by Paul Ham for the Summer 2026 issue
Marcus of all people should know better. His 3-year stint in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Middlesex County DA’s office, where it’s just OUIs and fentanyl. Down Route 2 from Ayer to Athol, he watched how it was made and sold, but also how it was sourced, packaged, and delivered. He learned it’s not the easy parts that make it successful: the backwoods cooks, the hand-to-hand dealers, the users. It’s the hard parts: imports/exports, interstate delivery, security, warehousing. And in his case, it’s not just mixing powders with spoons: like his college major, it’s biochemistry.
BPC-157 is what’s called a peptide — a tiny protein molecule your stomach lining produces to help heal all the muscular grinding and acidic dissolving work of digestion. The peptide is what your stomach uses to self-heal, but it also heals other things. Tennis elbow, golf-torn rotator cuffs, bad backs from pickleball. You can buy non-sketchy vials off of Amazon as “raw chemicals” for experiments. People inject that shit at home.
But that’s the main problem: people hate needles. And most peptides die in the Venus-like cauldron of our guts. If they survive, they need to figure out a way to soak through the gut lining to travel into our bloodstreams where they now have access to the entire body. But the gut is the challenge. The gut wants control. It wants swallowed BPC to become just expensive poop.
Fucking kombucha. Fermented mushroom tea. The fermentation produces organic acids that pry open gaps between your intestinal cells. Just enough. Just briefly. Just long enough to let things pass through that normally won’t.
Mix the ‘booch with BPC, the acids and peptides bind, and as soon as the gut cells loosen up and open they rush across the gut membrane, into the bloodstream, into our body manifold, where they are free to heal everything they touch.
Now add a little enkephalin. It’s five amino acids–proteins your body makes anyway. They’re “endogenous opioid peptides” — painkillers your body makes for itself. They bind to the same receptors as opioids and fentanyl. They produce analgesia–a body high you notice, and then don’t, but you feel like today’s going to be a good day.
Marcus is smart as fuck. But shitty at people.
They think the BPC is working even better than ever. They tell their friends. The reorders are steady. The steadiest revenue Marcus has ever seen.
“They bind to the same receptors as opioids and fentanyl.”
What did he expect would happen?
***
His latest investor, Yulissa, owns a regional landscaping company. They met when she was a witness for the prosecution in a local political extortion attempt by her dickweed ex-brother-in-law.
With a degree in agricultural microbiology from Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, Yulissa moved to Boston to get her masters at BU. To get through school, she nannied for the Chengs in Brookline. Four years later, she’s pregnant with Jasen, and because he’s half-Chinese she moves to Leominster with enough cash to buy out her tio’s landscaping business.
She names it JST (Jasen Soto-Tejada) Landscaping and Services, crushes it, and eventually buys out four other tios’ routes, employs 40 folks on staff, and now pulls a steady $3M a year. I’ve seen her trucks in our tony neighborhoods of Brookline, an easy 2 hours south in morning traffic from Leominster. She focuses on neighborhoods closer to downtown Boston, where the commute is longer, but the “Boston Tax” that contractors and landscapers charge is designed to match their clients’ Boston incomes.
In DR, Yulissa studied her family’s generations worth of cultivation and fermentation of cassava roots and the microbiology to support their ability to thrive both ecologically and culturally. It took her 5 seconds to get Marcus’s plans with the kombucha-facilitated peptides. And with her knowledge of the major traffic routes and neighborhoods in and out of the city, she saw how distribution from Leominster to Boston would fit nicely with her crews driving back and forth.
She formed JST Logistics and Enterprises the next day and entered into a partnership with Marcus for distribution rights and territories.
Nailing the details is what takes you from feeding your kid to buying your mom a Benz. And with Yulissa’s network of vehicles grinding the streets of the Metrowest; access to globally sourced chemical precursors (fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides); her warehouse and storage in Leominster, including her security force? Details? She had them nailed.
Marcus also sold Yulissa 20% of his company for half a mill. I didn’t ask if it was in cash.
***
We know the main structural systems of the body: the skeletal, the circulatory, the nervous systems. The skin. But those are the wires and the bag. What’s all the stuff between? The fluids, the fats, the gunk, where traffic is snarled, where waste collects, spaces where the dirty work of life flows through.
Our cities are our skeleton; roads and highways our blood stream; the internet our nervous system.
Folks like Yulissa and companies like JST. They’re the gunk.
***
Work sent me out to Leominster to research Monsterland. Leominster (LEH-min-stuh), in North Central Mass, about an hour and a half northwest of Boston. Leominster, the Pioneer Plastics City, home of Johnny Appleseed, birthplace of the pink flamingo. Also Monsterland: realm of the Massachusetts Bigfoots.
Monsterland is a section of Leominster State Forest and is a locus of supernatural and unaccountable phenomena, most notably the Bigfoots, a UFO sighting, and not-uncommon interdimensional glowing orbs. My task was to collect contemporary knowledge of Monsterland, the current status of the lore, and–while the Bigfoots are the draw–it’s the interdimensional orbs that fascinated me.
But I didn’t know where to start in Leominster. Coming from Brookline, it’s like traveling out-of-state. So Marcus put me in touch with Yulissa.
North Main Street, Route 12. In the Commonwealth, these old state routes were the main arteries between towns. Now they’ve been replaced by federal interstates (I-395, I-290), and Route 12 is now a strip of dirty local industry: car repair shops; contractor supplies; rock, mulch, and stone. Found her place and drove down towards the back, past barbed-wire fences, rat kings of balded tires, and shortstacks of greyed-out broken pallets.
***
Waiting for me were two other brown guys, Khmer, but southern, Vietnamese-Khmer, so I didn’t know them. Apparently they were in a rush, so one immediately pulled me up by my shirt, while the other grabbed my legs.
***
When I read the manuscript for Nocturnal Omissions (Fister, Michael; Paragon Publishing, 2023) I learned: if you cover someone’s face with your hand, once you feel them pushing back, imagine a line from your elbow through your forearm to the back of your hand. Now smack the back of your hand with your elbow. That’s how you take someone out in one shot.
I should have seen it coming.
***
When I woke I was face-down on the asphalt behind Yulissa’s shop. There was an iPhone in front of me. Staring into it, I saw my reflection. Someone had Sharpied the passcode 0729 on my forehead. Classy.
The sole text message was from Marcus.
meet me at the speakeasy up prospect hill from union square
I called and texted him a hundred times, from that phone as well as my own. He never picked up, never responded. Not atypical, because Marcus is shitty at people. 🏁
To be continued…
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