Feature: Abner Comes Home
“We went over to the guy’s house,” Abner said. “I was scared. I thought, I don’t want to be here. There was this big 400-pound guy on the sofa, just looking at us. I was scared to death. What am I doing here?”
The Abners’ lifestyle accelerated, snorting and selling now, pushing coke to other Crickets and Antiques and Pilgrims. Abner said they never thought about illegality, or morality: “To us, it was just a different drunk,” he said. Sometimes they bought just a couple of thousand dollars’ worth. And on some weekends, when they organized massive 500-person hoedowns, they’d make a bigger buy. Six thousand. Seven thousand. Eight. It went on for two years.
The Abners were cocaine dealers, yes, but they weren’t good at it. They would put out whole plates of the stuff on a hay bale and let their friends take what they wanted, confident they would pay later. The honor system, it turns out, didn’t make for efficient coke dealing, and the Abners started losing money fast. But the hoedowns were a hit.
In his apartment, Abner had stepped to a drawer in his kitchen and pulled out a pack of photos. They showed Amish kids hanging out around a barn, drinking and grooving to the sounds of an Amish rock band with electric guitars, drums, and sweat in their eyelashes. The girls wore bonnets and had bare feet, surrounded by beer cans on the ground but covering their mouths as they laughed.
Abner gazed at the photos a long time before setting them aside, seeming resigned in some way. He picked up his keys. Time to take me to the family farm.
