Saturday, June 18, 2005

Drugs

After my post about the legal grey area of growing shrooms in New Mexico, I felt bad, like I misrepresented myself. I may indulge in some smoke once a year or so, but I don't partake any where near the amounts I did up until when my wife got pregnent with our first child Ruby.

I just wouldn't want to be impaired if something happened, you know?

The past is different. High school is a fuzzy blob. A choice anecdote:

Background: About five of us suburban stoner skate punks used to cruise Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, looking for idiocy (the fact that it followed us like a little rain cloud was lost on us). I grew up right on the border of two very. very caucasoid Bay Area suburbs...Lafayette and Walnut Creek. If you wanted teenage kicks any racier than getting a pint of frogurt, you had to go the college town of Berkeley, about 15 minutes away on BART.

We didn't get up to any really good mischief. We just walked around, stoned, going to record and book stores, stopping at cafes to nurse lattes for hours. There was one particular patch of ground we'd avoid, a glorified vacant lot called people's park, home to various elements of the lifestyle homeless -- dead heads, street rats, lost souls, and a few genuine nut jobs. We'd cut through, but we wouldn't linger.

One day, we were on our pilgrimidge, when we noticed one of cohort, a kid I'll call Frank, disappeared. Seems Frank had dropped acid while we were merely stoned and hadn't told any of us. Being stoned, we didn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about the implications of this. We figured he'd catch up.

Frank was a special case. We called him Id Boy, because he was all Id, a pinball machine of urges that need to be acted upon for whatever reason. We had all read "On the Road" and "Fear and Loathing" and dug them, but Frank took them up as his brain's owner's manual. He was actually a sweet, basically decent guy who was always in trouble for some dada weirdness he dreamed up. His drug use was also way more advanced then the rest of us.

So we're trudging down the avenue, baked little hobbits, when Frank comes running up.

"Uh....we gotta get outta here."

We look at him: "Hey Frank is here, everybody!"

"Uh....we gotta get outta here, like now. I, uh, just had sex with a homeless woman in a port-a-potty."

So we left.

Seems he "met" a reasonable attractive young free spirit hippy urchin woman who was in a similar state and they hit it off.

Frank is happily married now in a far off state. I now live in Berkeley, but far away from the college district. Far, far away.

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for the great story, but you really didn't have to worry about your post. I find the law in N.M. fascinating, but short-lived. One of the first things Alberto Gonzales did when he took Ashcroft's place was overturn a Judge's ruling that allowed a religious sect to drink tea made from a Brazillian herb. The tea, (I cannot remember the name) had undergone a wide medical study and was proven to cure alcoholism and other personality disorders. That was the real reason for the ban. Wouldn't want to cut into Prozac sales, now would you. Anyway, I think the state was N.M. and Gonzales said by allowing the herb to be imported from Brazil we were encouraging international drug trafficking.

10:36 AM  
Blogger Crackpot Press said...

The days of the "Groovy Lounge" are always strange and wierd...

Remind me, why are we still alive?

Remember that weirdo fire party in that hippie commune under the Bay Bridge?

11:33 PM  

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