Pot Stories for the Soul, page 26
“Yeah . . . God!” he snarled. “Let’s talk about dear old God!”
With hate-filled eyes, Reno raised his gaze toward the ceiling. And, shaking his clenched, white-knuckled fist heavenward, he taunted his creator—daring the god, in whom he believed with every fiber of his being, to come down and take him on. Those in the crowd who knew him—and knew of his religious nature—were shocked. Here was a guy who believed in God, challenging Him to a here-and-now, kiss-my-ass fistfight. For Reno to defy God was as unbelievable as for Nixon to defy Eisenhower.
“This can’t be happening,” I thought. “This can’t be real.” But it was. His biker pals calmed him down and ushered him to a seat on the couch. Soon he chilled out. It was the reefer talking. It just couldn’t have been Reno. Things mellowed out and the party wound down. Soon it was 4:00 AM, and a group of us, including Reno, split the scene and went outside. Out on the street, we noticed that Reno’s bike was missing. We heard the distant roar of the Harley’s motor. Looking down the block, in the direction of the sound, we saw the shadowy silhouette of a mystery rider mounted on Reno’s bike. The cycle was weaving toward us in a crazy pattern.
It was Fith, the neighborhood idiot-boy, riding up to us on Reno’s cycle. We stopped him, and Reno took his Harley back. The bikers tried to intimidate the moron child, but it had no effect on Fith. That’s what the other neighborhood kids called him—Fith, an acronym for “Fucked in the head.”
Reno looked in his saddlebag and flipped out. His manuscript was missing. Gone was the one and only copy of the book he had so painstakingly scrawled out in ballpoint, pencil, felt-tip—bit by bit, day by day—over the last decade of his life. Reno grabbed the idiot-boy by the front of his Dale Evans T-shirt.
“What did you do with my papers, you little piece of shit?” he shouted.
Fith didn’t register fear. He just seemed confused. “Uhhh . . . I trew dem in da rivah,” he replied.
The sun rose that dawn, casting a pallid light on the caravan of choppers heading south toward the Chicago River bridge on Wells where it crosses to Wacker Drive. The idiot-boy was riding shotgun on the lead cycle, babbling confused directions to its driver. In time, we found ourselves on the bridge at the Wells Street entrance to the Merchandise Mart, staring down fifty feet or so at the countless sheets of floating notebook paper that represented Reno’s outlaw life. They were irretrievable. His book would never be published.
A few months later, Reno got married to a trade journal editor. On her urging, he quit his biker gang and got a job in construction.
It wasn’t Reno’s defiance of God that was his downfall so much as it was his belief in God. The forces that kept pot illegal likewise only have that power because we grant it to them by our belief in their authority over us. Instead of asking that marijuana be legalized, maybe it would just be better to just not acknowledge that the stuff is illegal—and just smoke it if you want to.
But, hey, what do I know? I have probably smoked seven or eight reefers in the last thirty-five years since people found out what it was. Pot . . . God . . . I don’t know. I just want to be left alone.
Shooting Pot
REX WEINER
My friend Chris and I were at his house one afternoon, cutting school and looking to get high. All we had was some sorry Mexican weed and no rolling papers, so he says, “Let’s shoot some grass!” So we cook up some grass tea, boiling it down to a dark green liquor.
Chris gets the spoon, pulls some cotton button-backing off his shirt, and I’ve got the spike. I fill up the works, trying to strain this swamp mixture through the cotton, but when I hold it up to the light, I can see leafy matter swimming around in there.
“What do you think?” I ask Chris.
He says, “What the hell” and bangs it into his arm.
Next it’s my turn. I draw up some of the stuff and hold the works up to the light. There is a twig floating inside, but what the hell. I find the vein and shoot it in. The two of us sit around watching a stupid TV show, waiting and waiting and waiting. Nothing happens.
“I’m going home,” I say. “My mom’s cooking something special for dinner and I don’t want to get in trouble.”
Later, I’m sitting at the table with my dad, my little brother, and my mom, eating beef stroganoff, when I feel the blood drain out of my face and my stomach turning violent flip-flops.
“What’s the matter?” my mom asks. “Don’t you like the beef stroganoff? I made it especially for you.”
My shithead brother, knowing I hate the food, says, “Hey, how come your face is green?”
I say that the food was great; I’m just feeling a little sick from something I ate at school.
I went to my room and was in bad shape for several days. Must have been that twig got stuck in my aorta. In any case, my mom never made beef stroganoff again.
Time Delay
A.J. PIRILLI
When I first came to Japan, I shared a rented house with six other people. One evening, while cruising the richer neighborhoods for usable trash—which is a popular pastime of foreigners in Japan on the night before the heavy trash is to be collected—I found a shortwave radio.
When I took it home and tried it out, I realized that it needed some sort of an antenna. While I was taking the steel strings off my guitar to fashion them into an outside antenna, one of my housemates came into my room with a friend of his who had just arrived from a Southeast Asian nation with a rather large lump of hashish concealed in his undershorts.
It was agreed that the three of us would try it out as I tried out my new radio, once the antenna was in place. He made his preparations and I made mine.
“I have no idea how good this stuff is,” he said.
“Well, we’ll soon find out,” I answered back as I switched on the shortwave.
We puffed a bit and I fiddled with the dials, and suddenly we could hear a clear voice in English:
“ . . . and . . . that . . . is . . . the . . . cur . . . rent . . . sit . . . ua . . . tion . . . on . . . Wall . . . ”
I choked up some smoke to say, “Wow, this is some really good shit. Talk about getting spaced.”
The three of us sat there, grinning and chuckling over our good fortune. Then the man on the radio said: “This . . . has . . . been . . . the . . . world . . . news . . . spoken . . . in . . . slow . . . English . . . for . . . foreign . . . listeners.”
Roaches
But Who’s Counting?
KIT SIBERT
As for pot stories, well, I got really paranoid once. Another time I couldn’t stop laughing and thought that was like hell. And another time I got jumpy legs and had to put them straight out in front of me (I was sitting down) for about a hundred hours. And about 534 times I had to eat everything in the refrigerator. And about 341 times I got totally tired and went to sleep. And once I acted really stupid. I didn’t cotton to pot much. Is that what you had in mind?
Problem Child
I’m a child-and-adolescent psychiatrist, and one day in the early 1980s these two parents drag their fourteen-year-old delinquent into the office, so I can treat his “dope” problem.
Their explanation was, “We don’t care if he smokes pot, but you have to get him to stop copping ours.”
Actual Dialogue
WILDMAN WEINER
“So, I’m over at Carole’s . . . ”
“Carole?”
“In Brentwood.”
“I think I know her.”
“I don’t think you know her. I don’t think I know her. I don’t think she knows herself.”
“Whattaya mean?”
“She’s sitting on her couch weeping.”
I hang up the phone.
“That’s a nice fabric, Carole,” I say.
“It should be,” she barks. “It cost a mint!”
“Oh,” I say. She returns to her weeping. “What’s wrong?” I ask, and she sniffles.
“Everyone’s always coming over here to get high and hang out all day and night and I can never get rid of them and I just want to be left alone! I’ve got so much to do!”
“Why don’t you just throw them out?”
“I can’t,” she wails. “I’m the dealer!”
The Hole
HAL MUSKAT
There was that time I took a cube of hash off the serving tray in an Algerian café (down one alley, turn left at another alley, take a right and another right into yet another, smaller alley) and, as was the custom, brought it into the WC where, alone in the dark with the hole in the middle of the floor, I somehow found my chillum and got so stoned that I couldn’t find my way out the door. I mean I couldn’t find the door. That hole was the center of the universe. There was no out. Fuckin’ joint stunk from colonial Algerian and hippie shit.
Moment of Truth
Four smugglers are sitting around a freezing apartment in Srinagar (imagine a place that adult human-size rabbits built, a warren three stories tall, hundreds of years old, no right angles), waiting for the best of the best to waft its way down from the Hindu Kush. They have been waiting for three months.
Whenever they ask their main man, Rashid, what’s the status, he looks out the window, up and down the street, as if the shipment were just about at the front door. He turns to the gringos and says it’s no problem. How reassuring. Business in Kashmiriville.
Smoking ten joints a day or so of the world’s best hash, joints as thick as your forefinger, and now, now, they are running out of stash. The unthinkable. As the last joint is rolled, they all give each other a sly look, reach into various nooks and crannies, and come out with a kilo apiece that each, thinking he is the only sane one of the bunch, the only one with foresight, had squirreled away.
Suddenly there are ten pounds of hash on the floor.
Choices
ERIC FURRY
When my friend Whitey and I first started smoking pot, he went into the drugstore and asked for a pack of rolling papers.
“Gummed or ungummed?” the clerk asked.
“Ungummed,” Whitey replied quickly, not wanting to appear foolish.
Predictably, he was chastised when he returned home.
“Next time, just ask for a pack of Zig-Zags,” a roommate remarked.
Needless to say, that’s exactly what he did the next time.
“Wheat or rice?” asked the clerk.
“Gummed,” Whitey responded.
Then there’s the story of my stoned girlfriend being asked for her visa at Amsterdam’s Centraal Station, to which she replied, “I don’t have a Visa—is MasterCard okay?”
Brownie Baked
This has happened to three different parents. My friends leave brownies in the fridge and, not knowing they are loaded, their dad eats one or more. All three times the dad has sat down in front of the TV and laughs and smiles a lot more than usual. Two of the three dads then stayed up later than usual and fell asleep in their La-Z-Boys (not a normal thing for them to do). The next morning, they all said that they slept great and wanted more brownies.
Light Show
One evening after some relatively intense smoking, three friends of mine were out cruising when they happened to be pulled over by the Man. After checking the driver’s ID, the cop shined his flashlight in the face of the very stoned person in the back seat, whose response was: “Strobe it, officer.”
Evangelism
DAN NEWMAN
While hitchhiking in Oregon, I goofed and left my fanny pack on the side of the road. It contained the usual—including my wallet and my dope. Two weeks later, I received the fanny pack in the mail. Everything was returned, including the money, except for the dope. The Good Samaritan had replaced the pot with religious pamphlets.
About the Editor
Paul Krassner published The Realist (1958–2001). He was a cofounder of the Yippies. He blogs occasionally for The Huffington Post, CounterPunch, and The Rag Blog. At the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, he was inducted into the Counterculture Hall of Fame. He is currently working on his first novel. In December 2010, the Oakland branch of the writers’ organization PEN honored Krassner with their lifetime achievement award. It was a tough competition, but he finally beat out Justin Bieber, Levi Johnston, and Snooki.
Pot Stories for the Soul
Copyright © 1999, 2012 by Paul Krassner
All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
eISBN : 978-1-593-76485-2
Soft Skull Press
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Paul Krassner, Pot Stories for the Soul
