The first time
I cleaned marijuana, I was hired to do it. On probation. By my sister.
Back then, I
had no experience with marijuana as a plant. I'd only known it as
a kind of messy,
chopped up green stuff that came in small plastic bags. I mean,
I had no idea what you did to a
growing plant to make it into the stuff you smoke. I'd never even
thought about it, to tell the
truth.
Well, how many
people actually know how to cure tobacco? Brew up a decent beer?
So my naivete
wasn't all that "Unfuckingbelievable," as Eagle claimed
on the day I showed up to clean the crop,
my new pair of clippers in hand. They had said, "Bring your
own clippers. We'll supply the eats
and the music, but bring your own clippers." I obeyed, to the
letter. Like a hired gun.
"Those
are goddam hedge shears!" Brenda fumed.
I stared at
my new tool. "It's what they sold me at the Feed Store. I asked
for clippers. They
said these were clippers."
"Unfuckingbelievable,"
Eagle breathed. "How can he be so dumb?"
Brenda began
to grin. "Let us not be too harsh on this man," she said.
"I think what we have here
is a case of oxygen deprivation in the womb. I seem to have heard
that mother wore tight girdles
well into her sixth month with Larry, hoping she wouldn't show."
Brenda was wont to offer
fantastic stories like this to explain my behavior. This one I ignored.
"What's
wrong with these?" I asked, waving the blades around. "You
could have told me exactly what
to get. But no, you send me 15 miles into town, over a road that
can't earn its name, to buy a
vague category of utensil known generically as 'clippers.' There
are all kinds of clippers for
sale. There are toenail clippers, there are hedge clippers, there
are barber's clippers. There is
a clipped British accent, there is the kind of clip I am about to
give you to the jaw..."
Eagle backed
away. "He's raving," she said.
Brenda held
up her hand. "It's okay. As long as he raves, we're safe. It's
when he goes quiet that
you should take cover." She took a funny looking little pair
of scissors out of her pocket. They
had brown plastic handles and tiny, sharp pointed blades. "Your
clippers are fine for clipping
branches of green plants in a hedge or bramble, but these are what
you need for trimming dried
leaf from the bud. They are known as 'Wiss Qwik Clips' and you could
have bought four pairs for
the price of the pair you did buy." The sound of Eagle's snorting
rose behind me. I felt six
inches tall. Brenda, bless her, noticed. "I apologize for not
giving you specifics." She added.
"It's easy to forget how much you don't know about this business."
I felt a little
better, but still felt pretty dumb. Hell, I don't even read "High
Times", which to
my memory, was always carrying how-to articles. I just never dreamed
I'd have the need for such
details. I sat down and stared at the clippers I'd paid twenty dollars
for in Garberville.
"I feel
so stupid," I muttered.
A woman named
Alida appeared at my side. She patted me on the shoulder. "It's
okay, Larry. We all
have to learn. Once upon a time, I was just a naive little kid from
the barrio."
Alida is a friend
of Brenda's from the Bay Area, who comes up every year to help clean.
Like a lot
of friends from the city, she takes her pay in product. The rest
of the year she's a policewoman
in San Jose, or some equally grim place.
"You know,
Larry, old sport," she rambled on while we cleaned, "If
I didn't have this good shit to
smoke, I'd never be able to carry out the job of enforcing the Anglo
idea of law and order on the
unwilling and restless natives of my beat."
By this time
I was feeling better. "You know, Alida, old sport, you sure
talk funny for a Latino
cop from Fresno...or wherever it is you brutalize the constitution."
"Eh, mon,
how am I spoze to speak?"
"What's
that accent, Scotch?"
"Wot you
mean? Dis is Bob Marley Reggae talk. Where you bin, anyways?"
Sure, I should
have known. For some reason beyond me, Reggae is more popular here
that it is in
Jamaica. Even the local disc jockey plays it by the hour. Me, I
can take it or leave it. And after
a couple of hours of close trimming, my eyes are burning coals,
my back is a war zone of twisted
muscles and my neck is ready for traction, so even the likes of
Beethoven's Ninth wouldn't lift my
limp spirits, let alone "Woman No Cry" or "Jah Says
Smoking Grass Is Okay And White Man Will Pay
For What He Done To Haile Selassie On Day Of Judgement." That
last title is my own invention.
Sometimes, after six hours of cleaning, I get crazed enough to do
my own composing and singing. I
drag on my ganja, pull at my dreadlocks, and gasp out a chant with
tortured breath...
"You're
hysterical," Says Brenda. She goes right on clipping. Cool.
"You also
have a godawful voice," says Eagle, setting a cup of coffee
and a homemade donut in
front of my glazed countenance.
"Ees hokay,
Gringo," Alida chimes in. "I know you peoples can't take
dis stoop labor. Reagan he
say so. Dat iss why we have to breeng my compadres across de river
from Mehico to pick de grapes
and de lettuce and clean de weed."
"Your British
accent is better," I mutter, through a haze of pain. Now I
was getting a cramp in my
hand, my only still functioning member. I didn't dare say so. Everyone
else was clipping away like
crazy.
So I lived through
it. And each year after, I got better and faster. And I sure knew
which
clippers to use, you'd better fucking believe it.
Being a policewoman
does not make Alida a rare bird in this part of the woods. Northern
California
is the vacation spot of choice for more than one police officer,
sheriff's deputy, or etc. from
around the state. Some of the bigger growers need guards during
the rip-off season, and they're
willing to pay. One guy I talked to in the Branding Iron worked
four weeks for a big timer over
near the Trinity County line. He patrolled the patches, and acted
as a body guard for Mrs. Grower
and kids since Mr. Grower had to be out in the patches nearly 16
hours a day at that season. The
hours were long, but the guard's take was $10,000 (half his annual
salary as a police officer in a
So. Cal. town) if he got the crop through. He did. He went through
a bit of his pay that night in
the bar. It was the first night he'd relaxed in a month. He took
his responsibilities seriously.
I suspect that
if I'd wandered into one of the patches he guarded he'd have beat
the shit out of
me. And if I got loud and disorderly in his home town, he'd damn
well haul me in. He was that kind
of guy.
Reagan may be
right about the scope of this underground economy. Perhaps it is
truly enormous, and
if so, I want to be a part of it.
What's the appeal?
What's so attractive that we underground types are willing to crawl
around the
hills nine months of the year, just to be in it?
It isn't just
the money. I mean it. I like that part, of course. Even if I haven't
made as much as
I planned, the prospect of riches is there. Like in the Gold Rush
of '49, the chance of getting
rich in one year is the carrot dangling enticingly near. Almost
anyone is willing to give up one
year to get rich, even in very uncomfortable circumstances. Then
the one year gets stretched out
to "Just one more..." and "Next year for sure."
No Lorelei ever sang so sweetly, and nothing
compares to the fantasies woven on dreary nights in a tent with
only a dog for a companion. For
me, the ultimate dream is to go back home with a roll big enough
to choke a horse. A horse, hell!
King Kong! Then all my friends and family will recognize that I
really am somebody.
If that fantasy
seems disappointingly trite, all I can say is that we can't all
be Einsteins or
Schweitzers. Most of us have simpler dreams...Hitler should have
been so lucky.
Kiki told me
once that she knew I was saving the really neat stuff for my next
incarnation.
"You'll probably come back with a cure for cancer or impotence,"
she added. It was her way of
being comforting. "You can save the world in another life,"
she assured me. "So relax in this one.
And finish your dinner."
I'm trying to
take her advice. I'm not exactly relaxed yet, but I figure that
will come when I
make more money. And I am trying to clean my plate.
Another thing
is this: I don't like to pay taxes. It's not exactly against my
religion. It's just
that I don't like others spending my money without my saying how
and when. It seemed to me that I
had a hell of lot grabbed from my check at Pacific Stereo. Maybe
I'm dense, but I don't think I
got that much back for my money. The upkeep of the roads...that
sort of thing was okay, but that
was paid out of the gas tax. And I was not among the reportedly
vast and anonymous recipients of
State and Federal subsidies. (I don't call my time in the Army being
the recipient of aid or
subsidy). So what did I get for all those years of doling out hunks
of my hard earned money to the
various tax agencies?
The only answer
I can come up with is that I was helping pay a lot of people to
do unnecessary
jobs in government service so they weren't out there competing for
my job. If I were lucky, maybe
a handful of them would turn some of their pay into a sound system
from Pacific Stereo...and thus
keep me employed so I could pay the government to keep them employed.
Hmmm.
The final, most
compelling reason for being a willing agent of the underground economy
is
psychological. What I do, what we do, is a psychological reaction
to those faceless and nameless
agents that tell us what to do and when to do it.
"Drive
55 m.p.h."
"Dogs on
the beach must be leashed."
"No shoes,
no shirt, no service."
"Do you
have a building permit for this treehouse?"
"You must
have insurance against the following risks:"
Sure, taken
individually, each of those admonitions makes sense in the monkey
cage of today's
world. But they accumulate! And you end up feeling like you're carrying
twice your body weight in
crap. This sense of oppression leads directly to stress, and we
all know what stress leads to.
Whammo! Cardiac city.
So I'm growing
dope for my health. The logic is irrefutable.
Kiki refutes:
"What about the money? You raise too many plants to be growing
just for your
health.."
"That goes
back to the part about being rich," I tell her. "I covered
that."
"You jump
around so much. You really need to get focussed."
"I'll drink
to that. Wanna focus?"
She shakes her
head hopelessly, but she's smiling. I'm saved. Can't let these dialogues
get too
heavy. If I know Kiki, she'd tell me to go focus myself.
