IN 2005 MENDOCINO COUNTY’S economic profits garnered by all legal endeavors amounted to about 2.5 billion dollars. Approximately 70 million dollars of this total came from the timber industry, 62 million dollars from the wine industry. Comparatively, the economic profits garnered by the marijuana industry amounted to about 1.7 billion dollars.
“And that doesn’t account for the profits made off us by the local businesses, dude,” Norman tells Johanna and me.
Yes, the Lawnmower Man’s name is Norman. Yes (not that it was obvious), he is Lady Wanda’s live-in boyfriend. I imagine the sex, search for the adjectives, come up short, and decide to spare you. A few key nouns, though: beard, rhinestones, theater curtains of arm fat, tenderness. Johanna said it best in a phrase native to her home country, loosely translated as . . . like a bulldog facedown in a bowl of corn porridge.
Norman also serves as one of the heretofore faceless messengers who drive into the nearby (again, not so near) towns to purchase the personalized supplies for the harvesting crew. In his eyes alone is a gloomy peace that could only have come from endurance and a nomadic lifestyle—surely, Norman survived scurvy on the beaches of Cape Verde, cholera in Delhi, encephalitis in Ikuno. His eyes bear the weight of dead leaves, leaking the secrets of some kind of afterlife, a spirit world that he belongs to more than this one—he seems to be waiting out the life of the body, having moved beyond it, but he’s well-stocked with patience.
Johanna and I are riding with him, only slightly less patient, in a red Jeep Wrangler with a rusted chassis into which he has installed a front bench seat from a defunct Chevrolet Celebrity. This must be the closest roadworthy vehicle to his beloved riding lawnmower. I am plastered against the passenger door by the bodies of two lovely people. Space is tight, but nice. Johanna takes the middle. We’ve been told that, at some point during the harvest (“Always after Cutting Day,” Lady Wanda stressed), Norman gets his kicks out of trucking newbies into one of the local small towns “to witness the transformation,” as he says.
“No one really knows how much the harvest season boosts the local economy,” Norman explains to us, the Jeep vibrating over the narrow dirt road leading out of Weckman Farm.
It feels surprisingly good to burst these confines, akin to disembarking an airplane after a redeye to Venus. The air seems different, more prodigious, yellower.
Norman, for the second day in a row, wears his long black nightshirt (unwashed) with blue jeans (a new pair) and black cowboy boots (his only pair). The same belt buckle marks his waist. Now, sitting only one body-length away from him, I can see that it bears a bejeweled version of the Native American “End of the Trail” design—an exhausted Native warrior sitting hunched on an exhausted horse. Here, on his belt, Norman somehow fuses himself with both my mother and a pockmarked American history.
Not as pockmarked, but certainly blemished, is this road. Johanna and I have not been along this road since we first came to work on the farm. After driving for over a mile, Norman wrestles with the converted Jeep’s steering wheel, his elbows raised. He smells like cumin. I can’t imagine what I smell like.
We approach the first of four locked gates that deter entrance to Lady Wanda’s way-way-way-off-the-beaten-path property. Quickly braking, Norman hops from the car and twists the combination lock securing the iron gate, his hair tendrils lifting into the wind. Flakes of barely blue paint fall from the metal to the earth as he pushes the gate open with a splitting creak. He jumps back into the Jeep, drives us beyond, parks again, and relocks the gate behind him. We will repeat this process for the next two gates.
At the final gate, we approach a command station, not unlike those posted at the entrances to state parks. The man inside, armed to be sure, recognizes the Jeep and waves to Norman. Norman does not return the wave.
“Randy,” he says in quiet acknowledgement.
Randy, a thirtysomething man with a handlebar moustache stiff enough to do chin-ups on, steps from the booth and unlocks the final gate for us. This is the first time both Johanna and I have seen this man, his post about three miles along a barely travelable road from our darling Residents’ Camp. I wonder briefly about his life, the wine he would keep on his bed stand and sip, deep into the night, as his wife, twenty years his senior, snores like an antelope next to him, dreaming of Bora Bora. I’m guessing a bottle of Nebbiolo.
And that’s about it for Randy. He’s seasoning. An ingredient that adds a small bit of flavor but disappears into the fabric of the whole dish.
After passing through this final gate, we drive for another mile, until we reach a small paved road, upon which we see no other cars.
“I forgot how out of the way we are,” I say to Norman, or, if I didn’t really say it, I thought it; or, if I didn’t really think it, aaayyy, what’s the big deal? Anyhow, as usual, Johanna said it better.
“I’m surprised we don’t have to have a DNA test or something to reenter.”
Norman laughs, “Yes. How would we go about that, dude? We’d have to be like these scientists. These arrogant fuckers, you know? They called junk DNA junk because they didn’t know what function it served. It was later discovered that junk DNA is everything.”
These Normanisms are, for the most part, accurately rendered, as I got into the habit of keeping a pen and folded-up loose-leaf paper in my pocket, trying to be discreet.
Johanna and I nod. We have discovered that Norman, when not atop his lawnmower, has quite a bit to say.
“But, of course, as you know, they want to wash my mouth out with soap,” Norman continues.
We approach a stop sign, take a right, and snake along a road just as narrow, just as carless.
“Sometimes,” Norman says, “when we bring people up here for the first time, we have them wear blindfolds.”
“Really?” I ask.
“Yeah, dude. We have to,” he says, pauses, and then continues. “When my grandmother washed my mouth out with Ivory soap, I felt like I had been introduced to whale blubber pie.”
“Hm,” Johanna responds.
“That’s a joke, dude,” he says. “Mm-haaa-aaa.”
Like the Jeep, like his lawnmower, Norman leaps among fragments and associations, pressing his own gas pedal, feeding his velocity in narrative. I stare out the window.
He proceeds to tell us about how the harvest unofficially affects the local economy, one hand descending from the steering wheel to his belt buckle, as if the etched warrior breathes the words into his palm.
“It’s all unofficial, dude. There’s not much official, anymore. Never really was, I guess.”
Every year, during harvest season, Norman tells us, the populations of the local towns swell, incorporating ten to fifty times the normal amount of people. Many of these people come to work on the farms; many come for the resulting social scene. Local businesses begin stocking marijuana paraphernalia; other businesses—restaurants and retail shops—open their doors only during the annual harvest, further supporting the nomadic lifestyle of the service and kitchen staff.
“They’ve got to support these scenes,” Norman says as we come upon the first stoplight of our journey. A relic from another age. Still, on both sides of the road, we are flanked by redwoods, the asphalt shrouded in shade, the sun buried behind their skyscraping trunks.
Norman tells us that the smell of the marijuana farms—the smell of marijuana itself—permeates these towns during the season.
“There’s a wave of tolerance,” Norman says, “but there’s still full-on harassment from the cops. They’re on the prowl. You can not fuck up when you drive. You can’t be missing any screws from your fucking license plate.”
Norman tells us that many people deodorize their clothes and car before going into town (though we did not). If we were driving with any marijuana (we are not), Norman would have to be carrying a certificate detailing how much Weckman Farm is allowed to transport at a given time.
“Every time I make a delivery to the dispensaries, I better make sure I have it on me,” he says. “But not today. We don’t smell too bad, and we’re not traveling with any, so we should be fine. It’s quite something. For a handful of months, it’s quite something. Don’t worry too much about it. It’s a very friendly scene.”
It is quite something. Notable musicians travel from larger California cities and other states to play the local bars and coffeehouses; artists dapple the streets, selling their pottery, weavings, paintings, jewelry; poets stand on crates and read their work beneath the streetlights; jugglers pass their hats.
“Last year, there was this guy lying on a bed of nails,” Norman tells us. “Jeremiah, his name was. He put a coffee can out for donations and made enough cash to take the rest of the year off. I haven’t seen him this year, though.”
I look to Johanna. People in Chicago just don’t do this: make their living—a very good living—lying on nails.
Precisely how much the marijuana harvest affects the local economy remains undetermined. Growers rarely deposit their profits into local banks, especially since the federal government requires the bank to file deposit reports for amounts exceeding ten thousand dollars. Further, there’s no way to tally exactly how much of the marijuana economy’s 1.7 billion dollars in profits is redeposited back into Mendocino County’s legal business economy.
But, turning right at the light onto a road speckled with a few other cars now, which also seem relics of an earlier age—nay—a far more hectic future, Norman tells us that he knows of many legitimate local businesses whose survival depend on the pot harvest.
“Without it, and the buzz, and the scenesters, we’d be surrounded by ghost towns,” he says. “The economists know it, the people here know it, but the government, dude . . . But the government can change. Look at Barry Goldwater. You really gotta admire a man for going crazy with plaque in his blood. Especially if he avoids World War Three. Mm-haaa-aaa-aaa.”
I want to say something intelligent here, prove myself to Norman, whose obscure knowledge and barrage of references delight me (not that Goldwater is so obscure). Maybe I can regurgitate something from the National Geographic Channel, or Animal Planet. Something about the reproductive system of the prairie dog, or velocity and how it applies to wormholes.
For all of the pro-marijuana socialites that descend upon these otherwise sleepy towns, there is a contingency of anti-marijuana protesters who travel here as well. They preach their gospel from their own crates.
“There’s always one dude who shouts in the streets about how he kicked drugs, and everybody else should follow suit because he’s been there,” Norman says.
I nod and breathe in the air through the open windows. Johanna shifts her weight between Norman and me. The air here, miles outside of Weckman, is decidedly less vegetal, full of concrete and a bit of industry. But it smells good. On leaving the farm for the first time in weeks, I realize how claustrophobic the same air can be, even if that air is cleaner than most. Johanna puts one hand on my leg and another on Norman’s. I can tell she’s finally found her western United States father figure.
He continues, “If you stopped taking drugs because this lying bastard stopped taking drugs, that’s not a good thing. That’s shaky at best.”
I laugh, but Norman does not, and because of this, arrest my laugh midway. Johanna drums on our legs.
Norman strokes his beard and looks at Johanna, smiling.
“But what the fuck do I know?” he says. “Ask anybody in town, dude. I’m the original brat. This self-indulgent brat . . . in addition to being the Gothic Santa Claus of Loneliness.”
I ready myself to laugh again but can’t go through with it.
Johanna touches the end of his beard, and I take a deep breath of this fresh, dirtier air and smile.
Norman says, “Mm-haaa-aaa,” bemused by himself.
The redwoods thin to shorter, skinnier trees; a few vineyards poke from the distance. I begin to hear, through the open Jeep window, the jangle of an amplified electric guitar. After the acoustic instruments of Weckman Farm, it’s nice to hear something that requires plugging in.
I’M WONDERING HERE if I’m giving Norman far too much attention, too much page space. Doesn’t Charlie the Mechanic or Lance or Crazy Jeff—hell, even Gloria, Hector, the German Shepherd, Ruby, or Lady Wanda herself—deserve this kind of attention, presented like a series of entries in some bizarro Bartlett’s Quotations? Is there an (albeit intriguing) irrelevancy in detailing at such length our journey into town with him? I’m hoping this strange irrelevancy adds spice, and thus makes these scenes relevant.
With Norman, in town, Johanna and I were asked to cope with a scene both beautiful in its freewheeling openness and maddening in its commitment to weirdness and lack of engagement with anything as real (and as human) as cancer. Can fighting for one’s life be an art? Can fleeing from such a fight be art criticism? Or is that just another maddening commitment to weirdness?
I touch Johanna’s leg as Norman perfectly parallel-parks the Jeep between two white Volkswagen Buses. She turns to me with the eyes of a woman who has no idea how, or why, coming from a small town in northern Sweden, she now finds her ass planted between the great, humanized Lawnmower Man and a husband who drags her from joy, to tragedy, to weirdness in rarefied Northern California. This is surely a tour of American life to render the Swedish-language brochures limp. On her leg, warming beneath khaki capris, my hand evolves from touch to tickle.
“Mm-haa-haa,” Johanna mimics, and Norman’s laugh sounds so good (and a little sexy) in her mouth.
I want to kiss her hard, press her up against Norman as if he were a paper-thin wall, undress her and kiss her, make the noise of the metronome. Norman nods as if he knows what I’m thinking, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. At a certain age, in certain people, wisdom confuses itself with clairvoyance.
I want to laugh too, and I want him to laugh. When sealed into a confined farm space for a number of weeks, there is a giddiness to leaving, to going anywhere, exciting or mundane—the bank, the post office, the library—a giddiness illogical and irrepressible.
Irrepressible also, is this town. It houses a wild cultural experiment driven not by marijuana but because of marijuana. I try to picture it during the off season, reclaimed by the locals—a placid town that smells of industry and salt, a few people walking their dogs, just them and the weather. Now, though, the streets are lined with scenesters, pot harvest folk emptying their dramatic reserves—faces made up mime-white, devil-red. People walking on their feet and hands, stilts and pogo sticks; contortionists threatening to kiss their own asses; breasts contained and exposed, sometimes hidden with Rapunzel-length hair, sometimes with blue body paint; fantasy and reality leashed to the same tether.
A person (man or woman, I can’t tell) plays the saxophone badly while dressed in an alien costume—glittery silver jumpsuit, full green face-mask with a slot just wide enough to accommodate the instrument’s mouthpiece. Oddly gloved, the Martian hands dance over the keys, mother-of-pearl meeting rubber suction cup. The alien has upturned a black Area 51 ball cap on the pavement at its green feet. Already, just after lunchtime, it is overflowing with dollar bills.
The Jeep’s window acts as a movie screen, releasing, in pumps of human film over a flickering bulb of sunlight, ribbons of celluloid that Fellini would have killed to have captured.
Music from one bar merges with the music of another, this chaotic symbiosis providing the soundtrack for the marvelous supersonics of the sidewalk. People fuse with reptile and flower, acrylic and yarn: latex masks, leis of roses, war paint, peace paint, homemade wigs. I am bearing witness to the genesis of a new generation of nursery rhymes; like the old ones, they just barely conceal their adulthood below a surface of dizzy youth, fueled by something desperate but nevertheless full of life.
“This is awesome,” Johanna says.
I nod, unsure if this is the good kind of awe or the bad kind. For example, I am in awe of Jeffrey Dahmer’s killing practices. Norman spins the car key inward, kills the Jeep’s engine. This fat-handed skinny man struggles to hold onto his key chain.
Just outside the window, a tall, knobby man in a loincloth lies on his back, on top of a yellow Slip ’n Slide, the lawn-bound backyard waterslide that was the envy of every kid in suburban Chicago. It was on a Slip ’n Slide that I, breaking into puberty, saw my first breast as a sexual thing. Amy Crossin. She was three years older than any of us (always will be), spilling out of a baggy red bikini top after a reckless headfirst dive. This event remained famous among the neighborhood boys, long after Amy moved to Oregon to live with her grandparents.
This lanky man disturbs my long-dormant memory of her, makes it embarrassing and, somehow, Roman. A small sprinkler rakes fingernails of water over his body, hairless, glistening. I do not mention Amy to Johanna, if only because I’m afraid of what Norman will say—doubtless, something about a historical penis, and its iconic psychopomp.
Instead, I ask her, “Do you think that’s Robbi’s boyfriend?”
In this question, Norman takes no interest. Johanna elbows me in the ribs as we step from the car. The lanky man bites at the air—a greyhound going after the horseflies. I wonder who his family is, and what conversations he has with them when visiting for Thanksgiving.
The sprinkler’s hose snakes around the back of a head shop, with or without the cooperation of the managers. For sale, in the display window, are pot bongs of blown glass, pipes the length of a leg, pipes the length of a thumb, books on growing marijuana indoors and hydroponically, psychedelic bumper stickers, wallets made of hemp, sewn with decals both Asian and Jamaican. This is a full global assault of yin, yang, and Bob Marley, and I’m not sure how long I can take it. I can listen to the jangling of hair-bangles and skirt-bells for just so long before lunacy sets in.
To the left of the shop’s doors, a man in a starched white shirt and black pants stands, literally, on a soapbox. (Well, to be honest, a Clorox Bleach box.) He harangues an ambivalent crowd. Straight out of a 1930s government-funded cautionary tale, the man spews demonic evidence pointing to marijuana’s designation as the Devil’s Weed. His sweat stains rival those of Pickers on Cutting Day, though his rasp has nothing on Charlie the Mechanic’s, his mania, nothing on Crazy Jeff’s.
“Rightful!” he shouts, his big glasses falling from the bridge of his nose.
He readjusts them on his face, not with his hands, which are clutching beanless (and therefore soundless) maracas, but with an upward fling of his neck. His blonde hair is slicked back and his face is red.
“Hateful!” he continues. “Don’t let them make yooouuuu this way!”
He catches my eye, and I look away.
On the other side of the shop doors, standing behind the Slip ’n Slide Man’s gunboat feet, is a small woman in a blue bikini top and aerated ankle-length skirt, also blue. She is long-toed and barefoot, her nails painted an end-of-the-rainbow gold. She juggles dice, the three tiny cubes spinning in the air—a drunken daredevil game of craps. Beautifully, these two ignore the Maraca Man. Though they don’t look at each other, there is something familial between them. Maybe they’re husband and wife, brother and sister.
“Mmm-haa-aaa,” Norman mutters, sliding his body from Jeep to street. “Willie and Rain. They’re here every year.”
He gestures to the Slip ’n Slide Man and his die-juggling companion. They don’t seem to notice him, lost in what I guess has to be called their performance.
“So,” I begin, “what’s their act?”
“Only flames!” the Maraca Man scolds from the other side of the doorway as the sprinkler continues to pump its water.
“Dude,” Norman answers me. “They’re calling upon the athletes of Ethiopia.”
Johanna turns to him. My cerebrum mouths What the fuck? to my medulla oblongata, which responds by increasing my blood pressure, shortening my breath. Is this merely senseless chaos?
“Ethiopia?” she asks.
“Same thing every year,” he says. “They correspond with these sibling runners over there . . . by mail, I guess. I forget his name, but the brother is this Ethiopian long-distance runner who trains by lying in a dugout near some river and back-floating. One time, he fell asleep and woke up thirty-five miles later. His sister runs the one-hundred-meter dash and meditates before each event by juggling dice.”
Again, Norman gestures to them, actually waves, but again, his greeting remains unrequited.
The Maraca Man shouts, “And we all know that this is the only place that smoke can take us!”
With a silent maraca, he mimics a plane going down, crashing at his wing-tipped feet.
I bite at my fingernails, dazed, sun-washed. A bedsheet of pot smoke hovers above us, perhaps the ingredient required to make sense of the chaos. Despite Norman’s warnings of an overzealous police presence, every squad car we see merely slows down, watches the street scene for a few seconds, and moves on. I suppose during harvest season, amid this atmosphere, tolerance is forced upon them. Smoke and nudity are, even to the law, gentler than blood. At least in California. As one cop car passes, two young men in assless pants race after it. Their smooth cheeks bob like a spirit orb in quadruplicate.
Johanna clings to my side, then pulls away, torn between the comfort of the old and the electricity of the new. Norman wanders unaffected, his senses accustomed to the assault. His arms slither at his sides, as if craving a larger belly to fold themselves over—perhaps the one Norman himself used to have.
He guides us along the sidewalk. We pass a girl in a back brace giving henna tattoos for five bucks. She has a gorgeous porcelain face, but her posture is ruined. When she concentrates on her work, she looks as if she needs to have a good cry but hasn’t yet had the time to let it out. I realize now: Who the fuck am I to say these people have no engagement with real and human tragedy? Who am I—some asshole who with his wife fled from his mother’s sickbed to a fucking marijuana farm—to say what is and what isn’t a valid response to misfortune?
Behind us, barely audible now, the Maraca Man shouts, “Garters!”
We stop in front of an old man doing caricatures of passersby as hallucinogenic fish. Every so often, he puts down his pens and sips from Alka-Seltzer-and-lime-spiked water. I can only imagine the homemade birthday cards he sends to his estranged grandchildren. Norman points to his easel.
“One year, I was a hammerhead shark,” he tells us. “I never sat for the fucker again. Mmm-haaa-aaa.”
We walk. A sandaled boy sits unchaperoned behind a dirt box, selling pubic sprouts of Red Russian kale. As much as the crippled henna tattoo girl needed to cry, this boy needs to laugh. He watches, with bored eyes, the crowd pass him by. His cardboard sign advertises, in decidedly adult handwriting, five cents a sprout.
“Hello,” Johanna says to him.
His smile is amazing.
A few yards further up the sidewalk, a trio of twentysomethings (two women and a man), clad only in elaborate body paint, sell entry (“Over 18 only!”) to their naked haunted house. This is a small tent cloaked in opaque black cloth, a miniature and far more titillating version of Lady Wanda’s food tent. The two women are painted as matching birds of prey. The man, swathed in pale red, can only be their worm. The archetypal early bird implications are too tempting to resist but too obvious to say aloud.
To Johanna, I speculate instead about spider-themed hand puppets leaping from the haunted dark and stirring, in one way or another, the patrons into ecstatic submission. Dramatically, she licks her lips.
“Sounds like it’s worth the six bucks,” she says.
Norman walks two strides ahead of us, the wind lifting the nightshirt from his body, as if a naked haunted tent all its own. He is a sorcerer walking on air, our unofficial tour guide to the world just outside Weckman. Behind him, we progress, if you can call it that.
We pass an old woman who, for three-fifty, will diagnose your madness. She sits alone at her foldout bridge table, reading an old issue of Better Homes and Gardens. Next to her, two girls in string bikinis offer to rub suntan lotion on our backs for eight bucks apiece (discounted from ten, their sign assures us). Their skin, still so elastic, has the appearance of a dolphin’s—at once nauseatingly attractive and unattractive.
Johanna grumbles something about how they give massage therapy a bad name. Norman, looking over his shoulder (at us or them, I can’t tell), laughs.
We come to a shop front, its entrance hidden behind a curtain of beads. The chalkboard sign outside advertises “Mirror Art.” Norman explains that this involves stepping into a dressing room of sorts, disrobing, and squatting over a floor mirror. Patrons are invited to examine, dwell on, and meditate over “the secrets of their undersides.” Then they dress and, from memory, publicly sculpt their hidden places in clay, which Belinda, the shop owner, will then fire in a kiln and cool. Patrons paint their baked “pieces” in a variety of colors. Belinda is most certainly not the dominatrix I imagine her to be, but I lack the courage to step beyond the beads and find out. Johanna, joyful, shakes her head.
“You ever go into that one, Norman?” she asks.
“Oh, god, no,” he laughs, running his sturdy hands over his torso. “I’ve lost my magic. But I don’t want my fucking dukedom back. That would be trouble.”
“I think it’s trouble already,” I smile.
The wind shifts the beaded doorway. I squint, trying to see inside, but to no avail. The hidden stays hidden.
“Mmm-haa-aaa. Wanda did it once years ago. The Twat Squat, she calls it. Mmm-haa-aaa. The result was this wreath she put up at Christmas. This wreath as a nest—takes the idea of mother and puts a dead zero in its center. Mmm-haa-aaa.”
“Since when is an opening a zero?” Johanna challenges.
Norman laughs again, and blushes. He starts talking about “the days of Prospero and Miranda . . .” and a Nova TV special he saw about Joan of Arc.
We continue, slowly, along the sidewalk, the music scribbling its blues, folk, rockabilly, funk. The aural melting pot is surprisingly listenable, a confirmation of the multiplication table and the success of exponents, at least when pumped through speakers.
We pass a white man in a turban charming a plastic snake from a pink basket. He wears a gold wedding band on his left ring finger. Beyond him, a long-haired, shirtless bodybuilder wears a necklace of chicken bone. He poses, his hands on his hips, his palms facing downward, in a textbook front-lat spread. The “Hello My Name Is . . .” tag on his left pectoral reads “Konan the Fucked-Up Barbarian.” (Yes, he spells Conan with a K.) Johanna points to him.
To Norman and me she whispers, “Small dick.”
Norman and I laugh like two bleating sheep.
A man dressed as Neptune (the planet, not the god) invites passersby to “be the distant sun,” revolving lazily around him for fifty cents.
“I’m not revolving around a gas giant,” Norman says.
A small girl in a white dress and garland of white flowers (she must be Neptune’s daughter) takes a Polaroid and hands it to the patron upon completing “the revolution.” Johanna speculates that the girl must be home-schooled.
We walk on, motion the only thing that keeps us from the underworld. A woman dressed as a heavily mascaraed corpse plays a toy harp. A dwarf in a bowler hat stands on a bar stool, extending a long metal pole into the air. For a dollar, you can stand beneath his reach and, for sixty seconds, protect yourself from imminent lightning. (There’s not a cloud in the sky.) An a cappella barbershop quintet dressed like the Marx Brothers strains to be heard over the live music of the bars and coffeehouses. They do an impeccable version of “You Are So Beautiful.” Chico, the baritone, is the best singer (or maybe just the loudest) of the bunch. As always, Gummo and Zeppo take the back seat. Johanna and I hold hands.
Together, we sing along, “tooo meeee!”
The quintet smiles. Groucho has a cardboard sign strung around his neck, imploring, in black magic marker, “Where’s Cousin Karl?” Harpo advertises ten-cent haircuts with a pair of giant plastic scissors.
As we come to The Verse, Norman’s oasis of choice and caffeine, we pass a staid man in his seventies, wearing a pinstriped apron and straw hat, selling hot dogs. Simply selling hot dogs. His red and yellow awning reads, “Snacks above Reproach.”
AFTER WORKING AS a bus driver and as an engineer for Boeing, Norman, as a slightly younger man, worked the streets of this town, faking antiques. Though this was only about ten years ago, I can’t help but cast Norman, and this town, in sepia. Surely, the local law enforcement, all carrying six-guns, waxed moustaches, and an Earpian air, constantly threatened his sidewalk busker operation. Surely, only ten years ago, this town was a town of tumbleweeds. Marijuana had not yet eclipsed the Old West vices of moonshine and opium.
We sit at a table in what I imagine to be an ex-brothel—one in which the ladies bore beehive hairdos and red dresses pluming with expensive fabric. We are in The Verse coffeehouse, hugging an open window. The place is drenched in gilded treble clefs and enough wood paneling to make the redwoods cringe. The afternoon house band is mercifully electric—four local celebrities who play, according to our benightshirted host, “the best surf gospel this side of Copenhagen, dude.”
I imagine the treble clefs detaching themselves from the wallpaper, unraveling like carpets. A few hours with Norman and my rare sober mind has already adopted some of his erratics. But this is a man whose personality and wardrobe are so firmly placed outside of our Chicago experience that I can’t help but thank my lucky stars that I can, at least for a little while, sit at the edge of his beard. In fact, it is only his beard that returns me to Chicago by association. It is the facial-bound version of Kodiak the Great Pyrenees.
Norman drums his fingers against the table. I remember this: he was a serious table-drummer. A mess of tarot cards lies pressed beneath the clear glass tabletop, the wrought iron legs holding the piece of furniture in place, and our three coffee cups upon it. This is not the dishwater coffee of the Granny Annie’s variety that sustained us in its delightful classic diner weakness through many a Chemo Breakfast. This, like Durban Poison, as Lance might say, is some concentrated shit.
In harvest seasons past, The Verse, along with many independent businesses in Northern California, had converted itself into an Amsterdam-style marijuana (and coffee) bar. To barely skirt the law (miniskirt the law?), such seasonal businesses took a page from the private clubs, providing membership cards to medical marijuana patients only. These patients would sign an affidavit naming the club as their lawful caregiver, allowing a place like The Verse to distribute marijuana to, and sometimes for, them. These clubs would routinely possess anywhere from sixteen to six thousand members.
Many of the Northern California pot clubs had security guards, and specific rules about smoking, or not smoking, on the property. Many clubs offered their patrons leather-bound menus detailing the available strains of marijuana as if beers on tap. Additionally, these menus routinely offered various strains of hash and hash oils, marijuana-infused breads, teas, ice creams, candies, and pastries.
“It was great,” Norman tells us, slurping his latte. “The marijuana industry was finally beginning to self-regulate. Local businesses doubled as dispensaries during the harvest season. And now, it’s pretty much a mass moratorium. But who knows how long it will last . . . this time.”
During the current moratorium on such dispensaries, both seasonal and year-round, the Americans for Safe Access (ASA) marijuana advocacy group is attempting to establish specific regulations for these patients’ clubs in an effort to spawn a mass and grand reopening. One can only imagine: Buy one joint, get one joint of equal or lesser value free! Because in this industry, like any other, a few bad apples spoil things for the whole bunch, the ASA hopes to enumerate a doctrine that will appeal to the local governments. This doctrine will include ways to register and identify patients, and the prescribing doctors, and will attempt to suffuse the industry with a measure of uniformity.
Many pro-dispensary locals champion this effort, while others dismiss it as unnecessary playing of the government’s game. The latter faction argues that devoting energy to detailed bureaucratic regulation is an example of skewed priorities; that there’s no way that the ASA’S doctrine could ever be uniformly enforced; that it’s the same historical beating of the same historical drum.
Many believe that the true success story of legal marijuana dispensing (if there is to be one) lies in the hands of the doctors. If doctors were to prescribe marijuana judiciously, and in written form, many believe that amiable regulation is possible. Others pessimistically (they might say, realistically) counter that there will always be some official to challenge the previously established notions of judicious and amiable.
Law enforcement has prosecuted doctors for prescribing marijuana indiscriminately, while these doctors defend the prudence of their actions. Law enforcement will sometimes send an undercover agent to investigate these small-town dispensaries. In cases, the owners have been arrested, threatened with life imprisonment, their shops, like Weckman Farm, raided and shut down. Many times, these owners are acquitted, their shops reopened, their bank accounts tens of thousands of dollars lighter. Where does all that money go?
Many doctors complain that these undercover agents judge the health of a dispensary patient via mere visual assessment. Fearing prosecution, a number of California doctors have stopped prescribing marijuana to patients who they believe are in need. In the “few bad apples” vein, some doctors have been known to cater to a marijuana-loving clientele, signing medical slips for money. The more conservative of the prescribing doctors, along with the ASA, hope that specific regulation can help the local law enforcement distinguish between the bad and good apples. The Pink Ladies and the Red Deliciouses, the Spartans and the Snows, the McIntoshes and the Honeycrisps.
Even those who believe ASA’S efforts may be in vain also tend to believe that some form of regulation will, eventually, be necessary, perhaps if, and/or when, federal law comes around. But mass cooperation is always a slippery, and elusive, slope. A Slip ’n Slide on a mountainside, if you will.
For many, the question remains: How can we legislate ethics?
“What will steal maturity from us,” Norman says, “is the government. And art! Still, the Measure P babies have a point.”
In November of 2006, many miles south of Weckman Farm, the citizens of Santa Barbara voted to pass a bill called Measure P. In effect, this measure declared that marijuana use for persons over age eighteen, whether medical or recreational, was to be given minimal priority by local law enforcement.
Despite the bill, many locals (dispensary owners among them) claim that the George W. Bush administration had been federally cracking down on marijuana use, putting pressure on local governments and law enforcement agencies. As the Obama administration has had its hands full, it has been difficult to find the time necessary to revise such strong-arm tactics in the smaller towns. As such, status bestowed upon such clubs is increasingly becoming a criminal one, in spite of the pro–medical marijuana propositions that thirteen states have passed as of 2009 (many of which are maddeningly vague when it comes to regulation in practice). Small-town police have been giving increased attention to these Amsterdam-style deviances, however arguably benign. There are those who argue that allowing the dispensaries and farms to operate as “legal” businesses—keeping records, paying taxes—will cause the availability of unregulated rogue marijuana to decrease at street level; that this is something that should make the police happy.
At any rate, in recent years, The Verse has remained just a coffee shop, one in which the occasional patron will light up a joint, tolerated or unnoticed.
“Dude,” Norman says. “The state laws are in conflict with the federal laws. There is no mass understanding of marijuana law. When we’re breaking it, we’re not. When we’re not, we are. But sometimes, people get scared. Now we all have to mourn the eccentric old shrimp fisherman who didn’t have a soul, but a dog.”
Johanna and I glance at each other, then turn away, fearing inappropriate laughter. With Norman, one’s not sure if it’s safe to laugh until he does. Either that, or if he injects the post-pause caveat, That’s a joke, dude.
Behind Norman, the clinking of mugs and breath of the cappuccino steamer are drowned out by the sounds of a greaser guitarist with Carl Perkins eyebrows, tuning his instrument through an amplifier.
“But even now, really, if a place wanted to do it, they could, legally. As long as they had a fucking business license,” Norman continues, raising his voice over the plucking of the G string.
He tells us: even these “legal” businesses have a history of being shut down via prosecution, only to reopen some months later, only to be shut down again.
“The paperwork is on our side and the paperwork is against us,” Norman says, referencing the various licenses needed to grow and sell medical marijuana either to, or from, a dispensary.
As a result, nobody really knows—not the police, not Lady Wanda, not the owners of The Verse—what they’re permitted to be doing. Regulations seem to be defined only by individual arrests and court dates. And chances are, a week later, another arrest and court date will contradict the regulations laid out in the one prior.
“Ask Wanda,” Norman says. “It’s all like a big fake fight. It can be a real labor. But there’s desire in labor. There’s desire for the end of desire.”
I wait for a Taoist quote, filtered through the udders of a birthing cow—in short, a typical Normanism—but he simply, for a moment, stares at the backs of his hands.
Norman’s fingers escalate their table-tapping. The Verse’s house band comes to life behind him, forcing the outside street scene to the background. The patrons sip their caffeinated drinks around us. For the moment, The Verse is joint-less.
The guitarist, now in tune, picks a surf melody, deep-frying what is basically medicine-show gospel. He sniffs the air as if missing something. At the microphone, a tall man and tall woman exchange a God-fearing call-and-response, he adorned with a yellow mohawk, she sporting a shaved head. They stick out their tongues, stopping just short of a pornographic kiss. In their mouths, I expect to see piercings, something metallic, but see only soft pink muscle unadorned, teeth so square and white The Verse must offer them a dental plan, or they discovered that rare Clorox toothpaste before it was yanked from the shelves for tasting like sodium hypochlorite. The lead guitarist hides behind Coke-bottle sunglasses and a blue crushed-velvet jumpsuit, a human threesome between Elvis Presley, Billy Graham, and Evel Knievel.
Johanna bobs her head. Norman stops his finger-drumming. Apparently, he wanted to predict the music, not engage it. Despite limiting themselves to the sale of coffee (still legal, for now), The Verse and its house band drip with covert exclusivity. Somehow admitted, I bob my head too. The silent sign of the cult.
The rear of the stained wood stage is occupied by an obese bassist in a cardboard Burger King crown, a dusty drummer, and dustier keyboardist. All three grit their teeth, affecting underbites. Occasionally, the spastic keyboardist leaps from his stool and plays the higher keys with the heel of his silver spray-painted combat boot. His pinky fingernails must be three inches long.
Though we sit near an open window, and the wind and light from the street penetrate the place, The Verse has a decidedly insular feel. Increasingly, I am surprised we didn’t have to utter a password or demonstrate a handshake to get in. Bookshelves lined with broken-spined paperbacks hug the yellowing walls, Joseph Heller sharing space with Danielle Steel. I envision a book cover: Fabio and Joan Collins riding a missile bareback into 1940s Germany.
Candlelit torch-style lanterns protrude from The Verse’s walls. Iron, black, and gothic, the lamps recall human hands forever trapped in painted plaster. The ghosts of The Verse’s bygone dispensary days?
The bar itself is like the tables, the remnants of an ancient poker game on the Day of the Dead. Though merely wood and lacquer, the bar seems in need of an autopsy. We bought our coffees from a girl in her late teens, with blonde dreadlocks and a scowl for anyone without them.
“A latte, please,” Norman ordered.
He turned to us, obviously preparing something, a mischievous delight ballooning in his face.
“What kinda milk?” the girl asked, a husky cruelty in her voice.
Norman’s eyes widened.
“Breast, if possible,” he said, eliciting from her a miraculous open-mouthed smile.
In her teeth, she didn’t have a single filling.
“Whole,” she confirmed.
Onstage, the keyboardist sits on the keys, bouncing along from the low frequencies to the high, his tailbone doing the dirty work. We watch from our table, and outside the window, the surreal product of the marijuana harvest continues to breathe. A teenager walks past and shows us his armpit. He’s followed by a twentysomething woman who flashes her abnormally long and triple-pierced tongue. Norman begins drumming on the tabletop again.
“Delicious,” Johanna says to the passing woman.
“Mmm-haaa-aaa,” Norman laughs, embarrassed or not, I can’t tell.
We’re quiet for a while—four surf-gospel songs’ worth of silence. The madness unspools around us like a solar system, but at this heavy table, I feel fixed. One of its legs. One of its screws. Johanna is fixed with me, and Norman trails after his own orbit as if on a dog sled. The weird music becomes commonplace, another footnote in the Encyclopedia Californnica.
I touch Johanna’s hand under the table. It is warm, and a little wet. When we first dated, she confessed one of her most self-conscious crosses-to-bear was her sweaty palms. I think I may have made a joke about lubrication, something my dad would have said before he stopped saying much after my mom got sick. She looks at me, and in her eyes are the lives we’ve led. Collapsing legs, exposed screws, but a fucking beautiful tabletop somehow sustaining the weight of this bacchanalian meal. In the space between us that stops just short of Norman are my year living in Italy picking wine grapes and mopping cantina floors, my years in Alaska, a portion of which were homeless.
The restaurant where I had been working closed and the winter was coming up. I had to break into the apartment of a seasonal couple, some of the former restaurant’s best customers. While these two spent their winter in a warmer place (Thailand), I commandeered their bedroom, bathroom, kitchen. I used the pots and pans of the people I used to serve—ham and cheese omelets for him, blueberry pancakes for her. Always coffee. I watered their plants and kept the place clean.
For Johanna the space contains the year she spent in Kenya working as a nun at a shelter for teenage prostitutes (the girls there would shoot drugs under their toenails because it was the last place they still had fresh veins); and her work as an au pair for a family in Israel. Their little boy fell in love with her. When she decided to return home to Sweden, the family locked her in (all the doors could be locked from the inside, she said), took her hostage. She had to sneak into the parents’ room after they went to sleep, rummage through the drawers for the keys. She fled to the airport at 2:00 a.m. without any of her things. The customs agent ran his fingers through her hair, looking for miniature explosives.
And then: together in Chicago, this year . . . My mother’s mortality still hangs like tar, even out here in California, in swaths of body paint and Charlie the Mechanic.
I don’t let go of Johanna’s hand. In this scene, teeming with life, immortal as cockroaches, I realize how much I am beginning to crave boring. How good mundane sounds. Because there’s something familial in it!
I think about the purple handkerchief my mom would fold into her blouse pocket when she went to work. I think about that as the keyboardist falls from his stool and back-spins on the stage. I think Johanna and I were consciously trying to enjoy all of this—the music, the street scene, the sleeping in a tent and the dirty shower floors, the fields, The Mausoleum—in such a way knowing that this is as young as we are ever going to be, leaking our carelessness like blood.
In the keyboardist’s back-spin is the nauseous bliss that dizziness can bestow only upon the preteen. This is the maneuver that ends their current song; that allows Johanna’s hand to drop from mine, regaining its own space; that allows Norman to reassert himself.
“Yeah, I used to work these streets,” he says, his voice snaking in from a distance, welling up from the bottom of some canyon in some desert where the wild daisies have just opened for their yellow, week-long lives.
“You did?” Johanna asks.
On the sidewalk, Norman would set up a barley twist French desk from the nineteenth century. He would sit behind it in a gilt Edwardian armchair, advertising his services.
“Faking antiques,” he confirms, as the house band launches into a tongue-in-cheek 1950s doo-wop tune.
People would bring to him various items—jewelry, pottery, furniture, paintings, picture frames, lamps. For a fee, Norman altered the appearance of these items, allowing them a false age: antiques for the dupable. The consultation, wherein a payment plan and timeline were laid out, was free.
“You know,” Norman explains, “sometimes people would have to drop things off and pick them up days later. It all depended: How long you hold it in the fire, how you rub duck shit into it, driving with the fan . . .”
His voice trails off as the band croons an irreverent “sh-bop, sh-bop” in unison. Johanna and I look at each other again. This time, we’re both picturing Norman hunched over on the bank of some inland pond, shoveling duck shit into a plastic shopping bag . . . for his business.
The bald female singer throws her arms over her head and flits around the stage like a baby bee. A few customers raise their coffee mugs to her. She is evil and elvish. Like Norman. Like his old job.
“Didn’t the police, um, have something to say to you about that?” Johanna asks him.
“Sure,” he says. “They tend to do that. But this whole industry has to deal with that as a part. You can’t have it both ways, though people tried. I mean, even Julia Child was a sexual omnivore. Mm-haa-aaa.”
“Really?” I ask.
“Dude,” Norman shrugs.
“You have balls,” Johanna says.
“Wanda has the balls,” he counters. “But we have to face the fear of being introduced to something else.”
Behind us, at the bar, the sound of glass breaking, the blonde dreadlocked girl screaming, “Shit!”
Unmiked, she’s still louder than the band.
Norman turns to me.
“This fear, dude,” he says. “Ask your mother. It’s all this twice-cooked Buddhist shit. The reality is: our generation has long been preparing for death.”
I think of my mom’s purple handkerchief, folded neatly into a triangle or diamond. I think of her folding it.
Johanna has this book on Color Theory. I remember her telling me that purple can signify romance and nostalgia, or gloom and frustration. I remember telling her that the author should make up his mind.
The music onstage swells, penetrates the back of my neck and stirs me to chills. I feel like we are waiting it out here, purgatory as sock-hop, masked with a combat boot. Norman smooths his beard. Johanna tries to find my hand under the table again but only bumps along the iron legs, a dragonfly trying to find its way through a window screen.
My heart beats and I think of my mom kissing us goodbye as we left for California, our car sparsely packed, her body like chicken bones in a wool sack. I wonder about all that she put into that goodbye. How heavily packed it was. I picture her waving in the side-mirror to a chorus of surf gospel—the waves that washed away God. She goes inside the house where my dad is watching a Sopranos rerun, pets Kodiak, and opens the refrigerator door. She does all the food shopping. In it is everything she expects.
The female singer rasps, “I’m just a pris’ner!” and Norman stops smoothing his beard.
“What do I know, dude?” he asks me, trying to diffuse some sort of unticking bomb, trying to make an antique of me. And I feel it: Johanna and I have been dropped off at Norman’s old desk. Surely, we have already been faked.
I smile and shrug.
“I’m not sure,” I say.
“I do know that in a past life, I was a walrus,” he says.
I laugh; he confirms my impression of him as a formerly large mammal.
“Or Achilles,” he continues, “bathing in some woman’s bellybutton . . . Mmm-haa-aaa.”
Johanna laughs, sips her coffee, lots of cream, lots of sugar. In her mug-bound decadence, I take a bit of refuge, try to find my old self, anything that’s still genuine. I allow Weckman Farm, which seemed so overwhelming when we arrived, to render the rest of the world unmanageable. I decide to believe Thoreau for one more afternoon. From Norman, to Johanna, to the band, to the Slip ’n Slide Man, this town is a puzzle smashed, the pieces cut or burnt.
Like a flipbook of mug shots, I picture the faces of the picking crew, a strange anchor in this stranger sea. Crazy Jeff morphing into Gloria into Lance into Ruby into Bob into Hector into Charlie; shirtlessness merging with a windbreaker. Norman and Johanna smile at one another, slowly becoming friends. It’s fun to watch.
We sip our coffee and talk of the farm, the female singer now riding the microphone stand like a hobbyhorse. Carved into The Verse’s ceiling, grinning cherubs protest their imprisonment in plaster. The singer antagonizes the obese bassist with her steed, while the lead guitarist unlocks the gates of heaven with surfboard wax and a stolen credit card. As he rips his Pacific solo, Johanna and I finally, and vocally, flesh out our own rumors. We tell Norman some specifics of our time in Chicago, our journey to Weckman, the uncertainty of our lives after harvest season. We talk in order to regain something, even knowing that whatever it is has been forfeited for good.
“Reincarnation, dude,” he says to us.
Johanna exhales out her nose.
“That’s a joke.”
“Oh,” Johanna and I say in unison, but neither of us forces the laugh.
“There’s no right decision,” he continues. “We go along polishing the spoon, folding the napkins, folding the napkins, folding the napkins, then a flood of tears. Emotion is in formal repetitive experience, dude.”
We go quiet.
Norman finally says something about how Tristan Tzara invented Dadaism after a brioche missed his mouth and went up his nose, “striking him with the nonsense of the world.”
The song ends. The singer says something about Jesus reincarnated as a moth, always flitting toward the light of us fuck-ups. I think she’s trying too hard. But she, too, has a load to carry, and she’s doing it creatively.
The dusty drummer answers with a pound on his snare. He pops something into his mouth and bravely swallows it with bottled water.
“Repetitive experience,” Norman repeats. “Wanda comes from three generations of tobacco farmers. And she carries it on. Repetitive experience.”
He pauses. The band has yet to begin a new song.
Finally, he cracks his knuckles and says to the cherubs, “Confucius: boo! Aristotle: boo! They weren’t even great assholes. Those guys could have learned from her. Wanda, I mean. They were looking for gold in the wrong room. They should have been on the farm . . . or in the kitchen.”
He turns from the ceiling to us. We smile again, and drain our coffee. The music goes on as we step from The Verse, the guitar driving the life on the sidewalk, the sun farther west. The tabletop tarot cards hold silent, keeping their secrets to themselves, specimens on a slide, but without the microscope. As we walk toward Norman’s Jeep, the warmth from our finished mugs still clings to our hands.