My Best Pot Stories

Workin At The Carwash, Yeah

Today, I'm finally getting rid of my cell phone. This step is huge, not in the sense that I'm walking off into the woods with only a pack of gum and a mirror, because by the end of the weekend I will surely have a new one. What is so remarkable, is that I've had the phone now for five years. In the way that people imagine an investment of hundreds of dollars might lead to having an object for numbers of years if not a lifetime, my five-years-young phone has not only become a relic, it has become fossilized, later excavated and displayed in museums, and finally, used to reconstruct how humans got along before the picture-phone. To its credit, it sends and receives text messages, with both monophonic tones and ASCII animations,  it also has a black and white display, and to the chagrin of everyone I know, an antenna.

I bought this phone when I moved to California after an oddly conceived idea to go live in Alaska for a summer. Even in Alaska, I was one of the rare hold-outs who did not have a cell phone. Even the Pirate who claimed to live in a tree was texting messages to shroom fairies in the tundra about hella-hiking, or was it heli-hiking.

Thanks in part to the advent of cell-phones, email, Facespace, and Twerpr, staying in touch with the Alaska-shroom-fairies has proved inevitable/obligatory/easier than olden days when a stamped letter via cart and pony was the only way of keeping contact with friends over great distances. Nearly two years after escaping the tundra wilderness, I found myself at the central bus station of downtown Chicago, awaiting the arrival of Elizabeth, a fellow survivor from the mosquito country, Denali, Alaska.

“Chirp-chirp-chirp”

I had my cell phone ring set to “Crickets”. It was the only ring available on the phone that didn't scare the crap out of me or cause a migraine. For such a primitive phone, the cricket noise was rather life-like, as I missed calls on several occasions while walking around, thinking “wow, there sure are a lot of crickets around here. Huh.”

“RD! Where are you?”

A kid from Korea who worked with us in Alaska had an undying crush on Elizabeth. To his frustration, he could absolutely not wrap his tongue around her name. I thought I'd greet her with my best impression;

“LAZERBED! I'm at the bus station, where are you?”

“I'm here too. I just got off the bus. I need to find you, there's a creepy man following me. He was on the bus sitting behind me the entire way from Wisconsin, and I swear he was trying to sneak his cell phone between the cracks of the seats to take pictures of me, and now he won't get more than ten feet away from me. His legs wobble like a tub of lard, and oh god, now he's drooling, RD WHERE ARE YOU?”

“Oh no, I'm stuck. I somehow wedged myself between a bus and a band of abuelitas who are unloading about a million tyvek bags full of tamales. It could be a while.”

In a perfect world, I could have started a micro-blogging feed of me eating tamales, while Elizabeth could have sent a cell phone picture of the slobbering lard-tub to google maps and labeled his stake-out area as “Pervert spot” with a zero-star rating. But Elizabeth and I had a train to catch, and did not have time for such new-age shenanigans. Chicago was our connecting point for boarding a train to Sandusky, Ohio.

If you're not from Sandusky, but know where it is on a map, chances are, you're a roller coaster enthusiast. Since the age of twelve, when standing in a line for a cork-screwing-double-looper didn't mean breaking down into hysterics (before ever getting on the ride), it had been a mission to get to Sandusky's Cedar Point Park. Cedar Point usually held and broke all the Guinness Book of World Records holdings for scream-machines, the tallest, fastest, most “why do people do this to themselves.” Every year at Christmas when I'd get the brand-new, next year's edition of the Guinness, I'd bookmark the roller coaster page, and dream of the day I'd get to Cedar Point Park.

Every year the statistics out-did themselves; “wow, a 200 foot drop, almost straight down!” Then, “wow, a 300 foot drop totally straight down!” and finally, “a 400 foot drop more than straight down.”

Having tempted fate by trying to live at Denali National Park for a summer, which included a trip hitchhiking for 500 miles with the sole purpose of sucking down Mudslides, a booze-induced excuse for a chocolate shake, at what can only be regarded as an All-American-Obesity factory, TGIFriday's. Tempting ourselves on something called the Top Thrill Dragster, a roller coaster promising to send riders 500 feet in the air at 120 miles per hour, seemed like child's play in comparison.

I hadn't actually ridden any roller coasters in about six years. I wasn't nervous about rides breaking down, being ejected from my seat mid-loop, or loosing my lunch at any point of the journey. I was nervous that I'd find the whole affair boring and not worth spending an entire day in lines to enjoy. What if I had simply grown up, and the whole idea of spending much too much money to get sunburned and eat fried who-knows-what was more nauseating than getting on a ride that knocks people upside down eleven times in less than a minute.

The only way to find out was to get through the gates and head first to the then world-record-holder for tallest and fastest ride on the planet, the Top Thrill Dragster.

“I knew you'd want to ride the giant boner first,” Elizabeth said, our eyes fixed on the tallest phallus ever constructed for human amusement.  “Why do men build things that look like their penises?”

Indeed, The Top Thrill, looked unlike most roller-coasters I had remembered. No angled chain-link lift, no rows of tear-drop loops, just a 500-foot erection in the sky, with tiny arms, barely visible waving up from the top of the head before plummeting down the shaft at speeds that could rip the braces off all those adrenaline seeking teenagers. “What better way to start a day, yeah?”

And since Elizabeth brought it up, we spent the hour long wait in line discussing the psychology of men and their penises, for which I was only too happy to oblige. The time literally zoomed by as we bore witness to train after train of almost-crying, somewhere-between-shrieking-and-laughing, and just-soiled-my-undies riders come through the station, nearly unable to pull themselves out of the fiber-glass coaster cars.

Finally getting ourselves strapped into safety harnesses, about to be whipped off for our thirty second journey, I looked over at Elizabeth and questioned, “Are you sure about this?”

It was like were about to get married or something equally as horrifying. “NO!” she yelled out.

“Good, because I guess it's too late now!” And that was the best part, knowing that the high-schooler with a badly paying summer job spent half a second to make sure we weren't about to die, had successfully crossed us passed the line of no return. Good-bye sweaty palms, hello top thrill penis!

Serendipity and Stuffed Llamas

The attic at my parent's house resembles one of those oddity shops with overpriced crap you would never need, but if you know how to decorate your house with a diorama of stuffed rats outfitted in tiny pioneer clothes staged to re-enact the Oregon Trail, then this is where to find it, kind of a place. My father traveled the globe when I was young; his often alcohol-induced taste for what he thought was meaningful and valuable found its way into our attic from his various escapades covering every continent to behold a library-cum-museum of shriekingly crazy and awesomely spellbinding curios.

“Don't worry, the llama's dead, it won't spit at you,” is the last warning my mother might yell to unsuspecting treasure hunters as they make their way upstairs to the attic. The taxidermied llama, which stands at an impressive six feet high, glares down the stairwell, face locked in its final act of defense before being taken down by an Amazonian Sherpa with a poison arrow in celebration for the white man whose Peruvian wife just gave birth to a bouncing baby boy back home in America. The llama arrived from the Andes around the time I started to walk. It would be another year or two before I would meet my father.

To that end, my father's appearance and disappearance in my life was something of a playful mystery as a youngster. His face would turn up on the back the children's books my mom would read to me, with the words “Illustrated by,” next to a picture of him holding a cat I never knew we had. Pictures of him with long blond hair, or sometimes short black hair and a thick mustache would come in the mail, postmarked Libya, UK, Mexico, Vietnam, Cape Verde. Jewels and scrolls adorned with symbols of the Free Masons, the pyramid with the all-seeing eye, the double-headed eagle, the compass and the square; all delivered via special courier, made their way up past the llama, and on to the shrine of dad.

But as far as appearance and background goes, he was a simple man, really, he just had a lot of what mom would call “special hobbies.” Portly, familiar but anonymous, from a military family just like any other, the boy from Poughkeepsie was on track to be a run-of-the-mill factory worker or retail store manager. Somewhere along the line however, Indiana Jones called up, and the real world hardly heard from him again.

“How's the eccentric one?” I'd overhear at family holidays. “Wouldn't you know, he bought a boat and sailed to American Samoa. Lord knows when we'll hear from that one again. Can you believe the audacity of that man? I mean, puh-leeze, bringing that housekeeper all the way over here from Payroo and leaving us to teach that roly-poly kid of his some damn English. If it weren't for us, that kid would only know how to say 'nachos-bell-grande.'” The picture they painted made me think he was the lucky one.

His eccentricities, however, did have a number of notable, and even international highlights. Perhaps dumb luck of the wandering soul, or for the conspiracy minded, a calculated move by Masonic grand wizards, he ended up holding the camera that broadcast the first images of the Berlin Wall falling down to the whole world. In a package that contained a piece of the graffitied symbol of reunification and freedom, the attached letter read, “Dateline, Berlin. Feeling the momentum, I went to see what was happening, and there was Tom Brokaw right in front of me, face in panic-mode. 'My camera man just fainted, we're on live, it's all you.'” The first images Americans saw of Eastern European freedom was through his eyes with the zoom control under his fingers. The package also included a scoffed and stampeded upon pin he found in the wake of the celebration- a shiny red star with the hammer-and-sickle emblem in the center. For years it stowed in the attic, pinned on the pelt of a giant polar bear he supposedly killed, but I brought it with me when I moved away for college and now I keep it with me everywhere I go.

Always situated for whatever wind may take him, following weeks, months, and even years on the road, he eventually led himself to the tempests of booze. An anthropologist might be able to trace the lineage of addiction through the photos he'd send from the road... dad holding a beer at dinner, dad doing shots with Australian backpackers at the hostel, dad holding an icy tumbler in his hotel room, dad holding a mostly empty bottle shirtless on the beach. The red leathery texture of his skin became more apparent as Kodachrome developing yielded clearer results through the years.

And the courier shipments got more bizarre as the drinks became less diluted: a copy of the Koran that belonged to the Ayatollah Khomeini, the last salon chair Marilyn Monroe ever sat in, pieces of staging from the Opening Ceremony of the Seoul Olympics.