The hotel turned out to be old and beautiful and we were told there was a wonderful restaurant just across the canal. As we were unpacking, my wife asked me if I had a light for her cigarette. I didn’t, as I hadn’t wanted to lose yet another lighter to US Customs.
But as I was going through my valise, I found a match box I didn’t remember bringing along, and I handed it to my wife, who opened it and said, “What the hell is this?!”
It turned out to be packed tight with pot. Then, looking in my shoulder bag, I found a rolled joint, along with a roach or two. Of course, we were safe in Amsterdam, a city that has been attracting pot smokers for years. But needless to say, the businesspeople with whom I was meeting in Antwerp would not have looked kindly upon me if I had missed my plane out of JFK or was stopped entering Belgium because of a drug violation. Once again luck was on my side—or in this case, ignorance was bliss.
(Rule #10 or 11 [I’ve lost count]: Unpack your bags before loading up for another trip!)
But here’s a fact, the truth, whatever you want to call it. I am a man of serious aches and pains, an actual condition that has impeded my walking, and pot is my medicine. I swear. I could no more walk the cobblestone streets of Europe than I could walk on air, something the drug makes possible. Should I move to California, or better yet, Washington or Colorado? Maybe. The only problem is getting there. Plane? Train?
And then there was the time I found four kilos of cocaine on a beach in Miami. But that’s another story for another time.
Happy traveling!
T
HAD
Z
IOLKOWSKI
is the author of
Our Son the Arson
, a collection of poems, the memoir
On a Wave
, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award in 2003, and
Wichita
, a novel. In 2008, he was awarded a fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His essays and reviews have appeared in the
New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Artforum, Travel
&
Leisure
, and
Index
. He directs the writing program at Pratt Institute.
jacked
by thad ziolkowski
The rental’s GPS declares with satisfaction that I have reached my destination but all I can make out, along both sides of the road, is scrub and evergreens. Which might be funny if I weren’t so sleep deprived and cranky. With the canceled connecting flight in Salt Lake City, it’s taken two days to get here instead of one.
Assuming I’m here. Finally, in the shadow of a spruce (or fir or larch or whatever) I spot the mailbox and cattle gate my brother described. I get out of the car, unhitch the rope keeping the gate closed, walk the gate open, get back in the car, and drive through onto the dirt road on the far side. Then I get out and close the gate, rehitching the rope, and get back in the rental. At which point a phrase from Marx comes to mind: The idiocy of rural life.
The dirt road has a strip of mossy grass running up the center and seems cut into forest primeval. Ever since he quit following the Dead around, Justin has lived in outposts like this. We’ve seen each other three times over the past fifteen years and if I hadn’t visited him—once in Alaska, twice in Kauai—we likely wouldn’t have seen each other at all. But he’s eleven years my junior and I’ve always felt a parental sort of obligation to meet him more than halfway, to shrug off the unanswered e-mails and unacknowledged gifts. Until recently he’s been too broke, working in restaurants, then as an apprentice cabinetmaker, to afford trips to New York. (I’ll pass over in silence the bluegrass festival he somehow managed to attend in Kentucky.) But the fact is, I’ve been only marginally less poor myself all these years, endlessly adjuncting and paying off student loans, and I’ve gradually gotten fed up with the asymmetry of things between us.
As the car crests a rise, the house appears swathed in fading milky sunlight, a modern two-story, familiar from photos, the wide rolling lawn and guest cottage. Half a dozen pickups and cars are parked in the upward-sloping driveway. A barn in the distance, a greenhouse. Dirt bikes and an ATV in the side yard. I know how recent and precarious this prosperity is, but seeing the spread in person releases a shot of envy mixed with something like shame that prickles my cheeks unpleasantly. The contrast with my monastic room in the group loft on Manhattan’s Avenue D is just too stark. I’m possessed by an impulse to back down the driveway and slip away before I’m noticed, somehow call the whole thing off from afar.
But Justin emerges grinning from the two-car garage. He’s cut short his long hair and shaved off his beard and looks, in T-shirt and jeans and work boots, younger than thirty-five but more plausibly proprietary. Getting out of the rental to greet him, I smile through my baser emotions and as we embrace they fall away—for the most part. Holding him, feeling the physical reality of his shoulders and back and head, is soothing and bracing in an elemental way I can’t seem to retain between visits. Which is the point of visits, especially now: our mother is dead, our brother, Justin’s father. We’re all that’s left of our immediate family.
“Man, sorry about the canceled flight,” he says. “What a drag!”
“Not at all—I got to hang in decadent Salt Lake City for the night.”
He laughs in the coughing way he has, meanwhile pulling back to search my face. “Hey, wanna check out the garden before it gets dark?”
“Not really.”
He stands squinting at me uncertainly.
“Jesus, I’m kidding!” I say. “Of course I want to see your precious garden!”
Justin delivers a half-speed martial arts kick to my rib cage and I’m reminded that if he winds up going to prison he’ll be able to defend himself. He leads the way to the acreage behind the house and a pair of Australian sheep dogs I also know from photos falls into step with us—handsome but on the small, mellow side for guard dogs, at least compared to the New York pit bulls I’m used to. Irrigation lines run along ground littered with white plastic buckets, torn bales of hay, shovels, pitchforks.
We come to a kind of signboard affixed with what turns out to be ten or so medical marijuana certificates, each in its own plastic envelope: Patient, Caregiver, Registry Number, State Seal. They look like play money. The plants themselves are just beyond, enormous, bushy things wrapped in green plastic skirts, the bud-heavy stalks held aloft by lengths of twine tied to stakes. Beyond the pot, the forest primeval again, where night has already fallen.
It’s obvious at a glance that there’s more here than these notional ten patients could smoke in a lifetime, which I knew was the deal, but the surplus is so flagrant that my surprise must show.
“It’s the backbone of the local economy, so the sheriff’s not gonna touch it,” Justin says. “And the feds are busting people with forty thousand plants, not forty.”
I nod as if reassured, but to my big-brother ears this sounds pat, like someone else’s words.
“Mold and thieves is what you worry about,” Justin says now, as if to add realist heft. I follow along as he makes a quick tour of the patch, pointing out the stumps of ten plants harvested a week ago.
“What about those thieves?” I ask. There’s no perimeter fence that I can see. In addition to being suddenly colder, it’s also gotten spooky out here, evergreens in thrusting, spiky silhouette against the midnight-blue sky, psychedelic foliage whispering in a rising breeze. Relatively small or not, this patch must be worth over a million. Past my mind’s eye flickers an image of Mexican cartel soldiers slipping balaclavas over their heads.