Chapter 7. STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
This was my secret, too, so Mongo and I remained under the deck long enough to hear Barker’s response to Mother’s revelation.
“And in that greenhouse,” my mother, Hiawatha Moscowitz, said, pausing dramatically, then bursting ahead, like a suicide off a bridge, “in that greenhouse, we grow marijuana.”
You can tell a lot about a man by what he doesn’t say.
Barker didn’t profess surprise nor indignation, he didn’t cast aspersions nor threaten to go to the police. He didn’t say anything right away, just absorbing the information, I guess, digesting the words.
“Who do you sell it to?,” he finally asked.
And I figured everything would be okay. I knew the answer to that question, so I skedaddled off to check the animals.
Rhino and Hiawatha didn’t sell marijuana to children. They weren’t dope dealers, the kind you see on television, luring the weak and downtrodden, the self-abusive, into an all too brief life of drug-addicted hopelessness.
Rhino and Hiawatha liked to think of themselves as herbal humanitarians, hemp healers, growing the marijuana for a most unusual market. The majority of their customers were victims of the HIV virus which causes AIDS, as well as AIDS patients, for example. And cancer patients.
The terminally ill seem to have little to fear from addiction.
Indeed, marijuana had often proved far safer than doctors’ prescriptions. Seems funny now looking back at all I learned.
Marijuana, a natural anti-depressant, organically grown, didn’t have all the harmful debilitating side-effects of chemical medications, which just seem to make the sick suffer more.
Marijuana also decreases the pressure of the liquid in one’s eyeballs, a problem with glaucoma, a degenerative eye disease and the nation’s leading cause of blindness.
Probably good for stress reduction, also. Lowers overall blood pressure.
Recognized since ancient times for its ability to relieve physical distress, marijuana had been proved effective for everything from the pain of childbirth to the nausea caused by chemotherapy treatments. “Weed”, as the drug was known by the kids at school, in addition to the high with its own whimsical effects, increases one’s appetite which helps a wide variety of patients, who are often too sick to eat. Wasting away.
Evidence was merely anecdotal, Mother’s phrase, but we’d heard of positive results from groups working with alcoholics, agoraphobiacs, which means folks who fear open spaces, and anorexics, usually young girls who literally starve themselves because they think they aren’t skinny enough. Not to mention a host of other people’s problems which didn’t necessarily start with the letter “a” but almost always ended in “-ics.” It’s a medical thing, I suppose.
Marijuana diminished the muscle spasms and convulsions of epileptics and those with multiple sclerosis. Sclerotics, they called’em.
Paraplegics, too. Terrible stuff you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, like arthritis, epilepsy, migraines, PMS, sickle-cell anemia and chronic pain. Marijuana helps all of that.
Menstrual cramps even.
There’s an alternative sub-culture of holistic healers, straight or traditional medical types, gay rights organizations and so-called outlaw senior citizen alliances, like the Green Panthers, who distributed the harvest. Sickness support groups. Chiropractors and little old ladies in Birkenstock sandals. Queer acupuncturists and renegade naturopaths.
Mother had a couple of special clients, a prestigious writer’s colony on the East Coast somewhere and a religious retreat for aged nuns outside of San Francisco. Fighting artistic and spiritual germs, I guess.
There was never enough product to fill the need.
When I returned from the stables, Barker was still there. I grabbed another piece of cake and sat down again at the table. Global generalities had replaced domestic specifics, so they let me stay.
Rhino was waxing philosophic, probably something he’d heard on National Public Radio. “Drugs are the symptom, not the cause. The cause is spiritual death. Drugs are worms eating the flesh of the already dead. Drugs are scavengers picking at rotting meat. Hope is the only antidote….”
“That’s not really the point as far as I’m concerned,” Mom countered. To her, marijuana was a medicine. “People are in pain, tens of thousands are ailing and needlessly suffer, while the politicians, the pharmaceutical industry and medical community….”
“Don’t forget the moralists,” Rhino interjected.
“Them, too. The mythology of reefer madness has simply, stupidly, eliminated an option that can ease some of the agony and despair….”
“Suppose the government wins the war on drugs. If you take drugs out of the ghettos, for example, you’re still going to have ghettos,” said Rhino, who was basically a right-wing reactionary, but with decidedly libertarian beliefs. He was adamantly opposed to anybody – particularly the government – interfering with his god-given, constitutionally guaranteed rights to do whatever he damn well pleased. Like I said, he was thick-headed that way.
“Marijuana has been used medically worldwide since before the birth of Christ,” Mother explained, “with no long-term negative effects.”
“The reasons people have for using drugs will still exist. Where’s the war on poverty? On illness? On illiteracy? On homelessness? The government’s pandering hypocrisy on drugs really sticks in my craw.”
Pandering hypocrisy? Rhino must’ve been reading the editorial page, too.
“Smoke and mirrors,” Barker concurred, rattling off a bunch of statistics. “Just saw something in the paper. Small, underpopulated state like this. Bad guys violate somebody every ten minutes. A homicide every couple days, there’s a rape every few hours, some other sex crime too often to keep track. A robbery happening somewhere all the time, a kidnapping twice daily. There’s an aggravated assault every hour.”
“A half million Americans die each year because of cigarette smoking,” Mom added. “Three thousand non-smokers die as a result of second hand smoke.” The grownups were rolling now, preaching to the choir.
“Don’t forget about alcohol,” I chimed in.
“That’s right,” Rhino agreed. “Anybody want another beer?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“He knew that.”
“I saw a survey recently of a couple thousand cancer specialists. Nearly half said they would prescribe marijuana if it were available.”
“Well, I’m happy to say,” Rhino said, returning with a couple of beers, “it is available.”
The conversation around the table continued in the same vein. I guess I’d heard it all by now. The same old, same old. Hard hat vs. hippy. Hawk vs. dove. Conservative vs. liberal. Right vs. left. Isolationist vs. free trader. Somebody else always stuck a label on their beliefs. They were simply my folks to me.
Rhino, a humongous white ex-football star from a dustier part of Oklahoma, was an anti-prohibitionist. T’was restriction of free trade, he’d wail when the spirit moved him, not to mention his pursuit of happiness, for the government to tell him he couldn’t grow and sell marijuana. Or shoot off his beloved Uzi in his own backyard. Stiff-necked revenooers, grumble, grumble, grouse. A veteran, too. With a Good Conduct medal to boot. The famed Kennedy clan had made its original stake by bootlegging liquor in the Twenties, so he figured he was in good company.
Mother, a diminutive Jewish artist from New York City, Manhattan, was a do-gooder. Still in high school, she’d spent her summers battling for civil rights, linked arms with black men as they marched through the streets of the Deep South, straight into billy clubs, fire hoses and dogs with foul dispositions and a license to bite. Protest sign carried high, she’d marched on the nation’s capitol to protest the imperialist war in Vietnam, she’d been at Kent State – “an outside agitator,” she said with an embarrassed laugh – when American soldiers had fired on college students. A pacifist, ardently pro-choice, she’d spent the night in jail for her part in a brawl with Right-To-Lifers outside an abortion clinic.
Hard to imagine, looking at her today. My mom. All that just so much history now.
Rhino was against abortion and for capital punishment, he saw no contradiction, so I’d heard more than a few heated conversations about such topics since I was real little. Politics was about power, he’d say. No, it’s about people, she’d argue.
Lately, I think he was coming around to Mom’s way of thinking, which was, in this instance, to use his own philosophy against him. After all, if the government couldn’t do anything right, why should it decide who lives and who dies.
Government decides every day, of course, but one can hope.
Both of them believed in what they were doing.
Rhino was doing what he wanted to do. For himself.
Mom was doing what she thought, believed, needed to be done. For others.
Besides, the money was good.