A trailer full of pot
I was only there a little over a week when I was offered some work by Zack. He didn’t seem to do much at all but he had people working for him at all sorts of under the table jobs. One of these was delivering cords of firewood. When his regular driver wasn’t available, as it was in no way a steady job, I would fill in, driving a beat-up, mid-sized old truck up the winding, narrow streets in the hills of Oakland to deliver and stack up walls of firewood next to their mansions, then bring him back the money. He never paid me much, usually twenty dollars for a hard day’s work, keeping the other eighty, saying I owed him for my lodgings.
I wasn’t at this but a week or two when he had another job for me. In the backyard of the house there was an equally old, beat-up trailer home, something from the fifties, all aluminum with rounded edges. Into this went his Hungarian friend’s pot harvest. I forget his name. It was unpronounceable. I was directed into this relic along with the two girls from downstairs and another girl, each of us with a pair of scissors to sit and clip all day the buds from the leaves. It wasn’t a bad job, sitting and chatting with the girls, getting a good buzz from just handling so much pot all day long. But his payment policy with us was always the same. He would pop in every few hours to check on our progress, carry off the bags of manicured buds and at the end of each day pay us twenty dollars each and then kindly allow us to keep a little shake for ourselves, in a sandwich bag, while he’d roll up a cigar sized bud for himself and smoke it in front of us, complementing us on our good work.
I think he missed his true vocation in life by not becoming a factory boss in some Soviet-era gulag prison camp.
Anyways, this task lasted about a week and we had many pillow sized bags of leaf when it was over. It was a bumper crop and our overlords were happy. There was a music festival happening in People’s Park at the time and they decided to give away a few bags of the leaf to the people, mostly hippies, gathered there and sitting on the grass, enjoying an afternoon of music. On stage was a very young and talented guitarist, the son of John Fogerty of Credence Clearwater Revival. Zack and I were the distributors of this bounty. We each had a paper grocery bag stuffed with leaf and we walked through the crowd handing out handfuls to anyone who wanted it, and many did. I was handing it out so fast, not even looking ahead, that I inadvertently offered a handful to two uniformed police officers sitting in the middle of the crowd. They smiled at me and nodded ‘no’. I quickly moved on and continued what I was doing, a little shocked. But police back then in Berkeley had a policy never to mind marijuana, the good old days!
Shortly after our pot harvest there happened a rift between Annie and me that brought an end to our relationship, and my days in that house. One of the girls downstairs, in her equally unhappy, lackluster life, resented Annie for having me as a boyfriend, while she had none. A few ugly words were spoken and feelings hurt. But that girl wanted a more material revenge and I proved an easy tool in her plot. One evening when Annie was out and we were cleaning up the dishes after dinner, side by side, after the other girl had gone to her room, she asked me into her room on the pretext that she had an old book to show me, and as soon as I was in and the door shut, she began kissing me with passionate fury, one arm locked around my neck. With her other hand she was tearing off my clothes and her own, breaking buttons.
She’d never shown me any partiality before, no winks or hints of attraction, nudges or footsies under the table at dinner time. But I think I have this in common with almost every other heterosexual male, not in love or betrothed, that when it comes to an offer of sex, no strings attached, the offer is accepted.
In a few minutes we were wreathing in bed. In another ten we were done, putting on our clothes and I skulking up to Annie’s room to await her return, my tinge of guilt matching the dusky hues of her room in the twilight.
That night went smoothly. She came home to find me asleep and we slept in each other’s arms. But the girl downstairs made sure our ‘session’ didn’t go unnoticed. She had been so noisy that the girl in the next room, probably reading a book by her night-light, heard exactly what was going on. So she, equally sex-starved and jealous, ran up first thing the next morning, entering and spilling out every overheard detail, as I lay in bed beside Annie.
The house exploded. All five of us were home. Annie started by screaming at me that I would never sleep in her bed again, then, pushing the messenger aside, rushed to confront her nemesis, banging on that door with loud recriminations. I followed. She comes out and turns right away on her neighbor, like a wolverine, declaring her a vile traitor, and that girl responding by calling her a slut. The strange thing was that both of these girls were near perfect matches in looks and figure, skinny and plain to a fault, with straight, shoulder-length brown hair, shrewish eyes, bland characters, little education, no vocabulary and hopeless futures, which made them hate each other all the more, like looking in a mirror and not pleased with what you see. A few years older they would have perfectly matched the farmer’s wife in “American Gothic” by Grant Wood. They were even wearing similar pajamas.
I imagined that Zach must have found each of them by chance under some covered bus stop on a rainy day and invited each to live in his house, which they immediately accepted as the best offer they’d ever been given. I know he slept with both of them, being the ruler he was. And on this morning, hearing the commotion, he rushed downstairs to stop them before they descended to an all-out girl fight. And it was exactly like that as they were all in pajamas, in the kitchen, while we’d both pulled on our jeans. It was bedlam. He pulled me aside, secretly patting me on the back, (for banging two out of three) but told me I had to apologize to Annie and pack up and leave, never to return. He also whispered that I should come see him tomorrow when Annie was at work, as he might have another place for me to stay.
And so it transpired. I apologized to everyone, packed up my backpack in Annie’s room and left, with no plans, no place to go, and only the vague hope that Zack might come through for me. The three girls seemed content with this decision, at least placated, as if it were a victory of women over men.
I remember that evening and night with distinct vividness. It was the only night in all my life when I didn’t have a bed or a friend’s floor to sleep on. I still had money, over four hundred dollars, but I wasn’t going to waste a chunk of it on a motel room. The trailer was locked and too close to the house for comfort. I had slid my heavy backpack under it on my way out and walked away, hands in my pockets. I headed to Telegraph avenue but noticed a few blocks from the house, on a quiet street, a small car owned by one of Zack’s friends which I knew he hardly ever used, being a stoner and a recluse. It was unlocked and I decided that when it was late I could sleep in the back seat unnoticed.
It was easily, excluding illness, the most miserable night I ever spent. I repaired there after midnight and snuck in but without my jacket for a pillow or my sleeping bag. I decided not to sneak back near the house to get them, the recent fury of the women vividly on my mind. I thought I could just lay down and sleep. It was early September but cold and I passed an uncomfortable six hours in that back seat, in a fetal position, catching only a few minutes of half-delirious sleep. I supposed this was the price for infidelity. But the morning beamed warm and sunny. I bought myself a good breakfast, went to see Zack and the next chapter of my life began.
