Snowplow.

Snowplow? I said with disgust.

Mark said, I know. I know. I guess they went to the same high school together and she was two grades above him. She’s had a thing for him ever since.

I said, And you mean to tell me they ended up in the same college, in the same dorm, and even on the same fucking floor?

Yep.

I said, Well, shit man, it must be fate and who are we to fuck with fate?

Mark said, That’s exactly what I was thinking.

No way man, that chick is whacked! Snowplow was wearing his traditional boxer shorts as we sat in his dingy second floor room. It was almost noon the following day and the shades were still drawn, a musky odor soaking the room in a net of stink that you couldn’t get away from no matter where you moved. Mark looked pensive. I was pissed.

I said to Snowplow, Listen man, we went out of our way to do you a fucking favor.  Now you need to do something for us, right? Remember the deal?

That must have gotten the best of his sense of honor because he said, Goddammit, you’re right. You’re right. He looked serious for about five seconds and said, Alright I’ll do it, but this squares us.

Mark said, Yeah, sure it will. Just make sure you get both copies of the write up from her room.

He said, If they’re in her room, I’ll get ‘em. What’s the kid’s name?

Alexander. Bart Alexander. Don’t forget.

The RA on the second floor told Mark that all RAs turned in their exception reports and write-ups to the Hall Director on the final Wednesday of the month, which left us only about a day or so to get the report out of her room. Every form had two duplicates for a total of three copies. Bart had one copy with his signature, one went to the RAs file, and the other went to the Hall Director for use in the formal hearing. The RA generally filed the report and never worried about it again until they were called in to testify on the incident. Sometimes there was no need for testimony and the whole incident was forgotten in the campus stretch between Orientation Day to midterms to finals. If Snowplow could get the two copies out of her room before the meeting on Wednesday, my boy Bart would likely be home free and would owe us one hell of a favor.

The quick skinny is that Snowplow did it but he got into more trouble doing it than what we were trying to solve. The plan was for this bulbous-nosed meathead to call the RA on Sunday night, ask her to go out and get some dinner, come back to her room, and start drinking. We weren’t sure how exactly that would be accomplished on a Sunday night but Snowplow was adamant he could do it and we left it to him.

We didn’t tell the ass not to get butt fucking drunk before he even got to her room. He got there, sloppy as hell, the door open, and she must have been in the bathroom which was six doors down from her room. This gave him about four minutes to investigate her room for the write-ups. He found them in her desk drawer in a folder marked Hall Meetings. There were four other sets of write-ups in there. Snowplow grabbed Bart’s papers, folded them up and shoved them into his pocket just as she walked back in the room.

He woke up naked next to her Monday morning. She had no roommates so no one but the Magistrates knew and since it pertained to official Magistrate business, a secret was a secret and something we held deadly serious. We didn’t hear anything from Snowplow until finals week, when he told us the RA was pregnant with his baby. He came to us for help with the situation but there were levels that even the Magistrates wouldn’t sink beneath. Bart was home free and we wouldn’t waste much time in collecting on the favor. I heard a few years back that Snowplow married the RA and they’ve been together ever since, plowing the snowy interstate routes of Eastern Ohio. Life take some jagged turns sometimes.

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The First Payoff

The story of the key fob goes back to the day I hit Greg up for info on who made the phone call. He had heard Snowplow talking about it on the smoke bench outside class with two other hillbilly Nascar boys. Greg was waiting for his roommate and Snowplow’s voice was carrying, distinctly saying my last name. Greg knew me from the hall meeting on the first night and my name had been passed around the floor as a possible source for alcohol.

I asked him why the guy’s name was Snowplow. Greg said his roommate was from the same hometown and the kid’s father and uncle owned a snow removal business and he was in line to inherit the empire when they both died. The key fob was what Snowplow used as his business card, showing it to everyone as his proof that the riches of snow removal were within his grasp, brandishing it like a papal seal.

Mark and I took the picture and the key fob to Snowplow the following Monday night. We found him in his room dressed in Ohio State boxer shorts with the waistband hidden from a hanging hairy gut. His roommate was sitting at his desk with his back turned, paying us no mind. We handed the picture to him first, his face stretching in a smile which fell away like an Etch a Sketch in his skull was being shaken. He looked back at us, obviously seeking his proof. Mark opened his right fist, revealing the fob which was scratched up, something Mark and I had done back in Columbus with the thought that it would look like it had been through a scuffle.

Snowplow took the fob slowly from Mark’s hand, like it was some holy relic.  At that moment, I actually felt sorry for the kid. How pathetic, to worship a rubber key chain, his whole life was defined by a red rubber fob, and we were giving a little pride back to him, pride we had taken away in the first place, a pride that had no honor to back it up. If I had any reservations about lying to and manipulating this peanut head, it was all washed away with that look of worship on his face as he took that fob out of Mark’s hand. I looked over at the phone sitting on his roommate’s desk, the same phone the douche bag had probably used to speak that filthy fucking word to me. He could drown in his own vomit for all I cared. We left without saying another word.

The Simmer Down

Mark and I resolved, after the whole Snowplow affair, that we’d cool it for a while and concentrate on school. We had been high consistently every day since the Saturday we arrived and it was getting to the point when being sober was just like being stoned again. Feeling high when you stop doing drugs is a hell of a thing, a final flag before things start sliding downhill fast.

I was going for an Astronomy minor because I loved space, astrophysics, cosmology, all that shit. The only problem was it was an 8:30 class. I had a great piece of ass that sat next to me and by the second week we’d already struck up a Hi/Hi relationship. By the fourth week, she was driving me to class and I was dumb enough to think she wanted more than my notes and I gave them to her of course because I wanted to fuck her. That never panned out and the last I heard she was slinging drinks in some dive near the flats in Cleveland. That class was on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Right after that, I had a 9:30 Imaginative Writing class taught by this girl who meant well but was so timid in her teaching style that she couldn’t contain my overly massive ego from running a whirlwind around the class. It got to a point where I would do things to initiate a response from her. One exercise in class was for everyone to draw an occupation and an action from a hat. The occupation would be the protagonist’s job in a short story and the action would be the image my story ended on. I drew a hairdresser as my occupation and the ending action was licking a lamppost in the middle of winter.

The story I wrote was about this hairdresser who wakes up to go to her salon, run by a real douche bag who sexually harasses her and gambles away all his money. She opens the shop every day and her life is miserable but this day she’s not alone when she opens up. There’s a finger breaker there from the loan shark the douche bag boss borrowed money from and hasn’t paid back. He gives her a chloroform mask and she wakes up strapped to the hair chair.

This finger breaker has a German Sheppard named Adolph. Since the hairdresser doesn’t know where the boss is, the breaker decides to torture her for amusement. He strips her naked from the waist down and shoves peanut butter in her crack and sicks his dog on her. She can’t scream, can’t move, and just as the dog is finishing up the boss comes in and then turns and runs out the door when he sees what’s going on. The finger breaker catches up to the boss, right next to a phone pole (in the middle of Winter). He grabs the douche bag’s face with his thumb and middle finger, forcing the guy’s tongue to pop out of his mouth, a pushes his face into the pole, the guy is stuck to the pole by his tongue.  He takes a gun out and shoots the boss in the foot, steals his wallet, and walks down the street with Adolph following. The douche bag boss is stuck to the pole with a bleeding foot and the poor hairdresser has finally resolved to find a new job in a better part of town. I caught a little bit of heat over that story. The teacher asked me to stay after and talk with her a moment. I obliged and when she questioned me on my motive for writing it, I just told her I had a feeling and went with it. She ended up giving me a B-.

Mark and Phil were struggling in their classes. With all the women, liquor, and pot in Mark’s case, they were having a hard time staying focused. I did my best to compound the problem by asking Mark to get high as often as I could. The majority of my writing that year was done under the influence of marijuana. Looking back at my writing during that time, I find a body of ideals never quite thought through, each caged in a haze of doped up euphemisms that only served to damage some decent ideas. And that gorgeous little herb did more than affect my writing. I was estranged from my family, had been for years, because I thought they didn’t understand me.

Then one day the following summer, after Mark had died, my mom caught me smoking a bowl on her back deck around midnight on a Tuesday. She said to me listen, you think I don’t know what you’re going through, but I do. Don’t forget, I lived through the sixties. The point hit home and I welcomed my mother back in my life. A hard shave was coming but for the time being, Mark and I were living the high life. The Magistrates official business had been put on the back burner for the time being and we were filling the minutes of our days with bong hits, blunts, and the crate of VHS stoner movies I brought with me.

Life is always sweet in the early moments of a memory.

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The Others

The plan involved Phil and his girlfriend. The poor guy had run up a three hundred dollar phone bill his first month there, talking to her about her stupid high school life, trying to explain what college was like to her, both of them speaking totally different languages from totally different countries. It turned out that the nights she wasn’t home talking to him (every other one), she was out with the starting senior quarterback, giving the guy blowjobs in the backseat of his Cavalier after every Friday night football game. Phil heard from one of his good friends who still went to school there and he was crushed. Mark still had Snowplow’s key fob and we were going to put it to use.

We talked Phil into going back to Columbus for his high school’s Homecoming weekend. On the ride there, Mark and I got high and Phil ran through his collection of Metallica CDs. Mark stayed busy cleaning his potato gun and fashioning a new pipe weapon out of a steel bar he had pulled from a campus dumpster. The strapping tape was wound, the music was cranked and we were all feeling good. The late night phone calls had stopped.

We sat in the stands of the Homecoming game where Phil’s girlfriend wiggled her little cheerleading ass and her quarterback boy toy threw for eighty yards. Phil hadn’t told her he was coming and we sat on the visitor’s side so as not to attract any attention. With one minute left on the game clock, we headed out to the player’s parking lot, stopping off at the truck for the potato gun, the wrapped pipe, a flashlight, and Phil’s Polaroid instant camera.

There was a dense growth of trees that we hid in until about an hour after game time when, sure as shit, here comes Phil’s girlfriend and the master jock. The guy’s walk telegraphed that it was his sole responsibility for the team’s win that night, a prideful ambulation that began from and ended at his penis. We waited until they had been in the car for about ten minutes, seeing her head occasionally bobbing up, Kurt Cobain belting out My girl, my girl; don’t lie to me through the cracked back window. Mark readied the potato gun and after the calibration was complete, he passed the gun to Phil. He said aim at the back window and when you’re ready, push the button on the butane torch. Phil nodded, those ten minutes had been damn hard on him.

Mark and I snuck up to the car; it was the only one in the lot by that time.  We were ducked down and waiting.  We waited for about two minutes that felt like twenty and finally the itch got the better of Phil.  The window exploded, startling me and moving Mark into action.  From inside the car came a masculine, What the fuck? The girl opened the door and ran toward the school, gone with the wind.

Mark opened the back door of the car, pulled the grunting meat head out by his hair, jerked his head up to his mouth and said Hello, motherfucker. The kid struggled as well as he could, even managed a decent shot to Mark’s neck. But Mark, built like a panzer, wasn’t fazed. The pipe went up, down, up, then down. The white strapping tape was muted red by the third descent. Phil’s girlfriend was screaming from the school, making a hell of a racket. We needed to speed things up and I looked over and saw Phil, still hidden in the bushes like we told him to. I told Mark to get the flashlight.

Mark pulled a small flashlight from his pocket and shined it on the kid’s face.  I picked up the Polaroid from the grass by the back tire of the Cavalier. I pointed the camera at the bloody dumbass, knocked out cold on the grass, and fired off a picture—proof.  I looked to the bushes again and said come on dude! Vengeance had once again been served and we all headed back to the truck.

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The Beginning

The magistrates formed about a week after the phone calls began, about three weeks into the semester. 2:30 A.M. on Monday morning and the speakerphone conversation went something like this:

Hello?

What’s it feel like to live with a nigger?

What the fuck’dju say?

Click

I said, Did you hear what he said? Malcolm’s voice was muffled with his head under the pillow. Yeah, I heard that shit, man. Go back to bed. The words said, Forget about it but the tone said, This is nothing new; I expected it. I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling for about fifteen minutes. I wanted blood.

I began my search immediately the next day to find the motherfucker who called.  Mark and I scored that oscar of pot from a guy I knew in my old hometown, a douche I called a friend because he knocked ten bucks off the bag.  Mark and I needed only enough to fill our Dugouts, little wooden boxes with metal bats that would last us two weeks. When we rolled blunts, joints, packed bongs or whatever, it was always a communitive effort where everyone threw in a little, the pot crowd being the only truly successful socialistic society ever to make it work. After filling our dugs, we had about a half-ounce left to do whatever we wanted with and Mark suggested selling it. I told him we should hang onto it, making the argument that a college dorm is essentially a prison state with a longer leash and keys to the doors, that prisoners traded favors for cigarettes and other social amenities and pot was no different. Mark, seeing the logic and the opportunity, nodded and smiled. The Third Floor Magistrates were conceived in a blitzkrieg of dope smoke, a campaign of vengeance funded by cannabinoids.

The first fish’s name was Greg. I still don’t know anything more about Greg than his first name and that idiotic Cocks hat he always wore. Hey, do you guys have any weed I could buy? I looked at Mark and he looked back at me, we were high, sitting on the smoke bench outside, the night was still hot which meant early Fall. We took him upstairs for a private chat where we said, Greg, we’re not exactly in the business of selling anything, but we might be able to help you out.

Greg got two fat joints in exchange for the promise that when called upon he would perform a service for us, straight up Godfather shit. Greg, not realizing that one day he might be called upon to do something he didn’t want to, thought this was the greatest deal in the world.  After Greg left, Mark looked at me and said, So it begins. I nodded and said, Let’s go back outside man.

Greg was called upon the next day. I caught him in the hallway on the far end of the men’s side of Kohl Hall, the one where most of the lights were burnt out so we called it The Dark Side. I followed him into his room and told him we needed a favor, explaining about the phone call, and judging from his blushing and avoiding eye contact with me, he knew something about it. I told him to spill and he gave me a name, some jackass on the second floor. The guy’s nickname was Snowplow, some redneck fuck from a podunk southeast Ohio town. We watched for the guy over a couple of days and one night when we were sitting on the smoke bench, he came out headed for the convenience store located in the building behind our dorm.  Mark, no expression on his face, said, Let’s go. We went.

There was a small alley-like walkway next to the Commons dining hall. Mark and I waited until Snowplow came out with his plastic back of groceries and his gallon of milk. We hid behind bushes and waited for him to pass. When he did, Mark ran out of the bushes and jacked him with a lead pipe wrapped in ankle tape about a hundred times over. He went down like anyone fighting Tyson in the 80s. I was behind Mark and began kicking the fucker in the ribs, the legs, and arms, stomping his balls, punching his face, and smashing his groceries on the sidewalk. Mark pulled his Ace of Spades throwing knife out of his boot, cut open the gallon of milk, poured it all over the worthless fucker, then spit on him. I followed suit with my own hocker. Snowplow’s keys had fallen from his hand when he went down. Mark grabbed them and broke off the fob that said Jensen’s Plow Company Logan, Ohio. We bolted away from the scene and all was well. The guy never saw us coming and Mark threw the lead pipe in the ten-foot pond at the other end of campus. Vengeance was served for the moment.

The Payback

Snowplow approached us a couple days after we beat the shit out of him. We were sitting on the smoke bench and he stumbled up, eyes still black, scratches from the concrete on his right forearm. He was wearing a Dixieland Drivers Do It Right t-shirt. He sat down next to Mark, sighed and said, I heard you guys have a way of finding people.

Mark said, Yeah, and who told you that?

I thought for sure we were about to scrap again but I stayed playing my hand.

Snowplow said, One of my buddies told me that you two were the ones to talk to about getting some revenge on the fuckers that did this to me. He touched his face when he said this, absently. He didn’t know. My God, he really didn’t know it was us. I spoke up before Mark could laugh in his face. I said, Yeah, we can probably help you, man. We hear things you know?

He said, I can give you guys forty bucks. That’s all my mom gave me for this month.

I said, It won’t cost you anything, as far as money goes; but someday we might call on you to perform us a little service.

He said, Whatever but I want proof that you got the fuckers.

I said, Okay, well we gotta go.

Mark and I got up and walked, reaching for our dugouts after we passed the campus police station and were well out of range of any innocent passersby. He said, Jesus man, what’re we gonna do? I told him I thought I might have a plan.  After we had talked it out, my egg of an idea became a panzer tank after Mark’s diabolical suggestions. The plan was hatched and I guess this was the first time I got a glimpse of what this thing would become.

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