The Marijuana Chronicles (26 page)

I broke out in a cold sweat, as did my wife. My trembling hands quickly surveyed the pockets of my jacket and trousers, which I had not worn for some time. Of course, each of the pockets on my jacket harbored at least one roach, which I managed to drop into the bushes as we inched along the path. I kept picturing the agents opening that container of talcum powder, laughing their asses off triumphantly, then checking
our
asses, and finally leading us off to a damp, stony prison cell (without a cell phone, without a call to our embassy, without our lawyer or our families). We would surely spend the rest of our lives there, dreaming of Club Med cocktails on the beach at sunset while we dined on tostada gruel and Montezuma’s Revenge water.

My wife and I walked up and hit the dreaded button together, holding our collective breath. I can still see my shaking hand reach for the button, which somehow turned green. A miracle. We could breathe again—though I think it was several minutes before either one of us did.

(Rule #2a: Whether you are traveling to Club Med, Disney World, or even on a Carnival cruise, do not take anything for granted.)

Did I learn my lesson?
Of course not
.

The Safety of Amsterdam

or

Tip #3: Don’t Skip the Dry Cleaners

I was going to be in Belgium for a business meeting and asked my wife to join me. After the three-day meeting, we would take a train to Amsterdam for a few days. The business part of the trip was going to be serious and boring; thus, no need to bring along any reefer. (Why waste good weed on boring business meetings?)

Business concluded, we headed to Amsterdam, just a few days into the trip. The train ride was long and tiresome, a local as it turned out that stopped frequently in Belgium and then Holland. We had planned to get to Amsterdam in time to check in to our hotel and then go out to dinner, and though the train ride seemed to take forever we made it in time, the trip uneventful.

The hotel turned out to be old and beautiful and we were told there was a wonderful restaurant just across the canal. As we were unpacking, my wife asked me if I had a light for her cigarette. I didn’t, as I hadn’t wanted to lose yet another lighter to US Customs.

But as I was going through my valise, I found a match box I didn’t remember bringing along, and I handed it to my wife, who opened it and said, “What the hell is this?!”

It turned out to be packed tight with pot. Then, looking in my shoulder bag, I found a rolled joint, along with a roach or two. Of course, we were safe in Amsterdam, a city that has been attracting pot smokers for years. But needless to say, the businesspeople with whom I was meeting in Antwerp would not have looked kindly upon me if I had missed my plane out of JFK or was stopped entering Belgium because of a drug violation. Once again luck was on my side—or in this case, ignorance was bliss.

(Rule #10 or 11 [I’ve lost count]: Unpack your bags before loading up for another trip!)

But here’s a fact, the truth, whatever you want to call it. I am a man of serious aches and pains, an actual condition that has impeded my walking, and pot is my medicine. I swear. I could no more walk the cobblestone streets of Europe than I could walk on air, something the drug makes possible. Should I move to California, or better yet, Washington or Colorado? Maybe. The only problem is getting there. Plane? Train?

And then there was the time I found four kilos of cocaine on a beach in Miami. But that’s another story for another time.

Happy traveling!

T
HAD
Z
IOLKOWSKI
is the author of
Our Son the Arson
, a collection of poems, the memoir
On a Wave
, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award in 2003, and
Wichita
, a novel. In 2008, he was awarded a fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His essays and reviews have appeared in the
New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Artforum, Travel
&
Leisure
, and
Index
. He directs the writing program at Pratt Institute.

jacked

by thad ziolkowski

T
he rental’s GPS declares with satisfaction that I have
reached my destination
but all I can make out, along both sides of the road, is scrub and evergreens. Which might be funny if I weren’t so sleep deprived and cranky. With the canceled connecting flight in Salt Lake City, it’s taken two days to get here instead of one.

Assuming I’m here. Finally, in the shadow of a spruce (or fir or larch or whatever) I spot the mailbox and cattle gate my brother described. I get out of the car, unhitch the rope keeping the gate closed, walk the gate open, get back in the car, and drive through onto the dirt road on the far side. Then I get out and close the gate, rehitching the rope, and get back in the rental. At which point a phrase from Marx comes to mind:
The idiocy of rural life
.

The dirt road has a strip of mossy grass running up the center and seems cut into forest primeval. Ever since he quit following the Dead around, Justin has lived in outposts like this. We’ve seen each other three times over the past fifteen years and if I hadn’t visited him—once in Alaska, twice in Kauai—we likely wouldn’t have seen each other at all. But he’s eleven years my junior and I’ve always felt a parental sort of obligation to meet him more than halfway, to shrug off the unanswered e-mails and unacknowledged gifts. Until recently he’s been too broke, working in restaurants, then as an apprentice cabinetmaker, to afford trips to New York. (I’ll pass over in silence the bluegrass festival he somehow managed to attend in Kentucky.) But the fact is, I’ve been only marginally less poor myself all these years, endlessly adjuncting and paying off student loans, and I’ve gradually gotten fed up with the asymmetry of things between us.

As the car crests a rise, the house appears swathed in fading milky sunlight, a modern two-story, familiar from photos, the wide rolling lawn and guest cottage. Half a dozen pickups and cars are parked in the upward-sloping driveway. A barn in the distance, a greenhouse. Dirt bikes and an ATV in the side yard. I know how recent and precarious this prosperity is, but seeing the spread in person releases a shot of envy mixed with something like shame that prickles my cheeks unpleasantly. The contrast with my monastic room in the group loft on Manhattan’s Avenue D is just too stark. I’m possessed by an impulse to back down the driveway and slip away before I’m noticed, somehow call the whole thing off from afar.

But Justin emerges grinning from the two-car garage. He’s cut short his long hair and shaved off his beard and looks, in T-shirt and jeans and work boots, younger than thirty-five but more plausibly proprietary. Getting out of the rental to greet him, I smile through my baser emotions and as we embrace they fall away—for the most part. Holding him, feeling the physical reality of his shoulders and back and head, is soothing and bracing in an elemental way I can’t seem to retain between visits. Which is the point of visits, especially now: our mother is dead, our brother, Justin’s father. We’re all that’s left of our immediate family.

“Man, sorry about the canceled flight,” he says. “What a drag!”

“Not at all—I got to hang in decadent Salt Lake City for the night.”

He laughs in the coughing way he has, meanwhile pulling back to search my face. “Hey, wanna check out the garden before it gets dark?”

“Not really.”

He stands squinting at me uncertainly.

“Jesus, I’m kidding!” I say. “Of course I want to see your precious garden!”

Justin delivers a half-speed martial arts kick to my rib cage and I’m reminded that if he winds up going to prison he’ll be able to defend himself. He leads the way to the acreage behind the house and a pair of Australian sheep dogs I also know from photos falls into step with us—handsome but on the small, mellow side for guard dogs, at least compared to the New York pit bulls I’m used to. Irrigation lines run along ground littered with white plastic buckets, torn bales of hay, shovels, pitchforks.

We come to a kind of signboard affixed with what turns out to be ten or so medical marijuana certificates, each in its own plastic envelope:
Patient, Caregiver, Registry Number, State Seal
. They look like play money. The plants themselves are just beyond, enormous, bushy things wrapped in green plastic skirts, the bud-heavy stalks held aloft by lengths of twine tied to stakes. Beyond the pot, the forest primeval again, where night has already fallen.

It’s obvious at a glance that there’s more here than these notional ten patients could smoke in a lifetime, which I knew was the deal, but the surplus is so flagrant that my surprise must show.

“It’s the backbone of the local economy, so the sheriff’s not gonna touch it,” Justin says. “And the feds are busting people with forty
thousand
plants, not forty.”

I nod as if reassured, but to my big-brother ears this sounds pat, like someone else’s words.

“Mold and thieves is what you worry about,” Justin says now, as if to add realist heft. I follow along as he makes a quick tour of the patch, pointing out the stumps of ten plants harvested a week ago.

“What
about
those thieves?” I ask. There’s no perimeter fence that I can see. In addition to being suddenly colder, it’s also gotten spooky out here, evergreens in thrusting, spiky silhouette against the midnight-blue sky, psychedelic foliage whispering in a rising breeze. Relatively small or not, this patch must be worth over a million. Past my mind’s eye flickers an image of Mexican cartel soldiers slipping balaclavas over their heads.

“Yeah, well, motherfuckers
love to jack
right about now, when you’ve done all the backbreaking work and it’s ready to harvest.” He lifts his chin at a pup tent I hadn’t noticed. “That’s why I post somebody out here every night.”

“Armed?”

“Just with a cell phone. I don’t allow guns on the property.”

“That’s a relief.” Or is it? How does he impose his no-guns rule on gunslingers?

The highest buds are so tall that he has to stand on tiptoe to reach their drooping, bristling tips. If I were a pothead, I’d be salivating, but I have if anything an aversion to the cannabis high, which tends to maroon me in my own head. Tenderly thumbing back leaves, Justin peers at a bud through a kind of jeweler’s loop.

“The sugary hairs are made up of what they call tricomes—a bit like shrooms. Here.” He has me take a peek but all I can see in the dim light is something like blurred rice vermicelli.

“You want all your trikes to be cloudy; none clear,” he explains, as if partly to himself, peering through the loop again. “With the right ratio, amber mixed in with cloudy. Leaving them up for a single day can make a subtle but big difference.”

He steps back and surveys the plot. “These are coming down tomorrow.” His tone is so momentous I nearly let out a laugh. But I’ve never rolled the dice on anything of this magnitude. If the quality of the pot and therefore his reputation ride on this decision, I guess he has every right to be solemn.

And with that we turn back toward the house, all of whose windows are now cozily lit. Trotting ahead, the dogs seem as relieved as I am to be leaving the ominous outdoors behind.

The living room is cluttered with sleeping bags and knapsacks. The scent of high-grade weed hangs like incense in the air but vaporizers are the new bong and the air isn’t smoky. The crew of trimmers, ranging from teenaged to grizzled, sits at a long wood table in the center of which is a pile of dried pot. Placing a hand on my shoulder, Justin says, “Hey everybody, this is my brother Darius, all the way from New York!”

“The Big Apple!” a guy calls out as if it’s a password, though it’s something only tourists ever say—some crass, Tammany Hall–era image of plenitude and opportunity, “action.”

There’s the usual slightly puzzled smiles as they look from me to Justin and back. We have different fathers and bear little obvious resemblance to each other. They call out greetings and wave, then Justin points to each one and tells me his or her name—Jai, Toph, etc.—which I’m too tired to bother trying to keep straight.

Justin’s new girlfriend is tending a cauldron of ratatouille in the kitchen. I know her name is Serena and she makes jewelry but I’ve yet to see a photo of her. It turns out that she looks enough like our mother at thirty that I stand frowning as she delightedly sets aside a wooden spoon and comes forward to give me a long, tight hug.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she whispers in my ear. “Justin really needs you right now.”

A bit annoyed at her presumption, I pull back and smile insipidly into her soulful gaze until, with what seems like a sigh of slight disappointment, she releases me to Justin, who shows me to a bedroom down the hall, where his two kids by a former girlfriend must stay on their visits, given the bunk bed and stuffed animals and Nerf guns.