Las Virgenes wound through the Santa Monica Mountains and Lasky knee-steered his red Celica through it, conducting the symphony of Joe Jackson’s Blaze of Glory with a lit Parliament in his left hand while pointing down hundreds of feet to the canyon below with his right.
“That’s where they filmed all the outdoor scenes to M.A.S.H.,” he said, and I looked and saw the tree-scattered tinderbox, yellowing from summer, hillsides cresting and falling and hiding rivers and coyotes and rattlers and whatever else you’d encounter if you were lost among its wild clutches without a canteen. I could picture the helicopters circling above those dulled peaks on the grainy Zenith of my childhood as the weird theme song about suicide droned on.
“That was supposed to be Korea?” I asked, and Lasky pulled on his smoke, said, “I guess so,” and the conversation drifted off into something much more comfortable, something I knew more about, having never watched much M.A.S.H. and having never been lost in Los Angeles.
We were headed, in the relaxing backward way, to the San Fernando Valley home of one Stan Raye, a man I’d heard about for months. Stan was many things to Lasky: respected elder, erudite instigator, grizzled gardener, reticent raconteur, devoted watcher of tennis on television (with the sound always off and the Beatles, preferably Rubber Soul, always on), and, perhaps most important, pot dealer.
Lasky had been preparing me for this day. “Stan is different,” he would say. “If he likes you, he loves you. Once you’re in, you’re in forever. But he doesn’t let everyone in. I can’t wait to see how you’re received.”
I’d never thought about how I’d be received. By anyone. Through the first twenty-six years of my life, I sat in apartments and didn’t think about anything other than the words that filled the air. It went over just fine. Now I was thinking of how to be seamless, how to not wrinkle an ironed-out existence that a man I’d only heard legends about had forged and foisted upon disciples.
“Stan basically sits on his couch all day, watches TV, listens to music, and hangs,” Lasky said. “Some days he’s really happy. That’s when he’ll open up a community bag and get you high for a few hours. That’s when the conversation is great. Some days he’s in a bad mood, though. That’s when it gets quiet in there. You just sit there, he takes care of you, and you know to just let him dictate the flow of the hang.”
I could deal with it. I’d guffawed in gilded corridors with millionaires and shared Old Milwaukee Light cans hidden in paper bags on panhandle strips of grass at midnight with Tucson freight-hoppers. I was ready, whether Lasky knew it or not.
We pulled up to his house on busy Nordhoff Street in the heart of the Valley. It was a white, one-story dwelling I knew I would soon forget. As Stan opened the door with a wry smile, I noticed that the inside was no better. It reminded me of my first apartment as a member of the work world — carpet, a couch, a coffee table, a bong and nothing else other than a bed, drywall and stucco ceilings. Of course the TV was there, and of course Stan, whose graying side-parted hair, Anglican nose, lithe frame and slight tipsy bounce to his walk, went right back to sitting before it.
I wasn’t about to start talking, but Steffi Graf was playing Arantxa Sanchez Vicario and Stan was drinking out of a large, obnoxious clear tumbler full of Dewar’s and ice and he served up his own verbal volley, a stinger down the line, right at me.
“I want your favorites,” he said, and the searching in my eyes told him to be more specific.
“Your favorite band.”
“Hmmm. Recorded, the Beatles. Live, the Grateful Dead.”
He shook his head, but kept smiling.
“You’re half-right. I only listen to the Beatles. There’s simply no reason to listen to anything else.”
I laughed. He became serious again.
“Movie.”
“Breaking Away.”
“Interesting choice. I haven’t seen it.”
“You should. Immediately.”
He laughed. I looked at Lasky, who was rolling a joint from the Ziploc bag on the table while reclined on the scratchy wool sofa and grinning like a sitcom chimp. I’d never seen him more content.
Stan continued his relentless quest to unearth my soul.
“Actor.”
I needed a moment. I looked at the ceiling. I didn’t have much of an answer. Stan’s dog, a young Bijon Frise named Bosley who needed a bath, hopped up on my lap. Stan laughed some more as I stroked the back of Bosley’s neck.
“I don’t know. Michael Keaton?”
“Really!”
“Well, I loved him in ‘Beetlejuice.’”
Uproarious hysterics from the notoriously reserved Stan Faye, who spit an ice cube halfway to the match, which was stuck on deuce. Whether it was laughing with me or at me, I didn’t care. We were getting a hell of a deal on dope today. I was sure of it.
“It takes a bold man to admit that he loved ‘Beetlejuice.’”
“Thanks, Stan.”
“No, Tom. Thank you.”
The afternoon rolled to evening. Stan showed me the impeccable strip of green in the backyard, a garden separated into bright pockets flowers, ornate rows of blossoming vegetables — he insisted that I take home a baggie of snap peas along with my forty-dollar sack — and well-supported tree starts that he claimed would block the view of the annoying neighbor with the winsome, possibly slutty high-school daughter. He pointed to the shed.
“You want to go inside and check out the setup?” he asked.
“Sure.”
Lasky elbowed me and whispered.
“Dude,” he said, wonder creeping into his eyes. “He’s never shown anyone the inside of the shed. Not even me!”
While staring at the racks of drying buds and the elaborate hydroponic contraptions that lined the tinted greenhouse windows, Stan told me that he left the confines of his home maybe three times every six months — once to refill the tank of his pristine 1974 Mustang, which he would drive to the rare freelance computer-repair job that would pop up, and the other two times to walk the two blocks down the street to stock up on booze and groceries.
Stan rolled his own cigarettes — Drum inside Zig Zag — because it was cheaper than buying packs. He said he was in the Army, spent time in Europe and had sex with a lot of German women. He said he was as excited as he’d been in two decades that a new library was being built right across the street from his house. I looked over my shoulder out the window and saw the cranes.
“I can bone up on my Kafka and my Robinson Jeffers and my Graham Greene,” he said.
“And your Edward Abbey,” I added, and he shrugged.
“Check him out. You’ll love him,” I said, and he nodded, and I knew he would.
We were all high by now, and to Stan’s dismay Steffi had won another one, and he put Revolver in the CD player and tousled the hair on Bosley’s head as the dog slept in his lap.
He leaned behind him and grabbed a wooden box off a shelf. He opened it and a sea of glassine appeared.
“So,” he said. “What’ll it be?”
Lasky took a half and I got a quarter and he escorted us to the door and into the chilly October night. Lasky rolled a joint as soon as we got in the car and told me that I did well, about as good as could have been expected.
Lasky was heading out toward the Pacific through Topanga Canyon and telling me about a little yellow shack on Devonshire called the Munch Box that we’d have to hit the next day. “I get the Double Hic with Cheese,” he said. “And after I eat it, I usually get another.”
I was about to ask him why Stan was the way he was, but I didn’t. Maybe it was because I was hungry and he was talking about burgers and maybe it was because I was stoned and amped up and driving the open road of a new, monstrous city by the ocean where two friends in their twenties could do just about anything they wanted at any moment and I didn’t need to know.
Maybe it was because I already knew the answer.
***
Pass one to Tom Dinard over here, bro:
Past work on FlipCollective.com.
To follow him on Twitter.
To befriend him on Facebook.
