Mike

Mike, also known as Pills and Coke, is a dealer whose work and drug use become difficult to separate: he consumes the pills and cocaine he is supposed to sell, grows nearly as addicted as the narrator, and eventually receives pills from the narrator. His brief appearances also reveal the vulnerability beneath his abrasive confidence. After a man referred to him by Raul threatens him with a gun during a cocaine deal, Mike calls the narrator to report that he has been robbed.

Identity and Drug Trade

The narrator identifies Mike by the alias Pills and Coke and calls him to discuss a possible contact, briefing him before Mike asks who the man is. Mike is part of the narrator’s drug-dealing network, but the account presents him as more than a source or intermediary: his own consumption has become a serious part of his story. He began using the pills and cocaine he was meant to sell and became almost as dependent as the narrator.

Debt, Supply, and Arrogance

The narrator recalls that Mike had struggled at one point and says he repaid him the entire contents of Mike’s safe. From the narrator’s perspective, that repayment means the earlier difficulty was not his fault. Their relationship nevertheless remains entangled in drugs: the narrator had reached the point of supplying Mike with pills. Mike’s dependence does not make him modest, the narrator observes; he remains conspicuously arrogant. The combination of indebtedness, supply, and contemptuous confidence makes their association practical but hardly stable.

The Gunpoint Deal

After the narrator and his companion buy ten pills from Big and return home, the day seems to be going well until Mike calls, at about two in the afternoon. Mike says that Raul had told him a man wanted to buy twenty-eight grams of cocaine. Mike drove to meet the prospective buyer, who pulled a gun and threatened him. Asked whether Raul was there, Mike says that Raul was not present; only the man Raul had sent was with him. The account places Mike’s robbery inside a chain of referrals rather than a deal directly conducted with Raul, exposing the danger carried by the narrator’s wider drug network.