Should I Be Stoned at Work?: Part II

In my junior year in high school, I opted to take what they called Cooperative Education, which was kind of like a work study program. The best part about it is you received 1 credit for the class and 2 credits for the job. This meant you were able to leave school at lunch time since there were only 2 more class hours after lunch and you had the 2 credits from the job. Shortly after I started that year, I moved up in jobs from working at a carwash to working as a line cook at a Steak & Ale Restaurant.

I didn’t start work until 4:00 PM so I always had several hours to get stoned before work to make sure I had the munchies. You were only allowed one meat item for dinner each shift because all the steaks, lobster, crab was inventoried. The sides, though, were another matter. You could eat all the salad bar, soup, rice pilaf, etc. that you wanted.

During the weeknights, it was always the same. You’d get to work stoned at 4:00, set up your station, and, starting at 5:00, the dining room opened and you would first get the older people until about 6:00 PM. Then you could go outside and catch a little refresher buzz before the main crowd started showing up around 7:00 PM. The dinner rush would be over about 9:00 but we were open until 10:00 PM so after the main rush you could get another little buzz before you started to break everything down and start cleaning.

On the weekends, everything was pretty much the same but the kitchen was open until midnight and the bar closed at 2:00 AM. When the bar closed, they would let us go in and play space invaders and missile command for free. We would stay and get stoned and play video games until the manager left usually between 4:00 and 5:00 in the morning. Needless to say, I was a space invaders/missile command expert after a few months.

Should I Be Stoned at Work?: Part II

War Games and Other Stupid Tricks

Growing up in what was basically the wilderness back in the 60′s and 70′s, there was still a lot of undeveloped land surrounding neighborhoods of homes. Much of the land was undeveloped because it was a flood plain for the mighty Dupage River, so it flooded a couple times every year. This area gave us plenty of places to go to get stoned and do some things that in hindsight were actually quite dangerous.

Since the open areas that were not forested would often flood, a reed like plant would grow that we called cat tails or pussy willows. During the summer, these plants would grow thickly and provided the perfect place to catch a buzz away from the prying eyes of our nonsmoking peers and our parents. Many of the kids who didn’t smoke wouldn’t go into the forests or fields because for some reason they were afraid of us.

Toward the end of the summer the cat tails would start dying and when they dried out they could easily be pulled from the ground.  Some would come out of the ground with large clumps of dirt and these would become hand grenades in our war games. Some would come out with no dirt attached and the root end would be a point and these were used as spears in our war games, or just contests to see who could throw them farthest.

We would meet in the field after school at either the fort or just at the end of one of the streets and get stoned. Once we were nicely buzzed, we would then split into teams for the war games or just sides for the spear throwing. The war games were quite simple. One team went out into the field and found a hill or forested area to defend. The other team would then use some strategy to attack the position using spears and mud bombs.

Many times over the years, someone would get injured either from a head shot with a mud bomb or a penetration wound from one of the spears and the game would end. Most times though you would get some bruises and maybe bleed a little from your legs or arms from a spear hit. After enough people were sore, the game would end and we would smoke a little more weed for some pain relief.

In all the years we played this game, there were no serious injuries from either spear hits or bomb hits. There were 2 instances of broken bones, but they were from falls or poorly judged jumps.

War Games and Other Stupid Tricks

Should I Be Stoned at Work?: Part 1

When I was in high school, the answer to this question was easy. I worked at a gas station pumping gas when I was 14 and 15 (back then self-service was a novelty) and I also had to do oil changes and fix flat tires. This means that even though I wasn’t old enough, I was driving cars around the station onto and off the lift to perform these services. I worked by myself for about 3 hours every night so I didn’t dare get stoned at that job. I was paid $1.50 an hour and received an additional $0.50 for each oil change and flat tire repair I did.

The day I turned 16, I applied for a job at the carwash that my older brother worked at. The job only paid minimum wage, which was $2.65 in 1978, but on a good day you could also make another $25.00 in tips. I started working there 2 days later and it was a dream job for a stoner like me. You were covered in head to toe in a yellow rain uniform that included a face shield so that even if the boss was there he couldn’t see your eyes clearly. He left usually around 5 or 6 so you were on your own until closing at 10 PM so you could smoke at will for 4 or 5 hours.

The best part, though, was that you could borrow some money against your tips and buy a joint or two if you didn’t have any weed or money before work. On any given night you were going to make at least $5.00 in tips, and back then a joint cost only $1.00 so you could get a friend to front you a doobie or 2 so you could be stoned when you went to work. They could stop by work later and even if you didn’t already have the money you could give it to them out of the carwash funds and replace it later. Life was good because I always had money and weed for the rest of my high school career.

See Should I Be Stoned at Work?: Part 2

Should I Be Stoned at Work?: Part 1

Finding Out the Boss Gets High

As a stoner, one of the first things you try to determine at your job is whether or which of your coworkers may get high. Of particular interest is your immediate supervisor because they are the ones who will be watching and evaluating you while you work. To me it was always pretty easy to figure this out because you could tell with most people if you had seen them stoned and straight before. Most of my bosses who smoked were always more engaged with what you were up to when they weren’t stoned. The opposite seemed to be true when they were stoned because if they didn’t know whether you smoked or not, they got paranoid and avoided you as much as possible.

The day after my 16^th birthday, I started working at a carwash where the boss didn’t get stoned  because my older brother already worked there and he got me a job right away. The nice thing about the carwash is that in addition to the $2.65 minimum wage, you also received tips. When you worked after school, the boss usually left around 5:00 PM and you were alone until you closed the place at 10:00 PM. Since weeknights were usually slow, you had a list of chores to do so you could get stoned after the boss left and tackle the chores.

After I had been working there a couple weeks, some of my friends started stopping by and we would get stoned and listen to some tunes. Soon a few friends started turning into many friends and before long we were having almost nightly parties at the carwash. We would throw all the empty beer cans and bottles on the roof so they wouldn’t be in the garbage can, which we thought was pretty smart. Sometimes when I was really stoned I would let my friends wash the cars and run the machine.

All of this came crashing down one day when the boss decided to go up on the roof for some reason. By this point there were hundreds of empty beer cans and bottles along with some empty liquor bottles up there. Needless to say, he was not happy because he had also found a package of rolling papers, which, as it turned out, led him to look at the roof. My job survived but the partying was over because he started stopping by on random nights and he knew if I was high when he stopped by so I had to stop.

Finding Out the Boss Gets High

The War on Drugs

Weed smokers today should appreciate how good they have it compared to smokers in the 1970′s, 80′s, and 90′ s. Starting actually with President Johnson in the 1960′s, the so called war on drugs made the life of a stoner miserable at some times. During this time, there were periods – lasting months – where it was next to impossible to get some decent weed. The pot you could get was also expensive in addition to being low quality.

During the late 1970′s and early 1980′s, the U.S. government began spraying marijuana fields in Mexico with the herbicide paraquat. Although studies had shown that smoking paraquat sprayed pot had little or no health consequences, the government ran a disinformation program claiming that smoking the tainted pot would cause health problems. While paraquat exposure has been linked to Parkinson’s disease, this has only happened with people who regularly worked with the herbicide such as farmers. The small amount of paraquat that was ingested from smoking weed wasn’t enough to cause any significant health problems.

In the end, all the war on drugs accomplished was to imprison people for wanting to use a substance that has never been proven to be addictive or harmful in the way that heroin, cocaine, and alcohol are. You don’t see stories in the news about people high on marijuana causing traffic fatalities in the thousands every year like alcohol does.

Luckily for me, I was busted with about a quarter pound of pot (a felony) before the war on drugs was underway. The charge was eventually reduced to possession of less than 30 grams (a misdemeanor) and I consider myself fortunate today to have beaten the war on drugs implementation. Had I been busted a few years later, I almost certainly would have received jail time because if you were caught with over an ounce in those days it was implied that your intent was to distribute. People who were caught selling drugs back then almost always received jail time.

The War on Drugs

The Ceiling Has Eyes

Our new modern high school which had been built in 1972 had drop ceilings throughout and we discovered that there was about three feet of space between floors. If you climbed up on the sinks in the washroom and were strong enough, you could pull yourself up into the ceiling and could roam at will throughout the entire floor. This created an interesting situation when it came to smoking weed in the winter. We could now smoke inside the school and no longer had to freeze our butts off outside to get high.

Once we were up in the ceiling it wasn’t long before the temptation to get into mischief when we were stoned became too great. Being stoners, one of our favorite lunch foods were the burritos sold in the cafeteria. We eventually found our way over to the cafeteria kitchen area and we were able to get our burritos for free. If we were really daring, we would drop down into the kitchen and get some chocolate milk to go with them. So now we could go up into the ceiling instead of freezing outside and get stoned. Once we were stoned, we could crawl over to the cafeteria and get some free burritos and, if we were lucky, some chocolate milk. Life at school was finally getting good.

Unfortunately, some people started peeking down into the girl’s washroom from the ceiling and they eventually got caught. The school made it so that the ceiling tiles in the washrooms were no longer removable, so as usual a few bad apples ruined it for the rest of us. We could still go up there once in a while from the hallway but that was risky because a teacher could show up at any time. Besides, since they now knew about it they would check up there occasionally so it was risky business to go up there anyway. They never did figure out that we were also stealing burritos and chocolate milk to cure our munchies and cotton mouth when we were up there.

The Ceiling Has Eyes

International Stoner: Part I

Eventually my travelling for my company started taking me on trips out of the country for weeks at a time. As this happened more and more frequently and the durations were getting longer and longer, I started thinking of ways that I could get some weed into the country with me. Some of the methods I used and the reasons why I wasn’t entirely comfortable with them follows.

Colombia Reverse Smuggling 1996

Even though they no longer contained lead, I decided to cut open a toothpaste tube at the top and squeeze out all of the toothpaste. I was able to then insert about 6 joints that were rolled and double bagged into the tube. I topped the tube back off with toothpaste and taped the top back on. I put the tube and toothbrush into another baggie and put them in my steel toed boots inside my checked baggage. I had no problems getting into Colombia, but when I came home U.S. Customs really searched everything thoroughly but I had smoked it all and tossed the tube so there wasn’t anything suspicious.

South Korea 1998

This time I decided to bring some along in carry-on baggage because I was going to be changing planes in SFO and Seoul and each plane change was a potential luggage search. This was before the days when everyone carried a laptop and cell phone so your carry-on bag would usually be used for toiletries, snacks, and camera. I carried 4 rolled joints inside my toothbrush holder and jammed them in so that they wouldn’t be exposed even if they opened it. I was working in a city called Taegu in Korea and the first thing I did when I checked in was get stoned since it was Sunday morning and I had the day to myself.

I left the hotel and since Taegu was about 150 miles southeast of Seoul they did not see the U.S. soldiers down there. All the kids were intrigued by the white giant and they would follow me and point and laugh. Their parents were all apologizing and I told them it was OK, I didn’t mind. I went into a Pizza Hut and ordered a “Chicago Style” pizza, which was crust, tomato sauce, pineapple chunks, cabbage, and a little cheese. Needless to say that was the last pizza I ordered in Korea.

See International Stoner: Part II!

International Stoner: Part I

The Boundary Waters

During the summer between junior and senior year we took a school sponsored excursion for 2 weeks of canoeing on the Minnesota – Canada border, The Boundary waters as they are called. The trip with school was alright but it was kind of hard to party much because there were always other people around. During that trip my friends and I decided that we would return the following year on our own when most of us would be 18 and our friend, Chris, would be 19  and we could rent the canoes and equipment ourselves.

You weren’t allowed to cross into Canada and spend the night, but that was exactly what we were planning on doing. We brought with us a half-pound of marijuana, but we were going to want some beers around the campfire as well. You had to paddle quite a few miles but you could cross into Canada where the drinking age was only 19 so that is what we did on our 2^nd day in the wilderness. We bought 12 cases of beer on that first excursion and the next 2 weeks were filled with paddling, portaging, and partying.

The water you were paddling in was also your drinking, cooking, and bathing water but I don’t know if they still do that today. I also wonder if after 9/11 you can still cross back and forth between the U.S. and Canada.

In some ways, this was almost saying goodbye to the group of people that I grew up partying with. These were the people I smoked weed with almost every day for the last 5 or 6 years. Now some of them would go to college, some would now get married and after this things would probably never be the same again. The memories of this trip are some of my most cherished memories.

The Boundary Waters

Trying to Slow Progress

Growing up in Lombard, IL, there was a lot of undeveloped territory. By the end of the seventies, though, the wheels of progress were turning and civilization was encroaching on our territory. Our territory was the land we built our forts on for smoking pot in the winter. It was the fields of prairie grass we could vanish in within seconds if the cops were about. We could walk out our front door and within 30 seconds we were out of sight and tokin’ away. This is where we experimented with growing the shitty homegrown we tried to grow every year.

In the summer of 1978, the construction equipment started showing up and we all wondered what was happening to our partying spots. At first we talked to them trying to figure out what they were doing and how much territory we were going to lose. At that point we found out that we were going to lose everything but we decided we would try and sabotage the construction.

We started with ripping out the construction stakes and once we pulled them all we would build a nice campfire with them and party away. This didn’t seem to slow anything down so we started trying to sabotage the equipment by smashing the controls and levers on the graders and bulldozers.

Our greatest accomplishment though happened when someone left the key in one of the bulldozers. It took us a while (probably longer than it should have because we were stoned) but we figured out how to operate and went on a destruction frenzy.

We destroyed as much of the concrete that had already been poured as we could. We used the bulldozer to push over as many other pieces of equipment as we could and did as much damage to the others as we could. When we were done, we drove the bulldozer into the manmade lake they had built. This would teach them to try and take our party spot away from us. The next day the police were all over us because they knew we did it, but they couldn’t prove it.

Trying to Slow Progress

Smelt Fishing

One of the coolest things we would do in the spring was go smelt fishing along the shore of Lake Michigan in March and April. You use a net to catch smelt because they travel in groups and are too small to make it worthwhile to try and catch them one at a time. Sometimes we would just go into the city and catch the smelt but most times we would drive an hour north to get away from the police so we could smoke some weed and drink some beers while we tried to snare some smelt.

Smelt are best to eat as you catch them because they are small and have a soft skeleton so you can eat the whole fish after you cut off the head and tail. They run along the shore feeding early in the morning while it is still dark out when they are spawning so it is best to be in place and stoned by about 4:00 AM. You should plan on about 15 smelt per person for a good hearty meal and if you plan on staying at the lake you might want to catch about 25 per person to keep the munchies in check throughout the day. You only have about a 2 hour window to catch them so it is fast and furious if you have a lot of people with you.

You always bring with you a grill, frying pan, olive oil, seasoned flour, garlic, tabasco sauce, and of course some pot to keep you hungry. If you like eating fried fish sandwiches you can also bring some bread and maybe some mayo. First, you get the smelt ready by chopping off the head and the tail of the ones you are going to eat. I like to keep the fish alive after I catch them so they are as fresh as possible when you eat them. Coat the smelt in your flour mix, fry em up about 10 at a time for a minute or two and enjoy.

Smelt Fishing

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