Pot Stories for the Soul, page 12
When I walked by with my wife, my friend invited me to have a few tokes. But they weren’t just smoking joints. No, instead they had made a kind of fruit pipe out of a watermelon by cutting a small crater to hold the pot in one end and a slit in the other through which you could inhale the filtered smoke. Pretty ingenious.
So, there I was, sucking smoke through a watermelon, when who should walk by but the old conservative professor who I had been reading More’s Utopia (in Latin, by the way) with once a week in his office for the last year. I didn’t panic; I just set the watermelon on the table and introduced my wife to him.
We continued to read More for another year, and he never said anything about me sucking on a watermelon in the middle of the campus. My students (now, I teach English Renaissance literature) love this story.
First Time
Secret Clearance
I vividly remember the first time I got stoned. It was 1969 in San Jose, California. I had been trying for nearly six months, but I was so uptight and paranoid about it that my mind would not let it happen. My paranoia was not entirely unfounded. I worked in the engineering department as a mechanical designer on the M113 project, the armored personnel carrier used by the military in Vietnam, and had a secret clearance from the Department of Defense. If I got busted for smoking marijuana, I would lose my job and my secret clearance. I would have to try to start over in a new career at age forty. And I was not good at door-to-door sales.
I was at my girlfriend’s house, and a mutual friend was visiting. We had smoked what they said was some very fine stuff. The two of them were sitting on the floor taking turns looking through a kaleidoscope and giggling a lot, and I was sitting on the sofa being as straight as a tournament-grade aluminum arrow.
After a while, my girlfriend handed the kaleidoscope to me. It was one of the kind—popular at that time—made of just mirrors, no colored glass pieces. It served to take my mind off my mind. I zeroed in on the ceiling-light fixture in the next room. The light fixture became a flying saucer flitting about, and before I knew it I was very stoned.
I left to go home about 2:00 AM, still very stoned. I drove to the end of the street, about half a block, turned left for about a hundred feet, and then right for a very short block to a T-intersection at a main street. I stopped at the stop sign, turned on the turn signal for a left turn, and waited for the only car in sight, coming from the left, to pass so I could turn left. As the car approached my street, he turned on his turn signal, indicating that he intended to turn down the street I was on.
As he turned, I saw it was a San Jose police car. I made my left turn and started up the street, keeping my eye on the rearview mirror. Sure enough, instead of completing his right turn, he made a U-turn and started up the street behind me. The dreaded red light came on, and I pulled off the street into the parking area for a small group of stores.
I was feeling really paranoid. Stoned for the first time and getting stopped by a cop. I had visions of being arrested, handcuffed, jailed, and fired from my job. I got out and walked back to the police car as the cop was getting out. This was a more mellow time when that was the thing to do.The cop explained that he had stopped me because my car was unfamiliar to him in that neighborhood, just apartment complexes, and I am Caucasian. He said he was going to fill out a report describing me and my car, and if I was ever again stopped for the same reason, to tell the cop that I was on file, he could check it in minutes, and I’d be on my way.
He stopped just in front of the driver’s door with his clipboard on the hood of his car, and the searchlight aimed down at the clipboard as he filled out the form. I stood by his left side looking at the clipboard as he wrote. When he came to the description of the car, I told him it was a ’60 Buick LeSabre, and he glanced up at it and said, “Two-tone, light blue with cream top.” My car was a solid light blue, not a two-tone.
I turned to look at it. Beyond the car was a sodium vapor street lamp that was reflecting off the top of the car, which didn’t really register on my stoned consciousness because all I saw, parked where I had left my rather plain old blue Buick, was a really sharp-looking ’60 Buick LeSabre hardtop with a beautiful two-tone, light blue and cream paint job. What a rush!
I said, somewhat bewilderedly, “It’s always been just light blue.” He looked at me suspiciously—as if to say, “What’s with this guy who doesn’t know what color his car is?”—and my paranoia meter shot up another couple of decibels. Then he grabbed the spotlight and twisted it to shine on the car, and—flash!—it changed to solid blue before our eyes.
There was a pause. Then he said, also somewhat bewilderedly, “Uh, yeah. Uh, right. Uh, solid blue.”
He continued looking at it for a moment or two, hand still on the spotlight. Then he twisted the light back down as he bent over to resume writing. He paused after two or three seconds and glanced up at the car again, once more a beautiful “two-tone, light blue with cream top.” He shook his head and went on with the report.
When he finished, he thanked me for my cooperation and time, and we went our separate ways—he on his appointed rounds, me on my way home, thinking about repainting my car.
Jesus
JOHN MCCLEARY
It was my first time. Having just left the Pentecostal Church with which I was associated for much of my life, I hadn’t had much opportunity to smoke marijuana. David was an acquaintance I met when I was hired to photograph his band. He rolled it in a filter cigarette after taking out the first half of the tobacco. We drove his Beetle along the freeway with the windows all rolled down to get rid of the smell. Paranoia was rampant then. For the first year I smoked, it was always in the bathroom so we could flush it if the cops broke in.
It was cold and windy and hard to keep the marijuana “cigarette” lit, tooling down the freeway in Dave’s bug. At one point, sucking on the thing, I reached the real tobacco and got a lungful. I had almost as little experience with tobacco as with marijuana. I’m still not sure if I was stoned on the weed or sick on the tobacco.
It was the Fourth of July, so we went down to the beach to watch the fireworks. I was sitting in the cold sand, looking up at the stars with this unfamiliar taste in my mouth and a self-conscious feeling on my mind.
It was indistinguishable at first. Then it began to sink into my consciousness—singing. It had a strangely familiar sound. Yes, I knew that tune. Religious. They were coming toward me. A group of Christians working the beach. Walking and singing among the heathens. Hoping to save one lost soul. Coming toward me. The backslider. Getting closer. I was frozen in place. Should I get up and run? No, then they would see me and recognize a sinner. What should I do?
“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong.” Oh my God, they were coming right toward me. Was it written in the fluorescent light across my forehead? FALLEN CHRISTIAN. What should I do if they come up to me? I know I’ll break down in tears. I’m doomed to be a Christian all my life. There they were. Young, fresh-faced, enthusiastic Christians my own age. “Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me . . . ” Right in front of me. I’ll look away, ignore them. Are they still there? What? They’ve gone? They walked on. They’re off to terrorize someone else. I’m safe! I don’t have to go back to church. I can smoke dope again.
Generations
When I first smoked marijuana in 1963, I was a student at Berkeley, and on my next trip home to Los Angeles, I told my parents about this fabulous discovery. They reacted with horror.
“We didn’t work and save all those years so you could go to college and smoke dope!”
Four or five years later, marijuana had become an emblem of the youth culture, and much was written, filmed, and said about it, and my mother was now curious. My younger sister, who was going to UC San Diego, and I were home for the holidays, and our mother asked if we had some she could try.
We took on this “project ”with glee, rolling a joint and showing her how to toke as we sat in the family room of the house we’d grown up in. Since it was her first time, we figured it would take quite a bit to get her buzzed, so after doing one joint, we lit another.
My sister and I were already ripped, but my mother was complaining that it had no effect; it wasn’t working. So we smoked the second joint, my sister and I giggling and flopping about the couch, and my mother turned angry.
She started saying she’d prefer to do it with “my own peer group,” that this was a mistake—it was probably just psychological, anyway—and then, virtually in midsentence, as she was ranting, with her finger jabbing the air for emphasis, she stopped.
“Oh my God,” she said, pointing at the TV across the room, “everything’s blurry. Girls, I’m stoned!”
Memory
Forgetting
ROBERT ANTON WILSON
The “funniest” experiences I’ve ever had with drugs all involved pot, and none of them seem comic when I try to write them down. Apparently, words, which cannot convey “mystical” experiences, also fail to communicate hilarious drug experiences.
For instance, a friend and I took a little too much hash one night and both got lost in stoned space. We knew who we were and where we were, but we couldn’t remember the last thirty seconds. We spent what seemed like an hour saying things like:
“Jesus, I can’t remember what we were talking about.”
“What did you just say?”
(Interlude of spasmodic laughter by both of us.)
“I think I’m having a . . . what? What did you say?”
“I can’t remember . . . what are we trying to remember?”
(More spasms of laughter.)
“We’re trying to . . . what are we trying to do?”
As the effect modified with time, we understood what was happening, and one of us described it as “a visit to the islands of micro-amnesia.”
Taking Inventory
JERRY OCHS
Once, while hitchhiking across the country, I was picked up by a very nice couple in a van filled with dried marijuana. When it came time for us to go our separate ways, they gave me three baggies to remember them by. I shared my good fortune with whomever gave me a ride, causing some of them to drive beyond their original destination.
Anyway, by the time I got to where I was going, I was down to two bags. I looked up my old friends Mike and Sue. They were happy to see me and the pot because they were dry, smoke-wise, although they did have ten hits of LSD. We smoked a little and decided to see a movie.
They lived in a “bad” neighborhood, and for some reason, once outside the house, while one of them was locking the front door, the other one, standing down on the sidewalk, shouted a question about what time we’d be back, and one of the bad neighbors must have overheard the answer because when we returned their house had been burglarized.
After recovering from the initial shock, they began to take inventory of what was missing. The TV, the stereo, Mike’s camera, Sue’s watch, the piggy bank, and two other items, adding up to seven. In addition, the dope was gone, both their stash of acid and my two baggies of pot.
For some reason, they called the police to report the crime, and when the policeman arrived, he asked, of course, what had been stolen. As he wrote each item down in his notebook, they described the TV, the stereo, etc. “Are you sure that’s everything? Nothing else is gone?”
“Nope,” Mike answered a bit too rapidly. “Definitely nothing else.”
Sue, looking puzzled, said, “But, Michael, I’m sure we counted eight things.”
Mike said, “No, you’re wrong, Sue, just seven.”
I hissed, “Nothing else, Sue. Nothing.”
“I’m sure there was an eighth thing missing,” she insisted, scratching her head as if to dig out the memory. The cop, pen paused in midair, looked slowly from face to face. Sue was still perplexed and refused to give up.
“If I could just remember the eighth thing,” she said. “We were just standing right here, adding up our losses: the TV, the stereo, the . . . ”
“Just seven things, Sue,” Mike and I shouted in unison.
As soon as the cop left, we reminded Sue what else had been stolen.
She said, “See, I was right, there was an eighth thing.”
Remembering
NOLA EVANGELISTA
I began smoking pot in college, when I was still a virgin and very shy around guys. Whenever a guy made a pass at me, I would freeze up in fear. I put this down to my repressive Catholic school upbringing and overall fear of the unknown. But as it continued to happen, I began to wonder if there was some other reason. One night after a date when the pattern repeated itself, I decided I needed to get to the root of my problem. I had just seen the movie Harold and Maude and was struck by the scene where Harold smoked pot with Maude and was finally able to express the source of his strange behavior.
I decided I should smoke some pot and think over my problem, hoping for a revelation. Smoking calmed me down, and as I was sitting, listening to music, not thinking about anything in particular, something suddenly popped into my head. I remembered a scene from my childhood when a neighbor boy had molested me. Apparently, I had buried the incident in my subconscious, unable to process it in my child’s mind. With the knowledge of this incident, I was eventually able to overcome my inhibitions. If it wasn’t for marijuana, I don’t know if I would have ever remembered my past so that I could deal with it.
Over the years, smoking pot has helped me with the recurrent depression from which I suffer. It raises my spirits and changes my focus. But, importantly, marijuana doesn’t put me into some dopey state where I avoid my problems; instead, it almost unfailingly helps me uncover the source of my sadness, so that I can address the underlying issues at hand.
Perhaps because I come from an emotionally reticent family, I’ve needed some help to tune into my emotions. Perhaps marijuana helps me reach a meditative state difficult to achieve in our fast-paced society. All I know is that marijuana has healed me emotionally and spiritually, and as an advocate for marijuana law reform, I am, as Al Green sings, “blessed in the service of my savior.”
Radio Daze
Berkeley Boo
LORENZO MILAM
The best place to find your forgotten history is on the Internet. By typing your name into Yahoo! or Deja News, you will run across the many unlikely trails you’ve left behind as you wandered the ripe, green fields of injudicious youth. “See KBOO,” said the computer.
“Oh, yes—KBOO,” I said. “I remember them.” At least I thought I did. Thirty years ago, under protest, I traveled to Portland, Oregon, to help a lady named Lloyd E. Livingstone found a broadcast station that was later to be named KBOO. And now, under the home page of that radio station, I found a reference to what we had done so long ago. It was interesting to see how the current KBOO handled their conception and gestation. It was most interesting to see that it had become a total fantasy.
“On Halloween day,” they wrote, “Lorenzo Milam suggested several choices for call letters for the new station. The holiday spirit prevailed, and the letters KBOO were chosen. Milam helped several communities start their own stations. Some of KBOO’s sister stations bear Milam’s witty trademark: KCHU, WAIF, WORT, KDNA, KTAO, KUSP . . . ”
Now, KBOO is a very politically correct station, they tell me—my baby is politically correct!—so they will always be in the pursuit of the absolute truth, right? Since the story of their naming was totally false, I wrote them, suggesting that they state only the correct facts of their genesis. This is what I wrote:Now that the end of October is upon us, I would suggest that you disabuse your listeners of the notion that KBOO was named for Halloween. That’s about the silliest story that I have heard in my life, and I’ve heard a passel of them. KBOO was named for a very potent form of dope sold in the ’60s in California and the West called “Berkeley Boo.” If you could advise your audience of this fact, I would be most appreciative.
And you should be appreciative of boo, too. If we weren’t smoking dope at the time—or at least thinking about it—we never ever in a hundred years would have applied for that frequency in Portland back in those dark days of the late ’60s. We certainly had better things to do at the time—what with FCC investigations, antiloyalty hearings, the FBI bugging us about our radical programming, none of us getting laid . . .
The thirtieth anniversary of the station will soon be upon you, and it behooves you to be generous with your past, even if it does involve a few disgusting scandals. Or, as Tolstoy said, “If we don’t honor the past, we cannot honor ourselves—much less our future.” Or something like that.
Flushing Toilets
In 1972, I was the chief engineer for a college radio station at a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. One Saturday night, I had the radio on in the background, as was my custom.
Suddenly, the music faded out, and a breathless voice shouted into the microphone: “It’s a drug bust on campus, and the cops have a roadblock at the main entrance! Dump your stash quick, dudes!”
Since this was clearly not our regular newscast, I dressed hurriedly and started for the station. Through the dorm, I heard the scrambling of feet, shouts, ceiling panels falling, curses, and the frantic flushing of toilets. As I walked into the radio station, I asked the DJ about the source of the “news report.”
“I got this call a few minutes ago,” he said.
“From whom?”
“I didn’t recognize the voice,” he reported sheepishly.
“How do you know it’s true?” I asked.
