The Golem

Posted on June 17, 2009

The phone rang, and for an instant, it was like calling anyone. The drug dealer’s line rang exactly the same. I don’t know why this came as a shock. What had I expected? Reggae? Actually, I didn’t know what to imagine. A woman picked up on the second ring. She spoke in sober, polished tones—not your traditional maryjane receptionist. I thought of the many Blazed-out-Bettys I’d been talking with in pharmacies lately. I’d been looking for pot work for almost a month, hitting up every smoke shop and co-op from Oceanside to Ocean Beach. Many of my cold calls had played out like this: Blazed-out-Betty answers the phone while coughing up a bong hit. I start to speak, only to hear a Bic flicker and water lowly percolate. “Who are you again?”

Ginger sounded more like a medical receptionist. First, she thanked me for my patronage, then identified the establishment, and then with a felicity that’s fading from the modern day, asked how she might be of service. A place with lucid employees was a twist I hadn’t expected. She wasn’t rubbing Maui Waui from the edges of her words. I heard no Spearhead in the foreground, just the double-jab of a stapler.

Funny the things we learn on the phone. I was learning, most likely, Maurice was not a part-time junior college student, running a collective out of his car. I’d met a number of pot-repeneurs who neatly fit this bill. They were young, enterprising, media savvy, able to quietly run their rackets with a Verizon plan and a Yugo. Theirs were bare-bone, nimble ops, that thanks to the magic of digital technology were able to present themselves in any way they chose.

My favorite was a delivery service where the website evoked a pastoral setting, as though this wasn’t the Mexican border, but the Irish countryside. There were offers for deep tissue massage and new age spiritual counseling. Marijuana and cannabis were not mentioned; the only way to know you had stumbled into a marijuana business were references to health and safety code 11362.5. But who isn’t up on their legal code, right?

There were other clues, if you knew what to look for. Many linked visitors to state Senate Bill 420, and its voter-mandated predecessor, Proposition 215. Back in 1996, California became the first state in America to decriminalize marijuana for the seriously ill. It didn’t come without a fight. Even in pinko California, this was a hotly contested race. Critics called it “backdoor legalization” while supporters trotted out the critically ill. A vote against medical marijuana, they said, was a vote against anyone suffering the scourges of things like cancer and AIDS.

I agreed, but still I couldn’t help notice a cheshire cat grin on some activist faces when I asked if total legalization remained their lattermost goal. I was in college at the time, so clearly weed wasn’t so hard to come by. What did I care if folks wanted to get stoned? What bothered me about “The Compassionate Use Act” was a sense it was dancing around the truth. “If you want legalization, then say it, fool.” There is no such thing as medical marijuana. It isn’t grown in special labs and the term “medical marijuana” refers not to any chemical properties, but to the people who are smoking it.

All marijuana is medical marijuana—if you have a doctor’s note. Read more

Rat on a Hot Tin Roof

Posted on May 24, 2009

Hollywood 12-Step, Melrose BoulevardPhotograph by Anika Kohon

Sharing: Elizabeth Gilbert

Posted on May 14, 2009

Yesterday afternoon I went to the soccer game with Luca Spaghetti and his friends. We were there to watch Lazio play. There are two soccer teams in Rome—Lazio and Roma. The rivalry between the teams and their fans is immense, and can divide otherwise happy families and peaceful neighborhoods into civil war zones. It’s important that you choose early in life whether you are a Lazio fan or a Roma fan, because this will determine, to a large part, whom you hang out with every Sunday afternoon for the rest of time. Luca has a group of about ten close friends who all love each other like brothers. Except that half of them are Lazio fans and half of them are Roma fans. They can’t really help it; they were all born into families where the loyalty was already established. Luca’s grandfather (who I hope is known as Nonno Spaghetti) gave him his first sky-blue Lazio jersey when the boy was just a toddler. Luca, likewise, will be a Lazio fan until he dies.

“We can change our wives,” he said. “We can change our jobs, our rationalities and even our religions, but we can never change our team.”

By the way, the word for “fan” in Italian is tifoso. Derived from the word for typhus. In other words, one who is mightily fevered.

My first soccer game with Luca Spaghetti was, for me, a delirious banquet of Italian language. I learned all sorts of new and interesting words in that stadium which they don’t teach you in school. There was an old man sitting behind me, stringing together such a gorgeous flower-chain of curses as he screamed down at the players on the field. I don’t know all that much about soccer, but I sure didn’t waste any time asking Luca inane questions about what was going on in the game. All I kept demanding was, “Luca, what did the guy behind me just say? What does cafone mean?” And Luca never taking his eyes from the field would reply, “Asshole. It means asshole.”

I would write it down. Then shut my eyes and listen to some more of the old man’s rant, which went something like:

Dai, dai, dai, Albertini, dai va bene, va bene, ragazzo mio, perfetto, bravo, bravo Dai! Dai! Via! Via! Nellaporta!Eccola, eccola, eccola, mio bravo ragazzo, caro mio, eccola, eccola, eccoAAAHHHHHHHHH!!! VAFFANCULO!!! FIGLIODI MIGNOTTA!! STRONZO! CAFONE! TRADITORE! Madonna Ah, Dio mio, perch,perch,perch, questo stupido, una vergona, la vergogna Che casino, che bordello NON HAI UN CUORE, ALBERTINI! FAI FINTA!Guarda, non successo niente Dai, dai, ah. Molto migliore, Albertini, molto migliore, s s s, eccola, bello, bravo,anima mia, ah, ottimo, eccola adesso nella porta, nella porta, nell–VAFFANCULO!!!!!!! Read more

Now on MyTunes

Posted on May 2, 2009

Sweet Virginia – The Rolling Stones
Chasin That Neon Rainbow– Alan Jackson
Sunny Road – Emiliana Torrini
Sick – Sneaker Pimps
Smells Like Teen Spirit – Paul Anka
Trouble Over Me – Tift Merritt
Lights Out – Santogold
Twice – Little Dragon
Full Moon – Black Ghosts
Mama, I’m Coming Home – Ozzy Osbourne
Milk and Honey – Jackson C. Frank
All Things Must Pass – George Harrison
Travelin Man – Ricky Nelson
Servo – The Brian Jonestown Massacre
Intermission– M. Ward
White Gold – Metric
Golden– My Morning Jacket
Star Chant – Carlos Nakai

Dig our playlist? How many places offer a mix of Cab Calloway and Temple of the Dog? Jim Croce and State Radio? Kenny Rogers, Etta James, Sam Cooke and Johnny Cash? Now it’s your turn to play music savant. Send us your top five songs of all time and we’ll start adding your choices to the site. Whether it’s old, new, country, folk, jazz, rock, or straight-up funk, what matters is that it’s musical nirvana from the very first note. So dust off your records, maximize your music files, and send us your picks of legendary licks. Mail them to “myTunes” at walkaboutjones@gmail.com

Artwork by Cya Nelson

Art Underground: Mac Hinkle

Posted on April 19, 2009

Mate KossBy Mac Hinkle

Walkabout Jones wants to feature artists of all kinds. Submit your paintings, graphic art, photography, drawings and other forms to “Art Underground” at walkaboutjones@gmail.com

Dad’s Last Drive: Part 2

Posted on April 13, 2009

By Scott Tejerian

In 2004 I met a guy who called himself the Certified Health Nut. He was a former Versace model who had lived in Milan, Miami, Tokyo, and any other place in the world that funded the glorious life of being beautiful and getting paid. Only for him it was a self-indulgent, drug and alcohol-addicted vortex which left him on the brink of madness, though with a desire to want something more fulfilling and sanctifying in his life. After failing many twelve-step programs, he created something all his own, turning himself into the best looking, healthiest, youngest 37-year old I had ever seen. His magic bullet, attacked with the same tenacious aggression previously fueling his debauchery, were herbs, juicing, Maori Healers, yoga, daily meditation; anything pure, natural and uncontaminated by the greed of mankind.

This was music to my drug and alcohol-addicted ears. I was twenty-eight years old and had never felt worse in my life. I had created a world where salsa and pizza sauce were my vegetables and most food I ate only grew in boxes on the grocery shelf. Espresso kept me alive in the morning, and strung out through the afternoon. Every meal I ate felt like it needed to be followed by a nap. I could drink six cocktails without a buzz and with a little help I could go twelve deep. On Sundays I could barely leave the couch, and Mondays and Tuesdays were often a haze, and by Wednesday I would start to feel better and the madness would start all over again. I was malfunctioning while dad was functioning with cancer. We both needed help, so I decided to be our lab rat. By getting myself healthy, maybe I could save both of our lives. Maybe I could find dad’s cure.

I bought a juicer. Did colon and liver cleanses. I changed my diet, learned about meditation, even did yoga a few times. Then with the gentle force of a hurricane I suggested dad follow suit. There was no time to waste. The challenge was changing ideas and views developed over a lifetime. This is not the kind of stuff that happens over night.

“Dad, you need to do a cleanse,” I told him. We were at home and it was breakfast. The meal was delicious, a traditional All American breakfast of pancakes and bacon, coffee with cream and a glass of OJ—but all I could see were hormones and antibiotics, pesticides and saturated fats; things that would get stuck in your colon. Read more

Poseidon’s Wake

Posted on March 30, 2009

Safe Harbor, Paros Island, GreeceBy Jillian Bisinger

Sharing: Barbara Ehrenreich

Posted on March 20, 2009

Mostly out of laziness I decide to start my low-wage life in the town nearest to where I actually live, Key West, Florida, which with a population of about 25,000 is elbowing its way up to the status of a genuine city. The downside of familiarity, I soon realize, is that it’s not easy to go from being a consumer, thoughtlessly throwing money around in exchange for groceries and movies and gas, to being a worker in the very same place. I am terrified, especially at the beginning, of being recognized by some friendly business owner or erstwhile neighbor and having to stammer out some explanation of my project. Happily, though, my fears turn out to be entirely unwarranted: during a month of poverty and toil, no one recognizes my face or my name, which goes unnoticed and for the most part unuttered. In this parallel universe where my father never got out of the mines and I never got through college, I am “baby,” “honey,” “blondie,” and, most commonly, “girl.”

My first task is to find a place to live. I figure that if I can earn $7 an hour—which, from the want ads, seems doable—I can afford to spend $500 on rent or maybe, with severe economies, $600 and still have $400 or $500 left over for food and gas. In the Key West area, this pretty much confines me to flophouses and trailer homes—like the one, a pleasing fifteen-minute drive from town, that has no air-conditioning, no screens, no fans, no television, and, by way of diversion, only the challenge of evading the landlord’s Doberman pinscher. The big problem with this place, though, is the rent, which at $675 a month is well beyond my reach. All right, Key West is expensive. But so is New York City, or the Bay Area, or Jackson, Wyoming, or Telluride, or Boston, or any other place where tourists and the wealthy compete for living space with the people who clean their toilets and fry their hash browns. Still, it is a shock to realize that “trailer trash” has become, for me, a demographic category to aspire to.

So I decide to make the common trade-off between affordability and convenience and go for a $500-a-month “efficiency” thirty miles up a two-lane highway from the employment opportunities of Key West, meaning forty-five minutes if there’s no road construction and I don’t get caught behind some sundazed Canadian tourists. I hate the drive, along a roadside studded with white crosses commemorating the more effective head-on collisions, but it’s a sweet little place—a cabin, more or less, set in the swampy backyard of the converted mobile home where my landlord, an affable TV repairman, lives with his bartender girlfriend. Anthropologically speaking, the trailer park would be preferable, but here I have a gleaming white floor and a firm mattress, and the few resident bugs are easily vanquished. Read more

Art Underground: Andrea Marshall

Posted on March 17, 2009

  La Senorita GringaBy Andrea Marshall

Walkabout Jones wants to feature artists of all kinds. Submit your paintings, graphic art, photography, drawings and other forms to “Art Underground” at walkaboutjones@gmail.com

Shadows in the Sand

Posted on March 12, 2009

Every morning, I listen to the news on the radio and some days I break down when I hear another story about people killed in Iraq. I can’t help myself from feeling so helpless and frustrated at the same time. And then I think about the soldiers who’ve come home. The ones who were fighting for us, and now have to readjust to something like a normal life. I can only imagine how hard it is for them. This photograph was taken in Santa Monica, California. Every Sunday, from sunrise to sunset, the Arlington West Memorial Project places crosses, stars and crescents in the sand for each soldier lost in Iraq. As the waves from the Pacific hit the shore, this weekly memorial offers a powerful place for reflection.

Photo and Essay by S. Yim

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