2019-09-05 - The Importance of Being Neighborly

Shit's been weird lately, and it has Greg in a weird place. So it is that he finds himself already awake and dressed this morning, swathed in his trademark oversized blue and gray knit 'drug rug' hoodie and some holey jeans and smoking a blunt at his counter, when he hears the timid little knock at his door. He sticks the blunt between his lips to quickly cross the intervening space and yank open the door; it opens inward with a flutter of loose weathering plastic. "Who dat is?" he asks semi-ironically, weighing his visitor with a gaze and a grin. He cranes his neck to look out around her. "You see any fuckin' cops around, baby?"

A bright eyed blonde greets him, the corner of Bennie's lip being worried between her two rows of teeth as she waits. "Um. Hi? Sorry, Bennie." She thrusts out her hand like he's asking for a formal introduction as a full smile blooms on her lips. "No po-po. They tend to leave Huckleberry alone because we typically police ourselves. Um. You mind if I come in? The neighbors, they keep tabs on me..."

Greg reaches out to give the hand a quick shake while his eyes run another scan of his untrimmed lawn and hedges. "Oh fuck -- shit yeah girl, get in here." He waits for her to pass him by and draws the door closed behind her. He gives a sheepish grin and general wave to indicate the shitty trailer. "Don't mind my dump. I bought it cheap, haven't had a chance to fix it up yet." He reaches out to run a hand up the paneling. "She's got potential, tho- Ow! Fuckin' splinter!" He swears, jerking his hand away to suck on it for a moment. He darts a furtive glance toward Bennie for some reason, then seems to really focus on the little hurt in his hand.

"Fuck," he ultimately swears, shaking the offending appendage. "Shit, that smarts." He winces as he starts to rifle around for... well, there's not going to be a band-aid. Maybe a halfway clean piece of cloth? He ultimately settles on his drug rug, pressing his hand against it to grin at Bennie. "Good to meet you, Bennie." He glances towards the plasticked-up window at the end of the trailer. "I didn't hear you pull in... you live in the park? I'm Greg, by the way. Greg...ORY Sumpter." He makes a gross-face about the 'ory'. "Just Greg works though, fam."

Bennie ducks her head even though it's not an issue of clearance, more a certain kind of shame that comes along with nipping into a suspected dealer's trailer. There is a little crinkle of her features in a wince when he gets a splinter, "Nice to meet you, Greg. I can..." She gestures to his hand, "..well, I can take a look at that if you need me too. I'm an EMT. But if you got the piece of wood out, a dot of super glue would be better than.." Well, his 'drug rug'. "I live over in 18, no judgment on my part. You...okay? Aside from your trailer trying to give you an infection."

Greg reaches up to run a hand through his hair -- the hand with the bleeding splinter wound, incidentally, and he leaves a little wet smear of blood in his reddish-brown hair. "I'm good family," he says with a heavy sigh, even though he's not. "It's just that..." He catches himself, and shoots a grin at Bennie. "Ahh... you don't want my life story, girl. I bet it's the same story everywhere, anyway -- this town is fucked." He takes another measureof Bennie, this one a cool-eyed appraisal. What he sees seems to encourage him, because he crosses into the kitchen to grab a little eight by ten slab of green marble from the stove and brings it over to set it on the counter. Reaching into a pocket of his jeans, he produces a little paper packet, unfolds an end, and starts dumping clumpy white cocaine out onto the slab.

If the lady knows her noseables, she'll note the color and clumpy, rock-like consistency of Greg's nose-beers: it's pretty pure shit. "So, what can I help you with? Pretty girls like you only come visit me for one reason." He flashes her his best dimply grin.

Bennie swings her overly large purse around to the front of her body, starting to dig through it as she comes over to him by the counter. Even though her eyes flick to the drugs, she doesn't seem to care hide nor hair what he's doing with the cocaine. At this point it would be like the pot calling the kettle a similar color. She pulls out a little zipper case from amid the various contents - seriously it's a wonder she finds anything in there - and yanks the little metal toggle. "I'm sure you do just fine for yourself in the female department." She says cheerily enough. "Before you do that, gimme your hand."

"Nah, they mostly run, girl." Greg's tone and expression hold no irony as he sets the packet down and turns to consider Bennie. An eyebrow lifts skeptically while he watches her rifle through her stuff; but then, the blood is already starting to run and drip off his hand. It's with an oddly fearful and skittish mien that Greg slowly holds out his hand to Bennie. His impossibly deep brown eyes are locked on to her face, searching, and he appears incredibly vulnerable in this moment, and very obviously uncomfortable with that feeling. To break the tension, he does what he always does, and opens his mouth. "You know, the lifestyle's a little hot, I guess. I suppose it makes sense." He gives a little shrug, holding his hand out like a good boy. "There's a difference between someone wanting to be with you, and someone willing to put out to get at my stash." His face colors rapidly after this, flooding with embarrassment. "I'm not sure why I'm still talking," he tells her, slowly grinning. "It's like a fuckin' train wreck girl... my mouth keeps saying dumb shit, and I'm over here like shut the fuck up, bro." It's finally with a visible effort that he clamps his lips shut.

"I have that effect on people." Bennie's grin turns a little lopsided as she sticks three packages between the fingers of her left hand: an antiseptic wipe, an antibiotic cream and a bandage. "Pretty soon you'll be telling me your shoe size, and how you lost your virginity." With a practiced easy, she rips open the first package and without so much as touching skin to skin, she wipes away the blood keeping contact with only the clean part of the pad. She flicks the spent thing into the sink and then tears open the next packet.

It's hard to tell what Greg thinks about this ministration. He certainly holds his hand still, cooperating, but he watches the proceedings like someone might watch a nature documentary about a weird, unknown animal. "It seems like you know what you're doing, Bennie." Greg's tone holds respect; a girl with skills, respectable, not some random skank. "You must have that 'nurturer'... thing." His grin flickers, trying to hold and mostly failing; something about having Bennie take care of his boo-boo makes him feel way too vulnerable. He draws breath to tell her he's fine, sees the blood start to run again, and shuts his mouth. Good boy.

There is a light laugh as Bennie squeezes some of the ointment on the wound, "I suppose. I like to fix things, and fixing people is like the best thing, right?" She uses the edge of the packet to spread the ointment instead of her finger, one can never be too careful in the absence of gloves. Especially in her line of work. "Try to keep this dry and bandaged for twenty four hours, but you don't need a tension bandage or stitches. Happy to report, you'll survive!" The second packet follows the path of the first, being flicked into the basin of the sink before she unwraps the bandage and applies it across the wound.

Greg inspects the hand, almost as though he expects to find a hidden razor blade or maybe a bomb. Nothing of the sort, though, and he grins to Bennie as he starts to crush the little coke rocks up with his lighter. "Thanks for that. I suppose I'd have to start giving deals if I was bleeding all over everybody's shit all day." He sticks the lighter in his pocket, grabs his license off the counter and cards the (still not close to fine enough) coke up into a rough and ugly line. His eyes shoot the question at Bennie, and he also asks: "Jump start your morning, Bennie the nurturer?"

Bennie packs away her little first aid kit and grabs a tissue out of her bag, laying it over the trash in the sink and looking for an appropriate receptacle to toss it into. "Oh, thanks, but no. Not my drug of choice, which I guess brings me to why I'm here." She gives a bit of a nervous laugh, using her free hand to tuck a lock of blonde behind the shell of her ear in a fidgety gesture. "Do you have a line on Adderall? I usually carry a script through my shrink, but then they left town and I just haven't made a new appointment yet, and I'm starting to run low and...well, now who's just flapping their mouth?"

Greg turns his full attention and an empathetic grin on Bennie now. "I understand," he says, grinning his grin and nodding. A brief pause to grab a waiting tooter and snort his line, and he reels on his feet for a moment. "Woo! Fuck yeah!" He likes to make some noise, it seems, but he doesn't appear to go in for the overblown physical reactions some folks embrace, at least -- 50 percent chill? He snorts in that charming, single-nostril way that contorts a person's face just so. "Adderall? Yeah girl, that's an easy one." Moving a bit more quickly now -- or at least jerkily -- he goes over to the coffee table in the living room, opens a drawer, and begins to rattle around. In short order he returns to hold up two little orange pill bottles with no labels. "I've got the 30's in the orange capsules," rattle rattle, "and the 10's in the blue pills," shake shake. "I like the 30's, personally, 'cuz they don't stain my nose blue. Those little beads are a motherfucker to crush, though."

Bennie sort of finds some other point in his kitchen to look at while he does his little snorting routine. Oh! A Cabinet. Look! A floor. Perhaps she's just giving him an ounce of privacy. Her lip gets clamped by her teeth again as he moves into the living room, trailing after with her arms folding over her chest. "What's the price difference? I'm a little tight on cash flow. Hey, maybe I can get the 'nurturer' discount." She jokes. Partly.

Greg considers Bennie, considers the bottles. Considers, considers. Decisions! He looks around the room for a minute, like he's trying to look for someone to give him advice. Finally he ends up squinting suspiciously at Bennie. It's an odd transition! He is just really peering into her soul here, and at length he asks, "You don't take this shit for fun, do you?" He doesn't even wait for the answer, but throws the bottle with the blue pills back into the drawer and closes it. With a look that manages to be half irritated and half amused, he tosses the bottle of the bigger, orange pills to Bennie. "We'll talk price on the next one," he says, avoiding eye contact now and making a weird little movement that starts as rubbing at the back of his neck, and ends as him staring down at his bandaged hand. He looks at Bennie then, forging sudden direct eye contact. "People need to take care of each other around here... this place is fucked. You know?" Those two words carry volumes of unspoken meaning.

Almost startled, Bennie's hands make a little cradle to catch the rattling bottle with a little bounce and fumble against her palms. She rubs her thumb over the label-less orange plastic as if it were gold, murmuring down at it. "No, I don't." Her digits fist around it and it's held to her chest like it's suddenly the most precious thing on the face of the planet and needs to be protected. "How cliche." The blonde suddenly turns up the wattage of her smile, "The whole, 'First one's free.'" Not that she's complaining, mind you.

Her bag swings around again, and she digs out her own prescription bottle, transferring the contents so that it looks legit, before lobbing the empty back to him. "But I like that. Taking care of each other. It's sort of the unspoken credo of Huckleberry, so...welcome to the family, Family. Oh, but if, um. Geoff - the tattooed guy who lives in the lime green beauty - asks? We, uh. We don't know each other, beyond my amazing paramedic skills? I can't risk losing my job."

At the mention of the lime-green trailer, Greg's eyebrows climb. "You mean the trailer next door?" Greg turns to peer out a hole in the plastic of the back wall towards the trailer in question. "I haven't met the dude yet -- you said his name is Geoff?" Greg files that away. "What's he, your boss?" And on the heels of that, "I'm hiring, you know." After a moment, he laughs softly. "Not, fuckin'... this." He grins and broadly includes the whole den of sin and vice that is his home. "I got a dispensary, a legitimate operation, down on Maple. I just opened. I can't pay people to get rich, but I need people I can trust to sell legal weed and watch my store while I... do other shit." He fishes a key from his pocket and reaches down to lock the table's drawer, walking back over towards the door. "Maybe not you, but maybe you know somebody, huh?" He shrugs. "Something to think about. I hope those get you to a better place." He points to the pill bottle, and his tone holds sincerity. He chews on his lip for a second. "I just can't do it again. I got a boss, ya know?"

"Yeah, that's the one." Bennie says of Geoff, tucking the pills away and swinging her bag around. Then she sort of continues to toe the ground with the ball of one foot. "But he's not my boss, a friend and just like, complete besties with my BF, which is a whole other ball of wax." Her hand pats the bag. "Trust me, they'll go to good use." But at the mention of expecting free scores all the time, she's quick to say. "Oh no! Of course not, I wouldn't ask that of you! I mean, I surely wouldn't want you to get in trouble. No, I'll pay. Absolutely. You're a real peach, though. And I'll be sure to keep your place in mind if I find anyone looking. I've got a pretty sweet deal with the City myself at the Fire Department as an EMT."

She bounces on her toes now, "Well. Um. It was totally nice meeting you and I'm totes sure we're going to see each other again. But I should...jet." She thumbs over her shoulder to the door. Not sure quite how to bounce without it seeming awkward, so it's just awkward.

Greg is a bit more practiced at these situations, and he makes it look effortless as he strolls over to the door and winds it open again. He sticks his head out to scout for bacon, but the air smells clean, and he withdraws from the doorway to turn a smile on Bennie. "The pleasure was all mine," he tells her smoothly enough. "Thanks for the hand, Bennie." He lifts it up somewhat awkwardly, and almost repeats his original mistake, which draws a laugh out of him. He settles for resting it on the door knob. "Let me know if you or your friends need anything else." He reaches into his hoodie pocket with his free hand and comes up with a business card, which he hands over. It's for Green Harbor Organics, and lists Greg's digits right under 'Owner Gregory Sumpter', all official and shit.

Bennie plucks the card from his fingers with another bright smile and a quick, "Thanks." Before she's ducking her head and slipping out to skim between the trailers and shortcut back to hers.