As a high school and college student I tried a fair
share of marijuana, (which, unlike Bill Clinton, I did inhale) but my use was what I call in retrospect “situational”;
if I was around people who were smoking, I smoked; if I wasn’t, I rarely sought
it out. I stopped smoking soon after I “found religion” in 1978, and stayed
away from it during the years that my children were growing up, but in 2001,
newly single, and apparently going through a second adolescence, I rediscovered
the evil weed.
Pam was one of my closest friends during the
interregnum between marriages; she used to hang around O’Rourke’s, one of my
favorite pubs, writing poetry in the afternoons at one of the back tables, all
by herself. She dated my good buddy Drew, who also wrote poetry (as did I) and
played a black Fender guitar (as I did not) that he named “Zero”[1].
Drew fancied himself a drinker, but more often than not he fell asleep in the
booth or started an argument with the bartender and got himself thrown out. I
first met Drew one night at O’Rourke’s as I sat waiting for Sheila (not her real name), a woman who
I had been dating for a few weeks, who was also an accomplished drinker. On one
particular night Sheila arrived at O’Rourke’s, where we usually met when she
finished work at ten on weekend nights to find me deep in conversation with
Valerie (possibly her real name), a college girl with whom I often discussed politics and Nostradamus.
Even though I excused myself from my conversation about 14th century
prophets and George W. Bush’s alleged lack of intellect, Sheila, who I had not
previously suspected of jealousy, reasoning that her profusion of male friends
precluded any problems with me having female
friends, assumed that I had another girl on the side and let her ire manifest
itself by flirting with Drew, who was about 30 years her junior. Drew and I
became good pals after this, and happened to be sitting on adjoining barstools
when Sheila, after yet another bout of raging jealousy [2]
tried to apologize to me as I explained to her my low tolerance for baseless
jealousy and psychotic behavior in general. On that night Drew suggested that I
find a girlfriend for him, since, despite all evidence to the contrary he
thought I was a good judge of women. I began introducing him to women that I
didn’t know who came up to refill their drinks until finally one of them sat
down with us and offered him her phone number. We ended up sitting with this
young woman and one of her friends for the rest of the evening; it was on this
night that it sunk in that to most twenty-three year old women, forty-four year
old guys were either invisible or “that safe old guy” who reminded them of
their dads, or occasionally the “creepy old guy”. Drew never called that woman
back because within the next few days he started dating Pam.
Pam was kind of a hippie-chick type. She wore a lot of
tie-dye clothes and scarves and purposely stayed out of the sun making her one
of the whitest white people that I’ve ever met. With five other people she
lived in a sort of a commune south of the city called “The Flying Fish Farm”.
Drew and Pam came together through their poetic leanings, though I had met Pam
before through other mutual friends, it was by way of my friendship with Drew
that we really got to know each other. Since we were closer in age than she and
Drew, in some ways we had more in common and often would hang out while she was
waiting for Drew or I was waiting for my girlfriend du jour. We would have long
rambling conversations about religion and philosophy and in some ways she
helped me start down the spiritual path that I now find myself on. She and her
housemates at the Flying Fish Farm hosted Equinox and Solstice parties where I
was exposed me to a variety of ideas and lifestyles. The first time that I ever
saw tarot cards was Pam’s hand-drawn deck.
One evening Pam asked me to accompany her to the home
of Mark (his real name, but he has departed this mortal plane), her pot supplier. Mark had an idiosyncratic way of peddling his wares.
If you wanted to buy from him, you had to go to his house, sit in his living
room, listen to music and smoke a joint or two with him, and then, and only
then, would he sell you anything. So here I am, twenty three years since I last
regularly smoked pot, sitting cross legged on the floor, blissfully floating
through clouds of cannabis smoke and banging a wooden frog with a stick while
we all sang The Doors’ Riders on the
Storm. Finally Mark brings out his sales kit: a big Rubbermaid© container
filled with pot, and closes a sale with Pam, who promptly gets up and leaves me
there. To be fair to Pam, she didn’t exactly abandon me, I was pretty happy
with the circumstances, and smoked a few more with Mark before getting up on my
numb legs, fuzzily trying to recall with my numb brain which direction was home
(happily, only about 8 blocks away) and staggered home, my whole body buzzing
contentedly.
As it turned out, a lot
of the people that I was associating with during this time were heavy pot
smokers, so the situation was almost always favorable for lighting up. For
something that is illegal, has always been
illegal, and will probably remain
illegal for the foreseeable future, (crossed fingers on the latest referendum attempt) there sure are a lot of people who smoke
pot. During the slightly less than two years that I was engaging in this
illicit activity, I was constantly amazed at the number of co-workers, friends,
and casual acquaintances who regularly got high. Of course, most of them were
amazed when they found out that I got
high.
The incident with Pam & Mark was actually the second time that I had lit up during Adolescence Part II. During the first
summer that I was single I had been given two tickets to B.B. King, The
Fabulous Thunderbirds, George Thorogood & the Destroyers, and Joe Bonamassa, (the opening act before anyone knew who he was) playing at an
outdoor venue in Council Bluffs. My buddy Mike and I were sitting in our lawn
chairs, drinking Budweisers and enjoying the blues when a guy who closely
resembled Jerry Garcia sat down next to us and started rolling joints, lighting
them up and passing them around. The first couple of times I just passed it on,
happy to be experiencing the music, but after a while I decided to take a hit,
then another, and another. Ah, yes, I remember this. Now I only had to get home. As we sat in the parking lot in
line behind hundreds of other cars, I glanced in my rear view mirror and was
stunned to see that the car behind me was racing toward me up the hill. It was
only just before impact that I realized that he wasn’t running into me, but I had let my foot off the brake
and was rolling downhill into him.
After the impact, the situation was quickly resolved when it was determined
that not only was there no damage to either car, but no one in either vehicle
was anxious to bring to the attention of the local constabulary the less than
legal level of sobriety of all the
incident’s participants.
One of my favorite hangouts during my second childhood
was O’Rourke’s Tavern on O Street a few blocks from my apartment. One of the
things that made O’Rourke’s a destination bar for me, other than Amber, the
pretty Scottish barmaid, was that the clientele was extremely varied: all age
groups, college kids to retirees; different socio-economic groups, from judges
and politicians to people who couldn’t spell “socio-economic” and might even
have a problem spelling “group”. One evening my friend Ken and another guy came
into the bar, fresh from a discussion group about the Earth as a living, self-aware
organism: “Gaia”. When I was told what the topic was I spouted off my own
opinion about the subject. Ken smugly looked at his companion and said “I told you that the first person we talked
to in here would be able to hold forth on ‘Gaia’!”
O’Rourke’s was also traditionally the last bar to shut
down for “last call”; people flocked in from all the other bars to get their
last drink of the night at O’Rourke’s. This meant that a seat right at the bar
was highly sought-after from 12:45 – 1:00AM, because if you were sitting there,
you could easily make eye contact
with the bartender, resulting in quick service, while all the latecomers had to
stand a row or two back, waving twenty dollar bills at the staff who raced back
and forth trying to get everybody served before the lights came on at 1:00
sharp. Now just because O’Rourke’s bartenders were willing to serve you up to the last possible minute, didn’t mean that they were going
to jeopardize the liquor license. It’s a City Ordinance that all drinks must be
taken away from bar patrons no later than 15 minutes after last call. So, after
frantically serving all the last minute drinkers, the bartenders came out from
behind the bar, confiscating pool cues, unplugging the pin ball machines and
yelling at everyone to drink up, yanking glasses and bottles out of people’s
hands and pushing them out the door if it got too close for comfort to the
danger zone time starting at 1:15AM. Then
we all kind of stood around on the sidewalk outside, watching the cops rough up
drunken Huskers fans and laughing at guys making that last ditch effort to get
the girl of their dreams to go home with them, and to see if any “after parties” were forming.
One night, my buddy Kevin and I were standing outside
of O’Rourke’s at 1:16AM, when we were invited to one of the notorious “after
parties” by a couple of our younger acquaintances. Neither one of us had to
work the next morning, so, after being out all night drinking beer, we agreed
that staying up all morning and
drinking more beer was a great idea.
After retrieving my car from my apartment parking lot a few blocks away, we
took off. Along the way, Kevin and I decided that we should demonstrate that
we, two guys in our forties, could keep up with all the younger guys and close
down this party no matter how late it lasted. I admit that we cheated a little.
Our twenty- and thirty-something party companions were chugging back the cheap
beers, while Kevin and I operated with finesse the fine art of nursing a drink.
It helps that most beer bottles are brown, thereby disguising the level of
liquid in a bottle at any given time, and that nobody checked when one of us
put down an almost-full bottle in order to accept a fresh (i.e.
colder-than-room-temperature) brew.
One of the guests that morning was Angie, a young woman
who Kevin and I had seen around O’Rourke’s but who neither of us knew very
well. Sometime close to sunrise, Angie approached Kevin and me with a problem.
She had given a ride from O’Rourke’s to Jamie, a guy who had apparently thought taxi service was an agreement for sex; Angie asked if we would give her suitor a ride home, to
spare her an uncomfortable situation; we readily agreed. (Of course we agreed – we were drunk and an
attractive woman was asking us for a favor) A short time later we heard Jamie;
amorous, yet transportationless, badgering Angie for a ride home and being
informed that we were his new ride.
This was not a welcome revelation to Jamie, as he surveyed us two non-females,
and he informed us that no thank you,
he was going home with Angie (wink,
wink, nudge, nudge, say no more, know what I mean squire?[3]).
Now at this point, despite the beer-nursing subterfuge, Kevin and I had been drinking steadily for about
eight hours, possibly nine or ten, and it’s common knowledge, many really,
really, stupid things seem like good ideas after a few adult beverages. Well,
our what-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time plan was to pick up Jamie by his
armpits, and forcibly escort him to my car, where we roughly threw him in the
back seat, Kevin holding him down while I quickly started it up and took off.
We thought this was quite reasonable, although, not surprisingly, Jamie did not
agree with our assessment, dissenting so thoroughly that he refused to give us
his address so that we could drop him off, but not quite bold enough or
irritated enough at the circumstances to jump out of the car, which I was
driving randomly around downtown Lincoln. The conversation, as one might
imagine was scintillating, Jamie’s side consisted of snippets like “You
bastards, you kidnapped me!” while
Kevin and I alternated with variations of “Did you really think that you were getting laid? Eventually Jamie admitted that the chance that he would have
been engaged in sex with Angie was indeed vanishingly small and gave us his
address, while Kevin and I allowed that we probably shouldn’t have risked the
involvement of the F.B.I. by kidnapping him. We saw Jamie many times after
that, but he never, ever admitted to
anyone that he knew us. Angie on the other hand made sure that everyone knew
that “the old dudes”, as she began calling us, had saved her with an impromptu
abduction; she dumped a guy in mid-date when he questioned why she was so nice
to us “old dudes”, offered to beat up women who broke our hearts and saved
seats for us on busy nights. For some
reason though, she drew the line at me hitting on her mom.
A lot of things contributed to my ending my dalliance
with marijuana: drug testing at work, thinking hard about the consequences,
both the legal ones and the effect on my relationships, but the very last time
that I smoked any was enough to make me kick the habit for good. Kevin and I
decided to attend another of the infamous after parties, this time at the home
of the notorious Mark, where pot smoking was sure to be on the agenda. By the
time I arrived at Mark’s, I had already consumed more beer than was good for
me, and downed still more sitting on Mark’s ratty couch. But it was the
multiple pipes full of pot that did me in. After a while the room started to
spin and I felt an overwhelming need to get some fresh air, because somehow I
had reasoned that the sensation that the room was spinning could be eliminated
by going outside where the whole street would
be spinning. As I sat on the curb across from Mark’s apartment puking, and then puking some more, much to the amusement of the party taking place next door. Eventually
Kevin and some of the other guys came out to check on me and it was determined
(as much as the word “determined” can be applied to a bunch of guys stoned on
top of being roaring drunk at three in the morning) that Kevin would drive me
home in my car and get me into my apartment. I was a pitiful sight, throwing up every couple of minutes and curled up in the front seat as Kevin took the
wheel. We figured we were safe for the eight block trip back to the Hovel,
since they were all residential streets and it was hours since the bars closed,
meaning the police were not out in force looking for drunks like
ourselves. It promised to be an
uneventful ride home until the white Cadillac driven by a guy who looked like
B.B. King pulled out of a side street and in front of us with a patrol car
pulling in behind us. This was not an ideal situation, so we turned off
west on the next cross street as B.B. and the cops headed north. Kevin took the
first available right, carefully aware that downtown Lincoln is a maze of
one-way streets, only to have the Caddy pull in front of us again, and again the LPD cruiser pulled in behind
us. This time we turned east and meandered around for a few minutes trying to
get back on track when B.B. King and his big white Cadillac turned into our
path with the police car getting behind us once more. This low speed chase went
on for about a half hour, with the cops staying far enough behind the weirdly
calm old man that we ended up sandwiched between the two again and again. In my
diminished state I became convinced that it was a hallucination. Eventually
Kevin navigated my Pontiac 6000 into the Hovel’s parking lot without further
incident, other than the front tire having been stolen from his bicycle as it
leaned chained up to my back porch.
I’ve got to move out of here!
[1] On one occasion
I loaned Drew $80 so that he wouldn’t have to pawn his beloved Zero. Holding on
to Zero myself while I awaited repayment.
[2] I had
walked Sheila home from the bar and then on to my own apartment. I arrived home
to find two messages on the answering machine from her and a third in
progress, accusing me of cheating on her and demanding that I never set foot in
O’Rourke’s again.
[3] Monty
Python once again
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