Pot Stories for the Soul, page 23
Before we finished inhaling, there was a noise in the woods behind us, and who should appear but two conservation officers. They promptly confiscated our small supply of medicinal herbs and arrested us for possession of marijuana. Bummer. While they were conducting the honors, one said, “So, just talking about us, huh?” Like Big Brother, they had been lurking nearby in the woods, listening to us the entire time. Serious bummer.
Who knows what they were doing there: looking for people fishing without a license, couples “doing it,” or maybe dopers like us. We’d never encountered anyone else in the area during previous visits. It was a long, silent, humiliating walk back to the car with our new friends trailing behind us. Miraculously, they didn’t search the car, which didn’t matter since it was clean anyway. No doubt the story still circulates among drunken CO’s at cop parties even to this day. It’s easy to collar people who aren’t going to fight back.
So, the major losses were all shreds of dignity, three joints, a nice roach clip, a good high and buoyant mood, and the $500 each we paid our lawyer to intervene on our behalf while appearing later before the local judge. He obtained for us one year of good-behavior probation and no conviction. And so we managed to be good and made sufficient reparation for the serious harm we inflicted upon society, that being appreciating the gifts of the Earth by sharing a joint in the woods, off the beaten path, bothering no one. Surprisingly, we have not become deranged dope fiends as depicted in Reefer Madness but remain “productive members of society,” for what it’s worth.
Most Likely to Succeed
Eleven nice plants in the ground. August, the late 1980s, 5:30 AM, Mendocino, California. The COMMET squad (County of Mendocino Marijuana Eradication Team) bursts into my house, waking me up from a sleep that still has four hours to go. They hold me at gunpoint as I pull on my trousers. A couple of their guys yell back to the house from the garden and confirm what the aerial photos had given them reason to suspect: This person is, indeed, a cultivator of marijuana.
As I listen to the swipes of their machetes putting an end to my short career as a dope farmer, I am told to sit at my dining room table and keep my hands where they can see them. They ask me to produce some identification. On the table in front of me is my high school yearbook, which I had been thumbing through the night before in anticipation of attending my twenty-fifth reunion a month later. I slide the book over and open it to the page that shows me in my blue-and-gold FFA (Future Farmers of America) jacket posing with the girl who, like me, had been voted “Most Likely to Succeed.”
“There,” I said, pointing to the picture. “That’s me.”
I think the deputy in charge of the bust cracked a tiny smile as she glanced at the photograph, but it was gone an instant later.
I was sentenced to ninety days. I did forty-seven of them and was released for good behavior and because the jail was overcrowded, largely because of arrests and convictions of other small growers and traffickers.
The part that hurts the most is that today, more than twenty years later, in a community I have served in many positive ways—as an artist, an educator, a worker for worthy causes—people still have a tendency to think of me first as “that guy who did some time for growing back in the’80s.” And, sadly, no matter what I may do or accomplish in the years to come, that simple fact will probably never change.
A Tale of Two Busts
CHIC
In 1962, I was sitting in the lotus position in front of a large mirror trying to disappear, and Robin said, “Chic, someone’s banging on my bedroom wall, and something is coming through the wall.” I got up and went to the far wall of her room where there was a hole six inches in diameter that now had a bulging plastic bag beginning to protrude from it. I heard my neighbor yell, “Hey, man, hold on to this till the cops leave. They’re coming in my front door!”
Meanwhile, Robin said, “Someone’s banging on our door!” I quickly took three dime-bags of my personal herb stash, tossed them out the window to recover later, and answered the door. It was a policeman who said, “Are these apartments connected?” I said, “No,” but he wanted to check anyway. He came into the kitchen and said, “What’s that noise in there?”
“I don’t know.” Then he looked at the hole in the wall, saw the bag protruding, and then a hand came through, trying to cram the rest.
The cop said, “What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Pick it up!”
“Oh, no,” I said. “You pick it up. It’s all yours. I don’t even know what it is.” The cop grabbed the biggest bunch of it and disappeared back out to the storefront. Robin said, “There’s still about two ounces on the floor. What are you going to do?”
“No choice. I have to go out there and watch the bust go down and act surprised.”
I walked down the tile hall, through the large wood-and-glass door, down the corrugated iron steps where I stood by the banister, propped up by a couple of my Puerto Rican brothers who knew what was going down.
After the cops took away fellow members of the Living Theatre cast of The Brig and a couple of my other friends, I went back inside and wondered what to do about the grass remaining on the floor of Robin’s bedroom. Little by little, we smoked it all. The cops never came back.
When I discovered that my three dime-bags were not where I had tossed them, I went out into the street and found one of my hermanos, Kimo, and asked him to put out the word that they were my bags. A half hour later, my friend Victor showed up with two $15 bags and said, “I’m sorry, Chico, I didn’t know it was your stash. We thought it was ditched from the bust.”
I said, “No hay problema, amigo” and gave him one of the bags. I loved my life on the Lower East Side. I loved our barrio. Good people.
Hash Police
In 1967, I was living in Hell’s Kitchen. As an aspiring actor, I was compelled to sell grass, hash, and acid to augment my lifestyle. One day, three plainclothes police came to my door with a search warrant, seized my stash, and took me and a friend to the local precinct lockup for later transport to the Tombs.
After my initial interrogation, they knew I would tell them nothing they could use. They were angry, but they knew I wasn’t a rat. The two older cops—one Irish, one Italian—left the room first, followed by the young Italian and myself. The young cop gestured with his eyes to the table in the room as we were leaving and said, “I didn’t see anything.”
I looked and saw a small piece of my hash just sitting there. I figured what the hell and picked it up and mashed it into the right hinge of my glasses and went to the holding cell to wait. I told my friend what happened and we were puzzled together.
Then the young cop walked by our cell and squeezed a horizontal bar and walked away snickering. He had stuck another piece of hash to the bars. I quickly molded my other hinge.
Later, when they took us to the Tombs, they gave us our own private cell away from the junkies and assholes, and we spent the whole night smoking little pieces of hash on a straight pin. I even managed to smuggle in a pen, and I wrote a song lyric on a piece of hanger cardboard.
Corrupting Minors
MAXIMUM TRAFFIC
I got a job and my first apartment when I was eighteen years old. Only weeks after moving into the place, the local cops came and forced in my door, knocking me on my butt. They tore the place apart, throwing all my clothes on the floor, overturning my bed. They looked in every nook and cranny. When they were done, they asked me if I wanted them to get a search warrant.
They found a full ounce of weed in my pocket and another ounce floating in the toilet. I had some friends visiting, and one of them—my best friend, Ray, who was only sixteen years old—had the presence of mind to try to flush one of the bags. Unfortunately, he emptied the bag into the toilet and flushed, but the damn thing never did flush very efficiently, and the weed was just swirling around and around.
One burly cop burst into the bathroom and yelled, “That’s evidence! You fish that out of there!”
To my astonishment, my buddy Ray yelled right back, “If you want it so bad, you fish it out of there!”
Scared as I was, I had to fight back the laughter. They decided to leave the evidence.
The cops took us all to the city jail where they questioned us late into the night, trying to get us to rat on our friends. While sitting in the front office of the police station, Ray started to freak out. Even though he was only sixteen, he was a stocky kid, heavier than me. He never even touched any kind of dope, but his adrenaline suddenly kicked in.
He got up from the seat and started growling in a very menacing way. He walked over to the counter and started pounding on it. Instantly, the room was filled with cops. Ray was bellowing like a mad bull, and he was throwing the cops around like popcorn! It took a three-cop pileup to subdue and handcuff him. All the while the cops were screaming, “What kind of dope is he on?” No dope at all.
Well, when the dust settled, I was charged with corrupting minors because I was the only one who was eighteen and legally an adult. They later dropped the charges down to possession. I got thrown out of the apartment, lost my job, and got a year’s probation and a $50 fine.
I was outraged. I knew that the revolution was here and that this kind of bullshit oppression was soon to be a thing of the past. Just goes to show you how wrong a person can be.
Serving Time
Escaping Reality
DENNIS SOBIN
Fortunately, when I was asked to make a contribution to this book, I was in an ideal place to get others more experienced than myself to write. Being in prison, I knew a lot of guys who had done lots of dope, both before and during their prison stays.
I wasted little time circulating the letter I had received asking for pot stories. Then a funny thing happened at the prison. The shit hit the fan, quite coincidentally. The factory here that makes license plates for the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles got busted.
It seems that the inmates who worked there had a terrific scam going. They stole plates to ship to criminal contacts on the outside, people who would sell them to practicing libertarians who preferred not to register their cars with a government agency.
The payment these inmates received for their handiwork was pot. Everything was handled through the shipping and receiving department of the prison factory, staffed by clever inmates. Who knows what went wrong?
At any rate, the scheme got exposed about the time I started passing around the letter. As a result, paranoia was running high and a major source for pot stories closed up. Too bad, too. Prison is about the safest place to do dope since it’s practically impossible to infiltrate by undercover cops.
The real trick is to get it in, but as long as people seek to escape reality—as they most surely do here—that will happen. Just the fact of using dope in prison seems pretty funny to me.
Lipton
FREDERIC BERTHOFF
I’m writing from the federal prison here in Miami, five years into a twenty-one-year sentence for hashish and marijuana trafficking. You hear a lot about drugs in jail, but at these new places, security is pretty tight, so there’s not much around. I’d smell pot at night once in a while, but it was rare. So, when offered a joint for free, I should have known it was a gaff.
(A gaff is a hook used to land a big fish. You pull in the fish on the standard hook and line, but when it gets close to the boat, you reach out with a gaff hook and stick it in the side of the fish. The gaff hook is a big gnarly thing attached to the end of a three-foot pole. So, in the metaphorical sense, “setting the gaff” is when the predatory salesman gets the hook into his customer.)
Jose lived upstairs on the corner and was a cheerful little Puerto Rican who spoke English like he was born here. He was in charge of the only set of colored pencils on the block, so I knew him a little bit through that avenue. I used to borrow them sometimes and would give him cigarettes for the favor.
Like most of the wheeler-dealers on the block, Jose mixed it up pretty good and still had a black eye that had been healing for a couple of weeks. I had the colored pencils from the night before and was bringing them back to his room before we went out to recreation in the morning. In his cell, he pulled a wispy-thin jay-bar (joint) out from behind a protruding ear and gave a conspiratorial leer.
They say nothing’s for nothing, especially in the can, but I liked the kid so I said, “All right, gimme the fucking thing” and took it. I brought a cigar and a lighter outside with me, looking forward to a good smoke despite the paranoia that I was way too old to enjoy anymore.
Outside, we had a choice of four cages to spend the hour in. The crowd from the cellblock divvied up mostly along age and color lines, but there was nothing formal or set about it. Each cage was a half court with a hoop, and that day I went over to the farthest one where Jose and the young kids of darker hues played.
So I lit up my El Producto and took a few puffs, taking a quick look around for the screws. Then out came the joint, looking pathetically small compared to the cigar, and I lit it, too. I took a couple of deep drags and let the sweet smoke out my nose like I always did to taste the quality. Old habits are hard to break.
I savored it like a wine steward wearing his little silver cup on a chain. It was sweet and kind of green tasting, but too dry for green pot, and yet it tasted familiar, like something from a long time ago. Smoke curled into the air and rolled indiscreetly downwind. Familiar, familiar.
I had a bamboo opium pipe that my mom bought in the Village back in the ’40s as a souvenir. She’d given it to me when I was a teenybopper, and over the years I had smoked a little of everything in it, though it had never been degraded with “the rock.” Banana peels and oregano, for starters, then later, several varieties of pot and hash, some opium psilocybin mushrooms, Sir Walter Raleigh Kentucky Burley, and one time, tea.
I was listening to a Simon & Garfunkel song about how they “smoke a pint of tea a day,” and I knew they were talking about weed, but on a boring afternoon, I threw a pinch of Earl Grey into the little brass bowl and fired it up. A long, long time ago, but that day in the cage, there it was again. The taste of tea.
Bobby was a young black wise guy who’d just been booted out of Pilgrim County Jail for fighting and sent up to Littleton. He wore his hair in little twists on top of his head with the sides shaved, as was the style. We were talking about the past week when I was playing hoop barefoot, and he was laughing at me with his buddies. “Yo, look at this dude . . . ” So he knew me and when he smelled the joint, he came hopping over, flashing his trademark troublemaker’s grin.
“Hey, man, I smell that shit, man. Where’d you get that?”
It wouldn’t have been cool to say just where, so I didn’t and shrugged it off. “Somebody gave it to me.”
“You pay for it?” He was laughing now just like he did when I was the dude playing hoop barefoot. “Never mind, I knows where you got it, man. Hey, yo, Lipton!” He was calling to my main man, my connection, Jose. “Hey, yo, Lipton!”
Jose came over from the game, knowing he was bagged (in trouble) and already looking at his shoes.
“Hey, yo, man, you still passin’ that shit? You passin’ that shit off on my man here?”
Jose—“Lipton”—looked so bad that I stuck up for him even though the jig was up. I said, “Well, Bobby, he gave it to me for nothing.”
“That motherfucker passin’ that shit out for weed, why you think he got a black eye? Motherfuckers caught him passin’ that tea last week for money and fucked him up.” Jose skulked back to the game and Bobby was hollering after him, “Hey, yo, Lipton! Lipton!”
It reminded me of the Eskimos I’d learned about in school. My anthropology teacher was a hands-on guy, and he went up to Alaska for an extended tour of field research with a primitive tribe up there. When one of the Eskimos got out of line, they punished him by assigning a derogatory name, related to the offense, for a specified period of time. A guy caught stealing someone else’s kayak was called “Stealer of Kayak” for a full year.
So I guess these kids in prison had unknowingly adopted a universal code of behavior modification for their own use. They added a beating, which the Eskimos chose not to include. Call that the barbarian influence. Anyway, Lipton still had the pencils, and the gaff joint was for free, so after a couple of days of ball-breaking, I went back to calling him Jose. Bobby didn’t let me forget so easily. He’d see me coming and say, “Hey yo, man, you smokin’ any good reefer lately? Where’s your boy, Lipton? Ha ha ha!”
Miscellaneous Joints
Good Vibes
STEPHEN GASKIN
One of the neatest hippie communes I ever lived in was a house in Stinson Beach on Highway 1 just north of San Francisco. It was a nice two-story house in a little ravine that went up Mount Tam behind the house. Off the left of the house, there was a grove of pine trees that was host to a swarm of monarch butterflies. On the other side of the house there was a river of nasturtiums whose flowers were the same colors as the butterflies.
It was a lovely hippie house and had three couples and a few single hippies living there. Paul and Pamela were an art student and a yogi. Charlie and Linda were the resident nonvegetarians. Linda had a liver condition and was under doctor’s orders to eat meat. Charlie was much too loyal to let Linda be the only nonveggie. And there was Margaret and me.
I say wannabes because we would have done a better job of having some grass around if we were more serious hippies. We had been out for a while. One of the single men wasn’t doing well at all without grass. He bitched and moaned and whined until we all said, “If you aren’t going to do anything about it, just shut up.”
