The Pot Head

Some people might think that smoking pot when I was young was stupid and dangerous. It was, and what I did to score some pot, combined with my naiveté and youth, could have caused me much pain. Like trying to buy some weed on a side street near the Cabrini Green Projects in Chicago. I was very lucky that the guy only took my money. Though he did give me a nice bag of oregano for my troubles.

One evening, in the summer of 1969, some friends and I were hanging out and smoking a little, when somebody mentioned that over in Indiana there were giant fields of marijuana growing, and if we had a car we could get all the pot we wanted for free. I had a car. An old 1960 purple Ford. So early the next morning, before dawn, we all piled in and headed for Indiana. We drove for a couple of hours and then stopped on a gravel road, in the middle of nowhere. With the first light of day, we could see that it was true, acres of pot plants spread out in the fields on the side of the road. After filling the trunk of the old Ford with all that it could hold, we headed home, but not before stopping for breakfast at a roadside diner.

For some reason it never occurred to us that four long haired hippies, riding around in an old purple car with Illinois tags, in the middle of bum-fuck Indiana might draw some attention. Within minutes a cop appeared. “You boys aren’t out here looking for some of that wild marijuana, are you?”, the cop drawled. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who pooped his pants. “No sir, marijuana? around here? us?”, we stammered. I don’t know how we got away without the cop making us open up the trunk of the car, but we did. After convincing the cop we were not, and would never, be looking for pot, he let us go.

When we got all that weed back to our apartment, we dried it out in the oven, rolled some joints, and tried to enjoy our harvest. We smoked, and puffed, and smoked some more, but we never got a buzz. You see the reason the cop wasn’t really concerned is because what we had was hemp that the U.S. government had planted during WWII to make rope. Talk about rope burn.