If you’ve been following the Jones

WJ: You’re a drug dealer now.

Dann: That would be the impolitic way of putting it. Here’s the thing: The best way to learn about a world is to work it with your own hands. I spent many years as a traditional journalist and you’re painfully restricted in that format. Your bosses tell you what to write and often how to write it. You don’t have time to do deep research, so you’re at a disadvantage in interviews. People lie to you all of the time. They even have a word for it now: Spin. After much thought, I decided I could never do this story justice unless I was willing to live it. I was tired of depending on others. I wanted to learn it for myself.

WJ: So you make the deliveries for Artists Collective and then write about being a delivery driver for Walkabout Jones.

Dann: That’s the plan. I change the names, muddy up the locations, and work toward the greater factual and emotional truths of the story. I’ve seen some crazy shit. As a delivery driver, it can sometimes be very frightening, to the point you’re wondering if you’re going to make it back. I’ve been on Skid Row late at night—with an ounce of marijuana tucked in a bag. In moments like this, you’re at war with your instincts—because every part of your body is telling you to go. I’ve seen things I’d rather not see again, but at the same time, as a writer, it’s an incredible story. The traditional stigma toward marijuana casts such an interesting prism on the world. As a storyteller, marijuana instantly changes the context of places and events. It’s the difference between a retirement home and a retirement home where the old folks smoke reefer. The whole picture changes. So as a writer, it’s golden. And thank god I can feel positive about the creative process, because the marijuana world is an incredibly stressful, hard life. It isn’t anything like you’d expect. I’m looking forward to when I’ll have the time to write about it more consistently.

WJ: You must get a lot of calls from people asking how deliveries work. Want to explain?

Dann: The first thing we do is make sure the patient is under doctor’s care. Many of the doctors in Los Angeles now have 24 hour phone verification or online verification. Compared with the old days when you sometimes waited a day for a doctor to respond, patients can often be verified within fifteen minutes. Once they’re confirmed, we can answer all of their questions about how the delivery system works and the marijuana strains currently available. Patients can either make an appointment for a specific time or for a delivery route. The latter is more affordable, but appointments are better for busy patients who’d rather order more, schedule it into their daily planner, and see us less frequently. Once we get to their home, there’s paperwork and then we’re able to help them.

WJ: What’s it like when you go into a stranger’s house?

Dann: One of the best parts about making deliveries is having dozens of dogs adore you…or at least be intrigued by the scent of what you’re carrying. I’ve delivered to mansions and trailers, hipster lofts, Indian reservations, bungalows with families stuffed in. What you realize almost immediately is the diversity of the people you’re serving. People who smoke marijuana are every bit as diverse as any other group. Every home is different. I meet an incredible variety of people.

WJ: What’s the difference between a medical marijuana service and black market delivery?

Dann: It’s night and day. What legitimate delivery allows is patients to make an informed choice. Different strains have different benefits. A patient suffering from chronic pain might need something very different from a patient with insomnia. We travel with essentially a mobile dispensary, letting patients see and smell a variety of options, explaining the qualities of each, and ultimately helping them make an informed choice. Collectives now are able to offer choices beyond the usual bag of nugs—edibles, teas, creams. There’s even now cannabis lip gloss. It’s just a safer, better way.

WJ: Fear of arrest?

Dann: You live with the reality that the Federal government could come in at any time and arrest you. And the conviction rate in Federal court is 100%, so it’s not like it’s risk free. I’ve learned you can never fully remove the target from your chest. All you can do is try to make that target as small as possible. You do so by following California law to the letter and not running afoul of local authorities. We’re small potatoes. We’re a little service doing a drop of business in a big ocean where others are making billions of dollars. Law enforcement is most concerned with businesses clearly flouting the law and proprietors with serious criminal records. They have more important work to do than go after me. And the Obama administration’s call to end DEA raids might really be a game changer. We’ll see.

WJ: Artists Collective is set up like a regular non-profit, with its goal to fund individual artists. How does it work?

Dann: Americans spend more than $100 billion on marijuana every year. Much of that money goes to crime. Most of us in our twenties and thirties agree that legalization will happen in our lifetime, so we want to shift the conversation toward how that money should be spent. Should we allow the tobacco companies (big supporters of legalization) to run it? Or should marijuana be like Indian casinos? A social curative pumping needed funds into non-profit charities. We’d love to see it become an economic engine for social good. Those billions of dollars would be much better spent by local non-profits than multinational corporations.

WJ: Do you accept tax deductible donations?

Dann: We do, though it’s a little more complicated when you’re a medical marijuana non-profit. Artists Collective Caregivers is recognized as a California non-profit, but we’re unable to get Federal non-profit status because the Federal government doesn’t recognize what we’re doing. So what we’re in the process of completing is incorporating a second non-profit called Artists Collective Arts. This will be strictly an arts organization, which should qualify it for Federal status. All profits from Artists Collective Caregivers will go to Artists Collective Arts. And Artists Collective Arts—thanks to a combination of medical marijuana proceeds and hopefully private tax deductible donations—will create opportunity grants for artists, writers, performers and musicians.

WJ: As a writer, how did you get this idea?

Dann: When I was in journalism school, many of my teachers were old reporters from the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times. I remember hearing a story from the 1970′s, back when newspapers had budgets and could still do real investigative journalism. Chicago reporters are famous drinkers and on some cloudy night, the story goes, someone got the idea that they should buy a bar. But not just any bar. They’d work it themselves and learn the complexities of running a Chicago neighborhood tavern—complete with mobsters, teamsters, and all of the commotion unfolding within it. The newspaper bought one, the reporters staffed it, and together they won a Pulitzer Prize. So a generation later, as I watched medical marijuana clubs spreading throughout Los Angeles, I realized these clubs were historical in nature. We were about to see a real societal shift on the subject of marijuana—one that would have a rippling effect in ways we couldn’t predict. I knew that somebody would eventually write about it—and I needed a job. So why not me?

WJ: How does Walkabout Jones fit in?

Dann: Jones is where we publish the stories. And from an editorial point of view, this is the perfect subject for the long-term goals of the site. Walkabout Jones, from a literary standpoint, is a hybrid between “creative non-fiction” and “new journalism”—with 21st century sensibilities for a young and vibrant digital audience. Historically, this has been called muckraking… or participatory journalism… or most anything by Tom Wolfe. Upton Sinclair and Mark Twain did it back in the day. Barbara Ehrenreich and Steve Almond have done it more recently. So it’s old but it’s new—we’re bringing it into the digital age. What we want is to make this a full art and culture site. My marijuana journey is one story. As we grow and improve the infrastructure, other writers will create new Walkabouts. And also art, music, politics and culture, geared toward a smart, adventurous, thoughtful young audience.

WJ: Big dreams.Dann: And small resources, but we’re patient and hard-working. It takes time to find investment. What we want is pennies on the dollar when compared to backing a low budget movie, but our format is new and unfamiliar—and there’s always a prejudice against “new” until it makes somebody money. But every month the response gets better. A lot of you seem to really love the site. So for now, we’ll just keep posting great work (as time allows) and be grateful so many of you are returning.

WJ: What’s the latest on the short story contest?Dann: We received more than 300 entries from around the world for Walkabout Jones/Artists Collective’s contest, and it’s taking some time to read them and bring the entries down to a group of finalists. Sorry for the delay, but we’ve been so busy, it’s hard to get everything done! Soon, a wonderful published author will choose the winner. We hope to announce later this summer.

WJ: When do we get more stories on Walkabout?

Dann: It’s so hard right now because there’s so much work to do and so little time as we try to get this non-profit running. The economy has made it very hard for us to focus on anything but Artists Collective because right now we’re just trying to make it! We’re publishing as often as we have something good to post. We’re also assembling a Walkabout Jones staff. Bottom line, we’re doing the best we can with the limited resources that we have. We want to publish great work consistently, and when we can do so on the daily, we will. Until then, we’ll just keep doing our best.

WJ: Do people tell you that you’re crazy?

Dann: They definitely have thought so, but at least now it’s with a smile on their face! Very few believed in this when I started. But folks are coming around. It feels good!

Artists Collective is Walkabout Jones’ social action project, a medical marijuana non-profit that will dedicate a considerable percentage of proceeds toward creating opportunity grants for deserving artists. For more information about Artists Collective, go to www.artistsforaccess.org

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.

I voted yes as an afterthought, more interested in girls on the quad and nickel beers at Jimmy G’s than nascent forms of political activism. And because of me, and others like me, marijuana was decriminalized in a portion of the United States for the first time since 1937. This made some I knew very happy, but it didn’t rock my world. And while I’m sure there were epic celebrations in Humboldt, Bacchanalian festivals lasting many moons, at the time I don’t remember thinking anything more profound than,“Cool.”

Marijuana was legal, well, sort of. With thanks to old-fashioned grassroots campaigning, a mass collection of supermarket signatures, and a slew of television ads to slickly seal the deal, voters had approved a new law, which at a scant four-hundred words, presented more questions than it answered. Who was eligible for the new program? What if counties decided that Federal law should trump the popular imitative? How much bud could I legally grow? The new law set no limits. It directed the state to create a dispensary system, but when that didn’t happen, in neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury, cannabis clubs opened shop. Some were headed by idealists—the spiritual descendents of Marijuana Mary, the Castro District nurse/granny who became the Mrs. Fields of pot. Mary Rathburn baked brownies by the bushel, then gave them to San Francisco men, many gravely ill. She called them her boys, and marijuana seemed to ease the disease that was taking so many in the 1980’s. Soon, underground collectives opened, many operating in the same good spirit, providing safe access to the sick, while attending to other health problems as well. Theirs was the bright side of the law. Though it plunged the state into legal chaos, it served as instant absolution for do-gooders on the down-low, now permitted to do their work as state-sanctioned non-profits.

The bad news would come later. Whether by accident, or design, the authors of Proposition 215 had written a law so utterly vague, they’d essentially dropped the allusional lever and brought to life a monster. Many will think of Frankenstein now—mad scientist, bolts of lightning. And this was where my mind went too, until I remembered Sunday school and stories of the Golem.The Golem is a vestige of middle-age mysticism, sometimes a tormentor, other times a protector. Made by man so he is imperfect. Brought to life by the word of god. Able to do extraordinary good, but fallible, corruptible, and capable of evil. Golems are both angel and devil. They’re monsters of conflicted purpose.

Medical marijuana would soon become a Golem. Its diviners were an alliance of political and moneyed interests—some from top universities, others breaking out of the underworld. Together, farmers, doctors, and businessmen (henceforth known as potrepeneurs) collectively held the means of production, distribution and access. The more new patients a doctor signed up, the higher the demand; and the more patients a collective accepted, the more crop its favored farmers could grow. And the doctors needn’t worry; the new law shielded them from any form of punishment. Excellent news if you’re an oncologist, but also a mile-wide loophole for unscrupulous prescription-mills, some charging $200 for a doctor’s letter.

Things would soon fly out of control. As marijuana activists got to work outgrowing big brother, opponents had their own cards to play. Arguing the proposition violated federal law, many conservative California counties sued to overturn the result. They cited the Supremacy Clause, arguing that because marijuana was illegal on a national level, no state could make a law saying otherwise. This seemed straight-forward on the surface, yet it wasn’t the easiest case to make before a state judge: “Your honor, please rule that the federal government may overturn any law voters approve should the government disagree with it.”Um…As far as state judges were concerned, this was no longer strictly about medical marijuana—it was now a question of state’s rights. Should Washington be allowed to strike down voter propositions? Are states “laboratories of democracy” or should their excesses be reined in by a federal judge? And if so, who defines excess? Judges who never smoked a joint in their life weren’t about to compromise their legal authority. Both liberals and conservatives, time and again, ruled in favor of the proposition and against the dissident counties. Some gave way, and medical marijuana grew available in more parts of the state. But other prosecutors held their ground, turning the map into a checkerboard: legal pot in some places, while the county next door maintained zero-tolerance. And this is how it went for years—seven years, to pick a number—until lawmakers finally clarified things in the form of Senate Bill 420. The new legislation, at five-thousand words, established a voluntary state i.d. system; set rules for co-ops, collectives and caregivers; and among other things, instructed counties to set cultivation limits—to the anger of marijuana growers. The law also set statewide possession guidelines, effectively killing zero-tolerance. No one was celebrating this time. Many activists were livid at the new, tougher standards, while prosecutors bristled at enforcing a law they believed was unconstitutional. Once again, some counties sued, including where my parents lived, San Diego county.

Now, wait, hold on, I know what you’re thinking. “San Diego doesn’t like pot?”

You’d think California’s southern coast would be an ideal place to run a marijuana business. When I picture San Diego, I think of lazy, sun-soaked scenes like the introduction to Three’s Company—blonde and bronzed Suzanne Somers at the San Diego zoo. Or, Ron Burgandy (“Stay Classy, San Diego”) though lately such daydreams have tested my ability to watch the local news. And, yes, San Diego is plenty mellow, a sparkling, seaside Shangri La, where weathermen report surf swells and girls blading on the beach look to have rolled off of magazine covers. But don’t confuse the sun and surf, and endless chances for al fresco dining, as Seattle ney the clouds. San Diego, very quietly, is the most socially conservative big city on America’s west coast—a portrait clearly at odds with its easy-breezy mien.When my parents retired, they sold our home near San Francisco and moved to a tract development in the north part of the county. Their new house cost considerably less—and that had been the plan. After a lifetime of nine to fives, they were ready for a change of scenery. Both had lived in the Bay Area for almost forty years, my dad originally from New York, my mom from Melbourne, Australia. Theirs were solid, practical lives, though it’s safe to say they were drawn to the border more out of wanderlust than planning. They’d come for a weekend and purchased a home right on the spot, lulled by dreams of eternal sunshine, easy living and endless rounds of golf.

They’d never spent time in San Diego, busy as they were, so it was easy to reduce the town to its chamber of commerce particulars. But there were other dimensions to their new home, less familiar permutations, though it took awhile to find this out. Mom would go for afternoon drinks at the Hotel Del Coronado and watch as Navy jets flew maneuvers, screaming over the antique cabanas en route to the northern part of the island. At night, from their new living room, they could hear the thunder of ordinance fire distantly off the Pacific coast. They were twenty miles east of Camp Pendleton, but still explosions filled the evening, a tangible reminder that we were at war.

San Diego, they learned, was a military town, a place that had gradually taken on a sort of Jekyl and Hyde duality: tasty waves in some quarters, Blackwater consultants in others. There were 95,000 active military personnel, including seven Naval and Marine bases, and on any weekday, driving north on I-5, you could look to your right and see the dust scatter on desolate plains of government property, chopper-blades reeling, sun striking Kevlar helmets, as soldiers board whirlybirds off in the distance.When my health took a serious turn for the worse, I saw no choice but to move in as well. Just two hours from Hollywood, and less than a day’s drive from San Francisco, yet San Diego in many ways felt like a different world. It attracted old soldiers and D.O.D. contractors, most far more conservative than your average coastal Californian. Over the years, they elected like-minded representatives: Congressmen like Duncan Hunter and Duke Cunningham, who spoke to their craving for military readiness and a return to traditional values. With the Mexican border a dozen miles off, illegal immigration was a red-meat issue. Patriot militias guarded the border—but they weren’t the only ones. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) keeps its largest field office outside of Washington in San Diego county, mostly to address narco-smuggling out of Tijuana. But in the wake of Proposition 215, and with the approval of county elders, the DEA had doubled-down, launching a systematic effort to stem the spread of medical marijuana cooperatives throughout San Diego.Together with local prosecutors, the DEA posed an existential threat. As the number of cooperatives grew across the state, San Diegians watched as their services were driven underground. In 2006, two years after S.B. 420, San Diego DEA agents conducted a massive countywide sweep, where every medical marijuana service was raided and shut down. Some went to federal prison, while others left town, and by the spring of 2008, there were less than a dozen services advertising—a pittance compared to the hundreds open in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Almost all of the survivors were delivery services; moving targets, so to speak, who delivered only to private homes and kept under the radar.

Even so, they lived under a federal microscope, and most behaved as such. Their hands trembled when the phone rang, their voices betraying a search for probity, but also a sad understanding that the stranger on the other end might not wish them well. It wasn’t like law enforcement was going to protect them from criminals plotting to steal their stock. Maybe bust them after offering a bum doctor’s letter and seeing if they make the sale. The point being simply, when you’re advertising marijuana over the telephone, anyone can call. Which made Ginger’s greeting so surprising and remarkable. The workaday malaise she captured was well-removed from the paranoia of her present business. I remembered her now from a cold call made the other week. I’d been on a patio near a state university, enjoying San Diego’s winter, while running through a list of calls. A throng of college girls sat close, gossiping as they sipped ice coffees. A few peeked over now and then, and I couldn’t help wonder what they were thinking: clean-cut, well-spoken, slightly-older guy sipping on a tall Starbucks, making a string of business calls. What job did they imagine me doing? Certainly not this one. Mostly, I left voicemails for men who didn’t sound far out of high school. Boys in their chem labs, for all I knew. The few who answered did so mostly to explain they acted more like sole proprietors, doing all of the work themselves. Employees were a drag on earnings, I heard this many times, and I assumed that Maurice would fall into this group, until Ginger answered that first day and made me believe I was talking with an actual non-profit.When I said I was looking for a job, she didn’t brush me off. Sometimes the littlest things help our cause, and I got the sense she was impressed with how I handled words. She said there might be an opening soon and copied down my name and number. A few weeks later, Maurice called, and here we were once more.

“Thank you for calling Green Medical. This is Ginger. How may I help you?”I introduced myself again, said I was returning Maurice’s call.

“Oh, the driver,” she said, as though it was a job of importance. “Maurice is in the back. One moment please.”

I smiled, happy to hear her voice, believing if someone so straight-sounding had been hired by Green Medical, maybe I stood half-a-chance. Ginger ran a good game. She was just who you wanted answering phones. She chose her statements very deliberately, while Maurice—I would discover—fired paragraphs at will. Somewhere in her past, she’d worked in traditional customer service. There were hints in how she handled things. Opening with the business’s name, for example, instead of hazily shouting, “Yo.”

But looks could be deceiving—as I’d lived in LA long enough to know. I wondered what Ginger meant when saying Maurice was in the back? I stood and wandered my parent’s living room. Nobody was home. My heart had raced as I dialed the number, as it often does when I call strangers. But now the page was filling in, though it only left me with more questions. I looked at photographs on the mantle—pictures of babies, weddings and proms. I was trying to picture the world I was entering, trying to put myself within it. But then I heard big feet approaching and knew reflection time was over. I felt the phone move into his hand, and then by way of introduction, “This is an intense, fast moving opportunity.”“I understand.”His voice was large and I tried to picture him and Ginger—but all I could piece together was a giant man holding a tiny phone. I didn’t even know where Green Medical was located. The area code was San Diego, but such fingerprints are obsolete in our brave new cellular world. Green Medical could be squared away in some godforsaken bunker—an abandoned shack out in the high desert; poor Ginger dutifully answering calls, while Maurice stands watch out in the back with a semi-automatic.“This ain’t no come when you feel like it job,” Maurice said firmly. “Let’s be very clear about that. So if you’re going to take your pay, go to the bar, and wake up at three in the afternoon, face deep in your own spit, this ain’t gonna work. I need somebody reliable. Reliable.”

“Sounds fair to me.”

“Somebody who will do what I need them to do, when I need them to get it done. Even if it means coming here at eleven at night because I have carry issues and need another doctor’s letter. Do you understand what I’m saying?”“I do.”

Maurice was saying that each doctor’s letter allowed a patient to drive around the state with half a pound of marijuana. Two doctor’s letters allowed one pound. Four doctor’s letters allowed two. I noticed the trace of a southern accent. He held his words very tight and close, but now he seemed to breathe a little.

“Good,” he said, and everything seemed to loosen up. I decided he’d been burned before, probably by family and friends. Which likewise explained his willingness to entrust such a delicate job to a total stranger.“What kind of car do you drive?” he asked.“I’ve got a 2006 Mazda 3.” It was leased but I wouldn’t tell him this. I’d been sick for years and the miles were low. I was willing to take the hit.

“Any alterations? Window tint, custom rims?”

“Nope. I’m just a boring white guy with a boring stock car. No bling on me.”

“Funny guy,” he chuckled, and now the rest of the edge left his voice, as if he had decided it was nearly impossible that anyone from the DEA could crack a decent joke. “The reason I have to ask these things is we get a lot of nineteen year olds wanting to deliver in their low-rider trucks with their blacked out windows. We can’t take on that kind of heat. That’s not the image we’re trying to project. We have to be the opposite of that.”

“I’m a thirty-three year old who drives a Mazda.”

“What do you wear? What kinds of clothes?”

“Boring. Just t-shirts and jeans. Sneakers. Shorts and flip-flops. Baseball caps.”

“Any writing on the shirts?”

“Some, but plenty just solid colors.”

“We can’t have writing on the shirts,” he said, and again you could cut meat with his words. His moods seemed to ebb and flow, one minute calm and conversational, the next wearily intense. Currently, he was intense about shirts, “Whatever it is, political, philosophical, religious, whatever, it’s not appropriate uniform attire. It might be funny, I’m aware of this, but we’re a patient service business, and we don’t want to offend our clientele.”

“Sounds fair to me.”

“Do you have a criminal record?”

My chest tightened. I didn’t have one, but there’s something about being asked this question.“Some speeding tickets, nothing else.”

“Ok.”

“To tell you the truth,” I said, running a mile away from the subject, “I’m just a regular guy whose had some health problems and is looking to come in, work hard, and get back on my feet.”

“What kind of health problems?”

“I have a hormone deficiency, but I’m doing better now. I take a big hormone shot every week and I’m fine. I’m under full doctor’s care, good diet, all of that.”

“When you say hormones, that means….?”

“Testosterone.”

“Anabolic steroids?” Maurice whispered, and I could tell he was intrigued. Then he gave me the talk about answering him truthfully, and how he wouldn’t suffer fools. I nodded, let him go, stretched out and relaxed in full Beta-man mode. Maurice was a hurricane twisting close, while I would quietly stand firm. I would play the role of dream employee. All I wanted was a job, and the last thing I wanted was any trouble. I would be a team player, do as told.

Maurice gave out a few more details. During my probationary period, I would make twenty dollars an hour. With tips, more than a thousand a week. The longer we spoke, the better I felt about my chances. After hundreds of job interviews, I recognized the signs. I knew I would pass my background check and suddenly I had exotic intangibles: I was a regular guy, with a late-model car and a clean criminal record, which made me in some twisted way the industry’s dream candidate. But at the same time, it all seemed too good to be true. It felt far too easy.

“I’m about to take a gamble on you, Dann,” Maurice said. “I’m about to risk thirty-five dollars on a criminal background check. So last chance. If there’s anything I should know about, you have to tell me now. Because, trust me Dann, even if you don’t say nothing, I’m gonna find out later.”“You’ll find some speeding tickets, that’s all.”

He wanted to believe me, and he said they’d be in touch. I would get a call in the next few days, assuming everything checked out, and be given an address. A few days later, it happened. Ginger called, but gone was the easy, velveteen voice, replaced by obvious concern. She gave me an address, released it to my pen and pad like a tiny test of fate, and told me to be there later in the morning. Maurice shouted eleven-thirty.“Eleven-thirty,” Ginger said.

This much I knew as I got in my car. It was Monday morning, but late enough to miss the traffic. I was driving to an address outside of San Diego county—along a winding maze of highways and charming country roads. Green Medical wasn’t around the corner. It would be a rather long commute, assuming I got the job. Maurice had exhaustively explained that this was just an interview, that things could end right on the spot. But I also knew, if things went well, I might get to make a run. As I drove up the highway, I passed scores of price-slashed houses, their banners begging easy payments. The economy was going down while gas was surging toward three bucks a gallon. I no longer questioned what I was doing; I was doing what I had to do when there was nowhere left to go for help.After an hour on the road, I pulled into a Central American neighborhood; bungalows cutting squat figures beyond rural driveways. I pulled up to a little house, lawn wild, fresh wire fencing nailed to the perimeter, killed the engine and got out. As I neared the front gate, I saw a big padlock, then heard dogs. There were two of them—one a pitbull, the other a mix of German Shepherd and wolf. They came at me barking, their bellies banging against the wire, their snouts poking through the holes. I’d smoked a joint shortly beforehand, so at least I didn’t panic. I sleepily took a few steps back and waited for the door. Maurice appeared a minute later, big as a continent, head shaved, tattoos running up his arms. He told me I should hop the fence, that the dogs wouldn’t eat me.

I put one foot in front of the next. If this was the end of my story, so be it. There was no turning back.

Artists Collective is Walkabout Jones’ social action project, a medical marijuana non-profit that will dedicate a considerable percentage of proceeds toward creating opportunity grants for deserving artists. For more information about Artists Collective, go to www.ArtistsForAccess.org

Dig our playlist? How many sites 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.comArtwork by Cya Nelson

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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.

“A what?” dad laughed off.

“Do you ever take your car to get an oil change?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t, the engine will break down.”

“Exactly, so clean your colon, so your engine doesn’t break down.”

Dad smirked, the way he did when I knew he wasn’t taking me seriously, “I don’t eat badly.”

“That isn’t enough for someone who’s missing an eye.”

For me it was easy to understand. I was young, angry with the world, willing and eager to find fault and create drastic change. I juiced raw carrots, kale and garlic on a regular basis. So much so one could smell the garlic still seeping from my pores the next day. That was the power of raw, organic food. That was the massive force that could destroy any malignant cell with ease. I felt vibrant, like I did when I was sixteen, before the booze and the blow. I could turn back the clock, shave off the years, and if it worked, then dad could live forever! The only thing was taking a radical plan to a practical, logical man. Dad never smoked, and drank only the occasional glass of wine, so in his mind he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Since his cancer had gone into remission, he had left it in God’s hands. He was getting his annual PET scan, but not much more. One time, after leaving an eye appointment where the doctor had said his prognosis looked good, dad pumped his fist in the parking lot and said, “Thank you Jesus!” But I didn’t believe that faith was enough. I wanted him to be proactive beyond conventional medical wisdom. I wanted him to listen but instead he smiled and tilted his head.

“Son, are you a doctor?”

“Doctors get rich when you get sick,” I said. “They benefit from your ailments!”

But dad wasn’t buying it. Not from a waiter who showed up on his doorstep in Fresno seasonally for complementary room and board, then took off with his buddies to the Elbow Room until three in the morning.

“Son, what does enucleate mean?”

I bristled, “Just because you understand the medical terms doesn’t mean you have a better understanding of health!”

“Leave the doctoring to the doctors,” dad told me.

It never seemed to matter how hard I pushed or how gently I nudged: Father Knew Best. But I was also determined. I bought him nutrient rich, organic vitamins and the purest herbs and tonics from the Amazon. When dad refused to try them, I used everything myself. Yet this only caused me to change my tactics. Rather than make idle suggestions, I would proudly point out all of my health conscious decisions as a clever way of taunting him.

“I did yoga last week and it was amazing!” I said, one night at dinner.

“Yeah, just be careful,” Dad said curtly. Then with deep gravity, he explained how yoga could influence good Christians toward a pagan Buddhist mindset.

“What does yoga have to do with religion?” I laughed.

And then, as we inevitably did, dad and I erupted into a philosophically painful bout, to the point where mom and sis had to pull us apart like pit bulls with jaws locked. Later after dinner, as dad angrily stormed across the parking lot, they begged me to leave him alone. Or at least make suggestions in a more civil manner, though this was beyond my capabilities.I needed dad to listen. He was the one with cancer. My inability to convince him was turning me into a frustrated mess.

In March of 2007, my bitterness reached its apex while visiting family in Peru. In the weeks leading up to the trip, I was certain the plane was going to crash. I saw it in my dreams and it wracked me with anxiety. I was sure we all were going to die, until my therapist dutifully pointed out my visions might have more to do with spending two weeks with my family. From the moment they arrived, I was tense. The only way I muddled through was to ridicule dad’s fanny pack. Mom sensed trouble and threatened to leave me behind if I couldn’t be polite. So I went the opposite route and said as little as possible for the 4,000 mile journey. Only when we landed, and I popped a beer on my cousin’s balcony, did I finally take a breath. But it didn’t last long. The next day we journeyed to a remote beach near Chincha, two hours south of Lima. We found ourselves at the edge of nowhere with nothing around us but a few bamboo huts, sand and the sound of waves breaking off the Pacific. For a minute, I was almost happy, and convinced myself that now was the right time to talk with my father.

“Dad, I love you.”

“I love you too, son.”

I started talking about the past, but he didn’t seem to hear me. The words I so desperately needed to hear were lost to a chaotic moment in paradise. Kids screaming and tides crashing shrouded my words in a haze of white noise. Here we were standing man to man, but I felt the power of intimidation he was once able to hold over me. My first memories of love came from dad’s affection. But when his anger would betray my trust, it spun me out of balance. I’d been wild and obnoxious as a kid, yet it never validated how dad reacted. The belt, the switch, and the intense force of his voice had left its mark upon my soul, and I needed this absolved. I had once imagined I would have a lifetime to right the ship, but when the cancer arrived, pressure intensified to be honest with dad while there was time. I had poured out my heart, but all dad said was my cousins were cute playing in the sand, and I went off for another beer in hopes that I could drink myself into believing all was good between us.

For the next many days, I was on the war path. We drove two hours from Chincha back to Lima and stayed up all night to make an early morning flight to Cusco. The ground snuck up during our landing and our short decent made our arrival feel abrupt. Everything seemed to wear on my nerves, and I focused all my ire on things that bothered me about my father. At that moment, his umbrella, safari hat and fanny-pack.

“There he is! Tour Guide Tom!” I taunted him through the airport terminal.

At the hotel the staff kindly greeted us with Coca tea so we could acclimate to the higher altitude, though when I finally got to my room, I felt like the walls were closing in. The setting was beautiful, if I could enjoy it. Here we were more than ten-thousand feet up in a place where it never snowed. The roads were narrow and made of stone and pebble. The locals, of Incan descent, looked alien, and I wanted to stare at all of their faces, but felt ignorant for my curiosity. And then, in the midst of it, was our one-eyed “tour guide-in-training” with fanny pack and safari hat. We’d been told not to look like foreigners, as unrealistic as that seemed, for fear of being pick-pocketed. But dad wouldn’t listen. When the locals approached, he would stop and try conversing, though he barely knew a word of Spanish. In churches, he marveled at the massive gold and silver alters, oblivious to how they’d been erected with the blood and treasure of his new friends’ ancestors. Secretly, I decided that I was an Inca, while my father was an ignorant Spaniard.But a burden like this was hard to carry. At Machu Picchu the next day, I wanted to decompress. The sun was strong, though the clouds cooled my skin. I climbed up the side of the mountain and pondered my thoughts in an old stone room that must have been somebody’s home long ago. The view of the river below, and the rainforest just beyond were inspiring. But my soaring heart came crashing down once we returned to the town below. We were sitting outside at a small café, eating Peruvian pizza, when it began to rain. The rain was especially hard for dad, who only had one eye to work with, and he’d asked me to keep both of mine on his fanny pack.

“Why?”

“Because I can’t see it. It’s on the wrong side of my good eye.”

I didn’t say anything, just shrugged, and moved the fanny-pack from on top of his suitcase to the top of mine between my legs. A much safer place, I thought, but Dad didn’t agree. He poked my leg with his umbrella.“Put it back, son.”

“I thought you wanted me to watch it.”

“Put it back.”

“It’s right here between my legs! Relax!”

Again, he poked me with the umbrella. “How many times do I have to tell you before it sinks into that thick skull of yours?” Maybe not those words exactly, but that’s how it felt. My mother and sister, sensing the tension, tried to intervene. “Scott,” they said. “just put it back.”

“No, because that’s stupid. If you want me to watch something because you’re afraid it’s going to get stolen, don’t leave it sitting on the outside of the table where anyone walking by can grab it!”

“God darn it, son!” dad with power, like a champagne cork ready to blow. “Put the fanny-pack back or so help me God!”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m five! You don’t scare me!”I swear he was ready to throw the table right on top of me, but mom and sis continued to beg and I finally relented. The six-hour train back to Cusco made me sick. I hated myself for fighting with him. I wanted so desperately to connect, but there was so much else to overcome—and I didn’t know if I could do it. To entertain us on the long ride back, the stewards put on a show with costumes and music, dancing up and down the aisles. Bizarre for the setting, but it lightened the mood. They followed the performance with a full fashion show, and here I found an opening. Dad had grown up in the family’s clothing store and he appreciated fine threads. I was mad as hell, but I bought him a red Alpaca sweater, then through tensed lips and frozen heart, I told him that I loved him.

“Thanks, son,” he said warmly, and I could tell he appreciated the gift. Yet I was only stalling the inevitable. Nothing could bridge our vast divide, not sickness nor neutral territory. We were running out of time, and my shallow peace offering was just that. Peace with dad meant shedding all of our empty gestures. I’d cloaked my anger long enough, and once and for all, even if I didn’t know how I would do it, I needed to own up to our struggles and make clear the truth of my pain.

Next: “Dad’s Last Drive” Conclusion

Scott Tejerian is a Los Angeles writer and contributor to Walkabout Jones.

Mostly out of laziness

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.

The next piece of business is to comb through the want ads and find a job. I rule out various occupations for one reason or another: hotel front-desk clerk, for example, which to my surprise is regarded as unskilled and pays only $6 or $7 an hour, gets eliminated because it involves standing in one spot for eight hours a day. Waitressing is also something I’d like to avoid, because I remember it leaving me bone-tired when I was eighteen, and I’m decades of varicosities and back pain beyond that now. Telemarketing, one of the first refuges of the suddenly indigent, can be dismissed on grounds of personality. This leaves certain supermarket jobs, such as deli clerk, or housekeeping in the hotels and guest houses, which pays about $7 and, I imagine, is not too different from what I’ve been doing part-time, in my own home, all my life.

So I put on what I take to be a respectable-looking outfit of ironed Bermuda shorts and scooped-neck T-shirt and set out for a tour of the local hotels and supermarkets. Best Western, Econo Lodge, and HoJo’s all let me fill out application forms, and these are, to my relief, mostly interested in whether I am a legal resident of the United States and have committed any felonies. My next stop is Winn-Dixie, the supermarket, which turns out to have a particularly onerous application process, featuring a twenty-minute “interview” by computer since, apparently, no human on the premises is deemed capable of representing the corporate point of view. I am conducted to a large room decorated with posters illustrating how to look “professional” (it helps to be white and, if female, permed) and warning of the slick promises that union organizers might try to tempt me with. The interview is multiple-choice: Do I have anything, such as child care problems, that might make it hard for me to get to work on time? Do I think safety on the job is the responsibility of management? Then, popping up cunningly out of the blue: How many dollars’ worth of stolen goods have I purchased in the last year? Would I turn in a fellow employee if I caught him stealing? Finally, “Are you an honest person?”

Apparently I ace the interview, because I am told that all I have to do is show up in some doctor’s office tomorrow for a urine test. This seems to be a fairly general rule: if you want to stack Cheerios boxes or vacuum hotel rooms in chemically fascist America, you have to be willing to squat down and pee in front of a health worker (who has no doubt had to do the same thing herself.) The wages Winn-Dixie is offering—$6 and a couple of dimes to start with—are not enough, I decide, to compensate for this indignity.

I lunch at Wendy’s, where $4.99 gets you unlimited refills at the Mexican part of the Super-bar, a comforting surfeit of refried beans and cheese sauce. A teenage employee, seeing me studying the want ads, kindly offers me an application form, which I fill out, though here, too, the pay is just $6 and change an hour. Then it’s off for a round of the locally owned inns and guest houses in Key West’s Old Town, which is where all the serious sightseeing and guzzling goes on, a couple of miles removed from the functional end of the island, where the discount hotels make their homes.

At The Palms, let’s call it, a bouncy manager actually takes me around to see the rooms and meet the current housekeepers, who, I note with satisfaction, look pretty much like me—faded ex-hippie types in shorts with long hair pulled back in braids. Mostly, though, no one speaks to me or even looks at me except to proffer an application form. At my last stop, a palatial B & B, I wait twenty minutes to meet “Max,” only to be told that there are no jobs now but there should be one soon, since “nobody lasts more than a couple weeks.”

Three days go by like this and, to my chagrin, no one from the approximately twenty places at which I’ve applied calls me for an interview. I had been vain enough to worry about coming across as too educated for the jobs I sought, but no one even seems interested in finding out how overqualified I am. Only later will I realize that the want ads are not a reliable measure of the actual jobs available at any particular time. They are, as I should have guessed from Max’s comment, the employers’ insurance policy against the relentless turnover of the low-wage workforce. Most of the big hotels run ads almost continually, if only to build a supply of applicants to replace the current workers as they drift away or are fired, so finding a job is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time and flexible enough to take whatever is being offered that day. This finally happens to me at one of the big discount chain hotels where I go, as usual, for housekeeping and am sent instead to try out as a waitress at the attached “family restaurant,” a dismal spot looking out on a parking garage, which is featuring “Pollish sausage and BBQ sauce” on this 95-degree day. Phillip, the dapper young West Indian who introduces himself as the manager, interviews me with about as much enthusiasm as if he were a clerk processing me for Medicare, the principal questions being what shifts I can work and when I can start. I mutter about being woefully out of practice as a waitress, but he’s already on to the uniform: I’m to show up tomorrow wearing black slacks and black shoes; he’ll provide the rust-colored polo shirt with “Hearthside,” as we’ll call the place, embroidered on it, though I might want to wear my own shirt to get to work, ha ha. At the word tomorrow, something between fear and indignation rises in my chest. I want to say, “Thank you for your time, sir, but this is just an experiment, you know, not my actual life.”So begins my career at the Hearthside, where for two weeks I work from 2:00 till 10:00 P.M. for $2.43 an hour plus tips. Employees are barred from using the front door, so I enter the first day through the kitchen, where a red-faced man with shoulder-length blond hair is throwing frozen steaks against the wall and yelling, “Fuck this shit!” “That’s just Billy,” explains Gail, the wiry middle-aged waitress who is assigned to train me. “He’s on the rag again”—a condition occasioned, in this instance, by the fact that the cook on the morning shift had forgotten to thaw out the steaks. For the next eight hours, I run after the agile Gail, absorbing bits of instruction along with fragments of personal tragedy. All food must be trayed, and the reason she’s so tired today is that she woke up in a cold sweat thinking of her boyfriend, who was killed a few months ago in a scuffle in an upstate prison. No refills on lemonade. And the reason he was in prison is that a few DUIs caught up with him, that’s all, could have happened to anyone. Carry the creamers to the table in a “monkey bowl,” never in your hand. And after he was gone she spent several months living in her truck, peeing in a plastic pee bottle and reading by candlelight at night, but you can’t live in a truck in the summer, since you need to have the windows down, which means anything can get in, from mosquitoes on up.

At least Gail puts to rest any fears I had of appearing overqualified. From the first day on, I find that of all the things that I have left behind, such as home and identity, what I miss the most is competence. Not that I have ever felt 100 percent competent in the writing business, where one day’s success augurs nothing at all for the next. But in my writing life, I at least have some notion of procedure: do the research, make the outline, rough out a draft, etc. As a server, though, I am beset by requests as if by bees: more iced tea here, catsup over there, a to-go box for table 14, and where are the high chairs, anyway? Of the twenty-seven tables, up to six are usually mine at any time, though on slow afternoons or if Gail is off, I sometimes have the whole place to myself. There is the touch-screen computer-ordering system to master, which I suppose is meant to minimize server-cook contacts but in practice requires constant verbal fine-tuning: “That’s gravy on the mashed, OK? None on the meatloaf,” and so forth. Plus, something I had forgotten in the years since I was eighteen: about a third of a server’s job is “side work” invisible to customers—sweeping, scrubbing, slicing, refilling, and restocking. If it isn’t all done, every little bit of it, you’re going to face the 6:00 P.M. dinner rush defenseless and probably go down in flames. I screw up dozens of times at the beginning, sustained in my shame entirely by Gail’s support—”It’s OK, baby, everyone does that sometime”—because, to my total surprise and despite the scientific detachment I am doing my best to maintain, I care.

The whole thing would be a lot easier if I could just skate through it like Lily Tomlin in one of her waitress skits, but I was raised by the absurd Booker T. Washingtonian precept that says: If you’re going to do something, do it well. In fact, “well” isn’t good enough by half. Do it better than anyone has ever done it before. Or so said my father, who must have known what he was talking about because he managed to pull himself, and us with him, up from the mile-deep copper mines of Butte to the leafy suburbs of the Northeast, ascending from boilermakers to martinis before booze beat out ambition. As in most endeavors I have encountered in my life, “doing it better than anyone” is not a reasonable goal. Still, when I wake up at 4 A.M. in my own cold sweat, I am not thinking about the writing deadlines I’m neglecting; I’m thinking of the table where I screwed up the order and one of the kids didn’t get his kiddie meal until the rest of the family had moved on to their Key lime pies. That’s the other powerful motivation—the customers, or “patients,” as I can’t help thinking of them on account of the mysterious vulnerability that seems to have left them temporarily unable to feed themselves. After a few days at Hearthside, I feel the service ethic kick in like a shot of oxytocin, the nurturance hormone. The plurality of my customers are hardworking locals—truck drivers, construction workers, even housekeepers from the attached hotel—and I want them to have the closest to a “fine dining” experience that the grubby circumstances will allow. No “you guys” for me; everyone over twelve is “sir” or “ma’am.” I ply them with iced tea and coffee refills; I return, midmeal, to inquire how everything is; I doll up their salads with chopped raw mushrooms, summer squash slices, or whatever bits of produce I can find that have survived their sojourn in the cold storage room mold-free.

There is Benny, for example, a short, tight-muscled sewer repairman who cannot even think of eating until he has absorbed a half hour of air-conditioning and ice water. We chat about hyperthermia and electrolytes until he is ready to order some finicky combination like soup of the day, garden salad, and a side of grits. There are the German tourists who are so touched by my pidgin “Wilkommen” and “Ist alles gut?” that they actually tip. (Europeans, no doubt spoiled by their trade union-ridden, high-wage welfare states, generally do not know that they are supposed to tip. Some restaurants, the Hearthside included, allow servers to “grat” their foreign customers, or add a tip to the bill. Since this amount is added before the customers have a chance to tip or not tip, the practice amounts to an automatic penalty for imperfect English.) There are the two dirt-smudged lesbians, just off from their shift, who are impressed enough by my suave handling of the fly in the piña colada that they take the time to praise me to Stu, the assistant manager. There’s Sam, the kindly retired cop who has to plug up his tracheotomy hole with one finger in order to force the cigarette smoke into his lungs.

Sometimes I play with the fantasy that I am a princess who, in penance for some tiny transgression, has undertaken to feed each of her subjects by hand. But the nonprincesses working with me are just as indulgent, even when this means flouting management rules—as to, for example, the number of croutons that can go on a salad (six). “Put on all you want,” Gail whispers, “as long as Stu isn’t looking.” She dips into her own tip money to buy biscuits and gravy for an out-of-work mechanic who’s used up all his money on dental surgery, inspiring me to pick up the tab for his pie and milk. Maybe the same high levels of agape can be found throughout the “hospitality industry.” I remember the poster decorating one of the apartments I looked at, which said, “If you seek happiness for yourself you will never find it. Only when you seek happiness for others will it come to you,” or words to that effect—an odd sentiment, it seemed to me at the time, to find in the dank one-room basement apartment of a bellhop at the Best Western. At Hearthside, we utilize whatever bits of autonomy we have to ply our customers with the illicit calories that signal our love. It is our job as servers to assemble the salads and desserts, pour the dressings, and squirt the whipped cream. We also control the number of butter pats our customers get and the amount of sour cream on their baked potatoes. So if you wonder why Americans are so obese, consider the fact that waitresses both express their humanity and earn their tips through the covert distribution of fats.

From: “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” by Barbara Ehrenreich. Available in bookstores everywhere.

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