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

Dad’s Last Drive

Posted on March 3, 2009

By Scott Tejerian

Ryan Adams’ “Let It Ride” from the Cold Roses album is cranking on “repeat” as I fly down the 10 West, from USC Medical Center to the Angeles Clinic in Brentwood. There’s something sadly optimistic about the song that feels like it’s meant for a road trip to heartbreak. It feels right because my dad is going to die, and the part of me not pissed off is pleased. This is what he deserves. This is his life lesson. I won’t make the same mistakes as him. I will listen to my son. I won’t challenge him on every idea. I will find inspiration and action in his words. But I drive fast anyway, for my mom and my sister, and because I’m not so heartless to let a man die—even if I know it could’ve been prevented if only he had listened to me.

From the look on the doctor’s face, we know the prognosis is grim. Even without the scans of dad’s liver—the ones I’m driving to retrieve—the doctor thinks surgery won’t be an option. He would need at least twenty percent of his liver to be free of the melanoma, and for a man whose liver’s so big he looks pregnant, the chances of that seem unlikely. But I drive fast anyway, knowing my dad is in pain and my family is counting on me.

I’m trying to be at peace with my father. For thirty-two years, I wanted him to listen, but it wasn’t critical until seven years ago when the first itsy bitsy, teeny tiny melanoma popped up on his retina. A check-up at the eye doctor, and congratulations, you have cancer! At twenty-five, it never occurred to me that my parents were mortal. My entire view of life shifted the moment the phone rang and dad said, “It’s nothing to worry about, but…”

A little laser beam took care of that teeny tiny, itsy bitsy melanoma on dad’s right retina. Hooray for modern medicine! Until six months later, when Tiny’s big bad brother showed up. No laser this time. Big bad brother refused to quit until they took dad’s right eye. But who needs two when you still have one?

Life went on. Dad was still walking, talking, laughing, and now he had a new set of lame jokes. His two favorites were covering his good eye and staring straight into the sun. Dad also enjoyed poking the marble with distressingly sharp objects. But beneath his veneer, and the jokes, I knew his new affliction was killing him emotionally. Though family and friends said Dad joked to put those around him at ease, I knew it was the other way around. Vanity had always been a weakness of Dad’s. Growing up in the family clothing store, image was everything. “When you look your best, you do your best” was a family motto. And now, for someone who took so much pride in his appearance, for the first few months after the surgery, he wouldn’t take a photograph unless he was wearing sunglasses. Read more

Art Underground: Kasia Polkowska

Posted on February 5, 2009

Agate Landscape By Kasia Polkowska

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

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Sharing: David Sedaris

Posted on January 29, 2009

It was Easter Sunday in Chicago, and my sister Amy and I were attending an afternoon dinner at the home of our friend John. The weather was nice, and he’d set up a table in the backyard so that we might sit in the sun. Everyone had taken their places, when I excused myself to visit the bathroom, and there, in the toilet, was the absolute biggest turd I have ever seen in my life – no toilet paper or anything, just this long and coiled specimen, as thick as a burrito.I flushed the toilet, and the big turd trembled. It shifted position, but that was it. The thing wasn’t going anywhere. I thought briefly of leaving it behind for someone else to take care of, but it was too late for that. Too late, because before getting up from the table, I’d stupidly told everyone where I was going. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I’d said. “I’m just going to run to the bathroom.” My whereabouts were public knowledge. I should have said I was going to make a phone call. I’d planned to urinate and maybe run a little water over my face, but now I had this to deal with.The tank refilled, and I made a silent promise. The deal was that if this thing would go away, I’d repay the world by performing some unexpected act of kindness. I flushed the toilet a second time, and the big turd spun in a lazy circle. “Go on,” I whispered. “Scott! Shoo!” I turned away, ready to perform my good deed, but when I looked back down, there it was, bobbing to the surface in a fresh pool of water.Just then someone knocked on the door, and I started to panic.“Just a minute.”At an early age my mother sat me down and explained that everyone has bowel movements. “Everyone,” she’d said. “Even the president and his wife.” She’d mentioned our neighbors, the priest, and several of the actors we saw each week on television. I’d gotten the overall picture, but natural or not, there was no way I was going to take responsibility for this one.“Just a minute.”I seriously considered lifting this turd out of the toilet and tossing it out the window. It honestly crossed my mind, but John lived on the ground floor and a dozen people were seated at a picnic table ten feet away. They’d see the window open and notice something dropping to the ground. And these were people who would surely gather round and investigate. Then there I’d be with my unspeakably filthy hands, trying to explain that it wasn’t mine. Read more

Californicating

Posted on January 23, 2009

Fate is like a smart-mouthed waitress, hovering over, glaring down. I imagine her saying, Kiss my grits. “You think someone is gonna solve your problems? Sugar, let me tell you something. God helps those who help themself.” Yup. That’s how it runs sometimes. Pray all you like, but don’t expect an intervention. And should your full-of-faith friends invoke the above rationale as reason not to stick out their necks, that really narrows your options. You can either pray for the existence of a benevolent deity or solve the whole damn thing yourself. Are you fucked? Not completely. But you’re treading water wearing handcuffs.I remember my last day safely tucked in a corporate cubicle: September 2000. I was an account exec at a Santa Monica ad firm. The office was lousy, the job sucked, though they’d enticed me with verbal photographs of afternoons playing beach volleyball. Never take a job based on extracurriculars, but then again, I was twenty-five and living in Los Angeles. This can be hazardous to your health in any number of ways.As a firm, we lived in eternal hot water. We marveled at our clients’ apparent stupidity on an almost daily basis. Why did they keep us? We wouldn’t. We would have fired us long ago. We serviced high-technology companies. Not the cool ones—we were the last place that those outfits turned. Our clients made things like semiconductors, and required awesomely dull campaigns targeting very specific nerds. We persisted on ever-dwindling profits, even when Nasdaq was running strong. And when the dot.com’s suddenly flatlined, our group—hardly an industry leader in any brand of sunny adjective, was one of the first to commence shedding weight.One afternoon, my manager called me into the small conference room, gave me a miniature bottle of water, and told me they were laying me off. “Downsizing,” he shrugged. I sat doe eyed, staring at the table grain. I’d never been fired from anything before. A flood of questions ran through my mind. How much notice would I get? Would there be a severance package? I wondered why my boss wasn’t delivering the news. Bart was outside at his desk. His desk was twenty feet from my desk. It wasn’t like this was General Electric. I could see the idiot shuffling papers, wearing his usual shit-eating grin. Read more

Shades of Reflection

Posted on January 22, 2009

Vondel Park, AmsterdamBy Amy Rollo Read more

Hollywood Reefer

Posted on January 14, 2009

“What do you do for a living?” she asks, in that droll, I-don’t-really-give-a-fuck way that sums up Hollywood so well.There are many ways that I could answer. I could say I’m a writer, flip a coin on whether or not she reads. Or tell her I work in medical supplies, if I want to kill the conversation. Or break it down legally: I’m the director of a licensed California non-profit, a caregiver to medical marijuana patients in accordance with state law. But often, should it get to the point where I choose to tell the humdrum truth, and it doesn’t happen everyday, I’ll say it softly, almost shrugging, as if my job is housed within parenthesis.(I run a marijuana delivery service.)Though it doesn’t matter how I say it—whether it’s a whisper or full-throated shout, the aftereffect is always the same: Heads square themselves on necks, as miniature bombs go off in both eyes, mouths working at every angle, as they try to wrap their heads around the news that I’ve just broken.It usually takes a minute or two before I am deluged with questions. How did I get into it? Is it really legal? Am I scared when I go places that I’ve never been before? Scared I’ll be arrested, or that somebody will rob me, or god forbid something worse?It’s awesome to be reminded of all your catastrophic scenarios while out for a quiet evening with friends, trying to be a regular joe. But the truth is—of course, I’m afraid. Though that probably isn’t the operative word. A better one would be aware. I’m aware of what could happen. I’ve heard stories ending badly, and in terms of handling such awareness, at least a journalism background offers the sense that I’ve been tested before. Am I out of my depth? Most likely. But no more than when the gunman opened fire in the Capitol, or the starlet tried to use me to get back at her cheating boyfriend. As a reporter, you learn to think on your feet. To watch and then work around the long knives. I wanted to bring this skill to deliveries, control borne out of concentration, if for no other reason than merely believing I still held some small hand in my destiny. Read more

Art Underground: Patrick Deignan

Posted on January 13, 2009

Emerging NovaBy Patrick Deignan

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

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Sharing:

Posted on January 9, 2009

Shades of Reflection

Posted on January 8, 2009

Malibu SunsetPhoto by Anna-Karin

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