The Marijuana Chronicles (23 page)

“Am I high? Did I get high?” I asked, addressing my question to no one in particular.

“Do you feel high?” B. replied.

“I don’t know. I mean, maybe. Or, well, I really can’t say.”

“You’re high,” B. asserted. “I’d say that one of the two pot specimens had some effect. But then again …”

“Only you would know, Eric,” Claire said, turning her head slowly to face me. “You would know.”

“By the way, dear,” B. offered, “
your
pot is much better than
my
pot. The results of the taste test are in. You win. It’s that green thumb.”

Looking up, I couldn’t believe it—I could clearly see the Big Dipper and some other constellations whose names I should have known but could not recall. “Wow! You can’t see any of this down in the city. The city lights wash out everything.” Even the crusty, textured surface of the moon was vaguely visible. “I’m sorry I was such a failure at getting high,” I said to my companions as another cat climbed up and settled down, in a sphinx position, with its front paws turned in, on my chest, facing me.

“You’re no failure,” Claire consoled, as she took my right hand in hers and, on her right side, found B.’s hand floating above her kaftan and gave it a squeeze. We lay there in silence for a long time, with two cats purring, and cicadas buzzing in the bushes. The sky sparkled, and the moon glowed.

“There are many ways to get that feeling of being high, you know,” Claire said, peering into the night’s vast ocean of unfathomably far-away, intoxicating eternal light. Taking my hand in hers and lifting it up above our heads like a teacher’s pointer as we lay there on the grass, she turned to me and whispered, as though revealing a long-kept secret known only to the members of an ancient tribe: “All you really have to do, if you’re looking for it on a night like this, is lie back, look up, reach up, and touch the stars.”

PaRT IV

GOOD & BaD meDICIne

R
AYMOND
M
UNGO
is the author of
Famous Long Ago, Total Loss Farm, Palm Springs Babylon
, and many other books. An original founder of Liberation News Service in Washington, DC in 1967, he has published articles on the 1960s counterculture in periodicals and anthologies.
Famous Long Ago
was recently reissued in paperback as a college textbook in American history. Mungo lives in Southern California, where he is also a social worker tending primarily to AIDS patients and the severely mentally ill.

kush city

by raymond mungo

G
OT KUSH?
screamed the green billboard adorned with a sparkling crystallized bud, Humboldt quality, looming over Pacific Coast Highway and Cherry Avenue in Long Beach, California, a thousand miles south of grass country. A bold black 1-800 number was prominently advertised. That was it, no explanation, a freaking ad for reefer, as big as the Ritz. I damn near crashed the Honda hatchback into the car ahead of me. The nation was swirling down the 2008 rabbit hole of depression, panic was in the air, and some old Republican Vietnam War POW who thought marijuana was a gateway drug to heroin was running for president. But this cheerful note lifted my spirits.

I had plenty of pot, but no “kush.” Smoking grass daily since 1963, I used it as a tool for writing, but in fifty years of herbal appreciation never called it kush, and the stuff I got from Charlie was definitely
not
in that exalted category. Charlie home-delivered rather ordinary shit, but he was reliable, affordable, and always ready. As a fifty-five-year-old sometime jazz musician, he needed the extra green, but he sold the brown. Charlie carried only one variety at a time. The price never changed, but if he thought something was extraordinary, he’d recommend buying ahead. He dispensed professionally sealed packets for fifty bucks. No dickering, no discounts, no scales. Looked like a quarter, but he called it a lid.

Charlie was a nice guy, and I was glad to be free of the lifelong pursuit of fickle dealers, hanging around squalid apartments waiting for delivery, now that I’m an old fart. If the neighbors thought anything of the gray ponytailed beatnik visitor who showed up with some regularity but never stayed more than five minutes, they didn’t comment on it. The pungent aroma of the Mexican rag weed seeped from my front door into the hallway, but I wasn’t the only head in the building. The evangelical Christian on the floor below, who began and ended every conversation with invocations to the deity, more or less smoked all day long and never seemed to go to work. He drove a silver Beemer and had a trophy girlfriend.

“Hey, Charlie, what’s with all these
GOT KUSH?
billboards popping up everywhere around town?” I ventured.

He just groaned. “It’s driving me out of business, man. All my best customers in Silver Lake have gone legal.” He lived in LA.

“Legal?” What a concept.

“As in medical. You know, with a doctor’s prescription. The dispensaries are everywhere now.”

“They are?” I hadn’t noticed a single one in Long Beach, and anyway, who ever heard of a pot dispensary? “But that’s only for people with AIDS or cancer or some other horrible disease.”

“Nah, man, anybody can get a prescription. You can claim insomnia, migraines, appetite problems, mental stuff, anything, man. You pay the doctor’s fee and you get the prescription. Nobody gets turned down.”

Holy kush. Charlie was either giving our friendship a higher value than his business acumen, or had figured that my loyalty to him would dissuade me from trying this legal maneuver. Probably the latter, although in fact I was just a customer, not particularly a close friend. I was already scheming to get some of this stuff. What did I have to lose? The doctor might find me too goddamn healthy to qualify.

“Mental stuff” reminded me that I had vials of antidepressants and anxiety pills with my name on them, prescribed by my regular physician at the HMO. Never mind that both vials were badly outdated. Mental illness had been documented. I used the antidepressants exactly one day, then ditched ’em because they gave me a
strong
desire to kill myself. The doc offered to replace them with some other kind of antidepressant but I said, no, I’d rather be a little depressed than suicidal. The anxiety pills came in handy during a six-month stint in France, where pot was hard to find, and they actually helped me tolerate the dreaded cannabinoid withdrawal syndrome, which every daily user knows sets in after ten days of abstinence. The French smoke hash mixed with black tobacco and cured with some kind of poison that always makes me choke.

Coughing is one thing, and actually considered a good sign, but choking is another.

I set up an appointment with the pot doctor at a Medi-Cann clinic on a seedy block of Atlantic Avenue. It cost $110 for the visit, discounted if you happened to be on Medicare or Medicaid, and the operator explained that it was only sixty-five dollars for the annual renewal thereafter. Cash or credit cards were accepted, no checks.

Medi-Cann was a storefront with dirty windows covered by closed Venetian blinds on a block of abandoned retail locations—the only other functioning business, a corner liquor store. The tiny sign on the door gave no indication of the nature of the place, which was hard to find and would have attracted little notice except for the scaggy-looking long-haired young guys smoking cigarettes right outside. I arrived fifteen minutes before the clinic started seeing patients, but the place was already packed, only one forlorn folding chair unoccupied.

The Mayo Clinic this was not, but it might be the
Mungo
Clinic. Unlike any doctor’s office I’d ever seen, it had no magazines or medical brochures, but rather stacks of advertisements for Long Beach pot dispensaries and specialty marijuana publications, mostly from Northern California, with dispensary advertising from all over the state. Postcards touted twenty percent discounts for new patients, “free” joints, pipes, grams of hash, and rolling papers with a minimum “donation” and “membership.” I crammed a bunch of these into my briefcase and sat down with a Julian Barnes novel from the library.

All the patients in the waiting room were strapping young men in their late teens or early twenties, Testosterone City, except for one old guy in a wheelchair, very talkative, who seemed like a Vietnam vet/panhandler, and an old woman missing front teeth. Of course, you can’t tell just by looking at someone what his or her particular ailment may be, but this roomful of youths could not
all
be suffering from terminal illness. They joked around loudly, a party going on.

Every five or ten minutes, a young woman in capri pants opened the door to the inner office and called a new patient by name. The nurse or medical assistant, I guessed. Given the number of people crammed in the room and the frequency of her appearances, I assumed there must have been three or four doctors on duty. Nonetheless, by the time I was summoned, it was forty-five minutes past my scheduled appointment. These docs were evidently on Kush Daylight Time.

When the young woman summoned me into the back room, I was startled to find that she was the doctor—Dr. Monica. No nurse, assistant, or other physician was on duty. The office was devoid of trappings associated with medical practice, she never took my blood pressure or weighed me, there wasn’t a stethoscope or even a computer terminal in sight. The room was furnished with a battered wooden desk covered with stacks of files, on which a gooseneck lamp was clamped, and folding chairs for doctor and patient. I produced the vials of outdated pills, which she scrutinized briefly, nodded, and hastily scrawled notes on what seemed to be my chart, but made no comment. She asked only how often I smoked pot, and how—joint, pipe, vaporizer? Every day, for over forty-five years, usually in joints.

“You ought to give yourself a vacation from it for a week or ten days every now and then, give your lungs a break. You’ll also get more value for your money when you do go back to it.”

(Fair enough, I thought, but in fact not gonna happen.) (Except in France.)

“And you should look into a vaporizer. Some daily smokers can’t make the transition, but the advantage is that it delivers the THC without the harsh smoke. The best one is from Vape Brothers.” (Now
there’s
an idea.)

Thank you, doctor ma’am. She marched me back to the receptionist who’d taken my $110 and handed me a document certifying my prescription for twelve months. The secretary took a Polaroid photo and promised I’d get a laminated ID card in the mail within two weeks. The prescription was ready for immediate use, and the nearest dispensary was only a few blocks away.

Natural Health Collective, identified only as NHC on the door, was in an alley behind a commercial building, up an outdoor wooden staircase to the second floor. Even with the street address from its postcard advertisement, the place was clandestine, the door locked. A handmade sign advised me to
Ring Buzzer for Admittance
. I noticed a video camera mounted above me and a wave of paranoia washed over me. The door clicked and I entered a small waiting room with a cashier shielded behind what looked like bullet-proof glass.

“Your first time?” the guy asked.

“Yeah.”

“Can I see your doctor’s rec and driver’s license or photo ID?”

I slid the documents through the narrow glass slot.

“Have a seat, this will just take a few minutes,” he said.

Voices murmured behind the wall and another locked door under video surveillance. Ten minutes passed while I wondered what was going on and felt vaguely insecure about the clerk having my driver’s license and doctor’s prescription, but he emerged smiling from his cage and returned my belongings to me.

“You’re clear.” A buzzer sounded and he waved me to the entrance of the inner sanctum. “One for the showroom,” he barked into a walkie-talkie contraption as the door swung open.

It was a pot smoker’s candy store. Glass display cases held rows of Mason jars crammed with gorgeous buds labeled with fanciful names.
Purple Haze. Strawberry Cough. Blue Dream. Jedi OG. Super Sour Kush
. Sensitive electronic scales and boxed displays of paraphernalia covered the glass countertops. One wall was dominated by a huge white board on which varieties and prices were posted in erasable felt tip. Prices were quoted by gram, eighth, or full ounce and got higher with perceived quality and more economical with greater volume, but my first impression was pure sticker shock. The cost was more or less double Charlie’s. As a first-time patient, I would get a twenty percent discount as well as some freebie—choice of a free gram or joint with minimum of purchase of an eighth, choice of a small pipe, pack of papers, or lighter.