My weed connection is a guy named Jake, who lives in an old school bus in the badlands outside of town.
We call this area the Badlands because it’s unclaimed territory, just a wild batch of scrub forest and shallow swamp.
It isn’t fit to develop into usable land, so everyone just leaves it alone. This makes it the perfect place for hobos, squatters, and guys like Jake who are harder to define. I know for a fact Jake makes good money selling marijuana to the locals, so he could probably afford a house with a real furnace in it, but he seems content where he is. For Christmas last year I bought him a cheap little space heater, just as a gift. He was touched by my gesture, but said he didn’t need a space heater because the bus had a custom heating system he had designed himself. He showed me to the back of the bus, where there was a large metal grate in the floor. This wasn’t an air vent or air grate, this was a big wrought iron beast. Underneath the metal grate was a large sturdy metal pan that he filled with charcoal and wood – basically it was a makeshift fireplace set in the belly of the bus. I will admit that the heating system worked for Jake, and he seemed proud of it, but I could never use something like that. It didn’t seem like a fireplace or a heater to me, it seemed like a barbeque put slowly roasting me. So I took my space heater back.