Waiting for the Man

Three horror stories from my weed-buying days

It has been many years since I’ve smoked pot, and even longer since I’ve purchased any — in fact, the last time I actually bought a bag was back when marijuana was still more or less illegal in most of the US.

I stopped smoking the stuff mostly because I felt it necessary to greet the joy and despair of each new morning with a clear head, and because modern bud is waaay more potent than the good ol’ Midwestern dirt weed I grew up on. I loved being able to share an entire joint with friends over the course of an evening while laughing and listening to music or watching movies together; but when it got to the point where my second hit caused me to grasp the arms of my chair in white-knuckled panic while wondering whether the roof or the floor would go first in the surely-imminent earthquake, I knew my cannabinoid days were drawing to a close…

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But as a recent post from my favorite contemporary baseball writer

Craig Calcaterra

reminded me, the procuring of said combustibles in those pre-dispensary days could also often be a massive pain in the ass, something I miss even less than the THC-triggered anxiety. To wit:

Weed dealers are the most exhausting people on the planet. Yes, you may be spending a few more bucks if you go to a dispensary, but you will not have to sit around and pretend that the clerk at the dispensary is your friend, share some of your stuff with him, listen to him talk about his band and any number of conspiracy theories to which he subscribes, at which point you have to lie to him and say you have to be someplace in order to get what you came for and get out of there.

Sure, one encountered the inevitable missed connections and occasional rip-offs back in the day, but that stuff was easy enough to shrug off. And I was never looking to buy anything harder than weed or psilocybin mushrooms, so it’s not like there was any real element of danger to any of my transactions. But the forced hangs with people whom I would have otherwise never mingled were absolutely excruciating. I mean, I’ve seen all sorts of films and After School Specials about the dangers of “the demon weed,” but I’ve never seen any that DARED TO TELL THE SHOCKING TRUTH about the horrifyingly awkward social interactions that were often involved in trying to buy it. Craig’s post flashed me back to three of my favorite godawful memories along those lines, all of which are of course music-related…

Legalize It (and I’ll Advertise It)

I lived off-campus during my senior year of college, and rarely ventured on to campus except to go to class, work my part-time job as a projectionist for the Film Department, and do my weekly radio show. So when a friend of mine asked me to take a side trip with him to one of the dorms so he could score some weed on our way out for the evening, it felt like a little bit of a sociological expedition, a rare chance to observe what underclassman life was like these days.

I was not expecting, however, to take a trip to Trenchtown — or, at least, the white boy from White Plains, NY version. The walls of the darkened dorm room we stepped into were completely draped with Jamaican and Ethiopian flags, as well as posters of Bob Marley, Black Uhuru and Haile Selassie. Peter Tosh’s Legalize It album was pumping away on the stereo, which at least felt like a nice respite from the endless spins of Bob Marley’s Legend that so often accompanied late-’80s dorm room bong sessions.

Though the kid we were buying from thankfully didn’t have dreadlocks, he was otherwise in full “white Rasta” mode: Red, gold and green knit cap on his head, leather Africa medallion hanging from his neck, and a constant stream of sub-Beasties NYC bro-speak and faux-Jamaican patois pouring from his lips. “Yo, Mon — dis shit is funky fresh,” he informed us, producing a zip-lock freezer bag full of fragrant buds.

Of course, as pot-buying etiquette dictated, we now had to take a seat, pass a joint of the stuff around, and verbally attest to the funky freshness of said bud. And it was pretty “fresh,” indeed; after just a couple of hits, my friend and I were unable to extricate ourselves from the beanbag chairs we’d plopped into, which meant that we were forced to endure the kid’s mush-mouthed ramblings about pot legalization (“Soon come, Mon!”) and the history of reggae for the next hour or so.

I’ll give it to the kid — he really knew what he was talking about, at least as far as reggae was concerned. But when he started picking up the various percussion instruments that were scattered around his room and trying to groove along to the music, it was all I could do to stifle my laughter; the kid had absolutely no sense of rhythm whatsoever. “There are guys in Jamaica who make a living only playing this instrument,” he told us, holding a cabasa (a beaded cylinder with a wooden handle) proudly aloft. “And dem earn every penny, Mon!”

He waited dramatically for a percussion break in the Peter Tosh song where he could suitably demonstrate his own mastery of the instrument — and when it came, his playing was easily off by a beat or more. At this point, I could no longer restrain myself, and began laughing hysterically… but the kid was either too stoned or too into the music to notice.

Payin’ the Cost

While the details of this particular story are a little hazier, I do recall accompanying my friend and Lava Sutra bandmate Bob to a brownstone in Chicago’s Armitage-Halsted district in the summer of 1991 to pick up a bag of weed from some guy that Bob knew. The guy selling us said bag was a “nice enough” middle-aged Chicago Board of Trade type who fancied himself an aficionado of Da Blues — he was a regular patron of the record store where Bob worked, which was how they knew each other.

Ardent blues lover that he was, he laid Pat Benatar’s new jump blues album True Love on us while he was rolling up the sample joint. Now, I have unashamed love for Wee Pat’s first three albums, and think she has an incredible voice, but these lackluster bar-band arrangements of Wynonie Harris’s “Bloodshot Eyes” and B.B. King’s “Payin’ the Cost to Be the Boss” were undeniably harshing my mellow.

Making things even more uncomfortable was the fact that the guy selling us the pot had a very cute, much-younger and extremely flirtatious girlfriend, who seemed visibly stoked to have a couple of longhaired twenty-something musician types in her living room. I can’t remember what excuses we made, but I do remember giving Bob the silent “We’ve gotta get out of here now” glare.

Todd is God

This one admittedly did not involve me, but rather happened to a couple of high school friends; the story became so legendary in our circle (and so thoroughly colored my view of Todd Rundgren and his diehard fans) that I have to repeat it here.

As I recall it (and again, I might be a tad fuzzy on the specifics), my friends’ usual connection wasn’t holding, so he recommended that they call a friend of his who was. This turned out to be a twenty-something guy who lived with his mom and sister in a house on Chicago’s North Side, and whose bedroom was — quite unusually for the early 1980s — packed to the gills with various synthesizers and other electronic keyboards.

“My name is Todd, and I’m just like Todd Rundgren,” he told my friends as he ushered them into his synth lair; and just to show that he wasn’t kidding, he proceeded to perform parts of several Todd Rundgren songs for them on one of the keyboards. Finally, he got up and went over to his bookshelf; they thought he was going to pull out his weed, but instead he pulled out a copy of Ra, the 1977 concept album Rundgren made with his then-proggy side project Utopia. “Listen to this music,” he instructed them. “It’ll get you HIGH.”

“No, Todd, it’ll get you high,” mocked his sister, who had stopped briefly by his room to borrow a lighter.

Undaunted, Todd continued to preach his “Todd is God” sermon to his captive audience, who were by now mentally counting down the minutes until they could complete the transaction and return to reality. Finally, the buds were produced and procured, and my friends were just about to head for the door when Todd hit them with one more parable.

“I’ve seen Todd seven times,” he said. “The last time I saw him, I got beat up, and I lost my stash. But it was okay — because TODD was there!”

Sadly, Todd (and I don’t mean Todd Rundgren) will likely never know that my Lava Sutra bandmates and I quoted his words of wisdom for the intro of our 1990 recording “So Many Ways to Be Happy” — a song which does not include “hanging out uncomfortably at some stranger’s house while waiting for them to sell you pot” as one of those ways, but probably should have.

Anyway — what’s your favorite awkward weed-buying story?

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