Pot Stories for the Soul, page 19
We tried all day to feel connected again, but Berlin is no damn place for young lovers. The romance was over. She got on a train for London that night. I never saw her again.
Thanks to Mindy, I’ll never think of Ecuador or spend another Christmas Eve without feeling sad, and I’ll never think of the states of the deep South without wistfully recalling a satisfied soreness in various obscure muscle groups.
I still have no idea what was in the Space Cake, and I know that the same neural overload that gave Mindy and me one last day of closeness also caused me to wipe my ass for perhaps an entire hour. But somehow it makes me happy to think of the whole ordeal this way: If Bogart and Bergman can always have Paris, then Mindy and I will always have Amsterdam.
Borderline Paranoia
CAT SIMRIL ISHIKAWA
I was driving through Europe with my friend Jack in the summer of an earlier year. Jack was from a country that set new standards in straightness, and I was just in from the land that Paul McCartney thought had legal weed. Fly, jailbird, fly. Neither of us had been stoned in ages. Then we got to the Netherlands. Rivers of hash. We ended up using it as a mosquito tranquilizer and eventually had to leave.
Jack wanted to see Belgium. The guidebook said it was what you’d expect from a country with a national symbol of a boy pissing, but Jack insisted. He’d heard (quite rightfully) that it had the best beer in the world. But, of course, it was not the smoke-utopia Netherlands, and we grew more and more worried as we neared the unknown land.
We sure tried to get rid of all our hash back in Amsterdam, but we still had a couple of orca-size joints under the seat. Jack was sure the border guards would find them. To smoke them would make us legally blind. What to do? I suspected Jack’s worst nightmares weren’t likely, but paranoia has a contagious quality, and it’s better to be safe, insisted our jail-loathing consciences.
We spied a waste orb by the side of the road. Adieu, dear doobies, we said, and hurled them into the orb. Thanks for the Dutch treatment. Back in the car. We drove another few kilometers through fields of small green things, and then we came to a store offering to change our money.
Change it into what, we wondered, and went inside. And discovered that we were already ten kilometers inside Belgium. There is no border. Between anything, after a while.
My Cannabis Cup Runneth Over
PAUL KRASSNER
When Steve Hager, creative director of High Times, invited me to emcee the awards night at the Tenth Annual Cannabis Cup, I had to decline, regretfully, because I was committed to be in Detroit that week to cover the trial of Peter McWilliams, who had AIDS and cancer. He had been there for a family reunion and got arrested at the airport for possession of seven joints. Judge Tina Green said she would allow a medical-marijuana defense, but one week later, she changed her mind.
That decision would be appealed, of course, and the trial was postponed, so I could fly to Amsterdam after all.
The Quentin Hotel, a friendly, funky place, was now filled entirely with Cannabis Cup attendees. In the lobby, folks were sitting around, drinking hot chocolate, talking, laughing, and openly rolling, smoking, and passing around huge doobies. I savored the culture shock.
In my tiny room, just around the corner from the lobby, there was a view of the canal and, right outside my window, a plain brick wall where someone had spray-painted the word SHIT in letters two feet high. Was this an omen or what?
Hager greeted me with a bud the size of a cucumber. Since all strains of marijuana at the Cannabis Cup have their own brand names—Purple Sage, White Shark, Stonehenge—I asked, “What’s this one called?” He replied, “Dr. Kevorkian.” I figured it would be killer weed. Actually, it cured my jet lag immediately. Yes, Dr. Kevorkian brought me back to life. It wasn’t even entered in the competition, but it was already a winner.
In the lobby, a pot purist was pointing out that judges should avoid using a lighter when trying out a new brand because the butane would taint the test. Rather, they should use a long wooden match, but wait until the sulfur was burned before lighting a joint. What about the glue on the rolling papers, I wondered. Someone offered me a cannabis cough drop. What a perfect concept. I sucked on it without missing a toke. And it worked; I didn’t cough.
Over a period of five days, the judges tried out various kinds of pot grown by Amsterdam’s top marijuana seed companies. They also traipsed around to a score of coffee shops whose own brand names were in a separate competition. And, unlike at a wine-tasting event, these judges were not spitting out each new sample.
At 4:20 each afternoon, I went to the Council at Hemp Hall. There are different beliefs about the origin of 4/20 as a countercultural iconic symbol. One theory is that 4/20 is the police code for a pot bust. Another is that there are 4/20 substances in marijuana. I thought that maybe it came from the old nursery rhyme about “four and twenty blackbirds.”
Actually, in 1971, a group of students—who named themselves “the Waldos” because they hung out at a certain wall outside their high school—chose 4:20 in the afternoon as the time they would meet at the Louis Pasteur statue to go hunting for an abandoned cannabis crop. The code word for this ritual was “4:20 Louis,” which shrank to just plain “4:20” and it became a popular synonym for pot-smoking time. Personally, though, I always light up promptly at 2:15, just to honor California’s Proposition 215.
I hadn’t expected that the ritual would also be celebrated in the lobby of the Quentin at 4:20 every morning. Drumming, singing, chanting, dancing, raucous conversation, loud giggles, and wild guffaws woke me up in the middle of the night. Naturally, I interpreted that as a sign to select something from my stash and seized the opportunity to roll still another joint on The New Testament—printed in English and Hebrew, which surprised me. I thought that the Jewish people are still waiting for a messiah to appear for the first time. Jesus Christ, I was wrong again.
Ah, my ever-increasing stash. The seed companies and coffeehouses were giving out little baggies of their product and rolled joints to all the judges, so it was a case of equal-opportunity bribery—oops, I mean free samples. But, no matter how tempting, I was afraid to bring any of it back to the States. Simply not worth the risk. At a High Times dinner, I sat next to Rita Marley and asked if she would be able to bring back any marijuana to Kingston.
“No,” she responded with a queenly air, adding, “isn’t it a pity?”
Joints were being passed around the table, but when I gestured to pass her one, she shook her head no. She was busy smoking a bomber of her own, which she didn’t pass. I learned later that this is the practice in Jamaica. Apparently, there is no Rastafarian word for bogart.
My old Prankster friend Mountain Girl told me she was entertaining the notion of buying a shovel and burying her gigantic stash. Next she thought of befriending a Dutch citizen and keeping it in his home. Or maybe she could obtain a safe-deposit box at the local bank—except that she’d have to open an account there first, and there wouldn’t be time for a check to clear. She even considered renting a small apartment in Amsterdam and living there for a couple of months until she had literally smoked herself out.
In my capacity as a stand-up satirist, I refrain from doing the comedy club circuit, which David Letterman calls “babysitting for drunks.” Instead, I perform at alternative venues—from a Neo-Pagan Festival to a Swingers Convention—but I have never been at an event as joyful as the Cannabis Cup. I remain horror-struck by the severe contrast between the drug laws of my own country and the rational approach I found in Amsterdam.
Before leaving, I climbed out the window of my hotel room and spray-painted on the brick wall so that the graffito would now read GOOD SHIT. At the airport back in America, I experienced a moment of paranoia when I thought the narco-dog was about to sniff out The New Testament that I had borrowed from the hotel, but he passed by my luggage. Whew! The tension was almost worth the relief.
Now I was ready to cover Peter McWilliams’ trial. The prosecutor in Detroit had legally changed his name to Luke Skywalker in 1977, when he was in his twenties and got inspired by Star Wars. Luke Skywalker battles medical marijuana. In court he would have perceived McWilliams as Darth Vader. If this is justice, may the farce be with you.
Customs
Car Sale
NANCY CAIN
During the mid-’70s, I’m working with a company called Media Bus. We are funded through the New York State Council on the Arts and travel the state, teaching people how to make their own television shows and taking them over to the local cable company to gain access.
One time, Media Bus is hired to stir things up a bit at the public access channel in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I make the trip with David, Carol, and Skip. Carol is a little distracted because this is the first time she has left her daughter Sarah since she was born two years ago.
We’re going to take the Canadian route instead of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We’ll drive up New York State and across Ontario to Detroit. Then we can stay with my mom and dad, and drive out to Ann Arbor in the morning. Relaxed, no-traffic country roads all the way. Idyllic day, at least for me, just riding along incommunicado, as if free.
Canada has a different vibe. A slower beat. After a while I relax and stop thinking that we’re going to get pulled over by the cops at any moment—like I do when we’re on the New York Thruway, for example. A sunny, happy day away. That is, until U.S. Customs. That’s the price you pay for taking the scenic route. You have to go through U.S. Customs.
Always a complex and dangerous game.
Sometimes it’s not paranoia. Sometimes it’s intuition. Sometimes you just know when your number is up. That’s the way I feel when I see that the Customs inspector moving toward me is a woman. She escorts me alone through a door into a small anteroom.
The officers have already ripped our car apart and taken our video reels out of the boxes and held the tape up to the light. They have already taken out the back seat, and they say, “Found a seed.” Jesus. A seed. Maybe they did. Shit.
Oh, they would have stopped us anyway because we fit a profile. Skip with his thick blond hair flowing way down his back, and David with his black beard out to there—Carol and I are not exactly in business suits either—and, well, I guess we do seem like a suspicious bunch.
The Customs inspector is closing the door behind her. She stares at me. Dry mouth. Heart palpitations. Mine, not hers. The little leather pouch of pot is burning a hole in my shirt pocket. I am a guilty murderer.
“You’d better give it to me because if I find it, it’s gonna be way worse.”
I hear the squish-squish of my blood pumping past my eardrums. Poomb! Poomb! My heart. I examine my options and hand over the pot. And I keep my mouth shut. Now she wants me to strip and squat to make sure I don’t have anything else stashed up inside me. Gee, this is happening to me and I’m not dying. Hey, it’s just a little dignity. Take it.
Turns out they searched Skip and David and Carol, too, but they were clean. Now the four of us are sitting on a hard bench, waiting for the Customs inspectors to come up with the next scenario. Here they come. The deal is that we are guilty of bringing a controlled substance across an international border in a vehicle, and the U.S. government consequently is going to take ownership of our vehicle.
“Wait a minute,” Skip says incredulously. “You mean that the government now owns our car?”
Yes, it’s true. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can buy it back from them for only $100. Wow! Really? Because this is a brand-new 1973 Dodge Dart four-door. Same color green as the phone company’s cars. A hundred dollars is a bargain. We buy it (leaving us with maybe $30 between us) and are kicked unceremoniously out onto Jefferson Avenue, Detroit, Michigan, USA.
It’s nighttime. We arrive at my mom and dad’s late, and we’re all excited about our border experience, which we relate breathlessly, leaving out the part where they find my pot.
Producing our live video-chaos television show in Ann Arbor is as bizarre and controversial as ever, but nothing tops U.S. Customs for a thrill.
[Excerpted from the memoir Video Days.]
Lobsters
DAN DENOV
It was sometime in the winter of 1971–72, and we were in the homestretch of a jaunt to New York and Boston, a mere couple of hours away from Lansing, Michigan. To save time we cut across Canada from Niagara Falls toward Windsor and Detroit. Somewhere in that stretch, we pulled off the highway to get a cup of coffee, take a leak, and stretch.
While searching in this small town for the way back to the highway, we picked up a cop who threw the lights on and pulled us over. He said it looked like we were lost—white VW bus, Illinois plates, and three somewhat unkempt guys at nine o’clock that night. We said yes, and he showed us the way out of town. Nice country, that Canada. Anyway, our stash of an ounce or so wasn’t even close to an issue at this point. Onward to the border.
In due time, we made it out of Canada at Windsor, over the bridge, and on to Customs in the U.S. It was so easy to get in to and out of Canada we anticipated an easy reentry to the good old USA, but just for safekeeping, we stashed the pot down one of our pants. It was now around two in the morning.
A youngish guy in a uniform came over, asked me details of where, when, and why, and then proceeded to look at the two pretending to be asleep in the back with that haze of road buzz about them. He asked us to step out and into the Customs house. We, at that point, were starting to worry a bit, and that worry quickly expanded when the young guy came in and said he’d “found some seeds” in the car and that everything needed to be searched.
We had all the usual paraphernalia for a road trip—sleeping bags, fast food containers, eight-track wired into the dome light in the back, and a supply of Firesign Theatre, Doors, and Jimi Hendrix tapes—but we had also picked up, at one of our compatriot’s request, some live lobsters in Boston to bring home. Among all our bags and boxes of crap now in the Customs house, the guards proceeded to empty the cooler box, at which point the two lobsters started crawling around on the stainless steel countertop.
The officer must have figured that there were “bigger fish to fry” and corralled the clawed creatures back into their temporary home. Not finding much of anything in all the stuff they hauled out of the bus, they proceeded to strip-search us one at a time in the bathroom. I forget the order in which we went, but I do remember the oldest of the officers said to me, as owner of the vehicle where they had found the stashed stash, “Son, you’re in a lot of trouble.”
It came down to this—I had an hour to come up with $150 or, in their words, they’d tear my bus apart. At first I thought it was a bribe, but I figured out later, after looking at the official receipt I have to this day, that the only federal law concerning marijuana was an importation tax of $100 an ounce! I was busted for trying to smuggle the stuff in without paying the tax.
Of course, this revelation didn’t help in terms of finding the money at 4:30 AM. A good college buddy of mine was living in Detroit at his folks’ house, so I gave him a call. His mother answered the phone and, although she mainly spoke Ukrainian, she understood what I was saying and put Head on the line. I quickly reeled off the scenario and he said he’d be right down.
Now this guy is about six feet five inches and around 250 pounds and at the time was selling phone systems for AT&T in the Detroit area. When he walked into the Customs house clean-shaven and in his three-piece suit, put his attaché case on the counter and clicked it open, the officers weren’t quite sure what was happening.
When he said, with a glance toward us, “What kind of trouble my boys in?” their jaws seemed to come down a little slack. I told the Head to give them $150, which he peeled off of a small wad of bills. They wrote a receipt, and we were out the door to a doughnut shop (sans the dope). Those guards must have figured they had run into some connected freaks when we got that kind of response with one call at four thirty in the morning.
Got One!
KATHLEEN EDWARDS
As two carefree people taking a casual tour of the northern United States, we opted for a detour into Canada. Never been there. Wanted to see what it was like. We thought it might be a good rehearsal for our impending yearlong trip through Europe. The Border Patrol on the U.S. side of the Canadian border at Sault Ste. Marie took one look at the 1968 Volkswagen van with bicycles on top, California plates, and a long-haired, bearded driver, and their eyes lit up. You could see them mentally rubbing their hands together. “Boy, this is gonna be fun.”
“Get out of the van and step inside.” Since we had finished off the last of the half-pint of whiskey the previous evening and we were sure the van was “clean,” we faced this challenge casually. We were escorted into a dreary room with a handful of potbellied, ruddy-faced career cops. “Wait right here.” We watched as a pair of these cops ambled toward the van.
A few minutes passed, then the “searchers” returned. In their stubby hands, they held what appeared to be a short, fat roach. We looked at each other’s eyes and the look that silently passed between us said, “Where did that come from?” Although we are admittedly partakers of the herb, this roach didn’t resemble anything we’d ever seen.
They then explained that this roach was to be dropped into a solution and, if it turned purple, that would prove it was cannabis. They stood around like Einstein-wannabes and indeed the solution did change to a purple haze. One cop rushed to a telephone, pushed a couple of buttons, and proudly shouted, “Got one!” We surmised that they kept a supply of these roaches around as an excuse to search any “suspicious persons.”
