Pot Stories for the Soul, page 11
But back to my second wife, who once told me that if I didn’t get her some grass, she would actually go out and get a job so she could buy some for herself. She says she uses it for artistic inspiration, but you know those addicts, they’ll say anything to get their stuff. Me, I don’t need it. I don’t need any more anxiety and I certainly don’t need to stimulate my appetite for Ding Dongs and Yoo-hoos. In the ’60s, I ate my fill. God, I loved those Hostess CupCakes and Twinkies.
I heard Paul Krassner say that the shelf life of a Twinkie is longer than the jail sentence Dan White got for killing San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. When I heard that, I used to wonder if the Twinkies I had eaten would eventually reconstitute themselves inside my body and eventually work their way out like a splinter that goes in real deep into one finger and comes out another one. It’s never happened to me, but there is always a chance.
Now, my friends (the ones who gave us a ride, I can’t remember where to) had a roommate who was a nurse, and after they put the brownie into their refrigerator, they went to bed. The nurse got up to go to work, and since she was a nurse, she ate a healthy breakfast of three cups of coffee and the brownie. I hesitate to even imagine. My wife would eat one of those brownies and probably go into her sewing room and make all the costumes for the Star Wars movies. Now that George Lucas has made the prequel, will he make the postquel?
So my wife had steeped the half ounce of pot with the butter, and this was organic butter from cows who weren’t pumped full of BST antibiotics. But what am I saying, that maybe we should medicate our food? Wow, I am confused. We do medicate our food—I mean your food, unless you’re like me and only eat stuff that purports to be pure. If this food is so good for you, how come I don’t feel better? Well, after the butter was strained, there was this residue left in the pot. Oh my God, there’s pot in the pot! At that point my uncle grabbed the pot and ate the pot.
The nurse with the brownie in her somehow negotiated the L.A. freeway system and ended up in a room with a patient who was lying very, very still. What could she do? Nothing. She just stood there staring for forty-five minutes. Maybe it was longer, maybe not. I wasn’t there, thank God. Come to think of it, she wasn’t all there either. After my uncle ate the pot that was in the pot, he wasn’t all there either. Funny how that works.
Well, to make a couple of short stories just a bit longer, my uncle took to bed for three days. He always said that it was the butter that did him in. The nurse, nudged into action by one of those hospital volunteers in a strawberry-pink dress, took the patient’s pulse. There was none, and she slowly made her way to the roof of the hospital where she spent the day sunbathing.
My dad didn’t really like the brownies, so my wife ate them and made a series of chairs out of wooden clothespins that she sometimes sells at my pizza parties.
Laughing Fits
Identified Flying Objects
JOHN SINCLAIR
One of the greatest times I’ve ever had on weed—with my clothes on, to paraphrase the great Miles Davis—started one Saturday afternoon in Detroit in the summer of ’65 or ’66 when several of us got together to help Bo Taylor move some stuff to his sister’s house in Highland Park, the little city surrounded by Detroit that was about two or three miles north of where we stayed in an old building called The Castle on the west side of the John C. Lodge Freeway service drive between Warren and Hancock, near the Wayne State University campus.
Bo Taylor was a young man of African descent who managed our building, worked at the Wayne County Jail, shot speed, and was related to the prominent Detroiter Hobart Taylor, who was at the time an advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Assisting Bo were the urbane poet and jazz guitarist Ron English, a crazy little guy who lived in our building whose name was John Hornfield, and me. All of us were between twenty-one and twenty-six years of age and long cast adrift from the shores of everyday America.
Driving the car, a big old Detroit special of whatever make, was the painter, Joe Gruppuso, who had also brought a bag of bright green weed to help us through the afternoon. I had seen bright green weed before and had found it sadly wanting in mental elevation properties, so I was ill prepared for the incredible psychedelic buzz that quickly followed just a few small tokes. The whole carful of us was totally blasted, laughing and giggling as Joe poled us up the expressway toward Highland Park.
When we pulled up in front of Bo’s sister’s place, the guys got out and went into the spacious house while I remained in the car for a few minutes to try to pull myself together for the forthcoming series of physical tasks inside. I finally staggered out of the back seat of Joe’s car, across the street, and up to the front door.
When I stepped inside, I was caught in the middle of a serious war of flying objects—pillows, seat cushions—anything soft and throwable was being pitched across the room by the stoned combatants hunched behind sofas and easy chairs. I found a protected spot and joined the fray, and for the longest time the five of us rolled with laughter and prolonged our play in the living room of Bo’s sister’s house.
Gradually, the high wore down a little and we looked around in a mild state of shock, assessing the minimal damage to the room with some relief and then breaking out in gales of laughter again. I’ve never been quite that blasted that way in all the years since.
Underground Paper
FRANK ATWOOD
The three of us decided to smoke a little of that infamous $10-a-lid weed. Since we had about a quarter pound of the commercial smoke, I decided it would be just wonderful to make a joint from a couple of ounces. Hey, what can I say? It was the days of those Cheech & Chong Big Bambu album rolling papers.
The immediate problem was no Big Bambu album rolling papers. Aha! I quickly determined that a newspaper would make far-out rolling paper. This wasn’t just a bad idea; it was a really bad idea. We took the front page of the Los Angeles Free Press and put two or three ounces of pot on it.
The three of us were able to then roll this concoction into a joint . . . sorta. Mark wanted to fire up this bad motherfucker, so he grasped it with both hands and held it to his lips. Kevin fired up a Blue Diamond match and moved the flame toward the tip of the huge, homemade joint.
Hey, man, ever get one of those premonitions? You know, that feeling that something really fucked-up is about to happen? Well, as the match neared the joint, I got one. A strong one. I hollered, “Wait!” But it was too late. The flame hit the joint and, now trust me on this one, it wasn’t just the tip that lit up. Man, the whole fuckin’ thing went up in flames. Looked like Mark’s head was engulfed in fire.
Of course, the joint blew apart and Mark’s lap was covered with smoldering marijuana. Soot and ashes were floating around everywhere. Poor Mark, not only did the smoldering pot burn the shit outta the head of his dick (yep, burned right through his Levi’s), but the ashes left black streaks all over his face.
Whew! Kevin and I simply burst into laughter. We rolled on the floor and made like hyenas. Mark somehow didn’t find the situation so funny. He struggled to his feet, brushed some of the soot off—which for some reason sent Kevin and me into peals of laughter all over again—and headed for the bathroom to clean off his wounded pride.
Mark finally emerged from the bathroom, ego obviously still bruised. He simply had to restore his “presence” by showing us a gag. Well, he showed us, all right. Mark pulled out his Zippo and thumbed the flame to life. He then leaned back and spread his legs. You got it, the old light-a-fart-on-fire trick. I don’t know what the fuck Mark had been eating, but this was no ordinary flame. The motherfucker shot out about a foot—and in three different directions.
Mark leaped up, grabbed his nuts, and started hopping around. Hell, the sight was just too much for us. Kevin and I rolled around on the floor makin’ like hyenas again. Just about the time our roars of laughter started to die down, Mark quit hoppin’ around and took his hands from his crotch. Lighting that fuckin’ fart on fire blew a hole right through Mark’s Levi’s, and the fuckin’ things were still smoldering. I thought I’d never stop laughing in my life.
Sans Screen
KEN MCINTOSH
The counterculture didn’t really hit Toledo until late 1968. By that time, the term hippie had totally lost its cachet; dopers started calling themselves heads. The first head shop in Toledo was the Lunar Moth. My friend Bonnie had gotten a big chunk of Lebanese blond hash. Neither of us had ever smoked hash before.
In Vietnam, we had used corncob pipes and cut-slot toilet paper tubes with foil to smoke the evil weed, eventually learning how to roll joints. Bonnie and I decided to go to the Lunar Moth and buy a pipe worthy of her bounty. We bought an elaborate brass chamber pipe.
We went back my place and gingerly placed a three- or four-gram chunk of hash into the pipe. We puffed and puffed and started getting headaches, but no real smoke. The chunk was too large to ignite.
In frustration, I took the hash out of the pipe and ground it into powder. The buzz was slow in coming on, so we ended up smoking the whole bowl before we really felt anything. I got the last toke. Unfortunately for me, we knew nothing about screens in dope pipes. As I sucked, the last glowing dregs of the hash flew into the back of my mouth. Bonnie said she could see the little coals glowing as I screamed in pain.
After dousing the embers with a glass of water, she started laughing so hard that she peed her pants, which started me laughing. We laughed while she was in the bathroom, we laughed while we spent an eternity trying to find a bottle opener to use for a Pepsi, we laughed while we tried to remember how to use the telephone, and we laughed while trying to remember her address so the taxi driver could take her home.
After she left, I stumbled down to Frisch’s and had a Big Boy dinner with a bowl of chili and a hot fudge sundae. When I got hone, I fixed myself a Chef Boyardee Hungarian Goulash dinner and read Head Comics until I fell asleep.
DEVO and the Sex Pistols
MARK MOTHERSBAUGH
It was 1978. DEVO had no record deal (although we all knew something was going to break soon). I had no money to speak of and no apartment. It was a hideously cold winter in Akron, Ohio, when, out of the blue, Richard Branson, the president of Virgin Records, called and asked me to fly down to Jamaica to discuss a deal. This was it!
Bob Casale and I arrived, shook hands all around, and watched Richard and the other Virgin execs roll up these huge joints—cigars, really. No one I knew rolled bombers like these and certainly no one had pot like this in Ohio.
We remained convivial, but in no time the ganja did us in. We were tripping, gone—incoherent. That’s when Branson said, “The reason I brought you down here is the Sex Pistols have just broken up. Johnny Rotten is looking for a new band.”
Bob and I looked at each other, stammered something, tried to hold on, but finally and unequivocally lost it, laughing harder and harder.
We tried to explain, through our spasms, that the Sex Pistols were great and everything, but we just couldn’t get it out. DEVO and the Sex Pistols, it was all too much. All the execs were smiling uncomfortably, Johnny Rotten was in the next room waiting to become the new lead singer, and we were out of control.
Finally, we excused ourselves, went to our rooms, sat on the beds, and stared for a couple of hours, sure that we’d blown it.
Later that year, they signed us anyway.
Higher Education
Spacey and Spacier
My first college was a tough engineering school, and I joined a fraternity. It included a crazy-quilt collection of characters, most of whom did drugs to some extent or another, and a few, including the president and vice president of the fraternity, who did not.
There were some showdowns between the freaks and the straights, which resulted in the “discreet rule.” Pot could be smoked in the fraternity house, but only if done discreetly. One day, Spacey came bouncing into the house, swinging a baggie full of herb. Larry, the president, saw him come in and, muttering something about “not discreet at all,” grabbed the bag.
We followed him out to the back of the house and watched him pour out the bag and bury its contents. Meanwhile, inside the house, Spacey was on the floor laughing. He had just come back from the grocery store with a baggie full of oregano to use on the pizza he was making for dinner.
I finished up at a liberal arts school. Just about everyone smoked pot. One evening, as a group of us were sitting around toking and doing our usual Marty routine (“Whadda you wanna do tonight?” “I dunno, whadda you wanna do?”), I had a great idea. “Let’s see Fellini’s Roma. It’s been in the theater a couple of weeks, and it looks really interesting.” Everyone stared at me. “Really, let’s see it. I heard it’s one of the best movies of the year.” I tried to convince them. Now they were looking at me like I was nuts.
My girlfriend finally said, “We saw it last week! With you!”
False Alarm
I had just left a party at the chairman of the Anthropology Department’s house and returned home, where I reached into my pants pocket for the film can (which is always there) to light up and relax, when I discovered to my horror that it wasn’t there. Where in hell could it be? My jacket pocket? No! Under the driver’s seat in the car? No! I was wearing a pair of those foul pleated pants that inevitably deposit your change anyplace you sit, and, by golly, those pants had deposited my film can somewhere I had been seated during the day.
It might have happened at my office, where I had rolled one before I went to the chairman’s house for the party. Had I left the can on my desk? I had to find out, so at 11:00 PM I got in my car and drove the half hour to the office to see. Nope, I hadn’t left it at the office.
That meant only one thing. I had dropped it at my department chair’s house. Damn, I could hardly go back to his house and say, “Hey, Dr. X, I dropped a can of dope in the house, did you find it?” By the same token, if Dr. X had found the can of dope, he would probably conclude that it was me who had dropped it, which would confirm in his mind all of his previous prejudices about me. Nor was he likely to return it, which, given the price of dope these days, meant a considerable monetary loss. What was I to do?
Nothing for the moment. I held my breath and went in to the office the following morning, when lo, a memo crossed my desk announcing a committee meeting from 10:00 AM to noon, which would keep the department chair busy for two hours. My window of opportunity.
I called his home when I knew he was just down the hall and talked to his gay roommate. I explained I had dropped something the evening before. Had he found it? No. Whew! Could I come by to look for it around 10 o’clock? “No problem,” he said. So I drove over (knowing the chairman was otherwise occupied), was let in, did a quick survey of the chairs I had sat in the night before, and found the little can under a table on the patio.
I fessed up to my chair’s roommate that it was dope and swore him to secrecy, a confidence that he appears to have honored. Narrow escape.
Disappointed
Back in the late ’60s, I was a young faculty wife at the University of South Carolina. The department my husband was in had weekly seminars on Friday, with a party afterward. We were into alcohol, but nobody I knew did drugs (Valium didn’t count).
One spring, there was an unusual new graduate student who had caught the interest of the faculty. He had a pickup with a camper on the back and was reported to have trekked across Afghanistan in it. He also lived two floors above one of our faculty members in a fancy new apartment building near campus. They said he came down and borrowed ice from them when he had a party.
But he seemed shy around us, so we didn’t know for sure if the stories were true. After great effort, I finally got him to talk to me at one of the Friday parties. Once he got started, I couldn’t get away from him. I never got him to talk about his travels or where he got all his money, but he went on endlessly about his work, which didn’t interest me at all.
I wanted to change the topic, so when the group next to us started talking about the legalization of marijuana, I asked if he’d ever smoked pot. He had lots of pot stories. After a while, he asked, a little too eagerly, if I was interested in trying it. I was much too fearful to ever try anything illegal, but I didn’t want to say so, so I waffled around.
“Maybe someday,” I said, “but not now.” I was relieved when a friend finally rescued me, and I avoided the graduate student for the rest of the evening.
The next Monday morning, I heard a car drive up to the front of my house and I went to the window. I was horrified to see his camper, but he just put something in my mailbox and drove off. It was a small velvet bag containing a matchbox full of pot. I was irrationally afraid of getting caught with it, but I didn’t want to throw it away, so I finally hid it in the back of my kitchen junk drawer, behind the bulb baster and the package of chopsticks.
Several years later, tired and angry and ready to leave my husband, I searched the drawer in a fit of rebellion. I was going to roll that stuff and figure out how to smoke it, even if I had to do it by myself. I pulled out the bag and opened it up, only to find it empty except for the two fat (and, I presume, very happy) weevils in the bottom.
Watermelon Blues
When I was an undergraduate at Penn in the mid-’70s, a friend from high school was president of the student council. Well, one day he and his ministers decided to use some of the council’s funds to purchase a pound of pot, and they set up a table right in front of Ben Franklin’s statue to distribute it to the passing student body.
