Pot Stories for the Soul, page 18
A few minutes later, we made our second pass and repeated our cheers. Only, this time, all the people shopping in the store joined in, evidently with no sense of sheepishness or irony, yelling: “Buy! Consume! Spend!”
Fickle Finger of Fate
WALDO STEVE AND THE WALDOS
In the early ’70s, the young Waldos—a group of friends from Marin County, California—were planning a stoner’s trip to Los Angeles and Disneyland. We were planning it for weeks. The day before the trip, two of the Waldos phoned me in the afternoon and said they could not go because they did not have the cash. No money, no trip. A big letdown. About nine that same evening, I got a surprise phone call from the two cashless Waldos. They said, “We can go now! We have lots of money. Wait at your house and we will come right over to explain.” When they arrived, they got out of the car holding brown-paper shopping bags.
Because my parents were having a party in the front of the house, we went around the side gate, through a back door, and into my room, unnoticed. As soon as the door was closed and locked, they opened the shopping bags and started pulling out and throwing cash in the air. I joined in, reaching into the bags, grabbing fistfuls of money, and throwing it into the air. It was raining money, and the floor was completely covered with green bills. The previously cashless and now rich Waldo explained that he had suffered for a long time while working for an ex-boss, who was an extremely abusive asshole. And this money was a revenge-related windfall.
The next morning, we packed up my 1966 four-door Chevy Impala (with a killer Craig eight-track stereo system) to head for Southern California. The cargo consisted of four guys and a girl with long brown hair, named Laura, who needed a lift to L.A. The cargo also consisted of six lids of fresh, green smoke. Driving south on Highway 101, we were in a hurry because I was extremely determined to make it to Burbank (to be an audience member) for an afternoon taping of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
Unfortunately, I had to slow down. Around San Luis Obispo, a police car got onto the highway directly behind us. I warned my passengers to put out their joints. However, my passengers thought it was sufficient to just keep the joints down low. A second police car got onto the highway in front of us. Now there was one cop in front and one in back of us. Besides the police cars, ours was the only car on the freeway. We put out the joints and watched the speedometer.
Within minutes, more cop cars got onto the highway. Now there were two behind us and two in front of us. Then, there were three squad cars behind us and three in front of us. We put the lids down our pants and continued to drive the speed limit. Then the cop car directly behind us lit up his bright, flashing, colorful lights.
We pulled over to the side of the road and so did all six squad cars. The officers jumped out and pulled their guns but did not approach our car. Stoned, we sat and waited for ten minutes while the officers walked around at a distance. Would we be busted?
An officer approached the car and asked for all of our licenses. He took the IDs back his car and we waited. We waited for a full half hour in total suspense inside our reeking automobile. Would we be busted?
The officer came back to our car, handed me our drivers’ licenses, and said we could go free. I questioned him about our detainment. He said the cops thought that the girl in our car was Patty Hearst and that we were the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army) headed south.
Very stoned and very miffed about the delay, I then reprimanded the police officer saying, “You goof, now we’re going to miss Johnny Carson.”
We got to Los Angeles in the early evening and went to a motel to try to get a room. They had no vacancies. The second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh motels we tried also had no vacancies.
With no other options, we filled up the gas tank. Gasoline was only about forty cents a gallon and we had six lids of grass. We cruised the freeways of L.A. nonstop, continuously smoking weed until the sun came up. Cheaper than a motel.
Later that morning, the Waldos arrived at Disneyland, determined to smoke out everywhere in the park. And we did. At one point, we hopped a fence, ran up a little hill, and down into a phony Disney-created desert scene. Consisting of a few acres, it was made to look like Arizona or Utah. We smoked all over the phony little Southwest.
A train whistle blew. There was a train tunnel leading to our Southwest desert mock-up. Happy Disney customers were all aboard and quickly coming our way. We ran up a hill and hid behind a giant, phony red rock. Crouching tightly behind the boulder, we lit up a new joint. The train stopped in the middle of the desert.
The tour guide on the train pointed directly at us as he exclaimed to the passengers, “Oh, my!” All eyes on the train looked right at us. We froze still. The tour guide then continued, “Oh, my! It’s Old Faithful!”
Suddenly, about two feet from my right foot, a water geyser shot up. First two feet high, then six feet high, and finally fifteen feet high. The Waldos took a good soaking. The train drove away. We were soaked, but we didn’t spoil the vacation for the Disneyland customers.
The Disneyland Memorial Orgy
PAUL KRASSNER
When Walt Disney died in December 1966, I remembered a couple of his statements with peculiar affection. “I love Mickey Mouse,” he had once said, “more than any woman I’ve ever known.” In 1945, Aldous Huxley went to work for him as a consultant on the filming of Alice in Wonderland. There was gossip that Huxley had turned him on with magic mushrooms. “If people would think more of fairies,” Disney said a year later, “they would forget the atom bomb.”
There were rumors that Disney’s body had been frozen, although it was actually cremated. Somehow I had expected Mickey and Donald Duck and all the rest of the gang to attend the funeral, with Goofy delivering a eulogy and the Seven Dwarves serving as pallbearers. After his death, as a personal pilgrimage, I thought it would be appropriate to visit Disneyland. I went with three friends, one a lawyer whose dog jumped into the car as we were leaving his home. We ate marijuana brownies for the occasion.
Dogs were not allowed in Disneyland. In fact, male humans with long hair or beards or other stereotypical hippie accouterments were not allowed in. The Beatles, who were more popular than Christ, would not have been permitted to enter Disneyland—unless they were performing there. Indeed, Jesus himself would not have been permitted to enter Disneyland—unless he was performing there. We bluffed our way into Disneyland by convincing a ticket-taker that the manager had given us permission earlier on the telephone inasmuch as the dog was needed to guide my friend with the impaired eyesight. Inside, we continued to fake it, explaining that the dog had already been cleared by the ticket-taker.
After lunch, a large man with a small walkie-talkie approached us with the choice of putting the dog in the Disneyland kennel or leaving the place altogether. My friend explained how this exception to their rule had been arranged two weeks ago, and he asked to speak to “the chief of security.”
“I am the chief of security.”
“Ah, just the man I want to see.”
Incidentally, I should mention that the canine in question was not a Seeing Eye dog (which would now be called an assisted-living dog). It wasn’t even a German shepherd. There was no metal brace for the owner to hold on to, just a rotten, knotted leather leash. Moreover, the dog was a bloodshot-eyed basset hound that kept stumbling all over the ground because it had to pee and was searching for a spot where a dog had previously peed, any dog, but no dog had ever peed in Disneyland. Especially not Pluto.
Okay, then, if we had to leave, were we not entitled to a full refund? Yes, we were. So, while the others waited at the gate, I was escorted to a building called City Hall. There, a woman was requesting that her lost child be paged over the loudspeaker, but she was refused because it wasn’t considered an emergency.
I didn’t wish people to think that I wanted them only for their money, so I asked if there had been any special ceremony when Walt Disney died.
“No, we kept the park open. We felt that Mr. Disney would have wanted it that way.”
“Well, wasn’t there any official recognition of his passing?”
“We did fly the flag at half-mast for the rest of the month.”
Disney stock rose one point the day after his death and continued to ascend. The company earned $100 million the next year, and even though Disney was dead, Mickey Mouse would continue to bask in his own immortality. Disney’s death occurred a few years after Time magazine’s famous “God Is Dead” cover, and it struck me that Disney had indeed served as the Creator of Mickey, Donald Duck, Goofy—that whole stable of imaginary characters who were now mourning in a state of suspended animation.
Disney had been their Intelligent Designer, and he had repressed all their baser instincts, but since he had departed, they could finally shed their cumulative inhibitions and participate together in an unspeakable Roman binge, to signify the crumbling of an empire. I assigned Mad magazine artist Wally Wood to create—as a black-and-white center-spread for The Realist, which then became a popular poster—the infamous Disneyland Memorial Orgy. (A digitally colored edition of the original poster is available at paulkrassner.com.)
Pluto is pissing on a portrait of Mickey Mouse while the real, bedraggled Mickey is shooting up heroin with a hypodermic needle. His nephews are jerking off as they watch a combination bed and cash register where Minnie Mouse is fucking Goofy. The beams shining out from Cinderella Castle are actually dollar signs. Dumbo is simultaneously flying and shitting on an infuriated Donald Duck. Huey, Dewey, and Louie are ogling Daisy Duck’s asshole as she watches the Seven Dwarves groping Snow White. The Prince is snatching a peek at Cinderella’s snatch while trying a glass slipper on her foot. The Three Little Pigs are humping each other in a daisy chain. Jiminy Cricket is leering as Tinker Bell does a striptease and Pinocchio’s nose gets longer and longer.
Anyway, still thoroughly stoned, we left Disneyland to fend for itself.
Amsterdam
Space Cake
I smoked a lot of dope in college. I had my reasons. I went to an engineering school. In Cleveland. At the outset of the Reagan years. Women were outnumbered on campus by more than three to one. Almost all of my potential male friends played Dungeons & Dragons.
This was even more depressing than it sounds. So my roommate and I kept the bong lit and the Firesign Theatre records playing, and we prayed for graduation or death. This was the entire extent of my drug use in school. Once I got out and around some actual women, my interest in marijuana ended.
Fast-forward ten years. By 1994, I was living in a beach house in Santa Monica with a beautiful, sweet, funny woman named Mindy. We intended to marry someday, and we filled the interim by inventing new sexual practices and naming them after states where we thought they would be illegal.
This was great for public flirting. We would stand in line at a drugstore checkout, and I would lean over and whisper the word Mississippi, and we would both be titillated for an hour until we got home and actually committed that crime. This was true love.
At least until Christmas Eve, when Mindy told me (and I swear this is true) that she had been sleeping with another guy, didn’t know why, and she was therefore going to sort things out by moving to Ecuador.
I started smoking dope again.
Fast-forward six more months. In summer 1995, I was killing time by riding trains around Europe. I had stopped smoking weed again. Instead, I spent most of my free time hanging around historic churches and cathedrals. Not because I’m religious—but because they’re remarkably good places to pick up women, who are often so awestruck and reverent that they don’t realize you have a plan.
I once spent a whole week cruising the Vatican, trying to score chicks from every member of the Warsaw Pact. None of this made me forget the thing Mindy could do with her teeth that we called “Louisiana.”
One day, I was in Paris, paying my respects to Jim Morrison and wondering if it would be nice to be buried in Père Lachaise. My travel agent, who had once been our travel agent, told me that Mindy was visiting Amsterdam. The next day, so was I.
Mindy and I hooked up in a place called the Boatel, a stationary love boat docked near the Centraal train station. Our window was at water level, and the seagulls ate bread from our hands.
Except for the fact that we had nothing to say to each other, it was romantic as hell. So, then. What to do? See the sights, we decided. Specifically, there were three places Mindy wanted to visit: a flower market where she could buy some souvenir tulips; the Anne Frank House; and the Oude Kerk, a big, old church Mindy was interested in.
This pleased me greatly. If my lucky streak in cathedrals held, we’d reach “Alabama” by nightfall. To our surprise, however, the first sight we saw was just as carnal—the Red Light District, where in addition to Surinamese women and bestiality magazines, cafés and bistros openly sell marijuana. Ever the eager travelers, we decided to sample the local cuisine. Ducking into a smoky little brown place, we found a menu of dope like a wine list. And since neither of us spoke Dutch, we ordered the only item listed in English: “Space Cake,” also known as hash brownies.
We ate our first pieces in silence. Elapsed time: thirty minutes. I had completely forgotten that hash brownies take an hour to kick in. Since we didn’t feel particularly stoned, we decided the stuff probably wasn’t very potent. After all, how could it be? They sell it to tourists, for Pete’s sake. If it was pungent, some idiots might accidentally eat too much, right?
Determined to get our money’s worth, we ordered a second piece. Soon we were talking like we hadn’t in years, as if we were a couple again. I mentioned “the Carolinas,” and Mindy kissed me in a way that let me know she remembered that particular crime.
I had completely forgotten that when hash brownies kick in, they do so really hard. We started feeling pretty happy after our second piece. Elapsed time: one hour. And so we decided, what the hell, let’s have a third. I don’t recall much after that.
I remember noticing that when you’re stoned, Dutch sounds a lot like English spoken by people from Wisconsin. And after that, there’s a blank spot in my memory, a gap where the time is simply missing. And then I remember . . . suddenly noticing . . . that I was wiping my ass.
I wasn’t sure how long I had been wiping my ass. But definitely I was wiping my ass. Probably for a long time. I noticed sitar music. Still I was wiping my ass. Evidently this was some sort of toilet place. How long I had been there, I did not know. I was relieved to learn I was wiping my ass in a toilet and not somewhere else. The sitar didn’t seem to be in the toilet with me. My ass seemed pretty sore. Possibly from all the wiping. The sitar music was nice, though.
And then: Where’s Mindy?!
Panic-stricken and clinging to one frayed thread of awareness, I searched frantically for my pants. After several minutes, I found they had been conveniently placed around my ankles. I ventured out of the toilet, unsure of what I might find. I was in a restaurant. It was an Indian restaurant. With really nice sitar music. I wasn’t sure where the music was coming from. I didn’t see a sitar anywhere. I also wasn’t sure what I was looking for. The sitar music couldn’t be coming from the toilet. That much was for sure. Mindy didn’t even like Indian food. Surprising, then, that we would be in an Indian restaurant. Perhaps Mindy would know what I was looking . . . for . . . Mindy?!
Panic-stricken again, and still struggling for that one frayed thread of awareness, I desperately searched the room for Mindy. After an exhausting struggle, I discovered her approximately two and a half feet to my left, giggling facedown in a pile of garlic naan. There was a tulip in her hair. Two down, I thought. And as a bonus, I was no longer wiping my ass.
There’s another blank spot here. And then I remember: Mindy and I were suddenly sitting under a tree next to a canal with our arms around each other. We were scared. The high was getting more and more intense. Apparently we had decided to sit down and ride it out for as long as it lasted. We quietly rocked back and forth and murmured, “It’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay . . . ”
I looked up and realized we were sitting almost directly in front of the Anne Frank House. Tourists were watching us and pointing. Three for three, I thought. Mindy and I held each other tightly and looked into each other’s eyes, knowing that, at least for a while, we needed each other desperately. It wasn’t love, but it was certainly real.
A church bell struck noon. “It’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay . . .” Before long, it was getting dark. My ass was way beyond numb from sitting on the pavement. The high was still peaking. We were still almost directly in front of the Anne Frank House.
I was convinced that by now everyone in Amsterdam knew we were stoned. Surely every tourist in Europe had heard about the fucked-up couple rocking and moaning in front of the Anne Frank House. Fodor’s was rewriting their guidebook for Holland. Animals stared at us in dismay.
“It’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay . . . ”
There’s another blank spot here, a long one. And then I remember: I awoke . . . as our train (huh?) rolled into a station. It was morning. We were in Berlin. Vividly I recall thinking, Whoa!
I took inventory. Finally, I was sober, at least as far as I could tell. Mindy was sound asleep in the next bunk. All of our things were packed and nearby. And we were in a sleeping compartment on a train. Entering Berlin.
Mindy didn’t know why we were there either. The prevailing theory is that we felt so guilty in our delirium for having disgraced the Anne Frank House that we sought the Nazi stronghold as penance. That’s pure conjecture. If you can make up a better explanation, I’m all ears.
So Mindy and I wandered around Checkpoint Charlie (which was becoming a shopping mall) and the Brandenburg Gate (which is now an open-air market) and the weird giant onion-dome radio tower the Communists built (which now has a T.G.I. Friday’s across the street).
