Famous Long Ago, Total Loss Farm, Palm Springs Babylon
, and many other books. An original founder of Liberation News Service in Washington, DC in 1967, he has published articles on the 1960s counterculture in periodicals and anthologies.
Famous Long Ago
was recently reissued in paperback as a college textbook in American history. Mungo lives in Southern California, where he is also a social worker tending primarily to AIDS patients and the severely mentally ill.
kush city
by raymond mungo
GOT KUSH? screamed the green billboard adorned with a sparkling crystallized bud, Humboldt quality, looming over Pacific Coast Highway and Cherry Avenue in Long Beach, California, a thousand miles south of grass country. A bold black 1-800 number was prominently advertised. That was it, no explanation, a freaking ad for reefer, as big as the Ritz. I damn near crashed the Honda hatchback into the car ahead of me. The nation was swirling down the 2008 rabbit hole of depression, panic was in the air, and some old Republican Vietnam War POW who thought marijuana was a gateway drug to heroin was running for president. But this cheerful note lifted my spirits.
I had plenty of pot, but no “kush.” Smoking grass daily since 1963, I used it as a tool for writing, but in fifty years of herbal appreciation never called it kush, and the stuff I got from Charlie was definitely not in that exalted category. Charlie home-delivered rather ordinary shit, but he was reliable, affordable, and always ready. As a fifty-five-year-old sometime jazz musician, he needed the extra green, but he sold the brown. Charlie carried only one variety at a time. The price never changed, but if he thought something was extraordinary, he’d recommend buying ahead. He dispensed professionally sealed packets for fifty bucks. No dickering, no discounts, no scales. Looked like a quarter, but he called it a lid.
Charlie was a nice guy, and I was glad to be free of the lifelong pursuit of fickle dealers, hanging around squalid apartments waiting for delivery, now that I’m an old fart. If the neighbors thought anything of the gray ponytailed beatnik visitor who showed up with some regularity but never stayed more than five minutes, they didn’t comment on it. The pungent aroma of the Mexican rag weed seeped from my front door into the hallway, but I wasn’t the only head in the building. The evangelical Christian on the floor below, who began and ended every conversation with invocations to the deity, more or less smoked all day long and never seemed to go to work. He drove a silver Beemer and had a trophy girlfriend.
“Hey, Charlie, what’s with all these GOT KUSH? billboards popping up everywhere around town?” I ventured.
He just groaned. “It’s driving me out of business, man. All my best customers in Silver Lake have gone legal.” He lived in LA.
“Legal?” What a concept.
“As in medical. You know, with a doctor’s prescription. The dispensaries are everywhere now.”
“They are?” I hadn’t noticed a single one in Long Beach, and anyway, who ever heard of a pot dispensary? “But that’s only for people with AIDS or cancer or some other horrible disease.”
“Nah, man, anybody can get a prescription. You can claim insomnia, migraines, appetite problems, mental stuff, anything, man. You pay the doctor’s fee and you get the prescription. Nobody gets turned down.”
Holy kush. Charlie was either giving our friendship a higher value than his business acumen, or had figured that my loyalty to him would dissuade me from trying this legal maneuver. Probably the latter, although in fact I was just a customer, not particularly a close friend. I was already scheming to get some of this stuff. What did I have to lose? The doctor might find me too goddamn healthy to qualify.
“Mental stuff” reminded me that I had vials of antidepressants and anxiety pills with my name on them, prescribed by my regular physician at the HMO. Never mind that both vials were badly outdated. Mental illness had been documented. I used the antidepressants exactly one day, then ditched ’em because they gave me a strong desire to kill myself. The doc offered to replace them with some other kind of antidepressant but I said, no, I’d rather be a little depressed than suicidal. The anxiety pills came in handy during a six-month stint in France, where pot was hard to find, and they actually helped me tolerate the dreaded cannabinoid withdrawal syndrome, which every daily user knows sets in after ten days of abstinence. The French smoke hash mixed with black tobacco and cured with some kind of poison that always makes me choke.
Coughing is one thing, and actually considered a good sign, but choking is another.
I set up an appointment with the pot doctor at a Medi-Cann clinic on a seedy block of Atlantic Avenue. It cost $110 for the visit, discounted if you happened to be on Medicare or Medicaid, and the operator explained that it was only sixty-five dollars for the annual renewal thereafter. Cash or credit cards were accepted, no checks.
Medi-Cann was a storefront with dirty windows covered by closed Venetian blinds on a block of abandoned retail locations—the only other functioning business, a corner liquor store. The tiny sign on the door gave no indication of the nature of the place, which was hard to find and would have attracted little notice except for the scaggy-looking long-haired young guys smoking cigarettes right outside. I arrived fifteen minutes before the clinic started seeing patients, but the place was already packed, only one forlorn folding chair unoccupied.
The Mayo Clinic this was not, but it might be the Mungo Clinic. Unlike any doctor’s office I’d ever seen, it had no magazines or medical brochures, but rather stacks of advertisements for Long Beach pot dispensaries and specialty marijuana publications, mostly from Northern California, with dispensary advertising from all over the state. Postcards touted twenty percent discounts for new patients, “free” joints, pipes, grams of hash, and rolling papers with a minimum “donation” and “membership.” I crammed a bunch of these into my briefcase and sat down with a Julian Barnes novel from the library.
All the patients in the waiting room were strapping young men in their late teens or early twenties, Testosterone City, except for one old guy in a wheelchair, very talkative, who seemed like a Vietnam vet/panhandler, and an old woman missing front teeth. Of course, you can’t tell just by looking at someone what his or her particular ailment may be, but this roomful of youths could not all be suffering from terminal illness. They joked around loudly, a party going on.
Every five or ten minutes, a young woman in capri pants opened the door to the inner office and called a new patient by name. The nurse or medical assistant, I guessed. Given the number of people crammed in the room and the frequency of her appearances, I assumed there must have been three or four doctors on duty. Nonetheless, by the time I was summoned, it was forty-five minutes past my scheduled appointment. These docs were evidently on Kush Daylight Time.
When the young woman summoned me into the back room, I was startled to find that she was the doctor—Dr. Monica. No nurse, assistant, or other physician was on duty. The office was devoid of trappings associated with medical practice, she never took my blood pressure or weighed me, there wasn’t a stethoscope or even a computer terminal in sight. The room was furnished with a battered wooden desk covered with stacks of files, on which a gooseneck lamp was clamped, and folding chairs for doctor and patient. I produced the vials of outdated pills, which she scrutinized briefly, nodded, and hastily scrawled notes on what seemed to be my chart, but made no comment. She asked only how often I smoked pot, and how—joint, pipe, vaporizer? Every day, for over forty-five years, usually in joints.
“You ought to give yourself a vacation from it for a week or ten days every now and then, give your lungs a break. You’ll also get more value for your money when you do go back to it.”
(Fair enough, I thought, but in fact not gonna happen.) (Except in France.)