"The Immoral Alliance,"

He told her....  "that's how I see drugs."
He was talking to a supposed counselor at the jail when the line drifted into his conversation.  Explaining to the woman why he was sixty, had no record, was an unrepentant drug user, and wished the cops in the town would just leave him alone.  Like they had in Denver, where the cops had better things to do than bust the peaceful.  If they knew anything about him, it was that he had no record, paid his taxes, taught school, and was exactly the kind of nice guys they were happy to help.  Here they knew him all too fucking well for his tastes, for red necks, at least.  Most cops he had known could have given a shit about who smoked weed.  They were interested in other shit, unless the quantity was huge enough for a pr promotion and what not, but that seldom happened.

Here in this town, they pulled him over after noticing the bulb was out on his license plate. A bulb that had burned out so long ago that he had forgotten to even remind himself to do it someday in the future.  He had a couple ounces in his the glove box, roaches over flowing from the ashtray that prevented any attempt to close the damn thing... a bowl in the cup holder between the seats in his Thunderbird.  He had just got in from a three hour highway ride from Denver and had basically turned the car into his front room, sipping a red bull to stay awake and using a traveling bong he had just bought, which had a holder you attached to the dash, pushed the packed bong down into and then  pressed a button under the steering wheel to ignite the water bong, electrically cooled with plug into an ipod station.  His car was mundane, a gray sedan that drew no attention from anyone, which was the way he liked it.  An old man in a sensible car was not going to get pulled over for suspicion of pot.  At least not anywhere except there, in Welcome, Utah.

Now he might as well be driving a vw bus with huge pot plants and a list of price list.
  Caught him once and that put a target on his back.  He was busted twice in three days.  Never arrested before and now twice in three days.

He was so used to thinking about other things.  Pot was like the blood pressure medication.  He decided to pretend to the cops that he was not smoking, told them as much, asked about K-2 and after patiently listening to a lecture told them that was off his list, too.   With four on the police force and not much to patrol, really.  He was being interrogated by Det. Preps, who had minored in social work and volunteered for all kinds of shit at his parish, where he was one of the serious bachelors who take from the priests and monks the decision that a life style without a lover is a viable option.  To him, pot was the way the kids went who were not going to amount to shit.
    


Looking around the police station after the second arrest, he told himself, 'I AM OUT NUMBERED ON FIELD OF FIRE.'   That sounded too dramatic.  He decided to stick with just slightly ahead of his times.The weed seemed like it had always given him the ability to hit the accelerate hard and not care how the fucking thing finally stopped, how the painting turned out, the trip, the lover affair... he was well beyond caring about dying.


He is a retired high school art teacher and was fairly well respected in the circles he ran.  He spent his summers selling his work around the country at fairs, basically traveling in a van with a few friends.  Other artists.  Sometimes alone.  Sometimes just him a woman.  Sometimes just him and his brothers.  Nice trips he could plan around visiting the mobile society that had scattered his college and high school mates all over the planet.

The sheriff was taking the matter way more serious than he was.  Jail did not scare him, and he knew the laws well enough to assume a decent lawyer would get him a fine.  He told himself he'd do a few days in jail if that was what it took to avoid getting probation, which would mean drug testing, would mean his painting ritual would be all fucked up.  Artists all the way back talked about how intoxication lead to inspiration.  That wasn't the only thing that existed, the more natural inspiration of an oil disaster or potential love comes on occasion...  weed worked for him every day.  Kept him focused on the often tedious process of laying down the preliminary layers of paint, waiting for the drying, slowly, so slowly waiting to finally see if the painting was going to please him, or disappoint him....  He had just enough of an education in art to be total unsure if his work meant anything at all.  People liked it, bought it, loved getting it as gifts.  Still, he seemed limited to himself.

The Sheriff did not give a shit about his painting.  "You moved into this town, what six weeks ago, and already you've been arrested twice.  That's some reputation.  What kind of work you do?"
"I'm a retired teacher."
"Public school I take it."
"University,"  he lied.
"What did you teach?  Bong packing?"
"Sometimes."
The cop looked up from his paper work with a bored, look tined with disgust.
 "Art.  Painting specifically."
"Smoke that shit with your students?"
"Uhmmm."   He thinks of Law and Order and how admitting to any crime at all was just stupid.  They were coming after him, and he was not going to lie, but he was not going to help him either.  "Look, I would like to call a lawyer, pay my bail.   And then, I would prefer if we could just leave each other alone until the trial.  They had no probable cause to pull me over the other night."
"We found weed in your car after you ran red light couple nights before.  Got lucky."
"You didn't get lucky.  I explained to you, I smoke the stuff sometimes.  I don't deal.  And here's something I have never told a cop -- I've smoked it a lot while driving.  And studies show that all it does it tend to make drivers go slower.  Nothing else.  Those are the facts.  Weed is a lot more mild to some, than most realize. Driving is done almost entirely by our unconscious.  I drove cab in college, and I avoided some accidents like a goddamn pro, on weed.  People thanked me for their lives, not to mention how I cut through traffic like butter by knowing the rythmn of the lights, and shit.  All stoned."
"You plan on driving stoned here?"
"No, sir.  Never again.  I can ride my bike."
"That's illegal, too."
"You know this stuff is medically legal?"
"There is nothing legal about driving while intoxicated.""
"Sure, okay.  A habit."
"You bought a lot of property out here recently.  You try and grow anything out there, I will throw your ass in prison."
"Boy, you sure don't seem much like the brochure the Chamber of Commerce sent me when they found out I was opening a business here."
"You are not opening a head shop in this town."
"No, I am going to...  you know what, actually, I don't know if I will even stay in this town."
"That's the kind of attitude that I like to hear."

He played it cool for a few weird weeks, driving over into the next county to a head shop and buying a pot substitute, legal enough, K-2.

.  The legal pot like shit tasted like pou pourri sometimes, sugar cookies,
Hizzle County had outlawed all head shops back in the seventies. Classified them along side the strip joints and sleazy, half mafia bars filled with slot machines and boisterous types calling in their bets, hoping to make a little, win for the day...  just the day.   He found the action extreme, having been raised in the seventies, and had watched head shops go from totally legal and honest, to banned, to back again and pot legalized, basically, for anyone who seemed to need the weed;  the high numbers of smokers showed that people were no longer being fooled into thinking booze was a better alternative than the ancient smoke, which man discovered long before the beer.   We are slowly, finally learning the lesson Nixon did when he closed the boarders to weed, and Heroin addictions blossomed in the cities;  those hippies inspired to do someting wildly good for their societies, became mundane again, mere fights against their own personal demons, the side effects of their immoral alliance. When he was sick of the K-2 and feeling brave after a few beers, he picked up a throw away phone he had bought just for the occasion, goes outside and walks down to a small dog park, empty now under a black, starry sky, dials a familiar number.

"Jess, I'm finally ready to come see you, buddy."
"Cool.  See you then."

Three hours later he was pulling into a parking lot under Jess's building, parking in the guest slot.  He had known Jess since he was in High School, and the kid had bought some of his best art.  Really consider his visits a chance to talk art, get advice.  The kid even got him shrooms every few years, when he felt the need to try and attain a spiritual experience he had with them once, in his twenties, when he sat by a tray of fresh mushrooms with no idea what a dosage was, and proceeded to eat a quarter of a try.  He loved the tastes of mushrooms and ate them almost like potato chips.  No one noticed.  The guys throwing the parties had actually gone out in the woods and picked them a couple weeks before just for the party.

He buys three pounds of weed and head over to Hertz, rents a car and explains that he is afraid to drive his long distance, and would like to leave his there.  He stops at a K-mart and buys over-sized, women's glasses with glittering stems and a a flowered scarf to cover his hair, and most of his face.  Lipstick.   That was enough with windows rolled up not to be noticed.  Whatever the cops thought of what they would see, they would not see him scoring weed.   The entire plot seemed sophomoric.  Out of some movie.  All cloak and dagger, enough so that in less desperate times,he would have considered himself the victim of parnanoia and score some valium to knumb out anxiety.


He chose a snowy night and everything went fine, until he was driving out of Denver and back to what he knew was going to be trouble.  He bought himself an air freshner on line that was supposed to remove the second hand smoke, switched to a vaporizer contraption that heated the weed just enough to release the chemicals and ignite no actual smoke.  Better for the lungs.  All the shit he learned from being around smokers all his life, and having a doctor hip enough to know it was better than cigarette smoking or drinking, with the vaporizor... he always stressed.


They then came to his door, in plain clothes, two deputies. Said they wanted to talk to him about his connections. They stood him there on his indoor porch and told him, speaking to him like he was a fuckign child molester who was infecting their little suburban landscape where he was beginning to think he was the only pot smoker they had but he knew better than that, had meant plenty already, though none of them wanted anything to do with him after the heat he brought on himself.    The cops had listened to him like they were interested for 17 hours, secretly gathering every admission to anything that might be perceived as a crime, and then had him sign it afterwards.  He had told the same rap to other cops before and while this was different, it wasn't going to hurt him in court -- he believed though was just unsure enough to have brief panic attacks and long moments of silence before bringing up the next bit of his crimes, which he was arguing,he knew, with the best minds on the topics as his footnotes.

Cops he found liked interesting people, broke up the night, as long they understood how to be polite, live up the prison code of using the word 'boss' and doing whatever is likey to get them a tip, more simpering waitors than hard cons.

Two months later he moved back to the City, had enough of the small time cops... leaving behind the students he had quickly gathered at his house on the lake, where he had hoped to bring in artists for sabbaticals year around.  He talked to the Mayor about why he was leaving before he did.  A banker whose family had lived in the town forever.   Younger than he expected, the benefit of his father dying young and leaving him in charge.  He ended up being the only pro-bono lawyer available for his case.  The Mayor at first treated him like he was a degenerate, then eventually mentioned that he had smoked a lot of weed in college, and still would if he could get away with it.  By then they had realized how much money he had, and the plans for the acres he bought;  certainly would have helped the local economy.  When other businessmen heard what their city had lost they voted out the mayor, though he got back in the next year, after promising to do everything he could for those who were forced to smoke medical marijuana.  In his commercials, he showed an old couple dying of cancer talking about how they Just wanted To Say No to pain.

He followed the progress from the city, still owned the property...  finally wrote the mayor and asked if he could be assured the artists wouldn't be picked out and harassed, as he had been, for a right the state laws had given him.  He got back something that the PR department put together, a packet about the now growing tax breaks they would offer him for using local contractors, and agreeing to keep the business in the town for ten years.  He signed all their papers and sent them back, wondering still at that point, if he really was going to forgive the red necks, if he wanted the young artists he was teaching, and other college kids from across the country, to feel like they couldn't smoke weed in what amounted to his studio.   "I only want to go where my weed is rolled," sings through his mind and he laughs as he thinks about being a teenager, and thinking he was going to smoke this shit forever... then thinking better of that for all the years going to school, having kids, being the kind of person they expected to teach;  artsy, cool, and using what was a mild drug -- the drug that told people you were not into the hardstuff.  Just a pot head.

Months pass.  He leaves the mayor's letter on a cluttered dining room table that he never used, preferring tv trays in front of his huge plasma screen.  He tried to tell himself he had to do this for the artists, and for himself... he had always fantasized about getting out in the wild like von gogh, instead of painting in the stolen bits of light between the skyscrapers....

People still asked about the project, and he figured he would get around to it one day...  ten years later the weed was plain out legalized, prices dropped and the taxes balanced budgets across the world, murder dropped and other statistics that the hippies had been predicting for decades came into being, less auto accidents, more community gatherings...  instead of every bar night ending in bouncers and fights, people went home tired and amused from their weed bar.

He didn't live quite long enough to walk into the pot bars, order his mix of the night, get his hand stamp to stop him from driving for four hours....  the community returned to the coffee shops, people even began to unplug the speakers on their laptops and listen to each other, had to as they tried each others joints, and shared the different blends in bongs.

His ghost watched the new development for awhile.  He was most pleased by how the prisons emptied, as the drug prone were kept at bay with the gentle weed and psych pill.  Cops particularly were astounded by the changes in the street.  Drink, they realized, Drink...  the monster we invited into our house and dressed up in designer labels, was too hard core for most humans...

In heaven the feeling was better than weed, but enough like the drug that he knew why the creator had made a bit of heaven smokable...