The Marijuana Chronicles

And then, just as suddenly, he said, “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you move here with us? You can have a plot of land to build your own house with a view of the ocean and become a member of our small but growing utopian cooperative. Live off the grid, get laid, and frolic on the dunes where clothes are optional. The American judicial system is fucked and always will be. Maybe it’s time to take your endless idealism and hope for a better world and focus it on growing organic tomatoes.”

At the time, I was determined to get back on my corporate career path, not off it—way off of it—on some remote island in the Caribbean to live with a bunch of fruity utopian money launderers. And yet my calculated risk of choosing a life of creative self-direction and shortcuts to greatness hadn’t pa

After abandoning my film to Jackson, Leona, and Munsey, I never looked back. I had done my work and made my statement about our crazy government. Recently, a friend called to tell me Pepperpot and Jackson were reunited and touring the globe making millions of dollars, in part due to the film I’d made about Jackson’s indictment, and I told him I was happy to hear it—but in truth, I couldn’t have cared less.

As of this writing, I’m sitting on the deck of my small house, built with sustainable materials including bamboo and hemp. I just read the New York Times cover to cover with a bialy and a hot cup of coffee, while enjoying the view of the budding Lamb’s Bread growing in my garden.

E

DWARD

M. G

ÓMEZ

is an art critic and historian, graphic designer, and environmental activist. He grew up in Morocco and Switzerland, and has lived and worked around the world. A former writer/correspondent at

TIME

, he has written for the

New York Times

, the

Japan Times

(Tokyo),

Reforma

(Mexico City),

Art in America, Art & Antiques, Metropolis, ARTnews, Raw Vision

(UK), and many other publications.

no smoking

by edward m. gómez

1.

I never smoked pot correctly.

Smoking pot never had an effect on me.

Sure, like many other kids in high school, I tried the occasional puff. However, compared to the high-volume consumption of the school’s most devoted potheads-in-residence—theirs could have been measured in bushels, not ounces—my experiments with the legendary herb were, well, dopey at best. Laughable. Half-assed. Lame.

One time, having learned about my plight from one of the less-frequent but still avid tokers who, like me, was a straight-A nerd, one of the PIRs took it upon himself to come to my rescue and initiate me in the art and pleasures of reefer madness. But it was no go. Even that well-meaning tutorial failed, or I failed it. Either I did not inhale correctly or I did not hold enough of the holy smoke in my ski

Perhaps that was it, for never before had I felt a need to escape from so-called reality, and even if I had, for me, this stinky stuff probably would not have been the ticket I would have chosen to take me where I wanted to go.

In fact, at school what I had wanted was to be able to penetrate and understand the “real” world more profoundly, with a richer sense of awareness than the average guy walking around in torn jeans and a rock-band T-shirt. I wanted to soar to new heights of consciousness and understanding, not be pulled down into the muck of pulse-stopping stoner bliss.

Maybe it was no accident that, while still in high school, during one of my routine prowls through a nearby college’s library, I discovered the branch of philosophy known as phenomenology and the existentialist writings it had inspired, as well as Aldous Huxley’s little book from 1954, The Doors of Perception, in which he described his experience taking mescaline, a hallucinogenic in the peyote cactus, which had been used for generations by indigenous peoples of the Americas. Still, although I found it fascinating to learn how certain chemicals could make a person view reality differently or even experience new, different realities, it was the one in which I was stuck that I still wished to inhabit—I still didn’t have a license to drive around in it—albeit with more of the sense of unpredictable adventure that characterized the movements of Alice and her cohorts in Wonderland than with the passivity and resignation with which so many people around me seemed to slog through their days.

Had I walked into my chemistry class to find a gigantic egg perched on the edge of the lab table, reciting indecipherable verse, I would have wanted to know how it got there; by contrast, the PIRs would have found in such a vision an irresistible affirmation of pot love and a good reason to light up.

Time passed. I was many years older when I got high for the first time. It was in a garden in which a single, exemplary pot plant grew—in a tidy collection of horticultural gems, it was more of a scientific specimen than its owner’s private, illicit indulgence—but even today I still don’t know for sure whether or not it was the marijuana that got me high. Instead, there was something else that flourished in that oasis, something else that must have intoxicated me on a balmy summer night many years ago. It was some other kind of elixir, not a rare herb or a strange vegetable or the essential oil pressed from the leaf of some exotic shrub. Instead it was the wafting scent of a spirit, and that spirit was Claire’s.

2.

High school, college, graduate school: I could not get enough of philosophy or art. In the past, having been the precocious kid who had covered the blackboard in “psychedelic” drawings when the class was out to lunch, I enjoyed nothing more than being left alone with my books to read for hours or with my colored pencils to create my own worlds on paper in long art-making sessions that stretched into the night. When I learned that skilled doodlers could make a living creating pictures for books and magazines, I focused my studies on that goal and became an illustrator.

For a while, after moving to New York, an artists’ agency represented me and found me jobs; nowadays, on my own, I’m able to find enough work to support my cat and myself. That summer, in fact, I was very busy. I was working on a children’s book and on a set of images of household appliances for a volume about twentieth-century inventions.

Then came the call. It was sometime during that very hot summer, and I was not expecting a new project to pop up.

“Hello, Eric? The illustrator?”

“Yes, this is Eric,” I replied. The voice was that of an older woman, raspy and friendly at the same time. I asked: “Who’s calling, please?”

“Oh, great. Glad I got you. I was leafing through some old magazines, and I came across your lovely illustrations. You have a charming style.”

“Thanks,” I said. “How did you track me down? How may I help you?”

“Well, I saw the name of an artists’ agency in one of those magazines, a company that represents you, and I called them and—”

“Right. That was a few years ago,” I interjected. “I’m on my own now.”

“That’s wonderful,” the woman said. “Talented people deserve to succeed. I hope you’re doing well. So, can you come over?”

“Uh, but you haven’t told me who you are and what it is you’re calling about,” I said politely. “Are you looking for an illustrator for a publishing project?”