Doing Menial Work Until Death, and the Dealers I Met Along the Way

A roundabout way of remembering a mom who drove two hours each way to sell edibles during the pandemic.

My return to full-time writing work was short-lived, I’m afraid. The copywriting job I landed about a month ago pulled a bait-and-switch on me. According to the job posting and initial communication with the employer, I was expected to complete three 1,500-word pieces per week. That struck me as reasonable enough. Flash forward to my onboarding interviews, and they suddenly told me the expectation was that I would turn around 3,000 words of copy per day. So the baseline for a typical week went from 4,500 words to roughly 15,000. Not sure how many of you are writers - that’s quite a bit.

I’m aware that going above and beyond stated responsibilities is a reality of just about any job, though I also don’t think it’s wrong to suggest an employer instantly tripling the workload on the first week counts as more than garden-variety deception by the bosses.

Suffice it to say, this left a bad taste in my mouth right away. I had left a decent job with a fair amount of downtime for this new abruptly stressful one, and felt already like I was being set up. That the company mentioned they had a 90-day introductory period before I would qualify for many of the perks of full-time employment told me they likely weed out a lot of people in order to cull those willing to accomodate these intense demands.

If I’m writing about subjects I’m passionate about, cranking out 3,000 words a day would likely not be that much of an issue, though on a constant basis that would still wear on me after a while. This would be even more taxing, as the purpose of the job was to produce career guide content, which entailed researching and writing about shit I generally don’t care about. So perhaps I could have sucked it up, been overworked and miserable for $40,000 a year, but the idea of constant stress, being immediately lied to, and less than spectacular pay didn’t exactly light a fire under me. I got sloppy and disinterested; they didn’t like that.

And that means I’m back to working another manual labor job for the summer, one with lower hourly pay than the job I left a few months ago (no, I couldn’t go back, they already filled my position). This new job is another in the service industry where tipping is encouraged and not uncommon, so hopefully that makes up the difference.

As much as I want to curse my fate, it wasn’t long ago I felt somewhat fortunate for my job luck. At the outset of the pandemic, I kept both of my jobs, as canvassing for the progressive non-profit transitioned to mostly phonebanking and textbanking from home (though we did do some in-person literature drops close to the election), and the dog daycare I worked at was one of the rare businesses that never closed. Does that qualify me for essential worker status? Probably not, but that status never got anyone anything aside from patronizing kudos from well-off people and maybe a vaccine appointment a few weeks earlier than others.

I had been working at the dog daycare for about three years by the start of lockdown. Along with being generally chill work - if you can look past breaking up the occasional scuffle and smelling rancid trashcans full of dogshit - it afforded a great deal of flexibility with my other jobs. There were periods I worked there three or four days a week, others when it was just one. Because I had to fit it into a combination of other low-paying hourly gigs, this proved valuable. There have been stretches in recent years where I held three jobs at once. During the summer of 2018, I went on a 60-day run where I worked for at least one of them every day. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it paid the bills.

Coping with that much stress and exhaustion isn’t easy when you have limited resources, and you’re cancelled to boot, so social support for sure isn’t coming. I turned to the recourse any reasonable person would: drugs.

When the pandemic hit, and I found myself living alone, seeing little of anyone on a regular basis aside from my dog and my cat (RIP Jean), the need for distraction was compounded. Early on in lockdown, when I had a little extra money from my tax return and the first stimulus check, I was taking edibles pretty much daily. To offset whatever guilt I had about heavy use I smoked less, I was also freaked out by the deaths resulting from black market weed vapes that hit the news in 2019. What’s more, the concentrated dose of edibles simply hit harder.

The only problem with edibles: because I have to buy them from gray market dealers in DC, knowing the true potency can often be a guessing game until you find reliable vendors. Many sellers greatly exaggerate how much THC is in their product. Some will straight-up sell you regular gummi worms with nothing in them, if you aren’t careful. Occasionally this semi-legal market dynamic means getting ripped off. Other times, you get blindsided by an edible that is much stronger than you expected. For a while, I tended to assume most were overstating the potency of their product. Then I’d get a product that was listed as high protency and was exactly as strong as it said.

The consequences for this aren’t especially dire, provided you’re in a good situation. Say I overdosed on an edible while at home - the worst that would happen is I’d fall asleep for 12 hours, maybe run to the bathroom to vomit if it was really, really bad, but that’s about it.

Then there are the bad situations. Last August, I was scheduled to work at daycare on my birthday. Money was scarce by that point, though I scrimped together enough to give myself a fun day. I did a little celebratory drinking in the morning before leaving to walk to work at 1:30 in the afternoon. I took an edible right before I left. I had done it several times before - I know well how much I can take and still function regularly, and the job is mostly standing around once you get a few tasks done, so it’s condusive to having a buzz. I understand what I did would obviously be frowned on, but I needed to blow off steam - it was my birthday, I had no plans other than work, and I was pissed off about a lot of things.

You can probably guess at this point that this is one of the examples of being caught off guard by the potency of an edible. About a half-hour into my shift, I could tell it was starting to go bad. Once in my section, I had no choice but to stay put and hope it would be okay. I did my best to maintain composure to no avail. Surely coupled with the drinking, this extra potent edible staggered me, and I had trouble standing after a while. I doubled over, threw up. I noticed the dogs were agitated by my bizarre behavior. A few snapped at each other. I made a motion with my hand to shoo them away and break it up. One chomped into my pinky finger.

In the span of years at the dog daycare, a number of times I’d been nipped strongly enough to draw blood, though this was my first instance getting bit hard enough that I had to go to urgent care to get the wound treated. Ended up being the last time, too, as the owner fired me days later. Can’t say I blame him, and given that I was only working there Monday afternoons, I wasn’t all that sore about losing a whopping $50 per week. Miss the dogs though.

Since a friend also works at the daycare, word to spread instantaneously among my social circle about what happened to me. Another friend alerted my parents, who somehow got the idea that this was a suicide attempt. True enough, I’ve experienced suicidal ideation in my life, but I don’t believe I’ve ever thought of offing myself in the middle of a shift at dog daycare. I suppose I should ask what message they thought that would be sending.

My parents forced me to spend a few days at their place to “clean myself up,” which was even more embarassing than the dog bite. Little surprise, then, that I decided to back off the edibles, for a while at least.

Months later, as the days grew shorter and election stress peaked, I was ready for some good ol’ backsliding, yet I figured I had to try new vendors. In DC, it’s not unusual to find spots where a handful post up in the same location, typically vacant office space or an apartment above ground-level retail. Since these are mostly cash transactions and these arrangements aren’t technically legal but also aren’t a huge priority for police, robbery is their biggest concern, meaning upon entry a customer needs to show an Instagram invite and receive a patdown for weapons.

I’m not even sure how I first got connected with the mom who became a fixture over the next six months. I tried a location I hadn’t before, using an invite from a different vendor. In addition to being considerably older than other dealers, her mixture of mostly baked goods stood out from the slickly packaged infused Sour Patch Kids and other candies that vendors had clearly acquired secondhand. She made everything herself.

Better yet, her stuff was reliable. The potency always matched up with what she claimed it was, and she was generous with freebies for regulars. If only I had found her earlier, I might have spared myself one semi-serious dog bite and job termination. Always glad to see me, she introduced me to her son, who worked as a vendor selling flower at the table next to hers. I admired how they drove two hours to and from Richmond several times a week, undoubtedly not super fun even if the roads were clearer than they are now. At a time when meeting new people was rare aside from halting and brief interactions, it was welcome bonding, lending our meetings an air of being more than purely transactional. I don’t have any folksy homespun wisdom from her to quote you, it was simply pleasant at a time when things were anything but. She amused me when she started offering her hand for fistbumps when I arrived or departed, given this was a period when you could easily find people who thought it was an abomination not to be double masking in public and treating any violation of Covid protocol as a high crime.

The place she posted up was about 10 blocks from the Capitol. In the middle of January, we talked about how she navigated the street closures and curfew imposed after the Capitol Riot. Though I resist the way mainline Democrats have tried to turn the riot into another 9/11 for politcal expedience, it interests me how such events and their fallout affect regular people. Tensions eased as spring emerged, the world slowly reopened, and she started mentioning that I should be sure to come by on 4/20, as she’d have special deals and the atmosphere at the shop would be worth taking in. I saw her a couple days before 4/20, but when I swung by that afternoon, while her glass display case full of product was there, she wasn’t. I came by a few more times in the next few weeks, and it was the same - her station full of wares but her nowhere to be seen.

Figuring she had some personal business, I was disappointed but didn’t think too much of it, until weeks later when a family member appeared on her business’ Instagram account to say she was in serious condition in the hospital. Days later, at the beginning of June, she died of pneumonia.

I’m still shocked. We didn’t know each other all that well, yet she was a welcome presence at a unique moment both in my life and the world at large. People come and go all the time, and perhaps I wouldn’t dwell on it so much if her exit from my life wasn’t also her death. It feels a tad solispistic to think of her this way, that her presence to me was almost like a magical storybook character when she was a complex person with a wide scope of experience I’ll never know. In the abstract, having someone who sells you edibles leave an impact seems funny, and I guess I’m glad life can be more than what glib assocations would have you believe.