"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."
-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

      Trying to make money dealing cannabis, I failed. For joyful consolation, I stashed fond memories. Like so many sublime adventures it began with almost equal parts of singleminded obsession and a great unknowing. Marijuana was a plant on the make. This was the shrub that wanted to change our lives. A Circe, a mercy, a controversy of our century. But this has been my destiny, a paradigm in my life, even way back then: I am at once blessed and cursed by always being too advanced, a point man for the zeitgeist forever eagerly undertaking heavenly projects--just for the hell of it--right before it becomes commercializable.
      Few people even knew about grass, even fewer smoked. In spite of this, only twenty-one, a fat assed fraternity boy from the American South somehow I managed to get myself from Paris to Morocco (via Switzerland) on the back of a 500cc BMW motorcycle. With fear and trembling and much danger, I scored two kilos of really strong kif in Tangier from a couple of thousand-and-one-nights Arab types. An official portrait of Sultan Mohammed V wearing a hooded dj'ellabah hung on the wall. Somewhere a loudspeaker blared out the gripping pristine voice of Farouz, she of the titanium tonsils, or a muezzin's wailing call for prayer. We sat on the ground, passed a sebsi, negotiated over many glasses of sweet mint tea and it cost a total of just eighteen dollars. A kind of beginner's luck for this student prince. From there I smuggled my large bundle into Franco's Spain in a small rucksack, hidden only by a change of underwear and a few volumes of Olympia Press books. Hitchhiking to Madrid, on to San Sebastian by the Bay of Biscay, (boycotting Pamplona, for reasons of love and literature), then zapping across the border into France. All the while living on hardly more than cheap wine, bread and cheese and melon. Did I really do something so awesomely absurd? Yes, indeed. It was 1960. And in my generation there was that perennial gang, the English majors in analysis, the geeks and wimps, who whiningly went for Rebel Without a Cause and The Catcher in the Rye. But those of us who really counted though were smitten, besotted by The Wild One and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Further! Smile on the outlaw dreamer's face. Down with the reality principle. Blitzkrieg the citadel of enlightenment. Crazy man crazy. Go man go. We were the best minds, Goliards going forth to meet everyone, do everything, in motion. A wholly holy communion.
      Wipe out in Paris. The gigoloesque guy who promised to buy the entire stuff--saying that was a way to realize the dream of staying in Europe for longer than only your standard summertime tour--gaped at me. "Here I am! I did it!" I exclaimed proudly, grinning, gleaming, maximum suntanned dressed in shreds and patches. Nick Smart, his real name, was not encouraging. He seemed surprised I had taken him at his word. Standing in the darkened doorway to his narrow hotel room at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur, wearing zilch save a Georgetown University sweatshirt, now he claimed to be completely broke. Wagging his head, and other parts, he spoke of having run out of copies of "The Beat Guide" that he had had breathless Jean Seberg-types selling on the street, caught a bad case of clap, just paid for an abortion. And more tales of tawdry glory. Et cetera. Et cetera. "Good luck," he said. "Like, uh man, you're on your own." Good luck, indeed. The city was quivering with extreme paranoia, bathed in incipient violence. The Algerian War of Independence had a brace of nervous gendarmerie, shock-cops, armed with sub-machine guns menacing all the street corners on the Left Bank. Body parts were found in the Seine every morning. Each of the governments from the Fourth Republic was a premature ejaculation, a short count. Someone advised me to go to Amsterdam. "Be cool and stay in the Youth Hostel on the Kloveniersburgwal. It's on a canal. Go see a certain spade cat named Frank, he hangs out in the Phonobar on the Thorbeckeplein. It's close by." This was my first, very brief glimpse of the watery city that would eventually become my home. Alas, couldn't find any heads. Another wipe out.
      Time to go to ground, find a safe harbor away from the whirlpools. A poet comrade from university, Larry Fagin, had given me his home address in Wiesbaden. His father was a civilian real estate agent for the US Air Force. Still hitching, I crossed yet another border Rhine/Main bound.

      "My God!" Larry said when we were finally alone upstairs in his parent's house. "Where did you get this? I haven't seen so much reefer in my life." To conceal our giggles, he stacked some cool jazz sides and rare blues on the portable record player. Turned it up full volume. We dug the sounds spinning on the turntable while smoking monster joints. Jumped up and down. Shouted burlesque aphorisms. "Plastic Man is the long arm of the law." "Lamont Cranston knows we know he knows, ha ha ha." "A bomb in hand is worth two million dead in the bush." "Ebetts Field's defunct . . . What do you do with a bald headed angle when tomorrow is still in the past?" "The girl I call my own, must dig Dizzy and Basie and play slide trombone." And then? And then? Then we wrote immortal Zen verses in the condensation on the windowpanes.
      As we started to come down a bit, Larry asked: "Remember Robin Rich from the Java Jungle?" He was referring to a beatnik coffeehouse in Washington, D.C. where I was introduced to smoking grass in the late-Fifties. Across the street we greased our chops scarfing it up at the Texas Chili Parlor for half-a-dollar a bowl. This was on Pennsylvania Avenue, our turf merely three blocks away from the Great Golfer and dipso Mamie in the White House.
      "I'm hip. Yeah, Robin. Wild," I answered rather vaguely.
      "Well, he's here in Wiesbaden. In the nut house.
      "Wow. That's a gas. Far out. How did it happen?" I might have asked. Or maybe I didn't. Larry might have been on one of his talking jags and just continued.
      "He's not really, really crazy. It's his father, you know. He's an Air Force general. When Robin told him he didn't want to join up and fight for Uncle Sam, and started quoting from Dr. Benway in The Naked Lunch, then General Rich had him committed to a military mental hospital. But he's allowed out in the afternoon. We'll see him tomorrow."
      Walking in the park overlooking the two rivers, we could hear the haunting and intricate polyphonic chanting as we approached the shiny onion-shaped domed Russian Orthodox Church picturesquely perched at the top of the hill. I told Robin that I was out of bread, but had all this pot. In return for a commission in kind, i.e. thin joints tightly rolled with my last packet of Zig-Zag papers, he volunteered to try and off stuff to some spade cats, grunts working as orderlies in the insane asylum. The unit measure of sale would be a matchbox full, the price twenty Deutsch Marks--then worth approximately five dollars.
      Those were my inaugural sales; the somewhat flipped out son of a general as subcontractor to colored privates posted to a loony bin. The GIs were happy to have something to mellow them out in a foreign country on a bad assignment. Also because it was a real good count, cleaned without stems or seeds, and it was the strongest weed they'd ever had.
      Each day the three of us would meet. It was September. We turned on someplace out in the open air caressed by the slight early autumn mist, the slanting light. Got good and stoned having contests as to who could keep the smoke inhaled longest. Soon afterward we lubed our parched throats in a beer hall and ate some part of a pig. Sometimes huge truncheons of roasted Schweinhacken or trembling boiled Backen with bristles or lumpy paprika spiced soups covered in a glacier of fat but chiefly plump grilled sausages garnished with slices of dark sourdough bread and honeyed mustard. Meanwhile Larry and I listened in a glazed way to Robin's high manic monomaniacal City of Interzone sci-fi monologues barked out as if giving order before exchanging about three or four matchboxes and the money. This basic arrangement went on for a week. Larry's parents were getting suspicious. Thinking I might be having a bad influence on their son, they asked him to tell me I had overstayed my welcome.
      "But it's okay," Larry said optimistically. "Remember that guy at the Java Jungle we called Leo the Greek?"
      "I'm hip. Yeah, Leo. Wild," I answered rather vaguely. Or maybe I didn't.
      "Well, his father was a member of Parliament and leader of a minor political party from Sparta. His real name is Leonidas, of course, Leonidas Lagakos. After doing his year studying in Dee Cee, now he's studying in Munich. I'll give you his address: maybe he can help you out there."

      He did help me. We helped each other. But the months I wound up spending in Munich are remembered only through a glass darkly.
      Very soon I ran out of money again. The first thing I did was get myself a job as a hilfsarbeiter at a construction site of Josef Resole, Bauunternehmung of Prinsenstrasse, performing non-miraculous efforts for the German Wirtschaftswunder. That gave me a small income and a place to stay for twenty-pfenning a night in a concrete block worker's dormitory at Aidenbachstraasse 70. I was placed in a square room on the fourth floor with three sets of metal double bunk beds arranged against the walls, in the center a table with chairs and next to each set of beds a pair of narrow wooden lockers. Toilets and wash basins were at the end of the hallway. On the second floor they had communal showers. Before the Turks, nearly all of the gastarbeiters at that time were Italian with a small contingent of various Yugoslavs. In fact, my dusky visage combined with a shabby appearance made the labor office and employer think I was Italian too. Only after being hired when presenting my identification papers did they discover-shock horror-I was from the States. My assigned roommates in the Arbeiterwohnlager, however, were five German unskilled laborers in their late thirties, early forties. Almost certainly they were veterans of the war. Reluctant to exacerbate the situation, I didn't want to inquire. But my concerns were unassuaged when each morning at about five-thirty one of them would wake me up to go to work by vigorously shaking me, and screaming "Raus!!!" then laughing boisterously.
      Even though I had all the grass it wasn't that easy to sell and I kept it in two big paper bags at the bottom of my locker which was secured by a large red and silver Abus padlock. Each evening after work I walked the streets alone high as the sky. Once when asked what I was smoking, I improvised an explanation. "Dieser ist Amerikaner Tabak. " "Nein." "Jawohl. Jawohl. Suden Amerikaner Tabak." That seemed to satisfy. After some weeks of digging holes, scraping lumber and carrying cement in a wheelbarrow, finally I found a sort of scene.
      There was Nicholas Hahn--lanky aristocratic--who lived on Ainmillerstrasse in the same building as Leo. His mother was a countess and his father a banker, albeit Jewish. Nicky had been born in Germany but when less than a year old was taken by his parents to New York where he went to school and grew up, a refugee, in affluent, chic surroundings. In exchange for turning him on I began to spend more and more time at Nicky's place. We had both studied economic theory and shared an interest in discussing it. One evening in the middle of listening to a Nixon/Kennedy debate on AFN radio, the telephone rang.
      "That," Nicky said in an excited voice. "That was Arndt von Bohlen und Halbach, the heir to the Krupp munitions fortune. He's invited us to come to his apartment for a drink. Bring your marijuana: That will impress him."
      I can't remember if the furniture was covered in red satin and there was a white shaggy rug on the floor, or whether the upholstery was white satin and the shaggy rug red. At any rate, the indirect lighting was dimmed and four of us gathered around a glass top table with a polished chrome frame. A real flaming creatures parlor. The precursor of a set from Visconti's The Damned. The only other person present was another man around our age named Messerschmitt.
      My heart gave a quick skip of excitement. "Oh, that's a famous name," I said when we were introduced, having trained myself as a young boy to spot and recognize the silhouettes of enemy planes.
      "Yes," he answered in a droll, matter-of-fact tone. "My family used to manufacture aircraft." He shrugged. "Now we only make cockpits on wheels."
      Over glasses of imported Scotch whisky Arndt said he knew about marijuana, having purchased rolled joints expensively in Acapulco the year before. He was happy to buy a couple of my good count, good stuff matchboxes. Arndt was a courteous talkative host with a cloying smooth charm. As the evening wore on though, with drinking and smoking, he became more and more camp. Nicky and I bade young Messerschmitt auf wiedersehen, tschuss, adieu, ciao for now and dive-bombed out of the apartment as Arndt the Krupp was flapping his arms about greedily, his head thrown back. "When I get my hands on all the money," he shrieked, "I am going to cover my mother in jewels."
      Then there was Kevin Donnelley--small blond yet wiry and pugnacious--a hard drinking, working class Irish guy from New England who was studying sculpture, specifically cireperdue bronze casting, at the Art Academy. It was through him that I met a group of Americans in Schwabing.
      There was Ivan Della--funny, jive, born suave. Originally from Harlem and a veteran of Ike's invasion of Lebanon a couple of years before in 1958, he had done his stint as a clerktypist attached to an Army Airborne unit. Stationed mainly in Germany, Ivan decided to stay on after discharge taking advantage of the Deutsch Madels fascination with this brown skinned handsome man. "She stuck her tongue in my pee-hole," was his famous line.
      There was earnest exchange student named Ira Schneider who begged me to let him try some marijuana, please pleeeze give him a taste. I warned him. He took a few hits, then slouched away in the night holding onto the walls for support, babbling and mumbling, not to be seen again for over a week, then claiming to have been drugged. Eventually Ira turned into a well-subsidized earnest video artist.
      There were also these two jazz musicians, a rhythm section. Yorke Hughes, the bass player, was a gentle redneck from some place in Arkansas. It's so small, he said, that if you ever want to come visitin' just stand in the middle of the town and holler my name. Yorke was always lavish with his smoking, his philosophy being: "If you worry about getting high tomorrow, you never get high today." He and his friend, the drummer, were regular customers, buyers of five matchboxes at a time.
      And also through Kevin, who remained a friend for over twenty years, I discovered the in-places. The Schwabinger Nest, a cafe on Leopoldstrasse, where we headed for when we got the munchies. Their specialty was a thick creamy berry-topped cheese pie, the best I ever tasted before or since. Moreover, during the day everyone, just everyone, passed through. The real night scene though was in the sidestreets between the Leopoldstrasse and the park. Very late we could be found hooting at the Nacht Eule--a boozy subterranean juke box den--huddled around a small wooden table covered with steaming plates of lovely white potato dumplings, Kartoffelknoden, swimming in the dark gravy of stewed mystery meat. Earlier in the evening there was a more up market jazz club with a regular program of live groups. Called the Tarantel this was where we spun our web, where women could meet us, and I met some hard-core Afro-American sergeants, military lifers, who moonlighted as pimps. They bought my stuff for their girls. One incident perhaps demonstrates best of all how completely unsuited I was to be a dealer.
      Standing in the shadows outside the Tarantel. Myself, Kevin and Ivan on one side like partners in a-down-in-the-heels law firm of Levy, Donnelley & Della. On the other side the buyer, in sleek civvies, smiling like a Cheshire cat, his sourpussed sidekick glaring with menaces and three brightly dressed cheerfully chatting prostitutes wisely ignoring all of us.
      "What's the bite?" the main guy signified.
      "Twenty for this matchbox, man!" I replied shakily, trying to be cool, speaking without moving a muscle, looking him in the eye, a Roth-Handle dangling from my lips.
      Without hesitation he reached in his pocket, pulled out a billfold and peeled off a twentydollar bill, holding it out to me.
      "No," I said fatuously in a rare example of seller Jews down buyer. "Dig. Not twenty dollars. I mean twenty marks."
      The tough sergeant smirked, did a small roll, shuffled. "Say what? Groovy. I hear you," he replied. "Hey now. That's a fine, fine, super fine deal."
      And the days passed in a daze. On the streets the mounds of fresh, oval-shaped deep purple plums and the clustered heaps of tiny pale-green sweet grapes disappeared. As did the paper cones filled with hot, roasted chestnuts. They were replaced by twinkling baroque Christmas decorations and Volkswagens with roof racks topped with wooden skis. Fabulous mountain clouds rolling in golden streaked wild blue skies had given way to a world of utter pewter. The secret ministry of frost hung around in silent icicles, quietly shining back at the quiet moon. Vanished were the yellow red brown orange leaves floating on the Isar. The Chinese Tower in the Englischer Garten looked desolate. Without doubt a ghoulish, chilly and foggy winter of Expressionist gloom was upon us.
      Bavaria was beginning to bug me. I had put together a little bread. It was time to split. Hit the road. Go where the weather suited my clothes. Gruss Gott. Later. Taking about two large hand-fulls of grass as a traveling companion, I crossed more borders--first heading off toward Greece where I landed a gig with the special effects department of a film called The 300 Spartans, a cast of thousands epic Hollywood extravaganza about the Battle of Thermopoylae. And from there pilgrimages for oracular pronouncements to Delphi, to Jerusalem. But that is another story.

"He who desires and acts not, breeds pestilence."

-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

 
      No busts. No burns. No counterfeit money. Truly, I was a fortunate traveler, a rider in the storm. Things worked out fine, could've been doing time. A big advantage of being a dealer in those bygone days so long ago was that I had no hassles with the law. They also didn't know what it was. In less than a decade it would have been easy finding pothead customers, and their groupies, the police. As well as all the collateral ganz Sorgen one needed. There is some sort of natural law in action here. This sacrament of exaltation was bound to become circles of commodification. Everyone knows it's usually the second tier who prosper, the second tier who comes along and calculatingly reaps the crop wildly sowed by others. You can tell who are the pioneers, so it is said on Wall Street. They are the ones lying on the ground with arrows in their chest. Although it must be noted that the friends of mine who started being superficially flush as dealers about five years or so afterward could never quite give up the adrenaline rush from this jerky business and its fast easy fools money. Most every one of them came to grief by the early eighties
      No regrets. Je ne regrette rien. How could I refuse the irresistible? All error is in the not done. It was my salad days. I was a spring chicken. What a salutary series of episodes trying to be a dealer proved to be. That too much quoted, "There's no success like failure and failure ain't no success at all" comes in quite handy. Yet all in all, in a fervor of passionate missionary zeal, I gave away more free samples of marijuana than I sold. As a quid pro quo I did get to stay in Europe then for a lucky seven months, seasons sweet and savory. My wanderings did not differ from ordinary travels for fun and study except that their itinerary, though apparently haphazard, rigorously coincided with the initiate's most arcane aspirations and gifts. Many, many years later I would run into people who would come up to me, beginning a conversation with: "Maybe you don't remember me. But you were the first person to turn me on. And that changed my life." Remembrance of things toked. For some it was heaven, for others it was hell. Having stayed and tasted the sacrament, transformed, one returns to the world outside bearing an apocalyptic message. For myself absorbing cannabis continues to be an aroused union--occasionally even an epithalamium--in skywriting, this nuptial song or poem writ large in ideogramic smoky breathe.
      Autumn 1999
      Amsterdam

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