Had someone suggested to me that the time would come when I would be involved in a drug deal, I would have advised them in no uncertain terms to seek professional help for their madness. Yet the time did come. 

Moving from luxury condo life amid the then notable quietude and relatively low crime rate of West Vancouver, Canada to the full on, or so I thought at the time, boisterous and drug centric nature of Vancouver proper’s East End was for me a challenging cultural change and adjustment. Freshly ensconced in a detached house one block from Commercial Drive, the epicentre I incorrectly believed at the time of the Vancouver hard and soft (if there is such a thing) drug scene, I felt some trepidation, some foreboding shall we say. 

Notwithstanding the omnipresent marijuana smoke and associated God awful smell, since legalized (the usage thereof that is not the smell) on the surface ‘The Drive’ as it is trendily and appropriately known, nor it’s environs certainly did not then or now scream ‘high drug use and crime area, get your fix here’ any more than West Vancouver’s Marine Drive and shall we say it’s much beloved public library. I will concede I let down my usually heads up guard and quite innocently (that is of course what they all say) shortly after taking up residence, stumbled into an opportunity for a bit part in an unfolding movie-like scene in the form of guess what, a drug deal.

For the record I might as well confess that this was not my first flirtation with the law. Years ago when I was both young and as even I recall quite foolish, I was a lookout for the execution of a crime – petty but nonetheless criminal. The site was a downtown Vancouver parkade. Some friends of mine with whom I was traveling needed a car battery in the worst way. We were running late for an event not involving petty crime and the battery in our car had gone dead. With no one around to offer a jump start (they had a well used jumper cable to hand) the decision was made to borrow the battery from someone’s parked car, start our car with it and then reinstall said borrowed battery. (Yes I know. That’s what they all say.) 

Car hoods in those long ago days were fairly easy to open without accessing the inside of the car. (Not that doing so was, again in those days, not much of an obstacle.) The plan was simple. While my friends worked to extract the battery, connect it to our vehicle, start the car and then return and reconnect the battery, I and another of our group would act as look-outs monitoring both the inbound and the outbound parkade routes. We would raise the alarm at the slightest indication of ‘danger’ and our would-be battery borrowers would cease and desist whilst assuming a nonchalant manner until the ‘coast’  as it were, was again clear.

We went to work with myself stationed below the scene of our very petty crime watching for incoming cars or pedestrians. Only once, and it was on my watch so to speak, was there an issue. I quickly gave the alarm and equally quickly the target car’s hood was dropped and the guys just ‘hung out’ for a few minutes before re-commencing the job. It worked! Our car was re-started and the temporarily stolen/borrowed battery was replaced. The owner would never know it had been borrowed and we made it to our event.

The above shenanigan hardly qualified me for a bit part in a B movie let alone a drug deal. Regardless, at a rendezvous that would have met with the approval of the Keystone cops, I encountered a shady looking fairly tall caucasian male at the corner of Salsbury and Gravelly in East Vancouver. As I was slowly pulling up in my silver SUV he opened the door, jumped in and buckled up, the latter perhaps to minimize the chance of an eagle eyed cop pulling us over. Go figure.

In total silence we eyed each other up for what seemed like but was not, a very long time. Who would speak first? Saying what? He probably wondered why I had shut down the engine, pulled out the key and applied the handbrake just as he had opened the door and climbed in. He made as if to speak but then suddenly unbuckled his seat belt, opened the door and vamoosed as we like to say ‘in the trade’ so to speak. 

As my would be passenger walked briskly away, he repeatedly hit his forehead with the palm of his right hand. A dead give away that he had entered the wrong silver SUV. Straight as they come I had just witnessed, indeed for a brief time been a part of, some kind of deal most likely drugs, gone wrong. I locked the vehicle, walked the twenty feet to our door, hastily entered and poured myself a large drink.