Pot Stories for the Soul, page 17
The Midwife
DEW U. CARE
Oh, I suppose it was a miracle. An act of love that began with a line of poetry, climaxed in the back seat of an economy-size car, and culminated in the birthing of a babe.
The midwife and husband stood at the ready, humbled by the complicated simplicity of the event. Unlike examples of women who’d paused in their daily labor, squatted in a field, commenced with a more personal type of labor, then bit the cord that binds, and, with babe on back, went back to the other labor, Madelaine’s had been going on for twenty-three hours.
Perhaps it was because it was her first child. Maybe it was her narrow pelvis. Or perchance the months of abstinence, having given up cigarettes, wine, coffee, pot, dying her hair, and all her favorite clothes, made her unable to give up one more thing. But we can state for a fact that the mother-to-be was not gently glowing and sweetly gasping as in the movies; she was sweating pools and cussing in three different languages. “Fuck! Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Oh, pinche tu madre! Help! Oh, I told you that you shouldn’t have cut off the end of the condom because it was too long!”
“Breathe,” said her life partner gently.
“If you’re so damned hot on breathing, you breathe!”
“Now, darling, you were great during the Lamaze classes.”
“Dr. Lamaze was a man. I want drugs!”
“Now, sugarplum, you were the one who wanted a natural birthing experience.”
The friend operating the video camera nodded his head in agreement.
“Why don’t you all just die?” the lady was heard to ask (all present gave the lady the benefit of the doubt and assumed the question was rhetorical). The midwife counseled, cajoled, massaged in ointments, wiped the woman’s brow with linen dipped in aromatic herbs. She related stories of easier births, then she told of more difficult ones. She recited haiku and Bible verse and African birthing stories. To no avail. The uterus dilated, the contractions increased, as did everyone’s frustration. Yet the babe refused to come until, it seemed, conditions known only to it were met.
The midwife consulted with the husband. An ambulance would take the woman to the hospital if the birth was not started soon. This was not the unthinkable alternative it had been just twenty-four hours earlier.
Midwifery is as much an art as a science, and the midwife whispered, promised, cajoled, sang, and massaged some more, for she wanted to be the one to bring the babe into the world. She whispered in the woman’s ear, “Let go of the gift and I will roll you a joint the likes of which you’ve never seen. Not just any joint, but a spliff rolled from the tips of buds grown in campo sancto by monks, blessed by a rabbi, and wrapped in organic rice paper by the delicate fingers of an aged Tibetan sage. It’s six inches long and as fat as . . . ” Here she cast a flirtatious look at the flushed life partner, who, if possible, looked even more bedraggled than his lady love.
“Give it to me now,” gasped the poor mother-to-be.
“No, my sweet. No substance shall pass your lips until you deliver what you’ve brought me here to deliver.”
“Don’t make me get off this table,” yelled the lady.
“No. Only afterward. That is the deal. I don’t negotiate. If you have to go to the hospital, you’ll be in a cold, sterile environment where the sacred smoke is not welcome, and they serve bad coffee to boot.”
And we, gentle reader, will never know if it was the babe’s own sweet time, the deity’s will, or the promise of some truly righteous weed, but it did come to pass . . . literally, and the mother delivered a beautiful bouncing baby girl.
The midwife made good on her promise and delivered the sacred spliff.
And then the third miracle occurred (the first being the conception, the second the birth)—no one told the mother to pass the joint. And yet she shared the sacred six inches of her own volition.
And what of the babe, hallowed by the halo of sacred smoke? She grew into a wise, brilliant, beautiful, kind, very patient, and calm woman—who likes her wine, her cigarettes, her coffee, and her herb.
The Blind Mime
DEW U. CARE
It was a blind boy who brought me to pot, and I never had the foresight to thank him.
It was my junior year in college and I was floundering about, looking for a major that would carry me through life. As if. But one is young and impressionable, and in my trying out of various guises, I worked with Handicapped Student Services. Part of my job entailed reading to visually impaired students.
My favorite was a boy named Bob. Bob had a “photographic” memory and incredible audio retention. He could hold hundreds of bits of information in his mind at once (i.e., retain a fifty-question multiple-choice quiz, each with five possible selections). A psychology major, Bob also had the ability to generate amazingly original ideas. Add to that a wry sense of humor, a kind heart, and the sweet, good-natured, broad-shouldered “gee, ma’am, are my boots under your bed?” charm the South is known for, and you have Bob.
Sitting on the grass, Bob pulled out a joint. I stared. Then I quickly got over it. Bob could always seem to tell when I was staring.
“But that’s illegal,” I gasped.
“No, it’s okay, really. I use it for medicinal purposes. It keeps me from going blind.”
“Ah . . . Bob . . . ”
“Yes?”
“ . . . um . . . um . . . you are blind.”
“You’re right.” Pause. He screams. Other people turn around. Bob continues. “I can’t see! I can’t see! I’m blind!” People continue to stare. Bob puts his hands in front of him. “No! No! Anything but this!”
It’s his Mime in a Box because, in a misguided moment of compassion, I had encouraged him to distract himself from his Humphrey Bogart and Bob Marley and Bette Davis impressions. How was I to know he’d keep at it? Then he sat down.
“Look,” he said, “I’ve enjoyed pot for five years. I’m getting into grad school. Science, the scientific method, is my forte. Pot has never been proven, after decades and decades of research, to have detrimental attributes. On the contrary. Most scientific and anecdotal evidence leads to the opposite conclusion. The most harmful thing for your body is stress and depression.
“Smoking pot enhances my perceptions and appreciation for the world around me. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t pilot an airplane, go through a pregnancy, or perform neurosurgery under it, but you’ve got my word of honor that I wouldn’t dream of doing any of those three things under the influence of THC. Scout’s honor.”
“Uh, Bob, are you a scout?”
“While I did say ‘scout’s honor,’ I never, by word or deed, only the assumptions you brought, said I was the scout in question.”
“But if marijuana was okay, it’d be legal now.”
“Segregation was legal in this country until the ’50s. Gay legal rights are still iffy. And an amendment that said women were equal was struck down. We do funny things. But I do believe that we’re evolving as a species. Continually maturing. By my reckoning, we’re in our adolescence. Some day future generations will look back at pot prohibition with the same proper horror with which we view bloodletting.”
“But I’m afraid it will interfere with my ambition,” I said.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you, you’re a type-A personality. You bite your nails. I can hear you, you know. Shouldn’t nibble on the cuticle like that.”
I pulled my finger out of my mouth.
“You mean, I’m type-A because I bite my nails?”
“No, you bite your nails because you’re type-A.” Here he broke off into his Groucho Marx imitation, complete with ashing an imaginary cigar. “And I don’t mean a blood type. I mean a tenseness. Let me put it another way. Are you usually the first person on and off an elevator?”
“Yes, why?”
“Even though you know it’s not going to move until the last person’s on, you’ll push and pull and weave and elbow and stand stubbornly in the front?”
“Yes, what’s your point?”
“Do you understand how oxymoronic the phrases ‘trying to relax,’ ‘military intelligence,’ and ‘right-to-work-state’ are? Are you the same religion, political affiliation, and economic status as your family?”
Silence reigned as I pulled on the loose hem of my Sears shorts in a charming pastel color.
“Here,” he said, “try a hit. Hold it for a bit, exhale gently. Ready, set, go!” And with that he handed me The Torpedo.
First it was the scent that intoxicated me, fresh and vital, musky and straw-like, yet with sweet overtones. Then it was the way the ember flared as I pulled the warm spring air and the smoke into my lungs. The sound of wind blowing through the leaves and grass. I closed my eyes.
I experienced the world through my other senses. I tried to experience the world as Bob did.
Through the years our lives took different roads, and the paths we’d chosen seldom crossed. Bob never did work with the differently abled, as he’d planned then, except as a volunteer. He worked as a lawyer for various progressive causes, his family growing—the last time we met he had a seeing-eye dog in the lead and his youngest taking up the rear in a royal red papoose pack.
“During my act, I tell people I’m their worst fear in a packed airplane—the guy with the kid and the dog.”
“You do stand-up?”
“Yeah, I added it to my mime routine. Mime in a Box!”
“How do you find the energy?”
For an answer, he pulled The Torpedo out of his coat pocket.
I looked at him fondly. We’d known each other many moons. I took the spliff and the smoke and the shared memories and held them deep. I closed my eyes. I felt his arm around my shoulders. I sighed with satisfaction. Then I handed him the joint.
“My little pothead,” I said. “I think I’ll keep him.”
The Funeral
DEW U. CARE
As funerals go, I suppose it went well enough. No one threw themselves at the casket, the religious leader I’d rented for the occasion mouthed the words I’d fed him with a passable sincerity, no one barfed at the wake—at least not in the hall itself—and the check I’d written for the whole shebang cleared. All in all, a success—as such things go.
Now, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Usually your way, my way, Yahweh’s, or the highway. Which brings us to the subject of my story, my beloved sister. The good Lord has a sense of humor, no one can take that away from Him, but there has to be a rhyme and reason for the madness around us, and my madness has included going through life as a clone—an identical twin.
I’ve grown up with a pair of eyes that mirror my own staring back at me, a gallery of similar gestures, a certain stride that marks us—and that’s it. My Republican, “free the magic of the marketplace,” MBA, lawyer sister is to me like the cream in my coffee (i.e., the scum that rises to the surface). In her patented manner, she lost herself in grief until I’d taken care of the funeral, only to find herself in time for the division of the estate.
I’ve never minded my sibling’s single-minded self-interest. All right, I have, but there’s a difference between ideological differences and being dicked over in the particular. We all can’t cuddle orphans, pen sonnets, bake bread, comfort the dying. Some of us were made for other things—mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, and litigation, for example. Some of us frolic with the dolphins, and others swim with the sharks. And that’s okay—or at least it was until she stole from me. Even then I didn’t take it personally. You can only steal what you have access to. And what she had access to was me.
During the probate period, money, stocks, bonds, certificates of deposit, and just about anything worthy of a serial number disappeared as quietly and efficiently as a Central American dissident.
But then the bitch absconded with our parents’ wedding bands. Feigning ignorance, she prevaricated, stalled, stonewalled, and flat-out lied. My first impulse was to . . . well, it’s pretty much unprintable, and it may be, in fact, a physical impossibility to bend an appendage to an orifice in quite the manner I’d contemplated, so I went for my second impulse. I got stoned.
Then I got her stoned. Now at this stoning, stamina came into play. You just can’t compete with a hard-core ounce of red-haired bud a month. I was hitting my stride as she slid under the table. I was wetting my lips with an innocent pink tongue while her parched lips went through contortions. And in exchange for a package of Hostess products and some pizza-flavored potato chips, she caved. It was Jacob and Esau updated. Only, instead of the pot of thick porridge for the birthright, I got her stoned and let her walk away with her integrity—and her life.
“I took the wedding rings,” she sobbed, chocolate rimming the corner of her lips, nacho crumbs in the lapels of her Armani.
“Honey, I knew you did.”
We hugged. We kissed. In the morning she woke up with a fresh conscience. I had helped her to do the right thing. Sure, I had to weed her up to do it, but as Voltaire said, “Cultivate your garden.”
Happily, my garden grows a righteous weed.
The Bostonians: A Pot Family Saga
JOMO RASKIN
When I remember the hordes of marijuana growers I’ve known in California, I can’t help but be reminded of the Bostonians, as I’ve always called them, because they came from Boston. They were an Irish, working-class, Catholic family, though by the time I met them they had long since stopped going to church or taking communion. I don’t mean to say that there was a direct relationship between their ethnicity, family background, and pot. There was none at all. Other growers were Jewish, Protestant, Buddhist, and more. Still, the Bostonians worshipped pot like no one else; pot was their religion, their creed, and their calling. They grew it, harvested it, transported it, sold it, smoked it, talked about it almost all the time, and taught me the ABC’s of the industry.
Every spring, they invited all the growers in the vicinity—seventy-five or so—to an outdoor “pagan ritual,” as they called it, and urged everyone to bring an ounce or so from the previous year’s harvest and burn it on the bonfire that raged all night. The idea behind the ceremonial burning was not to become attached to the herb, but rather to let it go up in smoke. Just sitting around the fire and breathing, we all were stoned. Couples would go off on their own, have sex, come back, smoke weed, and then wander off again for more sex.
All summer long, the Bostonians gave tours of their pot garden; they insisted they had nothing to hide. They talked about cannabis history, cannabis culture, and cannabis botany and smoked dope from dawn to dusk. Of course, they grew their plants outdoors in direct sunlight in a large garden surrounded by sunflowers, corn, fruit trees, and vegetables—all organic. At harvest in the fall, they invited everyone on the mountain to a potluck with mounds of pot as well as a variety of casseroles that were set out on the dining room table.
There was no official competition, and no trophy, just hours and hours of smoking and talking about weed, as wine lovers talk about Pinot Noir or Zinfandel. There was cocaine, too. Without cocaine almost everyone would have gone to sleep or faded away early. No one really cared about the coke; the growers snorted it so that they could keep on smoking pot and comparing notes with one another.
In the story of the Bostonians, there was no happy ending, though they were never arrested, not over the course of several decades. But Mr. Boston turned to meth and had a heart attack—“speed kills.” Mrs. Boston’s health declined rapidly. She died a slow, painful death.
They were both intelligent and did no harm to the environment, to animals in the forests, or any human beings, except to themselves, and they harbored no evil thoughts either. They built their own home, repaired their own vehicles, kept them running, and read books—everything by Stephen King. Despite their burning rituals, they became attached to the savage god of marijuana. They loved marijuana too much, and more than they loved themselves or their children, who were raised in the cannabis culture and never attended school or received a real education. The Bostonian kids lived isolated lives in the woods, wandered into town and found jobs at McDonald’s, or turned to petty crime. After their parents died, they squabbled over the thousands of acres that they inherited—the property their parents bought with hard work and marijuana dollars.
Their family trajectory might have made for a convincing argument about the agony of addiction. They smoked cigarettes, too. I loved them dearly and learned mountains from them about rural living, and so it was sad to see their bodies fall apart, the family implode, and the surrounding community of growers disintegrate. One day, when the drug war is over, I plan to build a monument in their memory. Yes, they did themselves in, but they were also victims of the drug war; I like to think that if there was no pot prohibition and no war on pot farmers, they’d still be alive, still planting, cultivating, harvesting, and leading healthy lives. Hey, Bostonians, may you rest in peace.
[Excerpted from Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War.]
Disneyland
Peer Pressure
BOB WIEDER
In 1972, I went with a bunch of friends from a Berkeley anarchist collective to Disneyland, where we all got stoned.
There was one slow pseudo-ride called the PeopleMover that was more of an elevated tour of Tomorrowland than an actual attraction. It made two leisurely passes through (and overhead) the spacious Tomorrowland gift shop.
On our first pass, we all started calling out at the shoppers: “Buy! Consume! Spend!”
