The Big Drug Deal That Wasn’t
Tales of Boomer glory
Once upon a time, in a land far away. Or, more precisely, in Eugene, Oregon, in 1971.
I was pursuing a degree in English at the University of Oregon and living with my girlfriend in a big old house that, like every semi-habitable building near campus, had been converted into student housing.
We kept our record albums in a wooden apple box next to the overstuffed couch and put a penny on the arm of our turntable so it wouldn’t skip when Janis Joplin sang “Take another little piece of my heart.” The house wasn’t much, but it was nirvana compared to the back bedroom at my parents’ house.
My good friend, Evan Winters, lived across the hall. Evan was an anthropology major and a counterculture trendsetter. He had hair past his shoulders, wore a floppy leather hat, and played bluegrass music on the dulcimer. He was ahead of me in school, but often took semesters off, during which he used his knowledge of indigenous craft to chip obsidian into arrowheads at a makeshift workbench beside the building and sell them to a sketchy Native American gift shop at the edge of town.
Evan controlled who lived in our building. The landlord was aggressively absent and did not do repairs. Evan’s job was to screen out complainers, and nobody got to live there without Evan’s…
