A Schedule of Drugs in the Valley of Death

by Sarah Reith

  I did not live with my mother for a long time after that. When I came back to San Francisco after years of tending bees, she was hard and bright and beautiful. Her mouth was always red. Her teeth were very white. Her breasts didn’t move when she walked, and the planes of her face were flattened with powders and creams.

  She told me her name was Lilith now. “Lilith was the real first woman,” she explained. “Sometimes, you have to go all the way back to the beginning to find out who you are.”

  IN THE SUMMER of 2008, I began my education in cannabis cultivation at Serendipity Organics, courtesy of Alizarin Goldfarb. There were fires in the hills that year, fires so fierce people abandoned their crops and fled for the lowlands. Smoke hung heavy and blocked out the sun, like it was punishing the populace for violating federal marijuana laws.

  Alizarin lived in an unincorporated community that was legendary for the beauty of the melons that sprawled across the valley floor. In 1852, when white men rode in on horseback, hunting for the headwaters of the Russian River, they reported wild oats that grew as high as their stirrups.

  But nobody grows melons anymore. And wild oats are what a young man sows before he starts planting his real crop. A few organic farmers sell produce at the local markets. It’s a decent living, because around here, people with acres of arable land buy fruits and vegetables at wildly inflated prices. With cash.

  “Unincorporated community,” in Mendocino County, means “wild west frontier town,” with a few modernizing features. For example, cable TV is a lot more popular than it used to be, in the days of the swinging saloon doors. And there is a very high median level of education in hydrology, micro-economics, and soil chemistry.

  After all, cannabis has its roots in the soil—even if that soil is trucked in by the ton because the native clay is too dense to support the root system of a healthy plant. By now, there are third-and-fourth-generation growers on a single plot of land, which, for people whose ancestors weren’t even here before 1852, is a long-standing tradition. Some growers have strains they can trace back to seeds their grandparents smuggled out of Afghanistan in the 1960s.

  In one of those instances of parallel development that has inspired thousands of hours of reverie, marijuana plants are charged with sexual tension. The females are hidden behind high walls like pampered virgins in a convent, provided with every luxury but freedom. Cannabis pollen is finer than thought, with the ability to drift for days on wind as soft as a sigh. Practically speaking, this means one vegetal pre-ejaculation can spoil the pedigree of every gently bred female for miles around. Because of this, almost all the males are pre-emptively destroyed.

  Sometimes, a female plant will turn hermaphrodite and ravish all the females she can, like the plants have cast themselves in a cheesy all-girl porn film. Once, I heard about a grower who literally beat a hermaphrodite plant to death—to teach the others a lesson, he said.

  At the height of their reproductive desperation, when their buds are full and firm and dripping with fragrant sap; when their fruits are covered with fine, crinkly hairs, the females are cut down like virgin sacrifices and hung up somewhere out of sight to dry. That means the next time you fire up a joint, you will be pressing your lips to the dried-up female genitals of a plant that never got laid. Inhale deeply, and let it out slowly.

  REVERENT ANTHROPOMORPHIZING IS the order of the day on a lot of pot farms. But Alizarin was no outlaw hippie rancherette, watering her sacred garden with menstrual blood by the light of the full moon. She also didn’t spend much time spinning her six-shooter and holding off the sheriff, who, in a story like that, would be torn by his duty to the law and his love for the woman who scorns it.

  Alizarin was a highly respected professional in her field. She had an extensive portfolio and a pages-long CV. She was a working artist, which, ever since the DeMedicis retired from patronizing the arts, has most often been a euphemism for laboring in poverty and obscurity.

  And no, her mother did not give her that name. No one—except maybe Alizarin herself—would do that to a defenseless human child. Alizarin is the name of a cool crimson, one of two colorants found in madder root. This, for her profound understanding of color theory and the inspiring power of rage, is the name her mother should have given her. Alizarin crimson is also an excellent mixer, which provides further commentary on the role of socializing in the life of a professional artist. And Alizarin was a consummate professional. She knew exactly what she was and was not doing, and why.

  “I’m not growing pot so I can fuck around and buy toys,” she explained, the first day I showed up to work for her.

  In this field as in so many others, it is standard practice to head up an employee orientation with an emphatic mission statement. It was late August, and the plants were quivering in an unseen summer breeze. They were endearing, like wild-haired creatures in a Dr. Seuss cartoon, adorable and manic and not entirely predictable.

  “I’m growing pot so I can work with kids!” she went on. “So I can give money to public radio and the SPCA and go to Israel . . .”

  I stopped listening. It’s what people do to women who talk too much. And I was doing that other thing, too. That thing that women do when they scrutinize each other.

  I was trying to imagine how a man would see Alizarin. Specifically, a missing wire-walker, with scars on his back and memories of a long, uncertain convalescence. I tried to imagine the joy of renewed vitality pouring through a young man’s healthy body. I began to understand how impossible it would be to defy this sudden power; the imperative to act, to love a beautiful, imperious woman.

  A part of me knew it means exactly nothing when people come together for temporary mating purposes. I have a very clear memory of being eleven years old and telling my father what I’d read on the bathroom wall about a slightly older schoolmate. “But I know it isn’t true,” I concluded triumphantly. “Because she’s dumb. And she’s fat.” I was deeply impressed with the solemnity of sex at that time. Girls who did it, I knew, were mysterious and knowing. They must be awe-inspiringly beautiful and expertly costumed to be inducted into the mysteries. In addition, they were required to be wise enough to comprehend the subtleties. I knew exactly no one who was qualified to conduct the activity on a non-professional basis, so I was forced to conclude that it was a very rare practice among amateurs.

  My father waited patiently for me to finish my analysis. Then, exactly as if he were collecting data on a little-known phenomenon, he asked me this: “does she have a vagina?” Point made. She was fuckable, and that was that.

  But daughters don’t care how daughters are made. We don’t care if our parents conceived us at the height of Tantric oneness or fumbling around in the bathroom of a Greyhound bus. We don’t care that we exist, with broken hearts and sentience, because some guy had a hard-on and a woman happened to be ovulating. We want our daddies to be deeply impressed with our complexities, to know us through and through and love us anyway.

  Alizarin was still talking. She was a tireless talker. “Look, I don’t have the cash this time around. For house-sitting and, ah, garden maintenance. I could give you trimming. You’d have to wait on the payment, though. I usually give that to Jezzie, but she’s fucking off somewhere, I don’t know what’s going on with her. She knows I have a guy in Marin who loves his lav—I don’t know why they call it that it isn’t purple not even light purple and it doesn’t smell like anything, I mean it smells like pot of course but nothing at all like lavender. Anyway! He basically gets it on consignment. He’s the one buyer I’ll do that for because he turns it around so fast and I’ve known him forever. He just sent me an email: got any luv? (That’s his clever code for lav)—and I do! It’s just not ready yet. You could do a pound a day, right?” She gave me a stern, tire-kicker’s stare, by way of assessing my competence at trimming weed.

  “But, um . . .” Suddenly she was hesitant, the way little kids are when they present you with something they’ve made. “If it makes it any easier to wait ar
ound. I could teach you how to paint. Like a trade.” I saw that she was trying to be casual. “If you’re interested. Just something to think about.” She led me out of the greenhouse and into the vegetable garden. “Now. There is no such thing as a green pepper. A green pepper is an unripe red pepper . . .”

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the pot plants. They were cheerfully miraculous. The only thing that could even approach their quality of down-home magic would be if one of the sheep strolled up to the fence and delivered a speech. The animal would have to fulminate on the most commonplace banalities, though, because really, the pot plants had no more access to mystery than that girl with her name on the wall. But, also like that girl, this didn’t change the fact that they were utterly enthralling—even, in the end, mysterious.

  They seemed to call down the light, like saints in a painting, and play an intricate, meaningless game with it. Every time we touched a plant, dozens of tiny goggle-eyed frogs burst into the air like slimy fireworks, then vanished like they’d been extinguished. As long as I lived among pot growers, I never saw another grow as covered with frogs as Alizarin’s.

  Or spider mites. Spider mites have mandibles to humble and inspire all the nightmare gods of Hollywood. They glow with a throbbing greenish light, like things on lonely roads that make people believe in UFO’s and fairies. They weave diaphanous webs of spun glass cotton candy in the flowers of the pot plant, and they will bankrupt a grower whose vigilance fails.

  This is where I found myself, after failing completely as an adult: standing at the end of a long dirt road, downwind from a reeking gray-water cistern in the doorway of a greenhouse made of scraps. I’d just received an offer for something with zero practical value, in exchange for the opportunity to commit the least glamorous crime imaginable.

  Perhaps no other felony requires quite as many buckets as I used in my daily round of felonies that season. There were buckets with loosely attached handles that I would drag through fields of poison oak. There were cracked buckets, for hauling rancid gray-water from one patch to another. For most of the year, Alizarin’s land had no water source, which led to complicated relationships with neighbors and a fervent appreciation for the nutrients in dishwater.

  This precise level of knowledge was important because I was about to stay at the farm for two weeks while Alizarin traveled to Israel. She and a Palestinian artist would work together on a large mosaic with a mixed group of Jewish and Muslim children, just as the pot plants in northern California were reaching a crucial stage of development.

  I would stay on the farm, because I had just received a detailed explanation of the condition of the tie rods and ball joints in the tired old pickup truck I had bought with my last financial aid check. This had been followed by a vivid description of what was likely to happen to that truck if I drove it seventy-two miles every day for two weeks, traveling back and forth between Foxglove and Serendipity. It would take several hundred dollars to persuade my eloquent mechanic that the dinged-up jalopy could handle more than one or two outings on the roads in Mendocino County, even the paved ones. And, of course, those funds were not available yet. I would have them as soon as Alizarin’s retailer in Marin got rid of the weed I hadn’t even laid eyes on yet, but which I would clean just as soon as I got around to it.

  I would be stranded on the mountain, which should have made me nervous but didn’t. Instead, I felt like I was about to be tested on some obscure subject that I hadn’t studied for, exactly, but which I’d been prepared for by the circumstances of my life and character. I was ready for it, even if I wasn’t quite sure what it was.

  I would have plenty to do. There were sheep to move around from one pasture to another. There were spider mites to do battle with. And Alizarin would give me free access to her studio, while she did artistic fieldwork in the Holy Land, at the continental crossroads.

  I saw pictures from this project afterward, Alizarin grinning with a bearded young man who did not smile. I saw the children squinting uncertainly, like children in historical photographs who are unaware of their obligation to be endearing. Behind this dusty exhausted crowd of humanity, the mosaic exploded with life, like the plants in her greenhouse. I learned that this was Alizarin’s response to authority backed by guns: this exuberance, this show of strength in foliage and color. It was her way of outliving all decrees upheld by force. Her artwork had the appearance of uncontrolled, wild abundance, like an overgrown garden springing up out of some unseen water source.

  The central theme of the design was children’s handprints, which were made of clay and glazed in brilliant colors. The hands adorned a grim grey wall in a war-torn border town, expressing every possibility of human gesture. They moved across the concrete canvas like the lines of faraway mountains, their edges treeless and smooth. Aquifers and orchards and wise sayings in Hebrew and Arabic flowed throughout the gestural landscape, rendered in shattered glass and broken mirrors.

  At that point, the plant husbandry portion of my résumé consisted of failing to kill the snails in Jackhammer Park and rinsing the dust from my mother’s ficus. The ficus benjamina is called a weeping fig in the vernacular, which makes it sound like somebody, somewhere, has succeeded in doing it harm. In fact, it’s a lot more likely that the ficus will be providing shade for the cockroaches after the nuclear holocaust has destroyed all other forms of life.

  This is not to imply that my mother was only fit to cultivate a ficus. Like Alizarin, if Caitlin ever had to feed the world from a single plot of earth, there is no doubt the world would have twice as much as it could ever eat—plus a few ornamental shrubs to give the place a dash of color. Caitlin was an archetype, remember that, all holy whore and mother earth, raising the dead and bringing in crops, citing Joseph Campbell and The Golden Bough with inches of dirt in her nails.

  Also: Caitlin Swift grew legendary pot. She grew in the days when legends were sung, because writing hadn’t been invented yet. She grew when growers were drawn and quartered and their heads put up on spikes outside the city walls. I was starting to feel like it might be a mark of distinction, to be descended from such ability and daring.

  So, yeah, I said to Alizarin. “Why don’t you show me how to paint. I’ll look after the garden for a while.”

  THE FIRST PAINTING lesson was learning how to look at color like I’d had a schizophrenic break with reality.

  “What colors do you see in that teacup? Do you see the shadows? Can you see how green they are?” Alizarin made me paint a teacup, exaggerating every breath of color, every shock of light. “Paint it like you’re on acid. You have taken acid, I assume . . . ?” She trailed off discreetly.

  “Of course, the last time I took acid,” she went on, like she was admitting that she herself might have been less than diligent, “it was that wedding gift from our mutual friend. Acid has quite the shelf life.” She gave a light, throaty chuckle. She seemed to be permanently laryngitic, which gave her bossiest pronouncements a quality of intimacy, a kind of strident cooing.

  The wedding of Alizarin Goldfarb and Morpheus Charnisse adhered closely to long-established Jewish tradition. They were joined beneath a chuppah in a ceremony where he stomped on a glass and solemn vows were spoken in a language no one understood. There was champagne. There were strawberries dipped in chocolate. And my father, gracious soul that he was, presented the other man’s bride with a small quantity of high-quality LSD.

  Alizarin’s husband was an actor and a musician. He was widely read in shamanistic practices; in vision quests and dreams and eloquent animal spirits with a savage sense of humor. He wrote densely populated lyrics full of yearning and regret, and he set them to music with intervals so intricate that even he could only play them after weeks of practice.

  Morpheus Charnisse may or may not have been the name he was given at birth. But Alizarin liked to call her husband M.C. Harness, perhaps by way of decorating the yoke of matrimony. He was Caliban to her Prospero, dependent and defiant. He would be lost in the dimension
s of a gesture or the resonance of a particular sound, just when the dishes needed washing or it was time to feed the sheep. He especially liked the round wooden water tank, with its top like a stage and its slatted hull that produced a different medley of echoes, every time he struck it. Charnisse treasured the water tank like a custom-made musical instrument, but he almost always forgot to turn the water off when he watered the garden, which drained the tank and killed the living echoes. He was not competent. He showed signs of deep resentment and even alarm at the slightest hint that he should ever perform a disagreeable task. When, after several years of marriage on the mountain, he began to long for a single life in the city again, Alizarin blew the dust off a powerful spell and Caliban was quiet for years.

  “It was perfect,” she reported, of the journey on my father’s acid. It may have been the weirdest educational product placement ever. “Just enough of that ooey-gooey connection stuff to make it clear that, hey, we’re really doing something here; and then we sang “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” as the sun came up over the mountains. It was zany yet profound. That teacup is great,” she added.

  THERE ARE PEOPLE who grow pot because it is their calling. They might be serious-minded stoners. Many are brilliant geneticists with no respect for academic hierarchies. Quite a few are entrepreneurs, displaying the creativity and independence that fuel innovation. Some of them are sure that pot will save the world.

  Alizarin was none of those things. Alizarin was a pot agnostic. She was as indifferent to the miracles of marijuana as an atheist Bible salesman to the Resurrection of Christ. For one thing, she was allergic to it. Because her endocannabinoids stopped short in her adenoids, she was immune to the passions of pot. She wasn’t unaware of the fact that the drug war is an actual armed conflict. But when Alizarin got a flyover, she glared at the pilot like he was no more dangerous than a wayward husband, in need of a radical therapy session.