The high times of Lewis B. Toklas

Lewis woke-up, rolled over, sat up and pushed a half-eaten bag of chips away from the computer screen, knocking an empty can of beer to the living room floor.

The flashing icon on the screen told him that “Medford Mantis” was ahead again, with “Slayer II” a close third.

“Take that damn wall down, rat bastard!”

Peeling a piece of tin foil away from a corner of the window he could see it was light outside, but couldn’t tell if it was early morning or late afternoon.

It took hours to regain his status. When he was satisfied he picked up the bong and fumbled for a lighter that worked.

“Bong’s dirty,” he thought, dumping the water into the trash can by the futon. Looking around, he picked up a half-empty can of flat soda and refilled the bong with the warm syrup. “Whatever works,” he said.

 “What’ll it be today, Durbin Poison or Cat Piss,” he said aloud purveying the assortment of mason jars on the coffee table. “Actually, I think it’s a pure Kush kinda day.”

Lewis picked up a pair of old scissors from the floor and wiped them down with a sock sticking out from under his pillow. He then cut up a couple of buds and pressed a generous clump of green into the bowl.

After five bong hits he hit enter and starred at the computer screen. “Slayer II, die!” he yelled, pounding the keys and maneuvering the mouse in an attempt to regain points. “You will rue the day you messed with Lewis B. Toklas!”

Several hours later he paused, wiped the sweat from his forehead, downed the last swig of a warm beer and reached for the bong. The routine was the same. It had been 14 days since he last went outside, and three since he showered.

The sunlight coming through the torn piece of aluminum foil on the window told him it was, indeed, daytime. He felt hungry. A pizza box lay at the foot of the futon. Lewis nudged his cat away from inside the box, peeled back a slice from the cardboard, and held it to his nose.  “Breakfast,” he said, putting half the slice into his mouth at once. Pepperoni grease dripped down his chin, and he made a mental note to have another pie delivered.

His cell phone vibrated and flashed from under a pile of junk mail. The name on the screen was, “Bud Boob Girl.”

“Hey, Boobette,” he said, answering the phone in a flirtatious voice.

“Hey, Lew,” she said, rolling her eyes – envisioning this trimmer/gamer in the hovel he called home. “You know I don't like to be called that, right?" she said, not really expecting an answer. "River wants to know if you can come help us this weekend,” she asked.

“For you, yes - for River, no way. He’s an asshole and he stiffed me last time. He said he’d pay half with bud, but it was fucking popcorn,” Lewis lamented.

“Then do it for me? Pretty, please? We really need the help this time, Lew. I’ll make sure you get some good bud, promise.” she implored, knowing full well she’d have to sneak it herself from River’s stash.

“Ah, alright. You are too cool to be with that guy, though. He’s a tight-ass grower and I don’t like him.” Lewis said his goodbyes and tossed his cell phone onto the floor. If there was one thing he hated it was So Cal gangsters coming up here ripping people off and taking all the good bud - and piles of cash south.

He decided to head down the hallway to get a little work done. A doorway at the end of the hall led to the garage and his grow. After dumping the humidifier into the utility sink he began the tedious task of thinning out leaves.

“Fuck-it, good enough,” he said after 20 minutes had passed. He stood up slowly. His back hurt from hours on the computer. Gnats were getting in his ears, nose and mouth, and it was time for a few more bong hits.

“Time for a series of serious bong hits,” he said to his cat, now licking the inside of the empty pizza box.

He could see the icon flashing on the computer screen, but he was trying to ignore it. As if in a dream he went to the computer and hit enter. Slayer II had signed off. “Fucking Pussy,” he said with disdain and sat back down for another round with a guy from Denmark.

Two hours later he reached for the bong and starred at his jars of bud, “Danes conquered! It’s Herijuana time!” he said, reaching for the big guns, singing, “One toke over the line, sweet Jack. One toke over the line…”

Vintage 420

The trimmers sat in a circle of folding chairs in an empty living room. On the walls were posters from the 70s, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” shared space with Jethro Tull and Rush cut-outs, while Peter Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey” spun on vinyl on a vintage Technics turntable.

The home belonged to Greg, a retired high school English teacher who was said to have gone out on disability after a twenty-plus year run.

Greg was from Southern California. He came up in the 70s, surfing and playing rock and roll in a few garage bands, working at a now infamous record shop through college. He was a quintessential 70s and 80s throw back and everyone’s favorite teacher, until the stress of correcting papers caused what he called his “correcting arm” to seize up with pain.

It was 2 a.m. and the group had been working since the afternoon prior. Everyone was getting a little trim-shocked.

A young man with Blond dreds sat beside his girlfriend, both equally outfitted in patchwork clothes, and both seemingly mesmerized by the gentle sound of sniping tiny leaf tips onto the floor.

 “Now that’s some bud,” Greg said, admiring a large cola on a branch four feet long. “You never saw anything like that when I was a young man,” he began.

Greg snipped a bud from the cola and dropped it onto what looked like an ancient smoking tray.

“What’s the story on that tray, Greg?” a young man asked.

“Del Taco was a Mexican fast food chain in So Cal in the 70s,” Greg said. “This has been my smoking tray since the day I lifted it in 1975.”

This admission was met with laughter around the room. It was plain to see the company logo on the once bright orange tray, now stained with years of worth of dark, blackish green resin.

Greg was known for his long, detailed stories of the bud back in the day. The stories were usually good, but most there had heard them before, so Greg focused his attention to the new migrant workers with the blond dreds, who were easily amused if the bowl was kept full.

 “The shit I smoked on this tray you wouldn’t allow in your bud jar today,” Greg laughed.

“Yeah, we know, you walked miles in the So Cal snow to get that brown shit,” one local  said, with sarcasm.

“Well, you have me there. But I would go back in time for the prices,” he continued, winking at the young woman with blond dreds. “One, four-finger ounce of that brown shit was just 10 bucks, man.”

“Now, that would be cool,” the woman said. “Ten bucks won’t even buy you a decent pipe today.”

 “Ten bucks,” Greg repeated to make his point. “It was more likely brought up from Mexico. What we’d call shake here in Humboldt - floor droppings, the stuff we make into hash today. Actually, it’s not as good as the shake we make hash from today,” Greg added, laughing.

One young man with dark circles under his eyes got up and walked to the table where his dab kit was set up.

“Anyone want a hit?” he offered.

“Green Crack isn’t just a strain,” Greg said, dead serious. “You are going to huff your brain away with that butane poison. The only thing helping you through that shit is what little medicine’s left in that lump of wax.”

A young woman with a vape pen held it out the dabber, to no avail.

“Carbon and butane kills,” She said, earnestly.

“I don’t know about dabs,” Greg continued. “But I do know about hash. In 1974 I was in a questionable situation.”

To this new thread, silence cloaked the room, bongs and butane torches were put down, and all ears were turned to Greg for yet another tale from his beloved 70s.

“I was on a road trip with a buddy seeking out our smoke for the night. We had been surfing Trestles and were looking for a weed score in a new place. Never trust a new place,” Greg announced, as if these were his children – his students in the Black Market game of life.

“There was a large quantity of certain 80 gram slabs of hash laid out on a long table,” he continued. “Each brick had an ornate brand on its side - a mark of, ‘Abar Kabul’ engraved into each bar. My buddy and I got out of there fast.”

“I bet that was some great hash, though,” the man with blond dreads said dreamily.

“Well, we didn’t wait around to check it out,” Greg said. “In those days it was ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ No one talked about the pot market, no one.”

“Yeah, but you had some good shit, too, didn’t you?” a young man asked.

“I dealt on the black market in high school, man,” Greg said. “My packages came from a place called Humboldt County, but at that time I didn’t know where the hell that was. We just knew it was some bad ass weed.”

Laughter filled the room as the irony was considered.

“The four-finger, ten dollar Mexican bag we used to sell on campus in high school in the 70s became the sixty-dollar Sinsemilla bag in the 80s” Greg replied. “It improved and got stronger until one ounce was more than two hundred dollars. That was a lot back then. And, yes, it was good, but it didn’t have the intense high we have today.”

“But did you care?” someone said to more laughter.

“I started smoking at 13, do you think I cared?” Greg laughed at his own folly. “All I know is it made me feel better. In high school I was both special needs and gifted. I was and am under the autistic spectrum, but no one could tell me what was wrong with me back then. I only knew pot helped me cope. It righted me like your Ritalin, but only I knew it.”

“They had me on Ritalin for years,” the young man at the dab table said, flaring up his butane bomb.

“By the early 80s we had Thai-Stick rolled in a ‘pinner.’ Now, that was some good shit,” Greg continued. “You could forget your way home on Thai-Stick. Then Kona Gold started showing up from Hawaii. It may as well have been from Heaven.”

“How did they get that to the mainland?” Someone asked.

“They shoved it in their pants,” Greg laughed. “We didn’t have fucking TSA back then. If you didn’t have a boat, you shoved it down your pants. I had buddies bring back bamboo bongs in their suitcases from Hawaii. There was nothing you couldn’t bring back in those days.”

Another load of branches were brought out from a back room and dropped onto a drop cloth in the middle of the trimmers. It was after three a.m., but they pressed on. Some left, others arrived with new energy, but the tedious work continued in the wee hours of the morning.

Greg trailed with one story after the other while heads were down around the circle and mesmerized trimmers worked to the gentle sound of snipping.

At four a.m. the host stopped trimming, got up and began to roll a few fatties.

“They say 420 began at a high school in San Ramon in the late 70s,” Greg informed. “They say it began when someone counted the amount of active compounds of the plant, or that it was the code word for a pot bust on a police scanner. They say it began as a joke on Hitler’s birthday.”

The trimmers laughed at the list of possibilities, as Greg noted the time and began lighting and passing the joints.

Greg straightened up in his seat and cleared his throat, and the room knew he was going to begin another pot story from the past.

“The history of 420 is as elusive as the history of the plant itself,” he said with authority. “The road to legalization has been a long one, with brothers and sisters persecuted, imprisoned, and killed for the right to enjoy this flavorful, enlightening, and healing herb. To quote Jack Herer, ‘The only dead bodies from marijuana are in the prisons and at the hands of the police.’ Let us smoke, my friends. Let us raise our fattys, our bongs, and our pipes, and the occasional brownie high in praise of this plant and its many wonders.”

Smoke filled the room as the trimmers stopped to enjoy a 420 moment in time. Others paved the way for them, and others still will sit in these same chairs doing the work for the masses.

The road to full legalization has been rocky and long, but the clock continues to tick, the joints are passed, and a happy 420 continues around the world.

Lewis B. Toklas was lonely. The grow house lifestyle kept him up late, inside, and without many options for finding release in his covert community of cannabis confidants.

His typical mode of operendi was finding a slutty video clip online to pleasure himself with, but it just wasn’t the same as the real deal.

“Do one of those ads,” a friend suggested, while helping flip a room. “You know the kind for hook-ups only.”

“Is that for real?” he asked, pulling a large stalk from a pot of soil.

“Sure, people hook-up online all the time now, right?” another helper advised, while dumping the D-hum into the toilet in the back bedroom bathroom.

Nats and other debris swirled around the tub and made its way down the drain slowly as Lewis pondered his cyber options, reaching for the plunger.

Tedious Trim Circle

A group of twenty-somethings sat in a circle on folding chairs arranged on a sheet of plastic drop cloth. Each held a small pair of pruning clippers, trimming leaf from bud. A large pile of stalks lay in the middle of the circle. Netted, stacked drying shelves hung from the ceiling, nearly full of trimmed bud. Fishing line, tacked from corner to corner held dry stalks, ready for trimming.

“Lewis just posted on that casual sex site,” a young man with a lap top said from the dining room table.

“How do you know it’s him?” a young woman asked.

“He uses the same lame name he uses gaming, ‘Jimmy Olson. It's from that old TV show, ‘Leave it to Beaver,” he said. “I don’t know why he’s posting this shit. Those women are fake, and, besides, no woman would want to have sex with an old guy like that. He’s dreaming.”

“How old is he? Can’t tell by his house - looks like a teenage boy lives there,” trimmer girl said, laughing.

“He’s in his fifties,” a young man said dumping another pile of branches in the middle of the group. “He was my Little League coach. What’s going on?”

“He’s posting to hook up for sex,’” the young woman said. “I don’t know any women who post for sex. We can get it anywhere – no offense, guys, but that’s the truth.”

This admission was met with laughter, but there was also a healthy dose of disappointment detected on a few of the guy's faces.

“She’s right,” dudes think all they have to do is post of photo of their dicks and chicks will come running,” a young man added.

“Right?” the young woman smiled. “And I’m sorry, guys, but the erect penis is only beautiful in the eyes of the beholder."

"The one-eyed monkey doesn't really do it for me," another girl giggled.

"The average dick is seven inches long – so don’t brag to me how big your dick is, either," said another girl. "They are all the same. Just tell me you know what to do with my clitoris.”

Howls of laughter filled the once silent room and the mundane work of trimming into the night was enlivened at Lewis’ expense.

“Let’s play with him,” another young man said. “Send him a response.”

This devious idea was met with more laughter, and just one protest.

“Dude, I’ve been on there before, don’t do it. That’s harsh,” a young man said, dumping a pile of trimmed bud into one of the netted drying bags.

“A friend of mine posted an ad just to see what she’d get, and 50 guys sent her photos of their dicks in just a couple of hours. They were local guys too, guys she knew or knew of – half of them married guys. Not cool.”

Laughter and jokes about Lewis B. Toklas, aka: “Jimmy Olson” circled the room, as the young man at the table downloaded a few pics from the Web of a random woman across the country and composed a note to the unassuming lonely grower.

Meanwhile, back at the grow house…

Lewis cut up bud, loaded his bong, and waited for responses. Soon a flood of porn spam filled his inbox.

“Damn, rat bastards,” he said, taking a big rip.

Then he saw it… “Lonely Alone” was sending him a note.

Hello. Saw your ad and I feel the same way. Not a bar scene lady. Send a photo?

Lewis couldn’t believe it. Attached to the note was a photo of a pretty, smiling face and the largest pair of breast he’d ever seen, seemingly attempting to free themselves from her way-too-tiny top - not that he was complaining.

“Thank you, Jesus!” he exclaimed, and quickly sent off a response.

Faking It

“He sent a photo!” the young man blurted out from across the room.

“Oh my God, I don’t know if I can look at that,” the young girl said. “I’ve worked in his room. Not sure if I want that visual stuck in my head!”

The photo could have been from anyone, from any site, but the those who knew the eccentric grower spotted tell-tale signs of Lewis’ crash pad right away.

“You’d think he would have wiped the gnats off that table in the background before he shot his dick, right?” a young man said, firing up a fatty and passing it around the circle to more laughter and crass remarks at Lewis’ expense.

“Hey that’s my hoodie on the futon,” one young man added. "Is that his cat in the pizza box?"

The man in charge of the charade was busy composing his response, but before he could, Lewis was already sending more fodder for what was fast becoming a night to remember.

“Better bring out that bottle of Tequila, Lewis just sent a video,” he said to the group of trimmers, some with clippers and bud still in hand, now forming a circle around the laptop, peering over his shoulder, watching as Lewis pleasured himself for what he thought was just another “lonely lady.”

“The thing is, we could be anyone. What a fool,” the young woman said, returning to her chair, picking up another branch as the group settled down to the long night of supply and demand ahead of them.