I snapped to my senses and woke up the next morning and showered (for the first time in like six months), cut my hair, and took a Greyhound back to our school to reenroll. At the bus station I tried to convince the dreadlocked white dude to come back to school with me and that we should probably switch our majors to like business or computer science.
I saw the look of judgment in his eyes and I knew immediately that he was going to say some busted shit, and I was right.
“I can’t follow you back to Babylon,” he explained, like completely fucking serious. “It’s like Jerry said, man—short time to be here, and a long time to be gone.” He broke down crying and hugged me. I went back to school and we stayed in touch for a while and by 2002 he finally cut those fucking things. I think he’s a librarian now or something. He even apologized for the whole dreadlock Phish period eventually and every once in a while, I look him up and torture him with a joke.
Q: Where do hippies fuck and how is it?
A: IN TENTS MAN, INTENSE!
EARLY RETIREMENT
HE HAD ADOPTED THIS INSANE new beauty practice of rubbing Preparation H on the bags under his eyes. He was trying to scrub that puffy, confused, alcoholic look right off his face—it burned to all hell but goddamn if it didn’t work. There had to be some kind of fancy, faggy, antiaging, anti-inflammatory something or other at a boutique in San Francisco that, like, smelled nice and blended into the skin in a less severe way. But these days he could barely make it to the corner store, much less downtown San Francisco.
The trolley cars bothered him, the European tourists giving him that what-are-you-doing-here look on the street bothered him, effort in general bothered him—put all these factors together and what was left was a tube of hemorrhoid cream purchased at the Grocery Outlet for $1.50. He still smelled like alcohol in the morning but at least his face didn’t look all fucked-up. It was a small victory that would have to do.
He threw on shades and thought, Why am I doing this? Then, Wait, how am I doing this?
The last couple of months he had started sleeping with his feet hanging out of his second-story window. It helped to correct his shiftless moving around in bed, and as a result he could hear the cars out by the highway in the night. He started to have dreams that he was peacefully underwater—but he knew it was his brain reinterpreting the cars roaring past. From a distance, the hum of the highway sounded like waves crashing into land. From his bed, he would pull the covers over his head and dream of being in the ocean. Alone and at peace.
It had been a hard stretch.
He was an actor and had got a job that summer as the lead of this god-awful play, some drama about a murderer in a mining town during the gold rush. It bored him to tears and he hit the bottle real hard one night before the show, ended up blacking out onstage and being removed from the play the next day. It was not the first time this happened.
He relayed the story to his friend Mark over the phone.
“I got drunk and embarrassed myself in front of a bunch of prominent white neoliberals,” he offered.
“Again?!” asked Mark.
“Again,” he explained. “The stage manager was this hippie who told me I would never work in this town again! I broke down and cried.” Real tears welled up—he could feel them leaking through the film of the Preparation H.
Mark kept his cool. “I mean, that’s nice of her to threaten you and all but keep in mind you never really worked there before—who gives a flying fuck?! Meet me and the boys for lunch,” he demanded.
He and Mark were brothers of sorts. Some decade and a half ago the two of them were cast in a TV show on a fledgling gay channel about the lives of four single Black gay men in L.A. It was a big to-do—audiences loved it, and he basically played the Black version of all the white queens he hated. He had been working on some horrible avant-garde play in San Francisco at the time when his agent called him with an offer for the part of “Jonathan”—muscular, thirty-three, nonurban Black, hippie wallflower type. It seemed easy enough. He had been having problems getting acting gigs not reading as “urban”—every role called for a strong masculine Black man with confidence and all the answers, and he couldn’t fake that even for a paycheck. The role of Jonathan felt tailor-made—after all, he grew up in Encino.
The show was so uniquely Black (or as “Black” as white West Hollywood tastes would allow) that no one noticed the characters for what they were: really shitty muscle queens from L.A.
He hoped at first they would mirror the Spice Girls and each have some form of distinct personhood (he wanted to be the dark-skinned “woke” one), but there was no such luck. Instead they were four leads who all mirrored one another like quadruplets; the running catchphrase of the show (said by all of them in unison) was “Ew! He’s fat!” (Cue laugh track.)
He made semidecent money for the price of his soul and did what all reasonable G-list “celebrities” on G-list sitcoms did: he stumbled into cocaine and alcohol addiction. The show was over before the third season and he stayed on drinking. He moved back to San Francisco broken as all hell and chased jobs in regional theater while, during harvest season, he worked in the pot farms up north.
Mark himself had moved to San Francisco recently—he was working as an agent now, developing talent.
I hate the idea of meeting these faggots for lunch, he thought, getting ready. The problem was, he despised Mark’s habit of always dragging boys he was fucking to brunch for an awkward meet and greet. And considering his foul mood it all felt a bit extra today.
Still, he threw on shades—it was time to meet these faggots for lunch.
Upon arriving he quickly ordered an “Irish Health”—Jameson whiskey and green tea on ice with simple sugar (a splash of Baileys if you must).
“Ah…,” he said, “… now I feel better.” He slammed it and then ordered a double of the same.
Mark brought two queens he’d had sex with the night before. One boy was a blond and the other had a birthmark on his face.
Mark was dominating the conversation, as always. He had a way of taking a conversation and boiling it down to its essentials—his stories always led back to sex and/or violence. It never failed. This particular brunch he was explaining how he had recently been robbed south of Market Street.
“I had on a thousand-dollar watch, had all my credit cards on me, seven hundred dollars in cash I owed my roommate, and an extra-large cheese pizza I ordered from the place on the corner. So, I see this big Black muscle queen walking towards me from Twelfth Street. Big ole uncut dick swinging to the gods in his track pants and I’m staring him down like, ‘Wanna fuck?’ He rolls up on me and the last thing I remember is him punching me in the head. Anyway, I wake up about thirty minutes later, and I know it’s thirty minutes later ’cause I still had my watch on, my credit cards, and the cash—the only thing missing was THE PIZZA!!”
The boy with the birthmark spit up his Jack and soda. The blond boy asked me what I did.
“I was an actor but I failed. Now I work in agriculture, seasonally,” I said, not looking him in the eye. “I’m in between trips.”
“You mean you grow weed?” he pressed.
“Yes.”
They all got drunker and went to Mark’s. The men got naked on the bed, but he felt apart, too drunk and sad to achieve an erection. There came a point where the merry trio was all having sex on top of him and he rolled over and pulled the covers over his head. He wanted to be underwater again.
* * *
HE HAD TO KILL ALL THE BOYS. This was his job. A boy plant’s pollen can travel up to half a mile away and, with one drop of it, the whole crop would get seeded. Pot with seeds is unsalable and the farm would lose money.
Other times, even without the boys, there were girl plants that could change sex—they would drop balls and start getting all the other girls pregnant. This was corrected by killing and disposing of all the new boys right as they “dropped balls” (seed sacs).
He had been on the mountai
n for a while now. The exact number of days he could not tell—time blurred so much up there. His task was repetitive, but he loved being alone. Just him, the plants, the drying room (the only built structure on the property), the hum of the gas generators, and his two guns.
There was a period when he would go to random farms and trim for strangers but it didn’t last long. It was a particular form of hell being stuck three hours from nowhere in the California backwoods with white hippies; they all smelled bad and had Ganesh tattoos. They insisted that he “think positively.” He hated that shit. He had scored the right gig eventually, with this private small farm that he worked alone until the fall trimmers came to finish manicuring the whole crop.
There was a fussy creek cutting through the hills that he bathed in in the mornings—the icy coldness of it stung his balls. No soap could be used in it, as it would pollute the river. All his other supplies and actual drinking water were kept in a slender kitchen with a separate entrance on the back side of the drying room. He had to shit in a hole in the ground.
The goal was to get all the weed cut and dried before the rainy season started in early winter. Two years before, the rain had started early and had molded all the plants, which didn’t begin to cover how damn miserable he had been in the tent. He made a pallet to sleep on in the drying room this time around.
He stayed in the room even after the rain was over.
At nights, alone in the drying shed, the landscape outside had the dark glow of moonlight. The moon had put a soul filter on everything. The hum of the gas-powered generator reminded him of the underwater sound of the highway cars he could hear from his bed in the city. He was alone in the expansiveness. He felt like a nature god.
* * *
IF HE REALLY HAD TO THINK ABOUT IT, he had never wanted to be an actor. Not really, that is; in his memory, it had all happened upon him. On a whim, he had stormed the stage when he was five—it was a one-man coup.
His older cousin was eight or nine and participating in her elementary school beauty pageant—he was sitting in his Sunday church suit in the audience of the elementary school gymnasium next to his auntie. He noticed all the girls in pretty dresses, lit up onstage, and the applause every time the girls twirled about.
When one contestant departed the stage, he saw it empty and knew he should be there. He snuck from under his auntie and ran up the side steps and placed his little body midstage. He couldn’t see the faces of the audience (perhaps an early indicator of his nearsightedness). Then came the roar of applause. He knew he had done something right because everyone was clapping for him. Right as the shock wore off, his little face produced a smile—just in time for his auntie to come rip him off the stage by his right hand.
“BOY, YOU KNOW YOU KNOW BETTA!!!!” she exclaimed in a yelled whisper in his ear as she led him down the stage stairs. He couldn’t even hear her. The smile on his face lasted for days.
All he wanted, he realized, were the stage lights and the applause; the acting itself was just the driver holding the carrot in front of the donkey. He figured that if culture had allowed for a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker to get stage lights and applause, he would have easily been that, too. But life, being what it was, made him an actor.
His mother had always hated his profession; she thought it was too common. She barely even congratulated him when he got on a network show. She wanted him to be a teacher and she eventually got her wish.
There was a time he spent teaching acting workshops at regional theaters after the TV show got canceled—there were a great many people who couldn’t act. He marveled at how all reluctant thespians had the same complaint: “I don’t like being watched.” He knew this statement was a cop-out. He could usually cure the novice actor with one sentence. “You’re not afraid of being watched—you’re afraid of watching yourself be watched.” The student would always get this confused look and then more often than not a series of breakthroughs would start.
In his eyes, the spewing of words was the easy part; it was the blocking that killed or illuminated the expression, the business of what to do with the hands or feet when trying to convince others that you are someone else, movement always being the pure indicator of how truthful one was being.
He had never been a good actor, just a very committed one. He was like Robert Downey, Jr., or Mel Gibson—he had committed in acting to being himself. Acting had given him the license to be himself. The context, accent, or historical backdrop could change play to play, but he stayed wrapped up in his typecast: a fragile yet strong (or fake brave) and always spiraling man.
In acting he hid behind his characters to put distance between him and the audience. It was like the first night he stepped onstage when he was five. As far as he was concerned, there was only the holy trinity of him, the stage lights, and the void. It was perfect freedom. It would not be forever.
He began to notice it. It was small at first, but then it grew. It was something he had warned others against but slowly was unable to reconcile in himself; he started to notice himself being watched. It was the beginning of the end, and the death was sudden. Out of fucking nowhere one day, the audience all had faces, eyes, and expectations. Without warning, something internal had changed. After the show got canceled, he retreated to the tepid world of Northern California live theater; all bit parts with no infrastructure for advancing. His artistic fatigue culminated the night he blacked out onstage the final time. Even his meltdown was mundane.
First it started with two celebratory shots before each stage performance, then four, then half the bottle. Before long he had been fired for the first time from a stage production for reeking of alcohol onstage.
He had quit for a bit and even went to AA—it seemed like a start but he descended again. The time after was harder. The second and third time you fail is always worse; there’s the voice that asks, “Am I really choosing to be this person?” The realization felt like death, or like being underwater, but not in a peaceful way.
Up north, after his meltdown, he sat at the general store in town looking at a bottle of whiskey for a good four minutes. He had come to refill the surplus gas containers for the generators. He felt a bad craving but knew he’d be on the mountain by himself and feared the hell he would conjure up and decided to be careful. Whiskey was his shaman drug of choice and he knew to avoid spirits.
He left the medicine aisle and got some dried jerky and water instead. He paid the cashier and left. He brought an extra blanket, too, just in case. It was becoming October and he had another month and a half on the mountain. He knew it would start to turn cold soon.
* * *
IT WAS 7:00 A.M. and he was working fast; in a couple of hours it would be too hot to work. He was counting the marijuana plants, getting some ready for wet trim, and taking others to the dry room.
He worked up until his midday rest. He sat under a tree and scraped the dirt and THC crystals from his fingertips, “finger hash” as they called it. He would smoke it later.
In his youth, he believed a lot of dumb shit. Like how one time this older fag in the bar relayed to him the origin of “Spanish hash.”
“So, in Spain they send young boys running naked through the marijuana fields and then they scrape the THC from their bodies. That’s why Spanish hash is so expensive!”
This myth was soon debunked by a fellow weed trimmer.
“Naw, brother,” said Austin, this California hippie boy he sat next to in the trim room. “No naked boys, they make that shit from explosives. Butane.”
The midday heat was fading and he was back in the garden making sure the plants hadn’t changed sex. He started to separate the good pot that would be trimmed and sold as flower from the lesser grade pot that they would consolidate and turn into hash.
Soon the chores were done and he sat drinking water under the shade of a tree. His thoughts always doubled down on themselves at this point in the day. Whenever catching a moment’s breath, he had the same feelings. All he cou
ld think about was where he had gone.
The last thing he remembered was forgetting all of his lines. It was relayed to him that there were no curse words or jittery, unexpected behavior. Rather, it was a cool and complete disassociation onstage. He went to a table upstage right and buried his face in his hands for a full fifteen minutes. The forty-nine people in the audience got frustrated and eventually walked out. It was his onstage retirement party. That had been some seven years ago. Since then he just chased the fall harvest and did the summer setup for whatever pot farm up north was hiring. He remembered back to earlier in the summer, the day he came to the farm.
Just to be a troll he signed up for one of those Christian free-ride groups, and it had totally backfired. The Christian man he had hitched a ride with was on his way to Oregon from Texas; he made it a point to pray every time they stopped to get gas or take a piss. On one prayer stop, the Holy Ghost spirit lasted for twenty minutes and ended in the Christian man going into full-on testimony. He sat in the passenger seat listening to the man and wished to God (ironically enough) that he could find a ride group where all he had to do was flash his dick and get to his destination in a timely manner. Next time, he thought.
The car finally made its way to Lake County. The farm was near there.
Supposedly Clear Lake was the largest lake in California, and supposedly it was the oldest lake in North America. He was told these things but never bothered to confirm them himself.
The car maneuvered around the two-lane highway that circled the lake for miles and miles.
Post–World War II the lake had been a popular Northern California tourist destination; he spied from the car window all the dilapidated fishing piers and run-down motor lodges with the original decaying midcentury signs more or less intact.
The lake itself was fishable, yet the catch was inedible. The mine nearby had closed in the fifties, but not before it had polluted the entire body of water with mercury. It was pure poison.
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