Читать книгу Ganja Tales - Craig Pugh - Страница 3

You’re staring at the western sky on the night I’m describing, watching the sun sink in a glorious melting sprawl of red, purple and orange, and you’re thinking: You know, life can be pretty good.

And if you’re lucky like I was you have a friend to drink a pint with and smoke a joint with, too; and you’re sitting at an outside table like one at Joe’s Brew House in Denver just as Mark and I were doing that night.

Mark fished a joint from his pocket and slowly spun it around with his fingertips, smoothing it for proper smoking while the sun set itself in darkness. Then click! Mark lit the joint and at the moment the flame sprang to life it lit up an older fellow sitting behind us against the wall. Sitting there all by himself he was. Mark saw him before I did.

“Dude!” he exclaimed. “You scared the shit out of me! Where’d you come from?”

I turned and saw a thin man about fifty-five years old with long, wavy-blond gray hair brushed back over a worrisome-looking face. He was plainly dressed like the rest of us in blue jeans, tennis shoes and T-shirts but stood out in that his skin was ghostly pale like that of a person who hadn’t seen sunlight in years.

Or perhaps he was just recovering from an illness.

His high cheekbones, deep eye sockets and wiry eyebrows along with a fine, prominent nose gave him the look of a wise old bird – an owl or an eagle, I suppose. And I never thought of blue as a painful color until I found myself staring into his eyes burning like two dark sapphires in his white face.

He spoke then through a slight grin. “Sorry gents. Didn’t mean to alarm you. Slipped in quietly, I reckon.”

And we heard that his voice was one of those voices: whiskey-soaked, barrel-aged; tinged with grief, touched by sadness. It was a great voice.

And I forget which came first – the thunder or the wind – but after he spoke a huge thunder-boomer belched in the distance and came scudding down Larimore Street in a series of ground-shaking rumbles, followed by an icy breeze that roared like a waterfall flying in off the Rockies. Some people went inside and those who stayed turned up collars or pulled hoods over heads.

“What the hell!” Mark exclaimed, hitting the joint a few times and taking a righteous quaff of his hoppy ale. I smoked and found myself looking over at that curious fellow now looking back at me with his smoldering blue eyes.

“Well, you might as well join us if you wish,” I said to him. “I hate to see a man drinking alone.”

His glass was near-empty and we had a fresh pitcher so I pointed to it and added: “We may need some help with this.”

He came over and sat, saying “Thanks, guys.”

I was glad. Nothing makes a fair mood go foul faster than a person who rejects your good will overtures.

And I missed it at the time but, looking back, wasn’t it peculiar that when he sat down with us the wind disappeared and the thunder with it?

“I didn’t mean to stare,” he said, “but it’s just so hard for me to comprehend you guys sitting out here smoking bud and drinking brews.”

“Why what do you mean?” I asked, filling his glass with beer. “It’s always been this way.”

He sat straight up and his blue eyes turned violet-black. “Oh no it hasn’t!” he nearly shouted.

I’m telling you, that dude put a chill in my veins. You could just tell something dark had got ahold of him.

So I thought a minute about what he’d said, and I replied: “Of course, my parents have told me of the times when marijuana was illegal.”

“You bet it was,” the stranger said. “And all the stuff that came with it. So there was nothing, even lights. It’s not like you drove to the store and bought a thousand-watt sodium or halide.”

“Weird,” Mark said. “You need a good light to grow good weed.”

The stranger shook his head in agreement. “Indeed you do,” he said.

We sipped our beers and the glowing tip of the joint bobbed around to each us as we smoked in silence and happiness and the camaraderie of just being there. The stranger said how good the marijuana was and we sat another minute before I asked: “Well, did you grow weed or what?”

He smiled. “Back in the day, me and my buddy had a bullshit growing room with four plants under fluorescent tubes.”

Mark and I looked at each other. I grimaced and he chuckled.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that; well, by today’s standards you had a three G platform.”

“Oh I know,” he said. “But this was a long time ago and I lived in a Republican state where the prisons were overcrowded and you could go to jail at the drop of a hat.”

“I am grateful I was born in Colorado,” Mark replied.

“Me, too!” I added, then asked the stranger where he was from.

“Military brat,” he said. “Then twelve year’s active-duty myself. So I’m from nowhere.”

I asked him where he was born and he said Greeley and I replied Weld County kid, huh?

He said he wished they hadn’t moved when he was two years old so he could remember something about Colorado, but he didn’t.

“You live here now?” Mark asked.

“Just got here. We’ll see.”

I told him: “Welcome back to Colorado, friend,” and he nodded appreciation while I poured more beer into his glass. I’m telling you there was something curious about that guy. So I asked him if he ever did score a decent growing light and he said sorta and I said what’s ‘sorta’ mean?

He closed his eyes and shook his head back and forth slowly and his lips drew inward, as if tasting a bitter memory. “Well,” he finally said. “If you fellas got a minute I’ll tell you a good old-fashioned marijuana story.”

I looked at Mark who shrugged and said: “I ain’t going anywhere.”

Neither was I. The moon was rising in the sky. Pretty girls were walking by. Me? Content, my friend. Very content. The joint went round a time or two and as we sat and drank our brews we saw the old fellow trying to begin his story. He stared off long and hard into space until finally he got to a place in his head where the movie camera started playing some of it for him.

“Go back thirty-five years ago, before you guys were born,” he said, “to Omaha, Nebraska. I was putting up roof with Eddie. He was foreman of the crew and my roommate.”

Mark interrupted. “I only ever heard of people leaving Nebraska -- not going there.”

“And for good reason,” the stranger replied, adding: “Don’t ever catch me in Nebraska again, or up on a roof. That is some hot damn work.”

But there he was, he said, in Omaha with Eddie the roofer. Eddie was a daredevil. He rode a loud and noisy dirt bike on city streets, skydived on weekends and drove an old green Chrysler with the words NO FEAR emblazoned in a raw slash across the trunk. He wasn’t the brightest bulb. He just had a lot of guts, a bad muffler and a leaky damn water pump.

“Man, that guy was always up to something. And everything he did was held together by chewing gum, baling wire and duct tape,” the stranger said.

Then he chuckled.

“But by God -- never a dull moment! Ready Eddie – that’s what we called him.”

Mark pulled out another joint and fired it up. “So what happened to ol’ Eddie?” he asked.

The stranger took a long, steady pull from it and exhaled slowly, enjoying the smoke.

“That’s some really nice weed, guys,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

He was a friendly sort and we sure didn’t mind talking with him as we were now anxious to hear his story.

Well, he says, Eddie had his eye on a thousand-watt halide high on a pole lighting up Fire Station No. 5 on the western edge of town. That light shined like the sun out there in the wee hours of the morning – lit up the whole damn parking lot. How he was ever going to shimmy up that pole and get the light down after he disabled it was beyond me. You have to understand the times, he continued. If you wanted to grow, you had to go out and get a light by hook or by crook.

“I had friends who snagged all four of the thousand-watters lighting the university bell tower,” he laughed. “University cops chased them all the way off campus. We thought that was cool as shit. Put the whole damn bell tower in darkness. Screw that college. Took all my money to get a degree and I couldn’t find a job.”

I pondered that this Eddie guy was one of those original growers from back in the day that you hear about every so often. How crazy was that? I topped our glasses off and leaned forward. “So,” I asked. “Did you and Eddie get that light?”

“Goddamnit!” he exclaimed. “I told Eddie not to do it. But he wanted that light so badly. He’d say ‘Just think of the size buds we could grow! Buds the size of your fist!’ He had a point. I just didn’t know anything about electricity. Eddie said he did. He said he had it all worked out. He said he would buy a pair of rubber gloves and the biggest loppers he could find and go out all ninja-style one night and cut that light down. That was Eddie. He was always in it to win it and down for a good caper.”

Mark said: “Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound too good.”

“No,” the stranger replied. “It wasn’t. But back then you were either a ganja guerilla or not. And we were down for it. We considered ourselves part of the 420 resistance.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Yep,” the stranger continued. “Times were sure different. And Eddie . . . he just had to have that light. That thousand-watter was his crack cocaine, the itch he had to scratch.”

He leaned forward and took a long drink of beer from his glass. “Jeez they make good beer nowadays!” he exclaimed, a statement that made me wonder where he’d been. I filled his glass back up.

He then told us how Eddie started researching how a typical municipal electrical grid worked. Eddie was already somewhat of an electrician and he could damn sure throw up a roof in a hurry. Handy, that’s what he was. Then one night after supper out of the blue Eddie says he’s gonna try and get the light tomorrow night.

“And I says to him: Eddie, let’s look at it tomorrow night. We’ll go down and you show me what you wanna do and we’ll talk about the plan. You’re gonna need my help, right?”

Eddie says yes, of course dude.

“So we go down the next night close to midnight. We drive back and forth on the street and I’m taking pictures of the station out the side window. We get back to the house and study the pictures. Eddie shows me his ingress and egress route.

“Eddie,” I says. “I’m worried. You’ll have to cross an open field to get to the light. You’ll be very visible.”

Of course he told me not to be a pussy and balls out is the only way to go.

Then he said tomorrow night was the night and it rolled around like it always does and Eddie’s dressed in black and got his gym bag sagging with weight in hand and he’s standing at my bedroom door.

“Get up dude. We gotta go,” he says.

I says “Eddie, what time is it?”

He says it’s one in the morning.

Mark guffawed. “So it’s one a.m. and you guys are going to go cut the light with loppers?”

“That’s right.”

“Holy shit.”

“Rock ‘n’ roll, dude,” the stranger says. “Balls out and no fear. That was the deal. Live hard, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.”

“If you say so,” I interrupted.

“So here we go,” he continued, explaining how he and Eddie parked in a secluded parking lot behind an apartment complex, got out and crested a small hill. “We crouch behind a row of bushes and look down below us about fifty yards out. Fire Station No. 5 is bathed under one-thousand watts of halide glory, white as the moon.”

“Wouldja look at it?” Eddie exclaimed. “Just look at it.”

“I’m looking, Eddie,” I says. “I’m looking.”

He opened his bag and took out a ski mask, fitted it over his head and adjusted the eye holes. Then he reached back in and pulled out rubber gloves and a huge pair of loppers.

“Holy shit!” Mark said.

To this I added: “Your friend Eddie was nuts!”

“Oh I know,” the stranger said. “And you can be sure I asked Eddie if he was sure about this. Of course Eddie said Hell yeah, Dude, Fuckin’ A and buds as big as your fist. And then he was off, creepy-crawling low and scrambling across the field to the light pole standing on the edge of the parking lot.

“He wasted no time when he got there. Kneeling at the base of the pole, he unscrewed the four screws holding the access plate, then removed it. And there was the electrical cord, that great spinal column of power that brought electricity to the bulb above him.”

The stranger explained how Eddie looked up to the light and got temporarily blinded, then quickly looked back down again, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes.

“The power of that light was incredible for Eddie,” he said. “I couldn’t help but think of Icarus . . . or a moth, perhaps – a moth to the flame.”

He said he then watched Eddie open the wooden lopper handles wide and push the steel jaws into the hole to cut the cord.

“From my vantage point behind the bushes in the distance I held my breath and crossed my fingers, saying Go Eddie go! to myself,” he said.

The stranger paused there and shook his head. “Fuck!” he exclaimed.

“Jeez, Mister,” Mark implored. “What happened?”

“When Eddie cut the cord there was a huge pop like a twelve gauge shotgun blast followed by instant darkness.”

“Holy shit!” I exclaimed.

He paused a moment before going on. “Well, I waited and heard nothing. So I began hollering Eddie’s name. Still hearing nothing, I ran down to the pole, and there was Eddie all passed out. I was shocked that firefighters weren’t streaming out of the station because that light made one helluva noise going off.

“And man, I am like freaking out. So I grab Eddie under the pits and I’m trying to drag him off toward the bushes and I’m not even halfway there and now firefighters are streaming out of the station toward me. Oh, and there’s some cop sirens, too. They’re coming closer and closer.”

“Jeez Louise and Holy Cow!” Mark shouted.

“God damn! That’s a story! I cried, pouring him more beer. “So what happened?”

“Well, you know after all that they were waiting back at my place for me and had torn up the garden. My attorney later said he tried to get me in drug court but the cops had been busting so many growers that drug court was full.”

“So then what?”

His mouth turned to a straight line then and I could almost hear the molars grinding when he shrugged and said, “I had to do three-to-five in the state pen.”

“Wait a minute. How big was your garden?”

“Eddie and I had four vegetative plants about two feet tall each. So I ended up doing a year for each plant.”

“May God have mercy on your soul!” I said. “That’s so hard to believe.”

“It was indeed,” he said. “And days go by so slowly in jail.”

“And those plants hadn’t even flowered yet?” Mark asked.

“Nope.”

“My sweet Jesus,” he said. “I’m growing six plants legally in my basement right now because, you know, Colorado.”

“But didn’t you and Eddie get amnestied with all the other marijuana growers in jail when the Democrats took over?” I asked.

“I wish,” he said. “Remember -- I went down when the Republicans were in charge. The four years were just for the plants. I copped another twenty for Eddie.”

He no sooner said that when the temperature, which had been pleasant, turned cold again; so cold people began filing inside.

But Mark and I were transfixed.

“Eddie?” we asked together.

“I don’t know how many amps Eddie ate that night,” he said. “But I was dragging off a dead man. When the cops got me they charged me with accessory to murder, said I helped kill him.”

“What the fuck!” I exclaimed.

“You fellers get it?” he asked. “I just got out of jail last night. I been locked up for twenty-four years in Nebraska.”

And Mark and I are just freaking out, shaking our heads back and forth.

“Dude, I never heard of anything so unfair in all my life!” I cried.

And then some thunder-boomers bigger than the last ones came thudding down the street again: Boom! Boom! Boom! one after another like a string of bombs rolling over us, and before we could even stand a cold hard rain came tearing down.

I was almost in the door when I heard a huge ke-rack! and turned just in time to see the tree across the street split in two by a lightning bolt, then blown over by one of the strongest winds I’ve ever seen. I’m telling you it just wasn’t natural. Not at all. Trashcans and everything rolling down the street. Windows breaking.

Sure everyone inside was talking about the mess of weather and taking pictures through the windows. I turned in all directions looking for the stranger, but didn’t see him. Maybe he went to the restroom. I could see the door from where I stood, so I kept my eye on it. Guys came and went, but not the stranger.

“Hey Mark,” I says. “Seen that old fellow we were just talking to?”

“I was gonna ask you the same thing,” he replied with mild bewilderment.

“Did we ever get his name?”

“Don’t think so. Don’t believe he ever said.”

So Mark and I sat there wondering if that guy we met existed at all or if we just imagined him out of some kind of stony-ass boredom. I stared at my shoes a good bit before finally saying: “Well this ended up being a strange night.”

Mark said nothing.

I looked up at him. He was still puzzled.

“Mark, I’m not sure what just happened,” I said. “Are you?”

“No.” he replied. “And that old guy . . . he just disappeared.”

“Damn, Dude,” I said. “What’s in this weed we been smoking?”