High Roller Blues (Part I), by Tom Dinard

Lasky, Jablow and I were fraternity brothers in the days when it was actually cool to be in a fraternity, when there were 110 kegs of Meister-Brau at every shindig, when Jose Cuervo was a weekly companion, when forced vomiting was a shared, almost revered ritual. We laughed at the world.

We were the legends of the group, the biggest partiers. We hadn’t paid our house dues in four or five semesters and didn’t plan to. We were too good for communal male bonding. We wanted our own showers. So we bought out our leases in the sickly, crumbling-from-the-inside house called the “bunghole” and headed north, about a mile, to a condo called paradise.

The three of us were beyond any parental control there, tucked away in our vaulted ceiling/wood floor/track lighting loft in La Jolla. And we were pros. We ate out. We drank only import bottles. We had relatively new foreign cars, covered parking, shitloads of cash, cases full of classic rock CDs, and enough high-potency marijuana to cover a Little League infield.

We’d wake up, pull three or four loads of California greenbuds through the foot-and-a-half glass bong on the table in the living room, decide not to go to classes, pull two or three more to whet our appetites, and then argue lunch. After lunch, we’d smoke some more dope to calm the digestive tract, and then we’d watch some more TV and smoke some more.

Picasso had the cubes, Pollock had the splash and Van Gogh had the swirls. But to us, a true artistic masterpiece was a freshly cut and manicured purplish green indica bud glazed with white THC crystals and sprouting orange hairs out of the neatly folded leaves.

We stuck the buds to walls, we stared at them in their Ziplocs for hours, we put them in film canisters to retain their skunk pungency and dampness, and then we smoked them until we couldn’t speak. And then we had to buy more.

Getting high wasn’t the reason — it was a mere bonus. We smoked the best because we could afford the best. We laughed at friends when they brought over the various strains of Mexican “hay” or brown, homegrown $40-a-quarter dirt. We only wanted “the kill,” and we’d only spend $100 or more per bag. We had class. We were schooled in etiquette and style way beyond our years. We were smoking what our parents would be smoking if they smoked.

Occasionally, I’d cringe, thinking what would happen if Mom really did have a surveillance system tapped into my living room, my car, whatever. The things she’d see. She’d lump me in with all the Humble Pie jean-jacket wearing stoner scumbags and pull me by the nuts back to Jersey. She’d make me wait tables and wander around some community college three nights a week in search of lost credits and maybe even a clue. It was better not thinking about it at all.

***

Jablow started his own space-age cultivation module in my closet. Electronic timers, plastic tubes stucking out of every orifice of the see-thru mini-greenhouse. He was serious. “Dude, in six months, you’re gonna be lovin’ life,” he said after accidentally unplugging his Feed-A-Tron, cutting off all electricity in the house, blanking my computer monitor and erasing 17 unsaved pages of my paper on the poetry of Hopkins. And I didn’t punch a hole in the wall or even yell at him. I just opened that huge book and started over. Why? Because I believed him.

Jablow was the lovable burnout — blue-eyed, short, stuck in a Nutrition major, pushing the middle of his fifth year, still needing maybe two more, attempting to decipher compound constructions with eyes as red as Grenadine, trying to sell enough “product” to pay off his loans.

And he was making money. A lot of it. Lasky and I didn’t ask how much. We didn’t pay enough attention to find out specific details. It was better off that way, anyway. It would never come down. We were smart, good-looking, white, and well-connected. The law would only take the real scumbags away. They’d seize our stash, probably smoke it or sell it, and then slap our wrists. Yes, the foundation of this country was still built around fairness. We’d get off easy. But it would never come down.

Besides, every time we went to the most expensive restaurant in town and each downed a bottle of forty-dollar Cab with dinner, or any time we found ourselves without enough cash to go buy Malomars or shampoo or a highlighter pen, Jablow would just peel off a twenty, throw it in our direction, and then mumble something about “chalking it up to the D.T.,” or Drug Trade.

Worry hardly crept into our secure pleasure dome, but still I hopped out onto the balcony those nights the helicopters hovered over the nearby park. I could almost make out the steel tentacles that would scoop us into the belly of the flying prison, but then they’d fly past our corner, scan the grounds with their lighted feelers, and then buzz away into the mist.

Lasky, the thinker. Five-nine, 110, even after scarfing a Wendy’s triple with cheese and Biggie fries combo. With those dimensions, he had to be a thinker, I guess. Flowing brown hair, that serious inward stare permanently stamped on his face, Lennon specs, comatose demeanor, he had all the moves. And he got the girls. But Annie and Jane and Maria — or was it Marla? — weren’t coming with him this Christmas break. It was a designated “sausage hang.” Behind his forced silence, I knew he was happy. Me? I was along for the ride, period. I couldn’t accurately determine when I’d graduate or if I’d graduate and I didn’t care.

Somehow the three of us were going to drive all the way up the coast to Seattle and look for possible job opportunities for the near future, when we’d all be graduates, to get the pulse of the town, to explore a remote corner of the United States just booming with opportunity and prosperity. That’s what we told our parents, anyway.

Along the way, we were to spend a short amount of time in Portland to procure as much of the best quality herb we could find. After that we’d come home and take our sweet time polishing it all off.

We got the obligatory oil change, air in the tires, and we were off, me driving my Beemer, only pausing every fifteen minutes or so along the winding coast highway to pull off the road in a “Turn Out” area and get high among the redwoods.

Later in the evening, when we finally hit the Interstate, a system was discovered: While driving, I could hold our six-inch plastic road bong to my lips and the shotgun guy would light it. This worked perfectly.

We found ourselves meandering up the road north, windows closed, all-night session in action, armed with a dwindling eighth of the Humboldt County, California, “kind” bud and the phone number of the most respected grower in all of Oregon. How did we get the number? No need to ask. We had that kind of pull.

The first step to hooking up with the ganja was meeting Wallace, our Portlander school neighbor who was home for the holidays. He knew the hippies, the tie-dyed, Birkenstocked “crunchers” who made their living growing and selling the Oregon “death bud.” Wallace informed us that we’d have to wait until later that day, so we went hoofing around the city.

Wondering why everyone in the city was walking slowly, why we couldn’t tell if the smell flooding the streets was freshly brewed java or freshly clipped cannabis, Wallace explained, “Everyone in Portland is stoned all the time. Turn on a Blazer game, dude. I bet seventy-five percent of the crowd was partying up until about 15 minutes before tip-off. Everyone smokes the kill up here.”

So there it was, all the justification we needed for the holding of a soon-to-be clandestine rendezvous with the bohemian Oregon underbelly and the unloading of over five thousand dollars on a plant. That’s when Wallace sprung it on us.

“Guys,” he said later that afternoon while pulling ferociously on one of our last cigar-sized joints. “Sit down. We need to talk.”

His friend, Diamond, needed a ride down to Eugene later that week. If we were willing to drive the 100 miles south, Diamond would gladly connect us with as much fluffy green, stinky, “sticky icky” as we could fit in my car. Lasky and I smiled at each other. The bud-tasting tour of the Willamette Valley had arrived. Jablow was fretting, though.

“Wallace,” he said, “I want some clones and cuttings, man. See if Diamond can hook us up with that.” Lasky, always pondering, shot me a “What the fuck?” look and quickly asked, “Jablow, what do you need that for?” Jablow smiled, his glassy eyes casting the midday light on the room.

“Dude, if we get these clones and I get them started in the Phototron, we’ll never have to buy pot again!” Lasky and I beamed at each other, realizing we should never have doubted him.

To be continued…

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