This is the second part of High Roller Blues. The first part can be found here.
Six days, five motels, four seafood dinners and three parking tickets later, we pulled up to the archery range at the park in the middle of the city like we had been told. Jablow was prepared, having just been wired two grand from a buddy back in Tucson.
It was going down.
We parked quietly, killed the lights, turned on some Hendrix and busted out the last nugget of Humboldt in our possession. Jablow surgically picked it out of the film canister, and then, shaking his head, looking like his beloved Shih-Tzu had just been steamrolled by an 18-wheeler, rolled the last joint. I offered optimism in light of imminent disaster. “Hey, as long as Diamond shows up, we won’t have any worries, right?” Lasky was smoking a cigarette and looking out the window, silent. Jablow hissed and shook his head some more.
Suddenly, we were saved. A battered royal blue Subaru wagon pulled in next to us and out walked whom we assumed to be Diamond, a smallish, frail, withdrawn character with dark eyes, Ronnie Wood hair, a plaid shirt and shit-kicker boots. He talked slowly, carefully selecting his words, enunciating them clearly, making sure to be soothing and gentle all the while, like he’d been living on a commune for the last three decades and we were his family, his brethren.
We spent an hour with Diamond and learned that we didn’t have to drive him to Eugene and that he had three ounces of “Kelly,” one ounce of “the Meech,” and an eighth of an ounce of the ultimate, as he explained:
“The Pure Rick.”
While sampling the Kelly, a normal bud but three times as large, sparkling emerald green, smelling like a mixture of skunk and Toblerone, Diamond sermoned us on the epic importance of this particular moment in our lives.
“I used to work for Kelly,” he said. “She grows this stuff. Dude, she has the killest setup. I would clip for her, and by the end of the day, we’d take all the clipped buds off the tray. Then we’d scrape the tray, and it would be solid THC crystals — the ‘keef.’ Let me put it this way: You can’t be enrolled in college courses and smoking keef. It just doesn’t work.”
Lasky was intrigued. “What about the Meech,” he asked, impatiently, like a kid nagging his own father. Diamond shrugged and laughed. “It’s pretty good, too, dude,” he said. “You guys are scoring big-time here. You don’t even realize that the best bud of all is the one you haven’t asked about.”
He was referring, of course, to the Rick. The Pure Rick.
Jablow cut in. “Dude, the best bud of all is right there, in my future,” he said, inspired, proudly pointing at the five live plant starts and jar full of cuttings in the cardboard box at Diamond’s feet.
Everybody was smiling. If there had been a campfire, we would have gathered around it. Diamond spoke, the lighter flashing his features at us, on and off.
“As Oregon legend has it, there was once a transient guy named Rick who lived in a wood cabin near Lake Oswego, not too far south of here,” he said, with well-rehearsed ghost-story cadence. “Rick was connected with a twenty-generation grower, who produced one plant way back when that started the cloning process that we have today.”
I wondered if I should have started taking notes. He was engaging and informative. He went on.
“Somewhere down the line, the Rick strain got mixed with the Seattle Blue and some Government-13, maybe even some Skunk No. 1, and it got polluted. Not that it wasn’t killer, because it was.
“But this my friends, is the Pure Rick, the lost strain. He told me himself.”
And so went Diamond, our prophet, our guru. Jablow thanked him, shook his hand and slipped him the dough in one deft motion. A few quick flashes, maybe even a bolt of lightning over Mount Hood, and we parted our ways.
But his words were our gospel and we rejoiced into the night, quaffing raspberry wheat microbrew at a Grateful Dead pub and trading grunge lingo with the locals. Not only did we have the best pot in town, we had three strains of it, and nowhere to go but home. We’d check out Seattle some other time.
***
Snaking our way at twenty miles per hour over snow and ice through the pass that leads over the Siskiyous on the way out of Oregon and into California, then cruising over the rain-slicked path of the Interstate plowing its way through yellow farmland, blowing fifty or so bong hits a day into each other’s faces with the windows closed, we were loving the road trip scene.
We played every Beatles album in succession. We discussed Pink Floyd lyrics at intellectual lengths. We dried out the Kelly buds by sticking them to the defroster vent.
Late one night, still in the middle of California, maybe 150 miles from San Francisco, Jablow was driving, stoned off his ass, singing along to Dire Straits.
I saw the sign that read “No rest area for 67 miles” and cursed my luck, knowing there wouldn’t be a hotel for a while, pumping my imaginary brake from the backseat while Jablow tailgated the left-lane pussies. And then he was on us. Like a magnet.
All I saw was lights and I knew: CHP. Instantly, my car became an obstacle course, filled with things that needed to be stowed away in some hidden compartment. Now.
I fumbled for the jar that had four or five quarter bags packed neatly inside. I jammed it under the front seat.
Lasky was asleep in shotgun. Jablow yelled, “Fuck!” and hit the steering wheel before pulling off onto the shoulder. Lasky, awake, aware, whispered, “We gotta hide this shit,” but by then I knew it didn’t matter.
Officer Haywood, Sergeant Wonderful, prowling the highways of America in search of the dregs like us. He introduced himself to Jablow proudly, and brought him back to his car. Tall, slim, face as rigid as his hands — he was not fucking around.
We were bathed in spinning blue and red light as Lasky turned to me, lit a cigarette, cracked the window slightly and said, “Dude, we’re in big trouble.”
I was somewhere else, observing the quiet peace of raindrops starting to cascade down my half-open window, shivering and laughing and crying inside. The red and blue light seemed to escalate by the second and the cold air seeped in and enveloped the car, which still smelled like a small Costa Rican plantation.
Somehow I regained enough sight and sound to remind him:
California’s marijuana laws are lenient, we’ll be fine, in fact, the cop hasn’t said why Jablow should talk to him anyway, it could just be a speeding ticket, we’ll be fine, maybe he noticed the tail light I busted two days ago in a hotel parking lot baseball throwing incident, we’ll get good lawyers, we’re good kids, maybe he’ll just give him a warning like the time I got one in El Centro that time, we’ll be fine …
I was fending off a diarrhea blast of seismic force. But we’d be fine.
Haywood came back to the car with Jablow in cuffs. Jablow, his ten-point buck, just waiting for the roast out back. He took us all out, cuffed us, sat us gently on the wet and frigid asphalt, spouting concern for the well-being of our coccyx bones, or something like that. None of us spoke.
***
“Do you think I’m a scumbag,” I asked of the officer driving me into metropolitan Los Banos for booking on charges of felony possession of over four ounces of marijuana and felony transport and/or sale of marijuana. I had a sudden need for someone to hear what I was saying and respond to it, that even though I was handcuffed and wholly busted, I could be recognized as a human being.
“No,” he answered.
I needed to talk to somebody, anybody. But that fleeting desire melted away when I heard over the radio. “Yes, we’ve got a sizable drug bust on south-bound I-5, we have a 1988 BMW 735i, green, New Jersey license Victor David Victor Niner Four Niner, owned by Martha Lander.”
My mother. My car. Her car, actually.
I was in big trouble.
Prints, mug shots, booking. The whole time assuring every officer around us that we were good kids, that we never did anything wrong, that we wanted good pot so we didn’t have to buy it off the streets, that we would never, ever dream of selling it, that we were in college, looking for jobs, graduating. We were clutching for hope and not finding any.
They had made me remove my baseball cap when we got popped. I had been wearing that hat over a head that was two weeks late on a haircut and hadn’t seen a shower in entirely too long. I went to get a drink and looked in the mirror.
I was greasy, dirty, completely unkempt: a true scumbag.
And then they threw us in jail. Into a cell with one guy they said was on heroin, rolled up fetally in a wool blanket on top of a who-knows-what-soaked mattress with a thin sheet in between. They threw us our sheet and blanket. I wanted to vomit but there was nothing in my stomach. My buzz was gone, too.
Jablow, also booked on DUI charges, stared at the wall. I asked, “Are you alright, man?” His eyes were blank. He didn’t answer.
Lasky, head buried in hands, shook and cursed. All we knew was that we would be arraigned the following morning and that we were in a town where public defenders show up, according to Officer Haywood, “only every once in a while.”
I looked at the concrete walls, the bars, the two bunk beds, government-issued, serial numbers somewhere, I was sure. I gazed at the sleeping junkie, spitting yawns into his blanket.
I looked over at the steel toilet, all one piece, facing whomever would be sleeping on the bottom left bunk, and I cried. Like an orphaned infant stranded in a field, I cried.
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Wait…then what happened?!
Rape.