A Schedule of Drugs in the Valley of Death

by Sarah Reith

  Alizarin grew Chocolate Thai and Golden Buddha, Bubba Kush and her own Serendipity Blend, a cross from a plant that had gotten fertilized by an unknown male.

  “Someone not keeping an eye on things,” she grumbled darkly.

  It was a serious breach of protocol, the kind that can ruin an uninsured black-market farmer. A fertilized plant has seeds in it, a condition that causes a swooning horror in modern pot consumers. Normal plant parts, apparently, are highly detrimental to the healing qualities of a plant that is destined to be transformed into carcinogenic smoke.

  But people are always developing new strains or improving old ones, which does call for the regrettable presence of seed. If a breeder fails to contain the producers of pollen, the plants are liable to explode with all the imprecipitate timing of frustrated young male lust everywhere. The most significant difference in premature ejaculation between the animal and vegetable kingdoms is that pollen can travel for miles, even on a summer day with no wind. Instead of one coy mistress, the triumphant male pot plant overcomes the resolve of every untouched female in the neighborhood. This is ruinous because, like an imperfect hymen in a savage country, the bud with a seed tucked into its folds is summarily rejected, unworthy even of burning.

  “We always smoked seedy pot in the ’70s,” Morpheus remarked, as Alizarin and I hung weed from the rafters in the cellar. He was supposed to be fixing the fan, but his powers of analysis shone most brightly when he was probing the emotional life of a fictional character. Immediately, as if we were in a rockabilly musical, the two of them broke into song. The same song, at the same time. “Sittin’ alone on a Saturday night,” they twanged happily. They rushed a little through the first verse before giving full throat to the chorus, in perfect unison: “And I’m down to stems and seeds again, too!”

  “Now that is an iconic tune,” Morpheus declared, when they’d harmonized their way through all five verses. “That is what it meant to be a starving young artist in the ’70s!”

  “But the last verse,” Alizarin protested. “Nobody who was a starving young artist in the ’70s got their house repossessed. We didn’t even have houses! That’s a dejected middle-aged redneck song.” And she hung a particularly phallic-looking cola on the line with the firmness of a woman possessed of good sense and a fine argumentative faculty.

  “Kirchen’s still married to his first wife. Bet you anything they have a house. And if he’s not legit, I don’t know who is.” Morpheus was the kind of appreciative listener who reads all the songwriter bios. “And I’m just talking about the chorus, about being young and poor. In the ’70s.”

  “Why don’t you run into the house and grab your guitar, Harness,” Alizarin suggested.

  It was plain to see that Morpheus, defeated on the question of analysis, was preparing to retreat into his vast knowledge of music and musicians. He could base his interpretation on a subtle chord change or a biographical detail, and Alizarin would have no way of verifying her suspicion that he’d made it up.

  “If you’re not going to hang weed or fix the fan,” she scowled, bringing the discourse back to the realm of practical housekeeping, “you could at least entertain us.”

  “Raining outside,” he countered.

  The “cellar” was really just a small cave under the house on the downhill side, so there was no way to get indoors without first going outdoors. He ran his long-nailed guitar-playing fingers over the titles in a small bookcase tucked into a corner of the pot cave. Spiders and earwigs scattered before his perusal, bringing a certain inclusiveness to the term dank.

  “How about poetry?” he suggested, by way of compromise. He pulled a pair of moldering volumes from a worm-eaten shelf, which shifted and sighed before lapsing into silence again.

  “We’ve got,” he peered at the spine, then opened to the title page when the effaced cover failed to provide a clue, “the Oxford Book of English Verse.”

  He produced a comical grimace of impressed amusement, as if he were unaccustomed to the trappings of a well-read life. I was never sure if he was mocking the poorly educated when he did this or taking a stand with what he perceived to be the working class. I do know that his grammar was less than perfect; that he was known to use the phrase, hoity-toity with infinite disdain; and that he took a particular delight in announcing, “I’m going to go lay down,” when he was about to take a nap.

  Every single time he did that, Alizarin would launch into a furious explanation of the past and present tenses of the verbs “to lie” and “to lay.” She managed the exact same level of frantic enthusiasm, each and every time. “It’s just because you’re doing it around all those kids,” she’d finish desperately, as if he were indoctrinating them with principles of Fascist thought while chain-smoking and drilling for oil in a pristine wilderness.

  Morpheus was peering at the other volume now. “You’ll love this,” he declared. “Fleurs du Mal.” There was no comic acknowledgement of the fact that, aside from people living in certain regions of Continental Europe, only former French colonials, nineteenth-century Russian nobles, and the uselessly overeducated speak French.

  “Something in English, please.” Aside from a few phrases in Yiddish and a handful of Hebrew prayers, Alizarin was monolingual.

  “Oder vielleicht ein bisschen Deutsch,” I suggested, just to remind everyone that I was there, too. I hung a puny cola on the line, careful not to snap its stem.

  Morpheus thumbed through the pages of the first volume, indifferently enough that it could have been his own idea. “The phrase, ‘conversion of the Jews’ has caught my eye,” he announced at length. He glared sternly at us, as if he knew we’d come to class unprepared. “Any takers?” he inquired pleasantly. “Any literary people out there?”

  I felt as if I were being drafted to bear witness to something. I hadn’t decided if I was embarrassed or fascinated, but I could tell by the drop in atmospheric pressure that there would be a fight before the next rain.

  “Andrew Marvell,” Morpheus relented at last. “Sixteen twenty-one to sixteen seventy-eight. ‘To His Coy Mistress.’” He squinted at the page for a long time. “Did you know he worked in Cromwell’s government? When he wasn’t contemplating the nuances of the human heart?”

  “Did you know that, ten seconds ago?” Alizarin responded tartly. This was a long way from the Americana guitar serenade she’d been hoping for.

  “And his housekeeper posed as his wife,” Morpheus continued serenely, as if it were his policy not to encourage the class clown. “Supposedly to keep his business partner’s creditors away from his small estate. Sounds like the slightly more respectable version, to me.” He was very happy now. Marvell had joined Kirchner in the pantheon of artists he knew.

  “Had we but world enough, and time,” he began at last. He sounded like a first-rate rogue. By the time he finished enumerating the superpowers that would accrue to the beauty who seized the day, Alizarin was flushed and smiling.

  “Should she sleep with him?” she asked, rhetorically, I’m sure, since we all knew the wages of male genius.

  Morpheus exploded. “If she has any sense of decency!” he cried, smacking the unfortunate shelf with the even less fortunate edition of the Oxford. “She’ll be humping his leg by the second stanza!” He shook the ragged volume like it was a pamphlet on how to change the world. “Any sense of decency at all!” he growled, and abandoned Andrew Marvell as if the dead man had done him a personal injury. “Now we’re going to hear something good,” he proclaimed. It sounded very much like a threat. “Enough of this sappy stuff.”

  He seized the Baudelaire. The spine flopped open of its own accord. “‘Une Charogne,’” he declared, like he might really be an MC. “A Carcass.” And he read us a poem in French, his voice dripping with sweet malevolence. “There’s a romantic little trifle for you.” He stalked out into the rain. Moments later, we heard him playing the guitar. It sounded like outlaw rockabilly. Alizarin sighed.

  FALL IS THE most stressful time
of year in Mendocino County. In mid-fall, I came upon a fragrant mound of uprooted pot plants, the little white fibers of their root systems plump and juicy in the weak September sun. All their limbs had been hacked off and placed in another neatly mounded pile about two yards away. I never found out whose pot it was, or who had savaged it so methodically. People used to alleviate this level of tension by burning a few witches at the stake. But what do you do when the witch hunts are over and the hills are full of dope-growing Wiccans?

  You throw things at your husband. Your shingles flare up and you take too many painkillers and you work through the fog and you make a lot of mistakes. In the last few weeks before the rains begin, there is an exponential increase in cold sores and rashes and domestic disputes. Hardly anyone gets shot until after the trimming is done, when a few trimmers return to the scene of the crime to rob the grower, who shoots them.

  Actually, that last scenario may have played out once or twice in the last forty years. But there are so many versions of the same story, everyone believes it’s a standard occupational hazard. Even the trimmers think it’s true, and each trimmer believes that he or she is a shining paragon of virtue for the lack of larceny in his or her stoned little heart.

  In the fall, I walked into Alizarin’s kitchen and noticed a great splat of something that looked like vomit on the refrigerator door.

  “Someone not feeling too good?” I asked, as I rummaged for the grapeseed oil. Alizarin ran a strictly organic grow and believed that cleaning the scissors with alcohol would compromise the certification for which she planned to be first in line when marijuana was legalized.

  “That’s Baba Ghanoush,” she corrected, taking a swipe at the vomity substance with a soggy rag.

  The Baba Ghanoush had been liberally applied to a picture of Morpheus, who grimaced as a black and white collie mix nuzzled his sideburns. It looked like the image in the photograph was wincing as the semi-liquid food mass hit its face.

  “I threw it at my fucking wonderful husband,” she elaborated, with what appeared to be great satisfaction. “M.C. Harness himself.”

  I noticed she was carefully cleaning the area around the picture, but not the image itself. She seemed pleased with what the Baba Ghanoush had done for the composition. I was starting to experience something like envy for the passionate dysfunction of this marriage. Being married to The John had been so boring, both of us simmering with silent resentment. Would I be happier now if I’d thrown things and shouted? What if I had been able to muster up the ability to give a shit about Karen?

  “I just don’t understand what’s going on with that guy sometimes,” Alizarin fumed. She wrung a khaki-colored dribble of organic matter into the sink, then corrected herself. “It’s his fucking ex. She let him get away with anything. I don’t know how she could do it. She had a job! She used to be a damned good singer but then she got depressed and started taking some horrible medication for it. She gained a lot of weight and stopped caring about things. She just sort of flatlined. But! She kept picking up after him! She never made him do anything!”

  I found the grapeseed oil and poured a few inches into a half-pint canning jar. I polished the blades of my Fiskars, which is the preferred weapon of choice in the trimming trade.

  “I have told that asshole.” She was seething now. “I have told him over and over again. But he doesn’t even wear his hearing aids around me. He says they hurt his ears. They’re inconvenient. But I have caught him wearing them at rehearsal. That’s important. Just not what I have to say. And what I have to say is: the containers go under here.” She indicated the cupboard where the Tupperware containers went—mostly to die, because they were crammed in so chaotically, no one ever bothered to use them. “And the lids go in here,” she continued, with what was left of her fury. What was left, if it had been agricultural surplus, could have kept a few small villages going on modest rations for a year or two.

  “He says Scott did it,” she went on, as if she’d gotten to the bottom of a nefarious intrigue and was boldly bringing her findings to press.

  Scott was another trimmer, the satori-prone middle son of a dermatologist and an engineering professor. He had rashes and eczema and obsessive-compulsive disorder and one day, without a word of explanation, he had set out on foot from Orange County and walked to Mendocino. In the spring, he’d refused to cut down the male plants, reasoning that he himself was male and if he deserved a shot at self-determination, so did they. He had the skulking posture of a dog that’s just killed a chicken, and when he talked, his lower jaw moved up and down like a ventriloquist dummy’s. Scott had removed all the lids from the lid drawer and all the containers from the cupboard. He had cleaned out the spiders and mouse droppings, and then paired up the lids with the matching containers. It was deeply satisfying for him to bring order to things.

  “I’m sure he didn’t do that on his own recognizance,” Alizarin insisted. “Harness made a unilateral decision while I was at Beth’s, and he deployed this kid to fuck up my system. And now he’s trying to blame it all on a trimmer! As if I’d fall for that!” It was humiliating to reflect that if I were to be used as a proxy in the Goldfarb-Charnisse hostilities, the attempt would be derided on account of my insignificance.

  “They don’t come out of the dishwasher together, do they?” She wrenched the lid from a container, to demonstrate how nature had created things separate and distinct from one another. “And they don’t go back together, either!”

  With the fury of a woman righting one of the great wrongs of her time, she restored the lidless Tupperware to its cupboard and the lid to its drawer.

  “He just doesn’t have the patience to take a few minutes to find the right lid,” she complained, as aggrieved as if he’d refused the peace terms of a civilized nation, on the grounds of a backward ideology.

  “Maybe Wifey Number Onehad time to make sure the right lids went on the right containers before she put them all away in her spotless cupboards,” Alizarin retorted, though nobody had said a thing.

  Nobody was me these days, since Scott, shortly after his deployment in the Tupperware wars, had resolved to change the world through education. His parents sent him enough money to come home “like a civilized person,” his mother told Alizarin, with a light embarrassed laugh at the foibles of her wayward son.

  “I don’t have the fucking time to be his mommy,” Alizarin hissed, still ripping the heads off Tupperware and slapping them into the drawer. “His mother did everything for him, too. Do you know she made his clothes for him? She was sending him shirts she made by hand when he was thirty-seven years old!”

  It was true. Stella Charnisse had a secret source for fabric in patterns of fanciful fish, photogenic predators, and flowers in colors that do not occur in nature. She also had a great disdain for buttons, which is why she sewed a single strip of Velcro right down the middle of her shirts, where a seamstress more easily intimidated by convention might have wasted time on buttons and buttonholes. Morpheus loved to rip open his mother’s shirts, goggling his eyes like a maniac and grinning with unself-conscious joy as he exposed his startled chest hairs to static shock and sudden sun.

  “Never laid down the law.” She was working to a cadence now. “Never had the time to make him do the dishes. Oh, no. But there’s unlimited time to do it yourself!” She scanned her sector with quick raptor-like movements of her head, seeking out any stray Tupperware that had been capped without prior authorization.

  There was no sense of proportion to Alizarin’s will. She had the exact same level of fury for the Tupperware as she did for the brutal triviality of the drug war. Every brushstroke was exactly as important as the rest. If the Tupperware drawer had been reorganized without her sanction, it was only a matter of time before the trimmers were getting stoned in her studio; before the Arts Council was walking all over her; before her vision dimmed into a placid thing and she was making watercolors of housecats and roses.

  I remembered a story my father told me about
a bear trainer, from his days in the circus. A few minutes before the end of every act, the clowns would gather in a chute behind the tent, so they could give the crowd a few laughs as performers struggled into costumes and roadies set the stage.

  One night, as on every other night, the band began to play. The music tripped along, drawing closer and closer to the part that cued the clowns. It built momentum, sped toward the climax—then stopped and started building up again. The people didn’t notice. They were looking at the bears. There is nothing like a couple of large carnivores in pink and yellow tutus to hold a crowd’s attention. But in the chute, the clowns were getting restive. Someone passed a rumor that the bears had refused to do their next trick.

  “Just let it go,” the clowns began to murmur.

  “But this was her life,” my father told me, bringing the force of it up from his guts. He had been modulating his voice since well before I was born. “This was her heart, this was her soul. She would stand there all night long until they did that trick. She didn’t care how many clowns were waiting in the chute. She didn’t care if every single person in that audience went home. She didn’t care if we took down that tent and left the country. The show was not going on until that bear balanced a ball on his nose exactly the way she told him how to do it.” I have often believed that my father’s favorite fact about human nature is the one about how people love to be just a little bit scared. And sometimes I wonder if Alizarin ever dabbled in bears.

  I asked if the bears in their pastel tutus ever did the trick. “Oh, yes.” My father smiled. “That was a long time ago.”