Pot Stories for the Soul, page 20
Since they were going to search the van, they would, of course, find it necessary to search our persons. While waiting for a female officer to arrive (forty-five minutes later), these protectors of our borders methodically went through every corner of the van. They were itching to get us on something. They even went so far as to count our traveler’s checks because, as was explained to us later, it is illegal to carry more then $5,000 across the Canadian border. Imagine their disappointment when they found only $3,800.
As for the strip search, that has to be pretty high up there on the humiliation scale. The female officer was curt but judgmental. “You must have had something for them to call on me to search you.”
Through this entire scene, my partner and I never spoke to one another, but merely nodded knowingly. Surprisingly, since they found nothing in the van, they unceremoniously handed us the keys without a word of acknowledgment or apology and went back to their doughnuts.
The lesson here is simple. We were about to embark on a journey through foreign countries, yet we endured an experience within our own borders that evoked visions of Midnight Express. The story itself is really the middle of a longer story that has a beginning story and end story to it.
The beginning of the story involved being turned away from the Canadian border by the authorities because my partner and I answered their questionnaire with complete honesty, and he said that he had been arrested as a teenager for marijuana possession. They refused our entry and turned us back to the United States, which initially explains the actions of the U.S. Border Patrol. We suspect they received a phone call.
The end of this story involves the same VW van and two hits of LSD. All I can say about this is, if you want to put something somewhere no one will find it, try the inside of a Tampax box. I’m willing to bet that there’s no male officer out there who’d put his hand inside such a box, even though the contents are clearly wrapped and unused.
Pleasant Surprise!
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, hitchhiking was part of the culture for hippies. I learned to hitchhike when I visited my sister in San Francisco for two weeks. Hitching was more than a means of transportation; it was an expression of communalism—those who had transportation would share with those who didn’t.
I was living in Chicago, and I soon made it a practice to hitch a ride down Halsted Street to get to school rather than taking the bus.
It was sometime around 1971 when my friend Steve and I decided to hitch to Toronto to visit a friend who was dodging the draft. Someone with more hitching experience than us had advised us not to accept a ride to Gary, Indiana. He said you could get a ride very easily with someone going to work at the steel mill there, but it would be hard to get another ride from that point. It was far better to turn down ten rides to Gary and wait for a car that was traveling further.
We started out early in the morning, and within five minutes a car stopped and the driver offered us a ride to Gary. We shrugged out shoulders and got in. Boy, that was easy! By late afternoon, we were still in Gary. We had progressed from the west side of Gary to the east side. But we were still a whole lot closer to Chicago than we were to Toronto. The sun was beating down on us. We were tired and sweaty and talking about giving up and hitching a ride back home to Chicago. Hitchhiking was supposed to be fun, but this was discouraging.
Finally, a van full of hippies stopped to pick us up. They said they were going as far as London, Ontario. It was a stroke of luck. Better yet, they had a bag full of dope. After a couple of joints, all of the day’s earlier frustrations were forgotten. The music was good, we were having a good conversation with some good people, and everything was mellow.
We got to Detroit and we were about to cross over into Canada when we realized our dilemma. We couldn’t cross the border with a bag of dope. The Customs agents might search the vehicle and arrest us. But it would be an awful shame to waste a bag of good weed. What should we do?
Someone got the idea that we should drive around and look for a hippie to give it to, so it wouldn’t be wasted (better that the hippie should be wasted than the dope). We drove around for ten minutes, knowing nothing about the neighborhood. We saw Tiger Stadium, we saw some policemen, but we didn’t see any hippies. Okay, let’s go into a restaurant, get a snack, and maybe we’ll find a hippie in there. There were a couple of tables occupied by cops, but no hippies.
We got back in the van. We were determined to give this weed away to someone who would appreciate it before we crossed the border. We drove around some more, but we had no luck. Finally, we stopped beside a parked car with an open window, dropped the bag of dope onto the seat, and took our chances. We laughed at the possibility that some totally straight person would discover it. We hoped some happy freak would discover it and that we would make his day.
As it turned out, the Customs agent didn’t search the van. He just asked the driver a few questions and waved us on through. We could have kept the bag in the van and smoked a few more joints. But then I wouldn’t be able to contribute this story to Paul Krassner’s book. Of course, we have no idea how the story ended. I’ve often wondered about it in the ensuing years. I can hope for the best, but I can also think of some rather unpleasant scenarios:1. A mother and her teenage son return to the car, and she screams, “Junior! What in the world are you doing with this?”
2. A couple on their first date return to the car, and she says, “Philip, you said you didn’t do drugs.”
3. A paranoid freak discovers it. He wants to smoke it, but he thinks it has been planted by the cops.
4. An undercover cop returns to his car and plants the bag of weed at an apartment he wants to bust.
I guess we’ll never know. We were just trying to give someone a pleasant surprise. I hope we did.
Spanish Lie
BOB WIEDER
In 1970, I was returning to Spain from Morocco. Spain was notorious then for its draconian attitude toward drugs. I had everything I owned stuffed in a massive duffel bag. “Everything” included some kif that was really too valuable and salubrious to leave behind and a bunch of long wooden pipe stems and clay and sandstone pipe bowls, which to this day I find the optimal vehicles for pot-smoking.
The people I was traveling with had all left their illicit goods behind, but I put my remaining kif at the very bottom of my duffel bag and all the pipe stuff right on the top. The general opinion was that I would wind up learning a lot of Spanish over the next ten to fifteen years.
At Spanish Customs (off the ferry from Tangiers), an inspector opened my bags, saw the pipes, and did a whopping double take.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Those are pipes,” I said.
“For what?” he asked.
“For smoking.”
“For smoking what?” he inquired knowingly.
“For smoking marijuana back in the USA,” I said.
He gave me his aha! look. “You have the marijuana in the bag, too, right?”
I gave him my don’t-be-ridiculous look. “Are you kidding? I’d go to jail! Everybody knows that Spanish Customs is the toughest in the world. I want the pipes to use back home, but I knew I’d never be able to sneak them past you. That’s why I put them right on top to just get it out of the way. But, come on, I’d be nuts to put hash pipes where a Spanish Customs officer could see them if I was carrying drugs. Nobody fools you guys!”
He gave me an eminently pleased smile and waved me in.
Divine Intervention
CELINA HERRERO
I was on the second leg of a three-day trans-Mexico odyssey—a forty-eight-hour bus ride from Tijuana to Mexico City. Two friends had driven me across the border and, as carrying drugs into Mexico from the States is rarely an issue, I had a quarter ounce of fragrant, potent skunk bud in a clear plastic sandwich bag, ever-so-carelessly tossed into an upper side pocket of my camping backpack, together with several pairs of rolled-up socks. Not cleverly tucked inside a pair of socks, mind you, nothing that prudent, rather just sitting where it would be immediately visible to anyone who happened to unzip that particular pocket.
I was sleeping soundly, as we veteran travelers tend to do on long, tedious bus journeys, snoring away as our “luxury coach” sped through the star-infested nightscape of the endless desert, a nothingness broken only by scattered stumpy cacti and a few frolicking nocturnal jackrabbits. Suddenly, heart-stoppingly, the bus came to an abrupt halt outside an ominously official-looking building in the middle of nowhere, a hideous squat concrete hut crouching malevolently in the night.
Several uniformed officers invaded the bus and immediately began pulling luggage off the overhead racks, shouting in Spanish: “Customs! Everybody off the bus! Let’s go, baggage, suitcases, everything, let’s go, keep it moving.” They swaggered up and down the aisle—half a dozen of them, at least—banging suitcases about and roughly shaking people awake in that endearing, people-person manner in which law-enforcement officers the world over seem to have been specially trained.
One minute I’d been dreaming of my upcoming month in a hammock under a palm tree in a Caribbean utopia, the next I was facing cops, all kinds of unpleasantness (or am I being redundant?), and, barring divine intervention, some serious time in jail. Mexican jail.
They were everywhere all at once, leaving no window of opportunity in which to surreptitiously dump the bag of weed onto the floor of the bus or take any other ass-saving measures whatsoever. Under the watchful eye of a veritable army of Customs officers, every last passenger, blinking and groggy, dragging along pieces of baggage, was prodded and shoved into the Customs dungeon.
The place was enormous, with some twenty different stations, each consisting of a long concrete table on which to have a proper snoop through our belongings, and staffed by a series of weary-eyed, heavy-set older women. As we waited in a single line for the next available life-wrecker, I, with a knot in my gut the size of Jalisco, sent out a fervent prayer to the universe: “Please, God, the young guy. Please, God, the young guy.” I chanted this silently over and over, a heartfelt, desperate, I-don’t-want-to-go-to-jail-in-Mexico mantra.
Happily, my prayers were answered. To my great relief, when my turn came, I was spared the fate of dealing with the grouchy grandmas and was sent instead to the lone young guy for my baggage check. I relaxed slightly at this point, taking it as a sign that, for the moment anyway, God, or someone with considerable cosmic pull, was on my side. If only my luck would hold.
The young man, predictably enough, was friendly and curious and made casual flirty small talk with me as he (gulp!) began to very thoroughly inspect the contents of my bag. He opened every lipstick, leafed through every magazine, took every cassette out of its box, felt up the padded collar of my winter jacket, and poked a finger into the coin pocket of my jeans (destroying any hope I had that they might be looking for guns).
By this point, I was kicking myself for actually requesting this earnest, out-to-prove-something, takes-his-job-way-too-seriously young go-getter. Maybe I would have been better off after all with one of the bad-humored old ladies, who probably just wanted to get it over with and go back to her siesta. Maybe he was prolonging the search in order to continue flirting with me a little longer. In any case, I was stuck with him, and I played the eyelash-batting, flattering gringo senorita role for all it was worth.
He was full of questions. “Your Spanish is so good, senorita. Where did you learn to speak it so well?” “How long will you be staying in Mexico?” “What is your final destination?” I chatted his ear off, prattling nervously away about my previous trips to the Yucatan, how much I loved the southern part of the country, how open and friendly I found the Mexican people.
The young cop was conducting a painfully thorough counter clockwise tour of every nook, cranny, and crevice of my huge, overstuffed rucksack, and behind my bright-eyed, beaming flirtatiousness, I was hopeless. No one searching that thoroughly could possibly miss a big, stinky clump of sticky, hairy buds in a clear plastic bag.
After all, no attempt had been made to camouflage or hide it in any way; it just nestled in among the rolled-up socks in plain view inside what would be the last pocket to be searched, silently screaming, “Bust me!” In my imagination, I had already fast-forwarded to my years in prison. Would it be as bad as I thought? How much time would they give me? Would I finally get that novel written?
Cop-boy had by this time gotten to the toiletries and cosmetics pouch, which would be the second-to-last pocket to be inspected on his counterclockwise search of my belongings. Last (but by no means least) would be, of course, the “socks and controlled substances” compartment. He began rummaging through my most personal items, pulling out shampoo, vitamins, a toothbrush—and condoms. Lots of them.
Before embarking on this journey, I had found myself enduring a flurry of last-minute get-togethers with friends and family members. Though I was only planning to be gone for a month, girlfriends, my sister, and my mother all insisted, “Let’s meet for a drink before you leave. I have a little going-away present for you.”
By some hilarious “coincidence,” the going-away gift was in each case the same: condoms. Boxes of condoms, loose condoms, ribbed, extra-sheer, flavored condoms (chocolate, grape, jalapeño, molé), industrial strength condoms, lubricated condoms, condoms in a variety of colors (red, blue, green, purple) and a variety of sizes (small, medium, and ay caramba).
I had thought it so funny that so many different people had seen fit to give me condoms for my south-of-the border adventure that at the last minute I tossed every last one of them into a gallon-size plastic freezer bag and brought them along. There must have been eighty or ninety condoms altogether.
I was sweating by this point, as the sole remaining pocket to be searched contained my one-way ticket to Sonora State Prison. I trembled and breathed deeply and tried to savor my last few seconds of sweet freedom. I had forgotten about the condoms—at least, forgotten how many there were, how varied and colorful and downright impressive they looked in the huge clear bag. The young officer’s eyes grew wide and he stammered slightly as, incredulous, he repeated one of his earlier questions to me.
“Uh, how long did you say you were planning to stay in Mexico again?”
“About three weeks,” I replied, smiling sweetly.
He blanched visibly. Holding the bag gingerly between thumb and forefinger as if afraid that mere contact with that many condoms might somehow infect him with some life-threatening disease, he carefully replaced the bag and toiletries case in the pocket, zipped it closed, and pushed the backpack over to me with a grin and a leer.
“Have a wonderful time in our country, senorita.”
Varieties of Paranoia
Lapse in Judgment
HUNTER S. THOM PSON
I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruit—and millions of Americans agree with me.
I’ve always been quite moderate with my use of marijuana except for eating it, which has caused a lot of trouble—overindulging on brownies, eating hash. Those are some of the worst physical reactions I’ve ever had. Being in someone else’s car in some strange neighborhood. Not being able to get a cigarette out of your pocket, horrible cold sweats, unable to talk, thinking you’re yelling for help and just whispering—praying for death, really.
I was in Zaire during the Ali-Foreman fight and everyone was smoking this black, grainy East African weed. It was utterly paralyzing, terrifying weed, not necessarily hallucinogenic. It was more like running into a closed door. You think it’s open, you start walking through, and bash your head into an oaken slab. It could put a room full of people into a coma one by one. I smoked it all the time—huge spliffs—went a little psychotic, overtones of everything.
I became convinced I should eat all my malaria pills, which were supposed to be eaten once a week on Tuesday. Very powerful orange things. The doctor assured me he didn’t mean Wednesday or Monday, that it was important to follow the prescribed dosage.
I had this conversation with a guy named Big Black, a conga drummer. We got to know each other pretty well. Big Black knew a lot more about malaria pills than I did. He had white ones that he took once a day. So, I said, what the hell, and began eating my pills just like Big Black. I didn’t have that many, but I had enough to give myself malaria—a real psychotic episode. I went absolutely crazy. I lost about three or four days wandering around Zaire.
Hide and Seek
GERRI WILLINGER
I walked in the door and crashed on the couch after a three-hour night class at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. I always kept my stash on the coffee table. I was lying on the couch and heard a knock on the door. Mom opened it. I heard, “FBI, ma’am, can we use your phone?” I could hear my mom laughing as she walked past me. As though it was a natural thing to do, she tossed a blanket over me (my head and torso mostly) as she led them to the phone. She just said, “She had a hard day at school.”
I had a wolfhound that was not pleased with my lying stiff as a board with only two legs showing. She had the personality of Catherine the Great (or any other empress) and decided to jump on me with her five-foot-tall body and act as though I was a trampoline. That was her way of letting me know she was displeased. She did this the entire time the FBI agents were there. There I was, being used as a trampoline by an imperial dog while the FBI was calling in to headquarters because they had lost the address of the house they were supposed to bust, and they did not want any bad publicity.
