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| That one interests me... |
Louis Shalako
The hash bash. The hash bash, and a trip to the rez.
So, there we were at college, trying to get our academic upgrading, grade 12,
and at the same time collecting pogy, slang for unemployment insurance. We had
a little money, what with living at home in our parents’ (or parent’s) house,
and I had been asking around about some pot.
Finally Stoney found some guy, and he had a gram of
hash. One. Fucking gram. Of hash. This was the first time I’d ever bought the
stuff, and a teeny-tiny little rectangular brick of red Lebanese it was, too. I
have to admit, I hesitated, to the extent of becoming something of a pain in
the ass. Finally, on Stoney’s word, I bought it. This was in a common area,
just off to the side of the main entrance. It was pretty public and of course
this involved dope. There were only two choices, right. We went over to the
guy’s house at lunch hour and he showed me how to smoke it. I was the guy with
a car, after all, and we could always grab a sandwich at a corner milk store—
This was the era of Mac’s Milk, Becker’s, and a coffee
pot on a hot ring, one that wouldn’t have looked out of place in any modern
office setting. Basically just some kid trying to run a store and keep the pot
full of lukewarm coffee and hopefully the high-school kids not stealing them
blind sort of thing. Anyhow, this is where I met Chris’s sister, who was a very
great help at a later date, as she worked in the Lambton College Financial Aid department.
And I did go back to college later, right.
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| That's a nice chunk of hash. |
I have to admit, with three or four of us smoking that
hash, and of course I did want to take some home, I wasn’t all that impressed.
Anyhow, Stoney was getting better pogy, unemployment
insurance, than I was. He’d also lost his driver’s license when he knocked over
some 90 year-old man in a parking lot. So, when he came to me with the tickets
for the hash-bash, I have to admit I was intrigued. He’d already paid for my
ticket, and I could pay him back later—surely by next Tuesday, like J.Wellington Wimpy, known from the Popeye cartoons.
What in the hell was a hash-bash. Five fucking
dollars, and Stoney was asking for a ride at the very least…
One of the guys in our class was selling tickets. Five
dollars, all the hash you can smoke. His place, high noon. It was a ground
floor apartment on the one hundred block of Bright Street. Dennis had three or
four tables pushed together, where in the hell he’d found all the chairs was a
good question. There were four or five propane torches, the ubiquitous Bic
lighters. People were showing up, some of us had fast food and others had
brown-bag lunches. Dennis was in the kitchen. Back then, you could get a
quarter ounce of blonde Lebanese hash for fifty dollars. It was less dense than
the black and the red, and a quarter of blonde was surprisingly large. He was
cutting up the first quarter, putting tiny little chunks of hash on the bottoms
of upside-down saucers. It was a gas stove, and we did a couple of hot-knives
before I took the first of several saucers, carefully balancing them, out to this
long dining area of the apartment. Where presumably he lived—
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| ...whatever happened to good old Dennis... |
Out in the big room, guys and girls had four or five
propane torches going, heating up the tips of butter knives red-hot…tapping a
bit of hash onto the end, the tips of the knives coming together, the clouds of
hot and resinous smoke sort of squeezing out on both sides, heads down and
inhaling…it seemed a rather weird sort of party had broken out, and all for the
price of five dollars, a sandwich, and an apple, and a cup of fairly shit
coffee from some corner milk store…most of these people were strangers to me.
His girlfriend was really something too. A kind of
strawberry blonde, I still recall her name, I remember her walking down the
halls in tight jeans and a tight sweater. She had small, natural, high-mounted
breasts…it’s like I never really forget a girl or woman that really interested
me. That one interested me.
The really interesting thing is that for fifty bucks
worth of hash you had to sell ten tickets to cover your costs, and I reckon he
had a few people more than that. If he was buying it by the ounce, his costs
were lower still, admittedly, it was no way of making a living.
Perhaps that wasn’t exactly the point, when you’re
just partying.
You’re looking at a fair amount of hash consumed in a
pretty short period of time, and I reckon we all got our money’s worth. Yes,
Dennis had figured out how to smoke, and how to get high for free. I heard he
headed out to California for a while. I have no idea of what happened after
that, the name is so generic, an internet search is nothing if not
inconclusive. One wonders what the landlord or the neighbours thought of all
that, but it was the middle of the day and not all that noisy.
Oh, I’m sorry. What happened after that, is that we
went back to school and kept trying to finish our grade twelve.
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| Heating up for 'hot knives'. |
I did mention that I was kicked out a time or two—that
was mostly for non-attendance. Taking attendance was one thing the instructors
actually did, bearing in mind the federal government and the unemployment folks
were paying for these courses.
Fuck, all you had to do was to keep showing up, if
nothing else, the government cheques kept a-rolling in, and in the end, a lot
of us did finish the fucking course.
Let’s hope the government got their money’s worth.
Honestly, there were times when you showed up, O.J. or
whoever took attendance, and at least some of us headed down to the gym for a
while, whether shooting a few hoops or maybe a game of badminton. I’ve never
played so much badminton in my life, before or since.
It was better than wrestling with quadratic equations,
I will say that much.
***
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| If one must cheat, at least let her be good looking... |
Stoney beckoned from the doorway. I was in math class,
presided over by the long-suffering O.J. Callahan, more often referred to by
the soubriquet ‘the Juice’.
Casually, oh, so casually, I stood up, left my books
on the desk, and headed out to see what he wanted. The big difference between
high school and college is that they sort of treated you like an adult. If you
needed to go to the washroom, you basically just stood up and walked out. He
had one of his gaggers, a misshapen joint, rolled with two papers, and knowing
Stoney, probably a few seeds and sticks in there as well. That guy never did
learn how to roll a joint. Back then, Lambton College was still small, a huddle
of concrete masses in a brutalist style. When I started, there were about 800
students all told. Nowadays there are thousands, four or five thousand at
least. There was a door on the southeast corner. While in view of the road
coming in from Wellington Street, this was at the opposite end from the
residence. It was on the other side of the building from the parking lot. There
was no one around. We stuck a convenient rock in the door-frame, otherwise we’d
be locked out and have to walk around the building to get in again. It was also
cold as fuck out there. We puffed our doobie as quick as we could and headed
back in.
He had a proposition.
He knew a couple of native girls. I had a car. They
wanted a ride to the Kettle Point reservation. I wasn’t too sure about all of
this, but the promise of gas money and of course pot was enough to seal the
deal. The girls were heading home at lunch time, it was a Friday, and while it
would be tight, I figured it wasn’t that far and we’d make it back in time…sort
of.
Well, one of the girls was fairly attractive, and the
other one perhaps not so much—that one could be Stoney’s right, what with him
not being quite so fussy. I also had a girlfriend, we’d been together a while,
but she was away at university. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt the
relationship. If one must cheat, at least let it be the good-looking one…
Right?
So, we grabbed all our books, coats and hats and piled
into the Beaumont, under leaden skies and sideways-blowing snow flurries. One
hell of a cold wind coming off of Lake Huron, that was for sure. We were up
front and the girls in the back seat. A quick stop at the beer store on Mall Road,
and we headed out on the highway, turning off at Lambton 30, the Oil Heritage
Road. At Highland Glen, a right turn onto the lake road, Lambton 7, and it’s
like fifteen miles to the rez. I reckon they knew Stoney’s game by now,
although they each took a beer and sipped at it, as slowly as possible as generally
speaking, ladies prefer not to piss in a ditch…everybody knew Stoney’s game by
now.
We turn into the rez, make the first left, all the way
to the end, then a right turn, finally pulling into a house about halfway to
the actual point. I suppose it was barely noon at this point, and there is
apparently a party going on—a daytime, possibly even an all-day sort of a
party. An all-day, all night, all weekend long sort of party was just getting
going.
For all we know, that party may still be going, ladies
and gentlemen.
Stoney and I are sitting on a couch, the ladies know
pretty much everyone. We don’t know anyone at all, but guys are pulling out
joints, bags of pot, and we do have our case of beer, which was enough of an
introduction as it seemed. We’d just driven somebody’s sisters home, which was
not exactly a safe-conduct pass…
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| The rez. |
At some point the girls disappeared…Stoney and I are
sitting around drinking beer and smoking pot with a bunch of young native guys.
It was all friendly enough, no one was giving us trouble, but my instinct was
that we weren’t getting too far with the ladies, and maybe it was time to go.
We handed out a few beers, took the rest of the case and headed on back to
Sarnia.
Stoney would most likely try again another day, as for
myself, I didn’t much care—I was there on sheer speculation, and I did have a
regular girlfriend. I used to go up to Guelph on the weekend, and she came home
for holiday weekends. Stoney was always on the prowl.
And we rolled up into the college parking lot trailing a big cloud of pot smoke, about
one-thirty in the afternoon. Counting up the remaining beers, it seemed we had
drank eleven beers each, in fact, we’d stopped in Forest on the way home, and
grabbed up another twelve-pack.
The really hard part, of course, was going back to
class.
I had already been kicked out once or twice, so all I
could do was to sit there and stare at the book, sort of regretting the fact I
hadn’t eaten anything all fucking day, and that was a hell of a lot of beer.
Stoney had taken off somewhere else.
That was kind of a wasted day, with nothing to show
for it but a bit of a headache, one that would almost surely turn into a
hangover by next morning.
I never did see that gas money.
Sometimes it just doesn’t seem worth it.
END
Louis has books and stories available from iTunes.
See his works on Fine Art America.
Grab yourself a free copy of One Million Words of Crap,available 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.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Eight.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Nine.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Eleven.
My Criminal Memoir, Part Twelve. (Access restricted due
to content.)
My Criminal Memoir, Part Thirteen.
Thank you for reading and listening.
