Pot Stories for the Soul, page 13
“Well . . . ”
I drove out to the main entrance to the college and found that one of the students had a flat tire, and someone had stopped to help, and both vehicles’ four-way flashers lit up the night. It took the better part of two days to get the plumbing back in order, a week in hiding for the midnight DJ, and about a year to get the radio station’s credibility to the point where any of us would admit working there.
Waiting for Cookies
HANK ROSENFELD
I got a job as a news writer at the alternative radio station KSAN—the “Jive 95,” they called it. “A San Francisco tradition since 1968,” KSAN was a wonderful place. Even the building was shaped like a classic orange-and-red radio. Everyone there was hip and did drugs, and some DJs got blow jobs under the console as they did drugs.
Every year around Thanksgiving, a verbal memo spread through the station: “The cookies are coming.” A shipment of cookies came each year from Oregon; with almonds in the middle, they were innocent-looking enough, like they could’ve come from Chinatown in a little pink bakery box, but these were soaked through with marijuana.
Someone called “The Rabbi” delivered them, and the legend was that the dope had been cooked “in the butter,” thus keeping the entire KSAN staff flying through the holidays. The music got a little more intense, the on-air announcers a little more cryptic.
I’d chew a corner off a cookie and completely forget about my news duties—I couldn’t remember how to “rip and read” anything. Then I’d duck into a production studio and just lock the door, turn off the overheads, ratchet up the monitors, and dance, tight and alone in the tiny studio, to the music and the flicker of the pulsating console lights.
Once I went in there with a girlfriend who was an actual dancer who, in her far-out grooving moves, slammed her head down into one of the huge, solid-block Ampex tape machines, requiring seven stitches.
That was funny.
Concerts
Knee High
It was 1975. I was fifteen years old and attending one of my first rock concerts: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young at the Cleveland Stadium. My boyfriend Carlo and I were sitting in the infield, watching the show and smoking dope—the first time for me.
We were sitting close and had our knees up, our arms wrapped around our knees. Suddenly, I realized I could not feel my legs—my knees were absolutely numb! First, I tapped them a bit to see if I could evoke any feeling. None! Then I hit them a little harder. Still nothing. Then I began digging my nails harder and harder into my poor numb knees, trying to get some feeling, any feeling at all.
As I sat there gouging my knee, Carlo yelped, “Ouch! Why are you gouging my knees like that?” Oops. Wrong knee. At least I felt better knowing I was not permanently numb in the knees.
Changed Attitude
PETER LIT
At the Inn of the Beginning in Cotati, California, a band from Mendocino—Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys—had a gig.
During the break, they and some friends were in the back testing some homegrown herbs for psychoactive ingredients when in the circle there “magically” appeared a uniformed officer complete with radio, gun, and attitude.
What struck us the most, however, was that he was at least ten years younger (or so it seemed) than any of us. Other salient characteristics: He was about five feet two inches and alone.
The slow change was wondrous as the energy turned 180 degrees from an officer apprehending lawbreakers in the act to a group of people looking at some child interrupting their party.
He got nervous, started shuffling his feet, then walked away with the parting comment, “Well, it is illegal, you know.”
Risk and Reward
DARRELL
One summer, while touring the country with an amazing band, my friends and I stopped in Indiana to see a show. The band would be playing for two nights at the Deer Creek Amphitheater.
I missed the first show, due to “lack of having a ticket,” but was absolutely positive that I would get in the next night. And I did.
Anticipating a great show, I waited on the lawn with a friend. Knowing that we had some time to kill, my friend offered to pack a bowl with some beautiful blueberry buds from Eugene, Oregon. The only problem was that we had left all of our glass pieces in the van.
We looked over to our right, and sure enough there was a brother who welcomed our invitation, provided he could supply us with something to smoke out of. He smiled and pulled out one of the headiest chillums I’d ever seen—and I’ve seen my fair share.
This guy was a true old-school hippie, happy to be sharing what he referred to as “my baby.” He had taken the bowl back and forth across the country at least a dozen times over the past four years. He smoked it at almost every show and had gotten compliments from smokers and even a cop who decided not to confiscate it. We were happy to pack it.
The bowl had made it around between the three of us only once when a polite-but-annoying security guard told us to put it away. No sooner had she spit out the words than another not-so-polite-but-very-annoying security guard took the bowl out of my hands. He proceeded to take the chillum and throw it over the amphitheater’s back fence, which was close to where we were sitting.
Our kind friend looked at me with despair, almost in tears. I felt so bad, having been the last one with my hands on his baby. He was not very interested in my apology. The thought of never seeing his prized possession again was obviously on his mind. He asked me to get it for him, and I really didn’t feel like I had a choice.
Here were the problems: First, the show was just starting. Second, the day was beginning to turn into night. Third, the fence surrounding the back of the amphitheater was at least twelve feet high. He offered to boost me over, but I sadly explained that there was no way for me to get back once I was over. He suggested trying to get back in through the front, but we both realized that once you’re out, you’re out. I had to come up with a plan.
I decided to take a walk to the corner of the venue, where the back fence met a chain-link fence at a ninety-degree angle. Looking at the point where they met, I realized that the slope of the venue left about a one-foot space between the ground and the fence. I thought that I might actually be able to slide through the opening and grab the piece. So I asked some stoned kid if he’d keep an eye on me and make sure no one saw me trying to squeeze through the opening. He curiously agreed.
So I got on my belly and stuck my head under. I couldn’t see much, except that the venue had a huge slope on the other side (obviously, because the venue was a hill). It was getting darker, and the band was playing their second song. I decided to go for it and managed to squeeze my body through the hole. After standing up, I realized I was on the other side.
Now all I had to do was find the damn chillum. I started to look. And look and look. I continued to look until I spotted it. I started to walk over to it, almost ready to grab it. I was within two feet of it when I heard a voice: “Hey!” I had to think fast. I was pretty much planning on getting booted and spending the rest of the night in the parking lot.
“What the hell are you doing back here?”
“Some asshole grabbed my wallet and tossed it over the fence. I can’t leave until I find it. I have to find it!”
“Okay, calm down,” the guard said. “First off, how did you get here?”
“Uh, I crawled under a hole in the fence.”
“Well, you have to go back in. I’ll look for your wallet and meet you at the beer booth in twenty minutes. But you have to go back in now. If anyone sees you back here, you’ll be kicked out.”
I realized I had no choice. However, I was afraid he would look down about two feet behind him and see the chillum. So I gave him my estimated whereabouts of the wallet.
“I was sitting in between the beer booths, so it’s probably over there somewhere.”
“Okay, well, go back inside and meet me at the booth.”
I crawled back under the fence and started to walk back to the owner of the chillum. I was getting ready to give up. It was practically dark, and I had just narrowly escaped being kicked out. But the sad look on this kid’s face made me try it again. Not many people sneak out of a show, sneak back in, and decide to go out again.
So, crawl under again is what I did. Only, this time, I headed straight for where I knew the chillum was. I ran for it. I saw it. And I grabbed it. I ran for the hole, snuck back in before the second song ended, and handed over his baby to the kind brother. Not only did I get a big hug, but he was so happy that I found it he stuffed me a huge bowl of some greeny-green Humboldt weed.
Pranks
Smoking Bananas
PAUL KRASSNER
The office of the East Village Other was across the street from The Realist on Avenue A. I dropped by one afternoon when editors Walter Bowart, Allen Katzman, and Dean Latimer were discussing a book, Morning of the Magicians. They were intrigued to learn that LSD released serotonin in the brain and wondered if it could be found in nonchemical substances. And yes, serotonin could indeed be found in bananas. And so they decided to launch the great banana hoax. The Berkeley Barb picked up the story, and both the underground and mainstream wire services spread it around the country.
It quickly became public knowledge that you could get legally high from smoking dried banana skins. In San Francisco, there was a banana smoke-in, and one entrepreneur started a successful banana powder mail-order business, charging $5 an ounce. Agents from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs headed for their own laboratory, faithfully cooking, scraping, and grinding thirty pounds of bananas according to the recipe in the underground presses. For three weeks, the Food and Drug Administration utilized apparatuses, which “smoked” the dried banana peels.
The Los Angeles Free Press in turn promoted yet another hallucinogen—pickled jalapeño peppers, anally inserted. All over Southern California, heads were sticking vegetables up their asses. And, at a benefit for the Diggers in San Francisco, I mentioned onstage that the next big drug would be FDA. Sure enough, Time magazine soon reported that there would be “a super-hallucinogen called FDA.” Silly me, I thought I had made that up.
When Time decided to do a cover story on the hippies, a cable to their San Francisco bureau instructed researchers to “go at the description and delineation of the subculture as if you were studying the Samoans or the Trobriand Islanders.” It was a proper approach. At the Summer Solstice Celebration in Golden Gate Park, the same hippies who ridiculed Lyndon Johnson’s call for a national day of prayer were now imploring the sun to come out at 5:00 AM. They had given up trying to influence the administration, but now—perhaps under the influence of banana peels among other hallucinogens—they were still trying to influence the universe.
Banana Tripping
DAVID PEEL
The banana-smoking movement began around 1966–1967. It started in Berkeley. The inspiration was from Donovan’s song, “Mellow Yellow.” The first New York City Be-In featured banana grass being smoked along with marijuana. My first street band was called David Peel and the Banana Trippers. I saw articles about smoking banana skins in all kinds of news magazines, and I really believed that banana grass could get me high like marijuana.
I even went to the United Fruit Company’s New York headquarters to see if they would sponsor my band to play banana grass songs. They said, sarcastically, that they sure would if only I would go to Quebec, Canada, and speak to the executives there.
Even the cops in Washington Square Park tried to bust me and some other fellow hippies for smoking banana grass. I wrote my very first song, “Banana Grass,” in 1966 while I was working on Wall Street as a clerk for a small brokerage firm.
When I first sang the song in Washington Square, it caused an instant euphoria and the beginning of Peelmania. The crowd followed me like a Peeled Piper, singing along with my new anthem. I then knew that playing music was my new way of life and banana smoking was my new way of getting stoned.
The brokerage company fired me because I looked too much like a hippie in a suit, and I was focusing less on my work at the office. Ironically, it had been one of my supervisors who had brought the banana-smoking craze to my attention. I wasn’t smoking marijuana or taking psychedelics in those days. Banana grass and a little alcohol was enough for me at that time.
I then went to Haight-Ashbury for a few months in the fall of 1967 and learned to become a professional radical hippie. When I came back to New York City in early 1968, I began to realize, along with my fellow hippies and straight-looking friends, that banana grass wasn’t really happening; marijuana was the real thing. I learned that when I had my first joint before leaving for San Francisco.
I wrote my song “I Like Marijuana” for Elektra Records, which signed me as a recording artist. Elektra featured it as the main song on my album, Have a Marijuana. So before I became a total banana peel, my re-bong life turned me on to real sacred herb, marijuana grass, and turned me off to banana grass. But it was surely my first high fantasy, and marijuana music has been with me ever since.
Smoking Dog Poop
JAY LYNCH
In the early part of 1968, when satire magazines were few and far between, I edited and published a humorous journal called the Chicago Mirror. As editor, I wasn’t above hawking the mag on Wells Street myself. This way, I got direct feedback from the readers as well as their twenty-five-cent pieces. There were reports in the mass media of hippies smoking banana peels, so I wrote an article for the second issue of the Mirror based on these reports. It was intended as satire. Here it is, reprinted word for word:
Groovy New High
Last December 15th, a hippie crash pad on North Larabee Street was raided by four members of the Chicago Police Department’s Narcotics Squad. Narco officers were surprised to find twenty-five pounds of an unidentifiable substance in the hippies’ kitchen. Eleven or twelve hippies of indeterminate sex were taken in for questioning, and the entire twenty-five pounds of the strange sepia substance were confiscated by the puzzled fuzz for analysis.
Police chemists were astounded to discover that the mass was composed of dog excrement. The arresting officers were even more amazed to learn from the hippies they interrogated that “doggie poop,” as they referred to the contraband, was the newest psychedelic sensation among the local turned-on love children.
The busted hippies were released from custody soon after their account of “voyages to infinity” on a few snorts of poop were confirmed by police chemists. It will be a matter of months before Illinois passes a law against doggie poop. While poop is still legal, the Mirror would like to inform the unenlightened about the phenomenal consciousness-expanding qualities of the drug.
How to Do Poop
The most common variety of poop in the Old Town area is “Lincoln Park Brown.” It can be found lying on the ground amongst the trees and bushes of Lincoln Park, distributed by loving doggies as a gesture of kindness. When poop turns white, it is virtually useless as a hallucinogen. Poop users, or “shitheads,” warn that only fresh brown poop will do. To derive the full psychedelic benefit of doggie poop, it must be cured. Place a three-ounce “turd” (doggie poop is measured in turds rather than in kilos or micrograms) on a cookie sheet in a 300-degree oven. After baking for thirty minutes, the turd should be of brittle consistency. It can then be crumbled and rolled in cigarette papers into approximately six poop joints—a twelve-hour trip for two poop freaks.
Novice shitheads tend to inhale fresh uncured doggie poop from a plastic baggie. However, this method requires a longer period before the high is attained, and hallucinations are weaker than those produced by a poop joint. As a seventeen-year-old shithead told Mirror reporters, “The high is kind of like grooving on psilocybin, but more warm and human. To try to describe my poop high in earthy terminology would be a wasted effort. It’s indescribable. All I could say while I was up there was ‘Oh, wow!’”
Not a word of the above was true, of course. But while I was selling the Mirror on the street, I started to notice that the magazine’s primarily hippie readership didn’t understand that it was satire. Maybe I should have called it something less serious sounding than the Chicago Mirror. Maybe I should have called it the Chicago Goofy Wacky Magazine. I don’t know. But the one event I remember that truly convinced me to give up on the Mirror and publish Bijou Funnies (one of the first underground comic books) instead, occurred while I was selling the issue of the Mirror with the dog poop article on Wells Street.
A young hippie boy enthusiastically approached me and said, “Hey, man! Thanks for that tip about the dog shit! It really works, man! And it’s free!” The kid went on about how he and his friends had read the article and tried smoking dog shit. He claimed it was better than pot. He was serious. He wasn’t kidding. Now that I think about it, dog shit might actually have enough nitrogen content to get a person high. Or maybe, like the banana-peel smoking craze, it was just the power of suggestion that got this kid stoned on dog poop. I took full responsibility, though. I tried to tell him it wasn’t true. I tried to explain that it was humor. He wouldn’t accept it. He had been in Dog Poop Nirvana. I could not convince him that it was meant to be satire.
That’s the problem with satire, though. There’s always going to be somebody out there who doesn’t understand it. How many folks were duped into eating their children after reading Swift’s A Modest Proposal? How many kids have adopted Beavis and Butthead as role models? How many seas must the white duck sail before he can sleep in the sand?
