Pot Stories for the Soul, page 25
I truly believe, if not for those two hits, I would be a vegetable. It took me fourteen months to fully recover. I never had any stroke effects. At first, I was taking Dilantin to prevent seizures. But I still had a couple. When I was released, I was getting high and taking my Dilantin. After about three months, I stopped taking the pills.
I went about a year with no problems. Then a dry spell hit. No weed to be found. On my fifth dry day, I had a seizure, which was like a truck parking on my head, and my body shook profusely. A friend came through later that evening. And I have been high ever since. And never another seizure. I truly believe this is something that should be looked into. I believe it could possibly benefit other stroke victims.
Speaking of Talking
DAVID MCREYNOLDS
As a recovered (or recovering) alcoholic, I know there is one thing marijuana and vodka have in common—you get earthshaking insights when you get high. The huge difference between vodka and marijuana is that in the morning, when you are sober and dealing with the hangover from vodka, the insights are forgotten, buried under a wave of nausea, while even forty years later I can remember in detail the insights from my first encounter with marijuana.
It was in Ocean Park, California, the little bohemia by the sea where, as a UCLA student, I’d taken up residence in one of the cheap shacks. (Cheap? Hell, it didn’t even have warm water or a shower.) A student friend, Bruce, a poet and a radical who had been expelled from Max Shachtman’s Trotskyist Socialist Youth League for being queer, had asked if I wanted to try marijuana. I said sure.
We went to his shack and lit up. There were no hallucinations. I didn’t feel light or think I was floating. But I did realize that as we talked I had the distinct impression that, just out of my line of sight to my right, was a golden wheat field in Kansas, viewed through an open window, while to my left, again just out of the line of sight, was a doorway leading downstairs to Le Club Tabu in Paris, which I’d visited on my first trip to Europe in 1951.
If I actually turned to the right, there was only the wall of Bruce’s shack, with an art print tacked to it, and if I turned to the left, there was only another wall. Not a hallucination—just a simple certainty that, as I sat in that little room, I had Paris off to one side and Kansas to the other.
And I became aware that . . . I couldn’t talk. I could see the words in my head drift off, assume shapes, become animals, sheep or cats, and wander into my unconscious. A simple sentence—such as “I find it hard to talk”—couldn’t be completed because as soon as I stepped past “I find,” the words had begun to drift away, and the next word, “it,” refused to appear.
I was stranded on whatever word I had last spoken. I couldn’t reach back, and I couldn’t reach ahead. I couldn’t even say, “I have forgotten what I was going to say.” I got as far as “forgotten” and found I didn’t know where that sentence had begun, nor where it was headed.
I became keenly aware of the fact that the mind was a time machine, that for a brief period of a few seconds, the past, present, and future coexisted absolutely. The only way any of us can talk is because we remember precisely the last words we spoke and because we know in advance precisely the words we are about to speak.
That which was objective reality only a moment earlier—my voice, which could have been recorded on tape, and which has, the instant I’ve finished speaking and the sound waves have faded and gone flat, ceased to have any objective reality—the words I have not yet spoken—are objectively real inside my brain.
That objective reality doesn’t extend far in either direction. While I know what I’ve just said, with each passing moment the past becomes more variable and, barring a tape recording, memory becomes uncertain. And while I know what I’m about to say—for the next few instants—beyond that, the future also becomes variable.
My sentences may shift and change because of some event—a comment by Bruce, with whom I’m smoking dope, some outside event such as a dog barking, anything that might disrupt the direction in which my conversation had been headed.
However, for the brief period of a few seconds, what I have just said, what I am in the process of saying, and what I’m about to say, all coexist in the brain. Which makes the mind, not in some figurative sense, but in a real way, a time machine, in which dimensions that we thought could never meet, coexist.
Whether I’ve been able to explain this so that it makes sense to you, I don’t know. But now, more than fifty years later, it is as clear to me as it was that night.
There are, of course, other experiences that I’m sure are common—music may make sense in new ways, making love becomes more pleasurable, more deeply involving. What marijuana is not good for is playing poker, where players can become more fascinated by the shapes and colors of their hand than by whether the five cards add up to anything that can win.
When I drank, I found I could play excellent poker up to the point I passed out. In social gatherings, alcohol is a social drug. A glass of wine and you relax, the group becomes more animated, more interactive. With marijuana, the group becomes less social as people drift into private worlds—in the words of Quentin Crisp, “Marijuana is a distancer.”
Research Project
ROBERT ALTMAN
“Would you like to collaborate, Robert?”
This query was extended by my seatmate, Gene, as we were hurtling through space at seven hindred miles per hour. But let me backtrack a bit.
My great inner awakening began with certain consciousness-expanding drugs and, not atypically, the very first of all these was pot. Although I would never consider myself a “pothead,” marijuana has, on occasion, been a part of my redemption.
Back to the plane.I was young, impetuous, and immortal, and I was seated with my dear friend on a cross-country charter plane heading toward one of those once-in-a-lifetime events, the Alternative Media Conference at Goddard College where we attended meetings at night and swam naked by day. Now, Gene was a medical doctor who found himself publishing medical advice columns and answering listeners’ call-in questions on FM radio, the new town hall for the counterculture. He became the premiere medical “Dear Abby” for the young and the toothless.
Well, we had some time on our hands, as this was a cross-country flight, so Gene began opening his readers’ mail. I snoozed beside him when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Would you like to see an interesting letter?”
“Sure, Gene.”
It went something like this:
“Dear Dr. Gene: The enclosed substance fell into my hands through a neighborhood acquaintance. I have taken the liberty of rolling it into a joint with the hope you’ll perform the necessary scientific research and chemical analysis. Thank you very much . . . ”
Hmmmmm. Dr. Gene must have been reacting to a particularly fey moment. He invited me to share this extrinsic “research” by lighting a match. Well, I do recall embracing the occasion with a naughty gleam and a resounding chortle that only Lucifer could really appreciate.
Fortunately, the research turned out well. The substance was benign but powerful. It stimulated the good doctor with enough brashness and playfulness that he took over the plane’s entire audio system. Since this was a charter flight, the stewardess winked at Dr. Gene as he sent raucous rock ’n’ roll from his portable tape player through the plane’s microphone, all to the delight of our fellow pilgrims.
Wasn’t it Samuel Taylor Coleridge who opined, “He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer”?
Digger
JOHN MCCLEARY
When you were with Digger, you didn’t just smoke dope, you sat upon the tripod at Delphi, partook of the blood and body of Jesus Christ, or ascended the Himalayas to commune within the cave of an ascetic.
I never knew what he was going to call his dope. “Come over and have some tea, boo, leaf, reef, greens, shit, or sacrament.”
His stuff never came from Fresno; it was always Maui Wowie, Kabul Gold, Nam Green, or Mendocino Mellow. Incense was as important as the lighting; music was supreme to the experience.
I never knew what he did to support his lifestyle. Style is perhaps the wrong word. His clothing was a Guatemalan shirt and nondescript faded jeans. Oh, and bare feet.
I never saw Digger outside of his place, although I have a photograph of him on his front doorstep, hiding behind an album cover of Frank Zappa in front of his face with his finger in Zappa’s nose.
Digger lived in a small house with two cats, one that liked the smoke of burning marijuana and one that left the premises whenever it was lit. He lived on the alley behind my house and used to call me in as I walked by.
Entering his place was like stepping into a very well-appointed Dumpster or a library after the apocalypse, take your pick. The Oriental rug had the patina of a pizza place. His record collection overstepped bizarre. He had cannabis buds drying in the window on a wire coat hanger.
One afternoon, I emerged from my darkroom with prints to dry on the fence. “Come on over and smoke some boo,” Digger said from his kitchen window. He slipped back into darkness as he closed the forest green terrycloth curtains. He lit three candles and a stick of musk incense. He put on the Fugs.
It was a water pipe that day. He was using sauterne instead of water. He wore a New Year’s Eve paper hat. I think I almost liked the Fugs that time.
At exactly 1:48 PM, Digger stopped om-ing and said he had to make a private phone call. I stumbled out. Almost back to the darkroom, I remembered my photographic tray left at Digger’s. I slipped through his door and found the tray on the Oriental rug. Digger, hunched over his unbelievably cluttered desk, was saying into the phone, “Sell IBM and buy that new little company named after a fruit or something.”
How Do You Spell Relief?
IRWIN GOOEN
Unlike any number of my acquaintances back in the ’60s, I had never been paranoid or even overly concerned about smoking pot at least somewhat openly. I recall making a point of lighting up a joint when driving past the Center Street New York City Police Headquarters and having smoked (in a regular tobacco pipe) grass on a cross-country flight as well as on the streets of midtown Manhattan.
Eventually, when I moved to upstate New York at the end of the ’60s, I smoked grass in the waiting room of a dental office, and once in the lobby of a movie house where Cheech & Chong’s Up in Smoke was showing, and the ticket-seller scrunched her nose and remarked about the awful smell, something like rope burning. I told her that there were lotsa young people coming to see the film and whispered that some of them were no doubt smoking pot.
Anyway, back to New York City, where one day I was driving down Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn and smoking away in my top-down sports car. Coming the other way was a police cruiser, which stopped parallel to me, and I saw the driving officer wave me over. I felt a flush in my face and thought that this was it, busted at last.
I put on the hand brake, crossed to the cruiser, and was about to say, “Hey, no—I wasn’t smoking dope—just a skinny, roll-yourself cigarette,” when the cop said, “Waddaya want?”
I said, “You waved me over.”
He responded, “No, we’re just stopping here, and I was waving on the traffic behind us.”
“Oh,” I smiled. “Sorry to bother you.”
Good-bye, Reno, Good-bye
My friend Bob and I went up to the Sierras to ski for a few days. He thought it would be fun to go to a show called Hello, Hollywood, Hello at the MGM Grand Hotel in Reno. It was a dinner show, $50 a plate, and when we got there we found that (a) the only thing a vegetarian could eat was canned peas, (b) we were seated with an elderly couple from Canada, and (c) the show had nothing to do with Hollywood and everything to do with breasts (except for one scene, which was aimed at the gay bondage crowd).
The show was horrid, the food worse, and my embarrassment acute, but I was well raised and fifty bucks was a lot of money, so when Bob asked me, in the parking lot on our way back to the car, what I thought of the show, I said I’d never seen anything remotely like it, which was true.
We got into his Karmann Ghia and started back up over the mountains toward Incline Village. I wasn’t saying much, and Bob decided to light up a joint. We smoked it, passing it from fingers to fingers in the light of the dashboard. It was good stuff, and presently we both had a good buzz on.
After a long silence, each with his own thoughts, I said, “God, that was good weed. It feels as if we’re going five miles an hour. Wow!”
And Bob said, looking at the speedometer, “We are.”
On the Border
Sometime in the ’70s, a pal and I were in San Francisco and we were—well, pretty stoned, actually—stuck in North Beach with no cash and low stash. So naturally we decided to hitchhike to Mexico.
We made it out to Nineteenth Avenue and got picked up by a grungy-looking biker in a Ford van who had just come back from Mexico and had no intention of returning. He was headed north and picked us up assuming that we were, too, since we had been thumbing a ride on the wrong side of the street.
We discussed Mexico briefly, and he let us know that he was fucking heading for Oregon, that we were fucking going with him, that he would drop us off in fucking Sonoma County in time to see fucking Walt Disney with mommy and daddy, that we were staying the fuck out of his stash since it was a fucking bitch getting it across the fucking Mexican border, and that, by the way, we were fucking driving since he was fucking tired.
As soon as he fell asleep, my buddy broke into his stash, and I turned the van around and headed south.
We toked and drove like maniacs and made it to the border early the next morning. We were idling back in the line a bit, watching Governor Reagan’s state troopers assist the border patrol by shaking down everyone under thirty who drove across from Mexico, and we were laughing and congratulating ourselves on being clever enough to be smuggling grass into Mexico, not out, when the biker woke up.
He had just slept for twelve hours in the back of a smelly van, after having been up for who-knows-how-long sweating his little score, so he probably wasn’t thinking too clearly. He asked us where the fuck we were, and we told him we were at the Mexican border. He screamed like a wounded deer, grabbed the grocery bag with fourteen kilos of Mexican weed, kicked open the side door of the van, and hurled it all into the brush beside the highway.
My buddy and I took one look at each other and bolted out the front doors of the van. We crossed the highway, thumbed a ride with a doughnut salesman, and got dropped off in Fresno, where my aunt lived, later that day. She gave us a good meal and bus fare back to Santa Rosa.
Biker Story
JAY LYNCH
Back in the days before the Summer of Love, I enjoyed smoking marijuana. I would hollow out a Winston cigarette and fill half of it with reefer. This was called a “cocktail” back then. I used to smoke these things in the school cafeteria, back when smoking was permitted in college. I figured, on the off chance that people recognized the smell, I would be down to the tobacco part of the Winston before they’d figure it was coming from my table.
When the “legalize pot” protests began in the early days of the hippie movement, I gave the stuff up. I didn’t want to smoke pot to make a social statement. I just wanted to get high and be left alone.
Back in 1965, most people just wanted to be left alone, including a group of outlaw bikers I knew back then. True, many were dangerous psychopaths, as I look back on it all. But I must admit that as a youth I did appreciate their attitude—and I enjoyed their tales of life outside the accepted social order.
There was Deviate, who was said to have killed a mailman in Milwaukee. He wore a vest, it was told, that his old lady made for him out of the murdered postal worker’s mail pouch.
There was Pony, who was able to turn into a werewolf. I had seen him undergo this metamorphosis many times. He had a wife and kid on the South Side. At home, he was a mild-mannered family man, known only by the name he was born with. But he had a separate apartment, another old lady, and an outlaw identity as Pony on the North Side. It was a Jekyll and Hyde thing. In retrospect, I believe he had the power to cloud men’s minds. He would arrive looking like Wally Cox. Then he’d do a werewolf take, grow a foot in stature, and sprout facial hair. Eventually, he got divorced. Last I heard, he was an antiques dealer in Indiana.
And then here was Reno, who chronicled it all. In the saddlebag of his Harley was his manuscript. Written in longhand on hundreds of sheets of school composition notebook paper, Reno had documented his ten years as a member of one of the Midwest’s most notorious biker gangs. He was the Kerouac of the one percenters. Some day his book would be published. Some day his story, and the story of the fugitive culture to which he belonged, would be told. Reno was an outcast. He was a rebel. But his tattoos reflected primarily religious themes. He may have been abused and kicked around by life, but there was no question in his mind about who granted him that life. Reno believed in God!
Speed was this scribe’s screwed-up drug of choice. Pot was not his scene at all. But at a biker party one night, we were all smoking reefer, including Reno. The talk was loose. Oaths, epithets, and curses flowed like cheap wine. And then somebody said (I forget in what context) the words that ignited something deep within Reno’s inner psyche: “God damn it! God damn it!” The words pierced Reno’s soul like a switchblade.
At first he looked flushed as he winced at the taking of the Lord’s name in vain, but in seconds he turned red with some inexplicable kind of pot-induced perverse and misdirected rage.
