Warning: This article may contain: Plummeting Stomachs at the Canadian Immigration Office; A Troubled Night in Bellingham; Rendezvous at the Vapor Lounge with Marc Emery; Hastings Shuffle; Entheogenic Mind-Manifesters; Madame Cleo's Stepford Wife Emporium; Lost on Granville; Dog Sex
Again?
A few weeks ago, Chad W. arrived in Eugene from Sacramento in a beige Volkswagen Jetta equipped to run on biodiesel. The plan was for us to go to Vancouver, B.C. and interview political dissident and marijuana seed entrepreneur, Marc Emery, the charismatic publisher of
Cannabis Culture magazine, a man facing extradition charges to the U.S. as a drug kingpin for his global pot seed business.
Chad was sick of the Bush Whitehouse lying about green house gases and slithering out of the Kyoto protocols, and decided driving a car converted to run on biodiesel would be good revenge on Exxon and Halliburton, while "doing his part" not to make conditions on this planet more intolerable than they already were (I've since read that biodiesel also contributes harmful nitrogen oxide emissions, so go figure). Also, a Biojetta was a "thinking babe's car," he affirmed, an "eco-pussy magnet" guaranteed to turn heads. He said he chose the color beige because it served as camouflage against helicopter surveillance, which might be able to spot him doing bong hits (for Jesus) through the sunroof.
The mileage you can get on biodiesel is incredible. Chad got a thousand miles on
one tank. When he filled up, the stuff spilled on his hands, and he said it was just like canola oil. Biodiesel gas stations are spreading like mushrooms.
***
There had been a flurry of reports that border security to get into Canada had been beefed up to ludicrous levels. A recent news item had stated that people with decades old arrest records were being turned away. Passports and birth certificates would be mandatory in a year. Things were tight -- and I was nervous.
I told him all this as we passed through Seattle on interstate 5.
There was a silence from Chad and I could literally
feel his neurons resisting my advice.
"There must be hippies at the border who do you the favor of taking all your weed off of your hands," I mused.
"Whatever," was his noncommittal reply, we kept driving up the 5, listening to King Crimson bootlegs.
After several bong hits, something
did click with him but not in the right place: "Jesus! I've got bootlegs from Yan
Hammer and Jeff
Beck here! -- bitchen' guitar solos you can't find anywhere else! What if the Canadian pigs
confiscate them? Maybe we
should turn back..."
But I had wanted to go to B.C. and hopefully interview Marc Emery, the Prince Of Pot, and try one of those volcano vaporizers they have in his coffee shop, the Vapor Lounge, where his magazine and political headquarters were, on Hastings St., in downtown Vancouver. I mentally nixed the return.
"I think there's a personal use clause somewhere about bootlegs," I said, not exactly sure. We then joked a bit about the questions the border guards would ask to determine if the concerts were bootlegs or not: barking orders to us to come clean about band line-ups for various performances, tripping us up about a Robert Frip solo at the Orpheum; a replacement drummer for a Toasters concert in Seattle -- checking our responses against a database they would have in a back room. Total Information Awareness indeed. Maybe we had nothing to worry about after all.
But after a while, I pressed him again about taking his eighth of kind bud across the border. I suggested we ditch it somewhere and retrieve it on the way back from Canada. He had done that before, years ago, he murmured, skulking about in Sea Tac to find a place to hide a half pound of Blueberry Skunk under a rock. The indignity! Plus he never found it again, and the memory of that loss got him angry, and he started to rant:
"Look, those customs pigs are
immoral! I'm taking
my herb
across their crappy border. You want me to turn back? I'll fucking
turn back, guy! Your choice: we take the herb with us or we go back to that nice Christian berg of Eugene you're stuck in. Tons of flatlined Christian girls for you to choose from at the ole U of O. Negative EKGs. Sorority sing alongs for Jesus. You can find the Christ-loving data entry tech of your dreams there -- and go to the church of your fucking choice -- the Patriot Act hasn't limited our range of Christian churches to attend, I've noticed..."
Chad had a way of making points that were sometimes hard on the sensibilities.
I reluctantly agreed to continue driving with the contraband, thinking it was just a small amount of dope, hoping I wouldn't get dragged down with him should the unspeakable happen.
I resolved to help him smoke as much of it as possible, decreasing the amount; carbonizing the evidence (believe it or not, this plan actually
worked, saving us from a $500 fine, since Chad only had 7.3 grams by the time we arrived at the border in Blaine, and anything under 8 grams is merely confiscated with no other penalties -- except a really bad time at the hands of customs agents).
In retrospect, if he had told me he was carrying a couple pounds with him (for his own personal use, of course), would I have agreed to go? It spooks me to think what my answer might have been.
So Chad was a seasoned stoner, possibly one of the nation's most glutinous weed-hounds -- at least in the top one hundred (In the Bedouin tent decor of a Moroccan restaurant in Seattle, I asked him what his least favorite kind of weed was, and he said, "The kind I don't have.")
A coworker at his software firm had been cleaning out an attic, and gave Chad a new black bomber jacket. Chad humbly accepted it and threw it in the car trunk, modeling it for the first time when he picked me up in Eugene. When he put it on, his aesthetic changed from the worldly gentleman activist I had known and kicked it with, to some type of deranged-looking Mad Max skinhead, violent and deviant, frightening young women on the street, who would make a point not to make eye contact with him, and by association, me.
An enormous, burly guy in his mid forties with a bald head and glasses, he sometimes looked like Foucault on steroids. Chad's a computer programmer with a good brain -- unless it comes to depriving him of cannabis, in which case he can become an ornery bastard, capable of committing any outrage against human decency and good taste. He could get ugly when provoked -- which on this trip proved to be often...
