Pot Stories for the Soul, page 14
There was a time when people realized that if they jumped out of a tenth-floor window, they would ultimately fall to their deaths. Today, though, they’ll metaphorically jump out of that same tenth-story window and then, on the way down, lobby for softer concrete.
The Great Yippie Valentine’s Day Caper
ROZ PAYNE
The following Valentine appeared anonymously in the mailboxes of about thirty thousand strangers in New York City on February 14, 1969; it was printed on paper with hearts going around its sides, and each one contained a joint:Yippie! You are one of 30,000 lucky persons being sent this freshly rolled marijuana cigarette. We are doing this in order to clear the garbage from the air. Here are some facts:▶ Marijuana has been used for over 2,500 years throughout the world.
▶ Scientific research at the University of Michigan and Boston University show marijuana to be as harmless as coffee.
▶ Here is what an official study carried out by the British government had to say: “Marijuana is much less dangerous than amphetamines and barbiturates, and also less dangerous than alcohol.”
▶ Marijuana is not habit-forming any more than are the movies.
▶ “There are no lasting ill effects from even the acute use of marijuana,” say researchers Goodman and Gilman in Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics.
▶ The often-quoted fact that pot smoking leads to heroin addiction is just not true.
▶ “Marijuana is not as dangerous as it was once thought to be,” says J. Murphy of the U.S. Bureau of Drug Control.
It would be almost impossible to find more than a handful of researchers who would claim marijuana as harmful, yet the government and local authorities maintain the same attitude they have held for years. The penalty for doing just what you are doing right now runs up to life imprisonment in some states. Mayor Lindsay has just petitioned the governor of New York to raise the penalty from one to four years for possession. In 1968, over 60,000 people in California alone were arrested for smoking pot. Nationwide statistics to be released next month will show over 200,000 arrests last year. The law is very discriminatory with blacks, hippies, and other minority group members being the only ones prosecuted.
Anyway, we thought we would give you a chance to make up your own mind. It’s very simple. Just get a match and light up! Plenty of people smoke pot who do not smoke regular cigarettes, and, besides, you can’t get cancer from it. Just inhale deeply and hold the smoke down as long as you can. You’ve had enough when you feel kind of nice and mellow. If you already smoke, join us when we strike again on Mother’s Day by sending out ten or more joints to persons selected from the phone book. Oh, yes, one more thing, don’t call the cops, dig?
The story goes that Abbie and Anita Hoffman asked Jimi Hendrix for a $2,000 check to buy the marijuana. Jimi gave them $1,000 cash so that there would not be a record of the transaction. Six kilos of pot were bought for $800; the rest of the money was spent on stamps and envelopes. The marijuana was divided up among various groups whose job was to clean, roll, stuff and stamp the already addressed envelopes, and mail them in time for arrival on Valentine’s Day. Anita, under the alias Ann Fettamen, wrote about this event in her book, Trashing. Because the acts were illegal, she changed names, places, and the date from Valentine’s Day to Halloween.
Our group was responsible for rolling two of the six kilos. Anita said that each kilo produced seven hundred joints, or was it each pound? We had bamboo rollers, various types of rolling machines, and rolling papers. Rolling joints got tiresome, so you needed to change methods. We hung out forever, rolling, smoking, talking, listening to music, and rolling some more. In order to clean large amounts at a time, Anita and Abbie used a window screen while we used my mother’s round metal sieve. None of us ever had that much marijuana before, so we lived in total ecstasy on one hand and in total paranoia of getting busted on the other.
Abbie showed up with envelopes that were addressed with a typewriter that had been destroyed, postage stamps, and thousands of leaflets. We stuffed the envelopes with the letter and one marijuana joint. The leftover joints were sent to people of our choice, some friends and some addresses taken randomly from the phone book. Some were mailed from mailboxes on Third Avenue in the Gramercy Park area, the same red and blue mailboxes that later were stenciled with a yellow star to turn the boxes into flags representing the National Liberation Front of North Vietnam. Anita and Abbie mailed some from uptown, and other groups mailed them throughout New York City.
Anita wrote, “There was no way of knowing how many people got high on Halloween [Valentine’s Day], but we knew it was the busiest night in the history of the Narcotics Division.” The story first broke in the afternoon papers and on the radio. The information was scanty, but there were shocked reports that thousands of city dwellers had received a marijuana cigarette with a strange letter. By evening, it was announced at regular intervals on all the late news programs.
One newscaster displayed the joint he had received, read the letter aloud, and, while on the air, he called the police, asked for the Narcotics Division, told them he had been sent marijuana, and then was told that the police were on their way to the TV station. While he was still on the air, the police arrived, took the joint, and announced to the American public: “If you have received marijuana in the mail, you must report it to your local police precinct. Marijuana is a dangerous drug that can drive people insane.”
Other Species
The Raccoon
MR . HOWELL
Growing up in the subtropics of Florida, one of the things that can be done to defray the ever-rising cost of pot is to grow your own. So we did (and do) in every available place and way you can imagine. Since much of our lovely state is made up of mangrove swamps, estuaries, and barrier islands, our youthful efforts to produce clandestine crops of cannabis eventually moved to this final frontier of mosquitoes, mud, and the raccoon.
Accessing the chosen site was difficult, the shallow brackish waters surrounding these islands meant that only a canoe could be landed, and all supplies had to be hauled in by hand—building materials, dirt, water, fertilizer. The terrain underfoot was all knee-deep muck, black and thick. It would suck your toes right off your feet.
Mosquitoes were so thick that any bare skin would turn black with them in seconds. Massive amounts of repellant and full-length clothing were mandatory. Since full-length clothing is highly suspicious on anyone in Florida during the summer, we had to change in transit.
Despite these obstacles, the crop got planted and thrived through the summer under our meticulous and tender care. We weren’t taking any unnecessary chances, and prior experience had taught us that wild animals also prized our lush, green stand of weed. The stand was made of chicken wire on all sides, so that only our hands, with their opposable thumbs, could access the secured barrier.
Or so we thought. Harvest time was fast approaching, and our anticipation swelled as harvest time drew near. The lush green of our lovingly tended plants was giving way to the purple, red, and yellow hues of maturity, and so we headed out for our last sortie into mosquito hell. This time there was no need for heavy water jugs or bags of dirt. Our labors would soon be repaid in full. Ready the bongs. This time we were coming back to party down.
Raccoons are clever and resourceful bandits, which is why I guess they have little masks on their faces. What makes them particularly successful are their front paws, which have opposable thumbs, enabling them to pry open shellfish, trash can lids, and chicken-wire cages.
That is exactly what we found when we arrived at our clandestine pot farm: one very stoned raccoon, stuffed to the gills and sound asleep on his back, lying inside the chicken-wire cage and surrounded by the stumps and scattered leaves of our former dope plants. While we were quite upset, it was obvious we’d been had. The blissful look on that raccoon’s face said it all: “It was good dope and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Thank you.”
The Duck
FRANK ATWOOD
We stopped at a store in Big Bear for some drinks. Things were just fine at first. One friend went into the store for drinks, the other was rummaging around in the van, and I was tripping on the outasight blue sky and toking on some hash. Suddenly my friend whispered, “The Man is coming.”
I kept toking on the bowl of hash and whispered back to him, “But I ain’t done yet.” He freaked and went around the van to head off the cop when this duck walked between him and the cop. I got the distinct feeling that this cop believed he had to save this duck from the long-hairs. Don’t think the duck felt the same way. My other friend came out of the store with our drinks, so I glanced over at him. When I turned my attention back to the cop saving the duck from the freaks, I simply fell over laughing.
Fuckin’ duck was chasing the pig down the road! Yes, really. The cop would run a few steps, the duck would sort of cock its head to snap at the cop’s foot, the cop would jump in the air to click his heels together like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and then land and run a few more steps. Of course, we were cheering the duck wholeheartedly. I don’t think I ever saw a funnier sight. Needless to say, the whole store was watching, so we got the fuck out of there. Still, every once in a while, as we journeyed down the mountain, we’d simultaneously burst out laughing, one of us making quacking noises, as our collective conscious envisioned the cop running down the road clicking his heels.
The Finches
In 1988, my husband and I moved to the canyon lands in Central California. Our closest neighbor was a retired fisherman who owned ten acres of scrub brush on which sat a nice old farmhouse and a commercial greenhouse. Richard was his name and he had lived a colorful life with fascinating stories about the movie studios in Hollywood, leaving there to fish the sea in Northern California, a stint in prison (we didn’t ask), and the usual macho talk about kicking people’s butts.
Richard had a German temper and more of a grimace than a smile. He loved to get on the subject of the Holocaust, and his eyes would bulge while he told us that the Germans would never, ever have exterminated anyone and that the story was a myth.
He really believed this. He would inevitably fire himself up so badly he’d start running around his property, kicking the cars in his old rotten collection on the rear ends. He had about fifty cars, trucks, and tractors that didn’t run and had large dents or broken windows.
Richard also loved to smoke pot. We considered how he would act if he didn’t smoke it. Luckily, he had given up alcohol years before. After we’d known him a few months, he took us out back to his greenhouse. He had five hundred marijuana plants neatly placed in rows. It was April and the plants were about two feet high. He was telling us that he’d been really busy knocking down all the bird nests near the ceiling of the greenhouse. The little finches got in through the gap between the walls and the ceiling. We admired his plants and then walked home discussing the risk of growing so much pot.
The next day we saw Richard jumping around his yard like an ape in heat. He was yelling and literally flipping out. We thought maybe he’d had another conversation about the Holocaust, but it turned out to be much worse.
Apparently, the little finches were panic-stricken when they had discovered their nests destroyed, and they had worked overtime pulling out all of Richard’s seedlings to rebuild their homes. They had even used some of the threads on his blue flannel shirt that he had left hanging on a hook in the greenhouse.
Richard was livid. He was beyond livid. He was freaking. We approached him as he was about to destroy the bird nests again with a long pole. We talked him out of knocking down the new nests. The birds were done building, so why not leave them alone and let them hatch their eggs? They wouldn’t bother any more seedlings.
So, Richard replanted his crop, and both he and the finches lived happily ever after. When the season was over, Richard gave us one of the nests made of pot and a blue flannel shirt. We still have the nest and it’s quite a conversation piece.
Gerbil Power
KEN MCINTOSH
One late fall Michigan weekend in 1973, on our way to Saginaw, Pam and I stopped in to visit some friends of mine in Ann Arbor. I had met them at a Free John Sinclair rally and kept up the contact. They had been members of the White Panther Party, which, on its way to oblivion, had changed its name to the Rainbow People’s Party.
Darby and Lee had a huge apartment in one of those rundown Victorian houses that seemed to be endemic to midwestern college towns. Their place was as messy as most places rented by career undergraduate stoners are wont to be. Most of the furniture was second- and thirdhand, except, of course, the stereo, which was state of the art. The décor consisted of lots of books, dope paraphernalia, burned-out candles, incense residue, and dead or dying plants. Dirty clothes were scattered everywhere, and posters and graffiti covered the walls.
The kitchen walls, though, were slick with grease. The refrigerator held a couple of beers, a couple of shriveled-up carrots, and some other stuff covered with a blue mold patina. The sink contained every eating, drinking, or cooking implement or vessel they owned, plus a colony of cockroaches, thriving on the food residue and dripping faucet. The bathroom was so fetid that both Pam and I decided to hold it until we stopped for gas later. Every room was badly painted a different color. The living room was black. This black room was where the stereo and albums were and, surprise, the black lights and Day-Glo posters of Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, and the recommended astrological sexual positions. Pillows were festooned about the room, which was dominated by a corded oval area rug and the biggest circular Naugahyde ottoman I have ever seen. The room was lit (it’s hard to think of black lights as being illumination) by candles and gerbil power.
Darby, it seems, had once been an electrical engineering major, way back in the mists of time when his academic career first began. The day after his strobe light broke, he had turned a rodent wheel into a small dynamo and hooked up a light bulb. Then he went out and bought a gerbil, which he ensconced in a large, cracked-glass aquarium. The gerbil was quickly named Lemmeoutahere because that’s all he kept trying to do the first few days in his new domicile. We called him Lem.
Darby would put the dynamo wheel in with Lem to entertain visitors. He did so for Pam and me. The twenty-five-watt bulb was soon flickering away. After a couple of minutes of this, Pam asked to pet the cute little fella. Darby retrieved Lem and placed him in Pam’s palm. Pam sniffed while she cooed at him. When she tried to pet his cute little head with a free finger, he bit her. Pam screamed. Lem hopped off her hand onto the floor and disappeared. We examined the damaged digit and found no blood, just a tiny red spot. Darby again assured her that Lem was really no threat and that Lem had just been sampling the salt on her skin. Pam was relieved and a little embarrassed at her reaction to the nip. Lee told us he had the perfect balm for her injury. He had just scored some Nepalese temple balls.
We huddled around the ottoman for a Himalayan high. Pam, crossing her legs, reminded me pointedly about our need to stop for gas. I must confess that I was more concerned about trying the gooey hash than Pam’s bladder. Lee was twisting off a goodly portion of a ball and placing it in a hookah. Lee sat the diminished temple ball down on a serving tray beside the pipe. We each grabbed a hose and started sucking.
After a couple of tokes, Pam’s bladder signals lost intensity as she settled into a comfortable buzz. She didn’t like pot, but she absolutely loved hash, for some reason a fairly common trait among distaff midwestern heads. We three guys started talking about our shared political past while we all drank some fresh cider from Dixie cups and filled Pam in on the things that I had failed to mention during the drive up U.S. 23 from Ohio.
While we rapped, listened to Pink Floyd, and sipped the pressed apple nectar, we would occasionally catch brief glimpses of Lem as he hopped around the room. Suddenly, Lem jumped up onto the ottoman to everyone’s delight. He hopped around the periphery, sniffing at each of us in turn. It was quite charming. He then stopped by a burning candle set in some driftwood and sniffed the air, standing high on his rear legs, resting one forepaw on the wood to steady himself. Obviously catching a whiff of something specific, he hunkered down, rotated about forty-five degrees, and made a beeline for the hash. He grabbed the ball in his forepaws, turning it like corn on the cob, and nibbled away for a few seconds.
Lee retrieved the hash and we all waited for Lem’s reaction. Lem was masticating earnestly as he moved away from the serving tray. He hopped very slowly to the edge of the ottoman in front of Darby and just lay down. Darby scooped Lem up, petted him tenderly, and placed him gently into his litter material. Darby assured us that Lem would be fine. It seems Lem had done things like this before, and, if his past behavior was any indication, he would quickly sleep it off. Pam and I got up and went over to check Lem out. He seemed to be peacefully sleeping.
We sat back down and took a few more tokes. I talked Lee into selling me some of the hash. We were all famished at this point, but there was no food in the house, so I offered to pop for dinner. We all rose to leave, putting our coats on. While Lee and I completed our transaction, Darby and Pam chatted. Pam was giving me a strained smile and crossing and uncrossing her legs. Just as we were about to depart, the twenty-five-watt bulb started flickering again in the black room.
We all rushed over to the aquarium. Lem appeared in fine fettle. The flicker became a steady glow. I imagined Lem fleeing the THC snake pursuing him with all his strength. We all clucked at Lem. Lee gave him a little power salute and whispered, “Right on.”
