Short Story 2

A Hippie and a Diplomat

I smoked pot in Amsterdam and conversed with the local diplomats over the nature of heroin. It seemed that too many people were having problems due to the destructiveness of the horse habit. Drugs long having been accepted in Dutch society, the discourse among the elected officials was quite unusual. Probably these same gentlemen had generously partaken of the substances they now condemned. Their reasoning was that society was going to pot. They didn’t mean pot as in marijuana, mary jane, etc., but it was funny because as the Dutch laws became more restrictive to harsher drugs this tended to happen. The lighting of marijuana cigarettes (pot) was at an all-time high.

Myself, a product of the Sixties, still a possessor of the shaggy do, a la George Harrison in his Beatle days smoked pot daily. Morning, afternoon and night. First thing in the morning I would roll some cannabis and heat up some tea, both for chasing the wheat donut. Trying to be healthy, high and motivated all the same time.

Morning was the best time. Every time I lit up, my mind conjured up fabulous images. Orgies of the unconscious. It invented thought so colorful and pure, far beyond the limits of normal imagination. Bummer was, every time I recalled the cancer warning signs: shortness of breath, nausea, dizziness, clamminess, lack of appetite, insomnia, fear struck a chord which resonated loudly, ambivalently, discordant. But by either the next day or the next sitting, I’d usually forgotten the ill effects of my pal, mary jane. She was too much fun. Besides who’d give a shit if some old hippie up and died from the green green grass of home. I was out for a natural high induced by good old cannabis, of course. With all the crap the world dumped on you, she proved beneficial. With her, life became magical for a while. Even if the magic existed only inside of your head, all the insults, the idiots, the disappointments, the heartaches were totally washed away, annihilated, cleaned up by your best friend. Mary jane.

Back in the Sixties I’d come out of Berkeley, Mr. Nerd. Yes, I’d participated in the war-ins and a couple of Civil Rights shindigs. Religiously I’d listened to the Supremes, Joplin, Hendrix, Otis Redding, The Buffalo Springfield, Morrison. All of this tended to raise my social consciousness a bit. Still I wore thick glasses, dressed awful, and even worse, I was the studious type. Mr. Nerd.

I’d gone nude at Woodstock, fondling the au natural chicks with my lustful eyes. What a time it was! Everybody’s mind was exploding with orgiastic delight.

In the early Seventies I’d participated in love-ins, communal type get-togethers of swapping chicks like some people swapping glances. This was when I first experienced drugs. Some redheaded babe with the kindest areolas turned me onto hash, turned me on so I could tune out. I fucked her. Doors music filling up every breath, every space in the room as we engaged in tribal lust, doing it like animals burying the civilization inherent in the outsides of our universes. I was tripping. I didn’t know it but some psycho-cosmic individual of the party set laced the lime-green punch with lysergic acid. LSD. Talk about high. For days we stayed up, me and the redhead with the areolas off and on getting it on, paying homage to the physical self, screwing the morality of the square-minded rulers of the world, conservative as they were from sea to shining sea.

During a space of seventy-two fucking hours, I remember standing in the street, nude as God had created Adam, picketing for free love. Up with love down with war. Some of the more conservative ruling class walked by calling me commie, freak-o bastard, homosexual, tripped-out sonofabitchin’ alien. I had removed my glasses. I couldn’t see shit.

I was so loaded, so sexed out, so fucking mad about the absurd existentialist view that society was taking on during this time that I stood there a wise-ass grin on my face and literally shit in the street. Hoping to soil the souls, the attitudes, the egos of the upper crust.

Accumulating pain seems to be a coming alive point in life. If you’ve got enough pain you’re definitely alive. During this time I found out I had plenty of pain, but every day mary jane made life a little more like being in the funhouse. A carousel ride for the mind. You’d never find me at one of those psychoanalyst freaks. I’d be the first in line when the pot-laced brownies got passed out though. Like my mother who committed suicide during a car crash always said, “Clean your ass out.” Of course my dad died the same day. Mutual suicide? So much for the holidays. My brother and I spent them at an old nun’s home tearfully reciting, ‘Hail Marys.’

For a while between Berkeley and Oxford, the site of my graduate studies in Diplomatic Relations, the doe-eyed, redheaded chick, actually Kimmie with the redhot areolas, and I, we lived together. We partied. I worked in the public library. She was a consultant for a low0cost housing commission. We fucked. We partied some more. Life was treating us fairly nicely. But we were always tired. After two years we woke up, she woke up nauseated, I was kinda happy but unsure, so I too became nauseated.

With the growing of her belly she became overly emotional. I became withdrawn. The third card in a two-card deck. As her belly grew rounder and rounder, she stopped doing chemicals, smoke, whatever, I stopped seducing her, though I still loved her. Then a thin line of animosity sprouted and began to blossom, widening the gulf between us. I still loved her and I loved the child or love had made. Still the vision of free love had become clouded over by the dark clouds of reality. Feeling a little too weighted down by reality, I quit the library, packed my bags kissed her areolas goodbye. I left her a note professing my love, promising I would be back to see this out. Be one happy family forever.

I love you because you melt me like sunshine. Brighten up my cloudy days. God knows like shit I don’t want to leave you. I’ll probably cry a few rivers after today, but Jehovah have mercy on my soul. I’m like the wandering village idiot. I’ve got to find my peace. I’ve got to find my mind. Even though, I say goodbye, I say hello.

Love, Jamie

Your friend forever.

P.S. You were always more than a piece of meat.

I hitched a ride on a tour bus to the outskirts of that oh-so European city nestled among the Americas, San Francisco. Old Victorian homes book rising and falling beyond the horizon within the boundaries of the golden gate. For a while, on a cold August evening, it rained, poured on my ass as I stood bewildered, thumb outstretched, heading south on the five reaching into my spirit.

Wet water drenching me cutting through my bones I shivered cried my own downpour undone by the melancholy. Words like song lyrics cut into me the past screwing with my sensibilities the unreality of the situation undercutting all reality. Then colder than shit, trance-ridden like a yogi I stepped into the cab of a Sixty- four GMC truck, a black dude and a white chick with a handsfull of tits welcoming me into their ship. I sailed onto the ship of fools. Ready for the ride of my life.

“Hey man, what’s up?” The white sister looked into my eyes lustily setting a place for me in the truck.

“You’re looking cold, brother.”

“Me and my man thought we’d rescue you from the precipitation.” She laughed and smiled into my eyes.

“Thanks for the welcome wagon.”

“This rainshit. Raining hippos and elephants eh brother?” The soulbrother laughed and gave me one of those looks you better not mess with this white chick, this is my piece of ass, my friend.

“Groovy.”

The oreo couple smiled at me, their eyes descending into a vacuum, a subterranean black hole. These cats were carrying. They had to be up to something. They were as loaded on mind-altering substances as the Black Hills were with quartz and granite.

“Hey brother, what are you doing on a night like this? Need your head examined?” The dude once again spoke and swam right into a volley of laughter. His laughter bouncing off hers bouncing off the fake laugh I managed to conjure up bouncing it right back to her crisscrossing the molecular chain of air back to him. I could tell they were too partied-out to know what was going on in my head. I’d been there. I’d been exactly where they were and I knew they were somewhere beyond the physical reality of this time and place.

“Need to have your head examined,” the white soulsister repeated his line, thinking it so funny. Laughing so hard she spit on me involuntarily, sex acts being played out in monotone. I shifted uneasily in my seat. The brother drove on as the woman nibbled on his shoulder, then his chest. I stared out the window trying to hide my embarrassment at the events happening beside me, thinking of Kimmie, my last joint, our last time together, how fucked up I’d become.

Hey man, you like to drive?” The dude was arcing his back, his eyes squinting tighter, dipping like the setting sun below the horizon. I believed she was giving him pleasure now, but I didn’t dare look. Things of this nature were private things to me. I didn’t get off watching others go for joyrides.

We bounced off the road, the truck slowing, unnerving us as it dropped off the shoulder. Out into the rain the oreos sloshed, quacked, in webfooted motion like ducks under the bursting sky. Into the bed of the truck they dove; they made it their own. Nesting.

Dumbfounded I stared out the window noticing the shapes of raindrops, the shapes of things passing into the night. I daydreamed as the rain poured from the sky washing away the earth which harbored us. Behind me in the truckbed, animals in heat sent out love calls, imitating the wildness of nature as the showers cascaded down their backs.

“Hey.” The dude was rapping on the window, eyes glazed. The rain had stopped. He passed me a joint. I looked surprised. Accepting the offer naturally I took a couple of tokes starting to feel the full effects of mary. I smiled silly, passed the joint back to the white chick now sitting beside me. They sat there under a blanket, faces lit up like angels, her butt pressing out from under its hiding place, the whiteness of her thighs illuminating the dark black night.
They laughed and he passed another joint to my fingertips. We smoked. We smoked like we were getting paid to do this. We smoked like it was another form of making love. We smoked like there was no tomorrow. We smoked time away.
The brother coughed, spit out the window. Phlegm-driven, we smoked on. “Hey man, think you could drive us to our habitat?”

I couldn’t imagine the road, the lines between the shoulders, the lines in our faces, but I’d been down this road before so I said, “Yeah.”

He gave me directions to somewhere in Oakland. They fell into the back. I moved over, eyed the gas pedal, the brake. It was an automatic. I was fucked up but I could drive this vehicle in the third dimension if I had to. I drove away listening to Sly and The Family Stone.



“It’s a family affair. It’s a family affair.
One child grows up to be somebody who just loves to learn.
Another child grows up to be somebody who you’d just love to burn.
Both kids are good to ma. Love is thicker than the blood.
It’s a family affair. It’s a family affair. It’s a family affair.”

By the time I’d arrived at their L-shaped, green and white three-bedroom, I felt as if my body was being overtaken by a foreign element. Later I learned I’d been introduced to Mr. PCP. He’s not a pretty boy.

Inside were various twosomes and a couple of extra chicks. Including myself, only three of us were white. Already fucked-up to the max, I was coerced into popping some L. Mild stuff they said. Joint after joint and a hash pipe made the rounds. The earth revolved in the room on the axis of our minds.

I napped for a few minutes. They seemed like years. I was awakened by a black chick, a full-on afro nestling under my chin, her lips reaching mine musically nibbling on my lower lip. We made love. Psychedelia filled the room. Day-glo posters emanating off the walls. Flashing lights like UFOS flying through our space and time continuum.

In the morning I wakened, vomit stuck to my shirt. Feeling like three-day-old bread I rolled over on the couch. In the back everyone was still asleep except for one couple. They moved piston-like under African print bed sheets, oblivious to everyone and everything else. Loving in a hyper-conscious state. I noticed the chick I’d been with. She was lying next to some other fucker. Bliss spread like a sunny billboard across his face. It seemed funny because I felt like shit. I moved out into the sunshine of my life mumble-singing under my breath, “It’s a family affair. It’s a family affair.”

Hysterically I laughed. A dog walked by pulling a man like a plowhorse for all he was worth. Feeling numbed by the twists and turns the winding road of life takes us down, I stepped into a little coffee shop, Randy’s. I polished off some coffee. The overweight waitress made eyes at me staring thorough her purple-orange eye shadow trying to penetrate he impenetrable haze I was languishing under. I felt sick.

Noticing a telephone, I asked for change and dialed away searching for Heaven. “Hey, Mike, I’m lost, like lost in space. I need your help. I left my woman, lost direction. Man, I’m fucked up.”

Calling my brother had been a good idea. Mike had a common square head on his shoulders. I needed sanity. He was the carbon copy.

Mike reacted like all good brothers do, he listened, he scolded, he overreacted, he re-listened. He wired me money. I picked up my money from a Western Union outpost. Then I hopped the Greyhound. I needed to seek sanity. Mike said I could hole up with him in San Diego for a while. I visualized. No drugs. No chicks. Just Midwestern middle-of-the-road type boredom living. I thought I was ready. I checked my secret pocket for my joints. They were still there. A little moist but secure.



“Hey, brother, you been overdosing on us, eh?” My brother sounded Canadian. Turned out he had grown his hair, gone to Canada, come back, changed his name, become a new individual. Though underneath all the camouflage he was still the same brother I knew from before. The basic Mike.

“Here’s your bag.” The busdriver grinned a shit-eater and tossed my duffle-bag with the good-natured gall of a drill sergeant. He knew I wasn’t military material. Get-down-kick-some-ass-in-your-face-go-to-war material. I saluted him with an icy stare.

“Hey slim, Jamie, don’t let the guy get under your skin.” Mike patted my shoulder and led me away. Led me away like the dog had led the man after I’d seen the sunlight beyond the darkness back in Oakland. My brother, my rainbow.



“Now that you’re out canvassing the country, you’re draft material. Lt. Material. They don’t care…they really don’t if you don’t have a shit-kicking bone in your body.”

Looking through a glass of milk, I lowered my eyes ashamed of what I’d become in such a short time. I ate Mike’s donuts. I drank his two-percent milk. I connected with him. Brotherly love.

I stayed with Mike the rest of the summer. Sober the most of the day. Lit up in the evening. Sometimes with Mike. He’d come a long way.

I wanted to become a diplomat, a communicator. I applied to Oxford. My grades pulled me through, they accepted my application. I was leaving the states. I was going to get my masters. My thesis would be the history of diplomatic relations between foreign powers and little struggling under-sufficient nations.

Funny, just before I left, my brother saw the evil in his potsmoking ways. He almost convinced me to give up my good ol’ faithful mary jane. He lectured me about the evils of her, trying to get me to adopt the boring two-martini lunch nature of the diplomat instead. “If you don’t quit you’re nothing but a pothead,” he said. We argued for days over cheap wine, foregoing sleep, filibustering ideas, morals, inventing new religions. I finally convinced him I was a convert to the Rastafarian religion just in case I came upon some good English stuff. But unfortunately brother Mike had planted the seeds of doubt in my head, and a mighty internal battle would now have to be waged on my interior battlefield.



When I’d first arrived, I’d cut my hair to impress the educators. They thought the non-existence of hair made me a neo-nazi. The administrators painted a picture of me that was imprecise, certainly inconclusive regarding the nature of my being. To hell with them, I grew back my hair with a vengeance.
I studied my ass off. Ate multitudes of donuts. Subsisted mostly on coffee and those donuts. Didn’t have sex for a whole year. Smoked a joint occasionally with a few philosophical (not to be confused with black) brothers. I was still waging the battle my brother had ignited. The tedious nature of life, I bored myself to death sometimes. But mostly sober, I read Plato, Descartes, all about the big bang, evolution, the Bible three times, Confucius” sayings. I had disciplined myself. In a way I had become a military man. I was educated like the elite. Only difference was my hawk’s nose didn’t sit snot-high in the air like a tormentor above the shit-kicking masses.

Education is a hell of a muscle. The best tool to chip, screw, tighten, loosen, bolt, whatever. It’s a tool you gotta have. At least I do. My dreams realized I became a diplomat. A kind of foreign correspondent.
During this time of transition, out of boredom I began to smoke again. How miserable life had been.



As I sat there majestically puffing on my weed, snowcapped mountains surrounding me, my freezing mind expanding, I smoke out with ambassadors from ten little-known countries, some from Africa, Asia and Europe. Sat there we did on top of the Himalayas spacing out on the subject of third world domination. I agreed with them about the wrongful imperialistic nature of some countries I hesitate to mention. I agreed with them about the awfulness of the Vietnam War. The war effort made me sick. I puked anti-war feelings. They puked with me. As the smoke circled around our heads we did our jobs, conversing defiantly, disagreeing with the moral nature of the good old U. S. of A. The whole war thing left a bitter taste in our collective mouths.

We compared notes on the best grasses around the world. The drug trade. Its ifs ands buts. We’d done this many times before. I’d turned the stiff-shirts on, being the connoisseur of these things. The loose cannon. They knew fine wines, high society bitches. I knew moral decline, orgies in the back of trucks, drug slumber. Sometimes I felt as if I’d masterminded the whole damn scene. Cannabis was my friend. We sang.

“Cannabis was my friend.
In every doorway, more and more each day
In every vision I see, the hemp that gets to me
Will be with me to the end.
Cannabis is my friend.”

It kind of gets to you the first time you hear a big-time official say, “I’m fucked up.” But I’d heard the sentiment expressed many times before, though in different ways. Different expressions that I’d helped teach them. Basically I’d helped them to loosen up. I, being the master.

“I’m totally wasted. Smashed out of my gourd, man. I’m leaving this plane of existence, sublimating myself into the next realm, beyond consciousness as I speak.” The China guy always had this Confucius type thing they felt he had to reveal. Confucius was like a Superman to some of the inhabitants of the Chinese culture.

“I like ze out there, shadow of the moon, blowin’ in the wind. My mind, it’s cosmic man.” Some of the Europeans you couldn’t understand. Just wished they would shut the fuck up.

I just repeated the same ole thing, “Some monster man jumped like a monkey ass-high onto my back, stole the oxygen from my lung center and parted the molecules of my mind, my existence. In other words, I’m fucked up.” I took just like I gave. I took a little of each from all kinds of wisdom. Made myself into a roundabout marshmallow smorgasbord pie. Gooey, eclectic, and open-minded.

These gatherings proved quite beneficial to the world as a whole. Once when a European country was about to invade his Asian neighbor, I called a joint gathering of the smoking diplomats club. Between tokes of some fine Bolivian grass I’d hastily procured from the Bolivian embassy, an agreement was reached. The two countries remained peacefully apart. Another time, a wanted killer was fighting extradition to the U.S.
The murderer was hiding in the Andes. I invited the Peruvian diplomat to a private smoke-out. We smoked until an agreement was near. He called his leader. After arranging prostitute delivery for the diplomat and his president, the deal was consummated. My friends got their jollies off and the killer was extradited.

I smoked in the Andes with fur traders, fishermen, and my diplomatic friends. We got high-we loved to get high in high places. Then we rode our souls down to the Amazon and swam like fish on native rafts with the builders of these rafts swimming the swim of life with us. With the native peoples, we smoked on long, thin peace pipes, ran around in flowery, tiny native garments. Made love to the native women unspoiling our nakedness under the pale yellow eyes of the moon.

I smoked pot. My stash emptying out on the shores of the Mediterranean. The diplomats, hangers-on, and I, we took journeys to the Pyramids. Fried our brains like greased bananas. Dreamed up theories, pure conjecture, about the massive structures that lay before us in the path of our eyesight defying the laws of physics, the laws of nature. We dreamed of mummies. That we were mummies. We smoked the stash until our asses were blue in the face.

My cronies and I, we tended to change our posts together. Occasionally someone would be a year or two behind the others. This only happened on a couple of occasions. For example, the Frenchman Andresor Gibaud stayed in Guam a little longer than the rest of us. Keeping a mistress on the shores it was a little harder for him to leave.

We smoked together as we spaced ourselves around the globe. I smoked, we smoked, in Africa. On the plains. Astride our jeeps, in our minds astride wild horses, our zebras. We counted the animals with accountant’s eyes. We smoked. We smoked the terrains like great white, brown, black, red hunters. We dreamed we were animals. Giraffes, elephants, ostriches, hippos were our alter egos. We got inside the primitive nature of man. Wondered why man was so primitive. So primitive in his desire to inflict pain on others. Was it just his way of creating jobs? We wondered. We contemplated. We spaced. We laughed. We cried. I made love on the plains not a woman in sight. In my mind I became an animal lusting like a wild beast.

I smoked pot in all the finest places. Cannabis (mary jane) was my friend. I had pals. We smoked. I smoked. We smoked here there and everywhere. We conducted business for our countries and the world, hastily but competently. Smoothing over relations with many a disturbed ruler. Caressing the egos of many a tyrant with the best smoke money could buy. In the halls, the boardrooms of our profession we made deals, we smoked over agreements. We were professionals. We were addicts. If our constituents found out how fucked-up we usually were they either be disgusted or want to join us. Still we discussed the matters at hand, world matters, with intelligence, vision and creativity. At least before the sleep-inducing nightcap.

My life was one big toke. Still throughout life I assumed my profession with the air, the nature of a professional.

I hardly ever saw my family or what was left of it, Mike. Last time I had seen him was ten years before. We went to Mexico discussing the politics and philosophy of philanthropy. He’d made money in oil, before the crude died its slow domestic death.

Down in Mexico, we drank cervases. He was against my good old faithful companion, mary. Stiff-shirted collar and tie, beady eyes, he lectured me while I sang. Sang about the experience the night before, newly-purchased guitar on my hip accompanying me in two-chord. Harmony.

“Rolled some senorita down Mexico way
in between smoking Mexican grass
fondling her ____________
thanks for the experience however crass
thanks for the Mexican _____________.”