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| Basically, just smokeable homegrown pot. |
Louis Shalako
Growing dope. The inspiration for this plan actually
came from the Sarnia Observer and
statements made by Sarnia Police Services. I would like to give proper credit
where it is due. Anyhow, it was front-page news at the time.
It seems someone had found a bunch of pot growing down
at the old Polysar dump, which was accessed off of Scott Road. I’ve been there
myself, working at a company called C.H. Heist, specializing in industrial
services, including high-pressure water-blasting, industrial vacuum services,
and sand-blasting. We were just dumping water and plastic pellets into a pond,
a legitimate occupation even if I say do so myself…
According to the story, police found and destroyed an
estimated one thousand pot plants, ranging in height from one foot to eleven
feet. This sounds like it was grown from broadcast seed, on prepared or
semi-prepared ground. They estimated the gross weight of this homegrown pot at
about four hundred pounds. They estimated the street value of this alleged pot
at a relatively-conservative sounding
one thousand dollars a pound.
We might dispute the cops’ method of weighing wet pot,
stalks, roots and dirt, much of which is unsellable. We could also make a case
for turning unsellable pot into weed oil, but even so.
And it made me think.
What if we could grow pot—any kind of pot at all. What
if all we could grow was indifferent pot.
Pot, good pot, Columbian and Mexican, was going for
anything up to $1,800.00 per pound. The real primo California sensimilla, a
lime-green, piney-tasting seedless variety, brought anything up to $300.00 per
ounce. Sensi, would bring
considerably more per pound, assuming you could even grow it. I had regularly
paid $15.00 for a gram of sensi, wrapped in a bit of tinfoil, where I would get
four, very skinny little joints, and if you saved some decent roaches, you
might cut that up with scissors and get an even skimpier roach joint. Fifteen
bucks a gram. Guys in high school or college were getting up to $420.00 per
ounce, assuming they could find the customers to buy it at that rate, and
assuming they didn’t smoke all their own product.
Okay, so we had no knowledge. We had no experience.
But good old Stoney, who was nothing if not literate, had gone down to the
library and rather than check a book out, never return it and basically just
steal it, he had taken the time, had the inspiration, and just this once, a
little cash on hand. Otherwise, he might have lost his library card, ladies and
gentlemen—
He’d spent ten cents a page, to use the coin-operated machine
and photocopy the entire book from front to back, complete with pictures,
diagrams, and all the text.
Our fantasy was all too real, when looking at pictures
of fourteen-foot pot plants, admittedly grown indoors in California, judging by
the architecture of what were some pretty high-end homes. Yeah, we were going
to split four ways—we were also going to take our money, head to the west coast
and buy a sailboat. The four of us were going to buy a fucking sailboat, load
it up with provisions, and head for Tahiti, ladies and gentlemen. It was a nice
dream, you have to admit…
I reckon this was about 1985 or 1986, based on the
fact I was still driving a Chrysler New Yorker, which will play a role in the
rest of this story. It was crazy enough, it might just work, or so we told
ourselves at the time.
***
There were four of us, sitting around, smoking pot,
watching something shitty on television, and just bullshitting in general.
Four hundred pounds of pot, at a thousand dollars a
pound, and this was the basic premise.
That would be a hundred grand each.
A piss-pot full of money, when you thought about it.
Stoney. I haven’t been all that complimentary in a
previous chapter, but Stoney had a job, and he was still living at home at the
age of thirty-six or whatever. His folks went back to the U.K. pretty much
every summer, but only for a few weeks. He couldn’t really do a closet. All he
could really do was to pitch in on supplies like peat pots, potting soil,
Rapid-Gro plant food, big plastic bales of peat moss, plastic self-watering
pots and stuff like that. Willy, had an apartment in the south end. He was good
with electricity, and he had a second floor apartment in an old house. He had a
closet about four by five feet and this was one of our closets. My brother, the
Duke, had a closet. We had a small fluorescent light and an old sun lamp for
illumination. We were starting with seeds, and everyone had a bag of fucking
seeds back then, what with all the Columbian, Mexican, California sensimilla,
Hawaiian, Panama Red, Jamaican, and good old Acapulco Gold. We were growing pot
seeds in dirt, and we must have had two or three hundred seedlings ready to go
by the May 24 weekend.
When predictably, things began to go awry.
Poor old Willy crashed his motorcycle and no one could
get a hold of him. My brother had some work going on, renovating a friend’s
kitchen, and he was just as likely to crash on the people’s couch as drive home
at the end of a day. It was left to Stoney and I, in late May, to box up all
those plants and get the last of the really big ones planted out in the woods.
It is true that Willy and the Duke had given some help with our initial
plantings. We simply could not do them all at once. We ended up with seven
small patches, scattered all over central and north Lambton.
My brother, what with a phone call from a friend and
an opportunity, had gone off up to Georgetown, framing houses, which really was
his calling in life anyways. But I kept his closet alive…
***
 |
| ...440 cubic inches up front and otherwise pretty anonymous... |
Stoney and I emptied out the last few plants from my
brother’s closet. These were the biggest ones, and they took up the entire
trunk of my Chrysler New Yorker. We’d been drinking and partying all day,
driving all over the county. You can smoke a lot of dope and drink and piss out
a lot of beer. We’d dragged a pile of stuff out of the vehicle and into the
back of a big field north of Arkona. And it was all wrong—fuck, Stoney was
pissed, but it was all wrong. We ended up lugging all that shit back to the
car, knapsacks, cardboard boxes with pots and tubs and a bale of fucking peat
moss, shovels, water jugs…fuck, it was insane in what turned out to be pretty
open country.
We were lucky to get the hell out of there, ending up
back at his place, where the poor boy was, by this time, fast asleep, what with
all this traipsing around in the woods, over hill and over dale, all the while
in long pants, that fucking safari jacket, and bloody big black cowboy boots…it
was late at night. I had his keys, I got into his house. I had slept on the
couch in the living room before, and his mother, before taking off for Old
Blighty for the summer, had laid in a generous supply of frozen entrees and
such for her little boy…and his friends. They had a gas barbecue out back as
well, incidentally.
And all of a sudden the fucking cops are in the
driveway…I can see the lights and the shapes out through the sheer curtains on
the front window. Taking the bull by the horns, I stepped out the back door and
there they were. One of the neighbours, knowing the folks were away, had called
it in. But I had Stoney, (one hell of an alibi), asleep in the car and this was
also his home—the pot plants were in the trunk. I asked the cops to help me get
poor old Stoney, snoring away in the passenger seat, into the house if not his
bed, and this is when they began to lose interest. They had my ID, they had my
license. More than anything, they already knew Stoney. One cop said something
about the smell and I suggested there might be a minor gas leak somewhere in
the neighbourhood—their own radio was squawking, and their priorities were
already elsewhere.
I went back out a couple of hours later, slapping him
in the face, waking him up, and finally getting him into what was his own
house, after all. He must have weighed two hundred sixty pounds, ladies and
gentlemen…
What with several different expeditions, all four of
us working at it on and off, we ended up with seven different patches,
beginning with seedlings and some fairly large plants, and when in doubt, we
scattered film canisters full of seeds of all different strains, once we’d dug
up the earth and prepped the soil.
.JPG) |
| Can you show us some ID, sir. |
***
We found out later that Willy had been racing another
guy on his motorcycle. Hitting a patch of sand on the road, he’d spun off,
slammed into a fire hydrant and busted up his ankle, to the extent that he now
had three steel pins in his ankle. The plants in his closet had died, due to
lack of watering and other care, but he cheerfully handed over a big bag of
immature pot, sitting there with one leg up, crutch beside him, and rolling
joint after joint of what was a kind of
cannabis, after all…
Our best patch was in behind a cemetery in Warwick
Township. Farmers go round and round on their tractors, leveling the fields,
but the cemetery still held some trace of the original terrain. With all the
tombstones, a few trees, once we got to the back, the old vehicle was out of
sight, it was also a kind of medium green colour. Stoney and I dug a hole ten
feet long and six or eight feet wide. We put in a dozen and a half of our small
seedlings, scattered seeds, sprinkled peat moss, and Miracle-Gro, and then dug
a few smaller holes in a promising open area. These were mostly Indica, each
one a few fairly dense four to six inches tall in a six-inch plastic pot. These
ones turned out beautiful. Just beautiful…
Another good patch was along the Ausable River.
Looking back, it seems awfully stupid, but we followed some farmer’s laneway,
along the edge of a tobacco field, with the forest and the riverbank falling
away, somewhere out of sight, off to our right. Again, these were fairly nice
potted plants, cannabis, grown from selected seeds, and while it was difficult
to actually get back there and water the things, at least they were in the
ground and one could always hope for a bit of rain, periodically, throughout
the summer.
In some kind of miracle, we managed to find at least
some of our little dope-patches, weeks and months later when it had actually
grown into some kind of a crop.
***
So, with a bit of dope from Willy’s closet, and
allowing for some of the more marginal patches, and allowing for small attempts
which we could not even locate, what with open, empty spaces in amongst the
forest growing up to five or six-foot underbrush in the intervening weeks, we
all ended up with about three quarters of an ounce of some fairly decent buds.
They were potent to some degree, and at least tasted like pretty good buds,
sweet, perhaps a bit of skunk or pine or even salt-air Hawaii bud in there.
And, we each got a plastic bread bag, with about one and three-quarter pounds
of a green, leafy home-grown, which, if you stuck two rolling papers together,
jammed as much pot in there as you possibly could and still roll a joint, well.
It was still all right.
It was better than nothing, and the truth is, if we
had succeeded, it might very well have killed us—when you consider a crew of
inexperienced sailors, chipping in and buying themselves a good used sailboat,
loading her up with a few grand in provisions, and then setting off in all
innocence, or possibly just stupidity, for the South Seas.
Nowadays, you can buy an ounce of pot for twenty
dollars, which may or may not be all that potent, it may or may not, be all
that tasty or flavourful, but I have to think that it probably beats our shit
all to hell, and think of all that work that you don’t actually have to do, in
order to smoke a fucking joint, after all.
That is literally a 1960s price, in the 21st
Century, and it’s all nice and legal.
At least that’s the way I see it.
Later in the story, I may talk a bit about stealing
dope—but that’s a story for another chapter.
END
Louis Shalako has books and stories available fromiTunes.
Louis has art available from Fine Art America.
He’s got this free audiobook, One Million Words ofCrap, from Google Play.
My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).
My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Four.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Five.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven.
Thank you for reading, and listening.
