Supra: A Brief History of Cannabis in America

Supra

A Brief History of Cannabis in America

===Jay Freen ===

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Jay Freen

ISBN: 9781310524059

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http://Suprawebsite.com/

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Contents

Part One

Tour me

Seek and ye shall...

How far the highlands?

1969

Welcome to my...

A thick plot

Part Two

1975

Home is...

The past present

Sheila Strong

1981

Quality time

Lincoln Chang

1984

Hare

The city

Carlyle

Wheat

Bumper crop

Captain Willy Jeepers

Sedgely hero?

Chang's town

Love me

Tell me about it

Find a way

Write now

An ending

Chang goodbye

Epilogue

Part I

It's a good thing marijuana is a natural product. Otherwise we would have had to wait around for someone to invent it. And that could have taken a while.

—Guerrilla grower, reminiscing, circa 2020

Chapter One

Tour me

Walk with me, my dad yells, grabbing my arm just this morning, an otherwise typical Saturday in our hometown. Since my divorce, people tell me I've lacked focus, have had too much time on my hands, and as such have become fair game for my father's semi-desperate, grasping iron grip.

The Tour, as he calls it, essentially takes his obsessions out for a walk, and I suppose that strolling with him makes me an enabler of sorts. Still, I have other motives—protective ones. I like to think that I accompany Pop so that his monologue will not appear to be the ravings of a lonely old nutcase. This way, he's a raving old nutcase with an aging offspring in tow.

I'm talking about a real tour, he says happily. Not the one you pay for, with the 20-year-old fake hippy guide in the tie-dye shirt and the sandals made from discarded tires and a cow who fucking died of old age, but a real walkabout, man.

And so, from the POV of a visitor (we host over two million of them a year), The Tour. Mercifully abbreviated.

Beautiful morning! Pop shouts into the startled faces of a passing tourist family, liberally dousing them with old-guy spittle as he pushes open the white picket gate and briefly takes over the Main Street sidewalk fronting our tiny yard.

Smell that air! That's oxygen pouring out of a hundred million firs and pines in a good mood. They used to say you couldn't buy air like this. Think again, motherfuckers!

Our first stop is the Hashbin Café, where we sidle past several timid gawkers—politely, mind you; after all, these overweight people represent cash flow, year in and year out. Pausing to give the perpetually loitering Wheatberry two gentle high-fives we enter the establishment, straight into a lowering bank of dense, aromatic dope smoke. It is ten o'clock in the morning.

Hey there strangers, calls the tall, gray-haired, half-Asian guy from behind the counter, ducking under the smoke to shake our hands. It's Bill. Current proprietor of the Hashbin. Millionaire several times over. Only legitimate son of co-founder Lincoln Chang.

Come, sit, sit, gentlemen of long acquaintance! Make room there, kind sir, yes you, for a founding member and his son. Honored stools, I say. Mind the busted springs and duct tape.

No one knows when exactly Bill began speaking like this. My dad vaguely remembers a Combine meeting once, years ago now, when someone mentioned, merely in passing, that if quaintness was to be the goal of the town, maybe the merchants should try to talk like people did way back then.

Some retailers took to the idea, even if no one had specified the exact era they should be attempting to imitate. The range of accents was broad. Most people who initially adopted them have either died by now or abandoned the idea long ago. Bill has talked like this in his public role for so long that apparently he can no longer speak standard twenty-first century American English with any degree of reliability.

So, Bill says, wiping the Formica counter with a dirty rag and sliding two steaming lattes under our noses. No, no, on the house, he indicates with a shake of his head and wave of an index finger, although neither of us has made a move toward a pocket. What brings you out of your manse, Sir? And with young master Sedgely the Second in attendance no less?

Just a tour, Bill. Just giving the town its yearly checkup. Ha, ha.

"Hmmm. If only it were a yearly event. I must have missed something, methinks, during lo these last five or six board meetings—where you, Sir Sedge, were conspicuous by your absence. I add this as merely a statement of fact, no criticism here. After all, the aforementioned meetings are not mandatory. Indeed, indeed, as you know, Sedge Pere, nothing is mandatory in our little slice of Paradise."

Lost, says Pop, so low in his throat that it sounds like he's merely working on coughing up a hairball. Bill, wound up now, doesn't catch it.

But, he continues, all the while receiving fistfuls of cash and dropping artistically wrapped samplers into the palms of customers, who are everywhere around us sucking on mouthpieces connected to homemade, antique American hookahs of every description, arranged about the room, and here is an inquiry worthy of your erudition, Sir Sedgely: A 'checkup' would seem to imply that our fair hamlet might have some chronic condition, me thinks, some health issue as it were, which requires, well, checking. More, even, implication-wise. Checking up upon! Implying a wavering, a deviation from some straight and narrow path. Is there, in short, a problem? Of which I am not aware?

Jesus, Bill, my dad says, I'm just out with the kid on a lovely morning.

Bill stares, and there are invisible dotted lines in the air between them, before he breaks away, reluctantly, and returns to his roaring business, with just a final, vague pointing of a finger in our direction and a You lads have a nice day.

We are back on the sidewalk, among the gaping shuffling throng, with our untouched lattes sitting back there on the counter.

Pop is shaking his head. Shit, talk about a chip off the old Chinaman's blockhead. And doesn't anybody ever change? I mean, in Bill's case, starting with their underwear, like?

What was all that about, anyway? I ask.

Always hard to say with Bill. He seems more paranoid than usual. His old man pushing some new fucking agenda, through his idiot child? Who knows? Cash flow is Bill's only reason for being. So what on earth would threaten ...? Hmm, could be I guess... Naw. But what else would ...?

He's looking around, confused for a second, then, remembering the mission: What the hell, let's hit the museum. Then we'll go home for lunch, I promise.

We carefully cross the street and enter the foyer of the Musée du Dope. There is some trouble at the ticket counter with the nineteen-year-old hippie re-creation (the kid fails to recognize Pop), but after some old-guy yelling, the manager, another son of an original Combine cohort, appears and waves us through with a world-weary nod.

You would think that a museum dedicated to the outsized role our little town has played in the long history of domestic US marijuana production would exude a casual, funky, laissez faire type of atmosphere in which the visitor, after inhaling, could wander around a bunch of lame exhibits at something like a stoned pace—and that's pretty much it.

After coughing up the hundred-dollar entrance fee, you wait around until the number of gawkers has reached critical mass, at which point the group is joined by one of the tour guides—in our case a scrumptious (Pop's term) little slip of a sexbomb flower child in a peasant dress, who introduces herself as Sunbeam Sue.

She greets everyone with a kiss and a full-frontal hug—Are those real? loudly queries my dad. Yes indeedy, she cheerfully replies as she launches into her presentation.

Good morning people, and welcome to the hamlet of Log’s Musée du Dope—the first and the only fully authorized museum in Humboldt County dedicated to the history of the cultivation of our nation's favorite weed, cannabis. A word of warning before we begin. Our mission statement here at the museum is clear. Our co-founder, Albeit Bean, long ago left us with a one-sentence command: 'Try to tell the fucking truth.' To this end, we have pulled few punches in our exhibits. The language already may not be suitable for small children. We may see some simulated copulation here and there.

A pause. A smile.

Just kidding! Follow me—this is not a race—and watch your step!

Through a huge wooden door and down a creepily dark, dank hallway we file—some stumbling, some complaints from behind us about not being able to see shit ...—and then there is a sensation of openness, of a breeze even, as one massive, slightly concave wall suddenly comes to life with historic newsreel images, projected via hidden, walk-right-in holographic technology, which was last considered state-of-the-art around the turn of the century.

Jaded though they may be by lifetimes spent watching much more fully realized 3-D everything, there is nevertheless a quick intake of breath, here and there, among some members of the tour group. Probably those of a certain age. Like me.

The year is 1968. America is torn asunder by the horror of Vietnam, as chronicled every night on TV.

A deafening soundtrack pummels the room. Jets dive, dropping napalm; Hueys swoop in, disgorging troops; a monk burns; a mustachioed soldier takes a hit on an opium pipe. A flashing series of still photographs assaults us: war protestors; the men on the balcony in Memphis pointing in the direction of the shot; Bobby Kennedy dying on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel.

We smell something pungent, familiar to everyone. Someone in the group coughs.

The War produced many things, our guide continues. "There was that great movie, Apocalypse Now, for example. But perhaps the most important consequence of Vietnam was the surplus of Disaffected Youth it created. And the banner, the flag, the totem of their disaffection? The marijuana cigarette. Passed around a dancing circle of so called 'freaks,' the joint became an instant icon, the smell of burning cannabis as common as smog."

Who writes this shit? Pop wonders out loud, forgetting, perhaps, that it was I, during an on-again, off-again stint as publicist for the Combine. Writing corporate copy being one of the many things that we, the currently gray-haired army of dinosaur fossil journalists, found to do on our way down oblivion road.

The old-timey holograph fades, replaced by darkness. Our guide, now a disembodied voice, warns the group to stick together, think kind thoughts, watch your step, and hold the hands of the person behind and in front of you.

Pop, knowing what's coming, follows her directions, up to a point, by grabbing my hand and leading me straight to the end of the line. We linger. Soon the group is well ahead of us. He does this every time; now he can conduct his own rant, delivered to his very own captive audience. Me.

Meanwhile up ahead dawn has broken, birds are chirping, as everyone's sight is restored and the history of dope continues.

I fought this approach—fought it tooth and nail, Pop reminds me for the hundredth time, while the group ahead gathers around a tableau vivant.

Why have live actors? he's saying. I asked the committee: who the hell wants to watch people—even attractive young people—sit silently like a bunch of stoned mimes in a mock-up of a grower's hooch, pretending to smoke dope while yet another teenager tells you what's going on, right in front of your face? It's redundant. Ridiculous. Asinine.

I start to answer, then think, why bother? We've been over this. My dad is old school, a movie buff. To him, moving pictures, however projected, are the ultimate art form, the one capable of true storytelling, of putting you there. When 3-D took over the world, he loved it. It's so real! he gushed. But then he was literally caught looking the other way when the inevitable backlash set in. Live theatre, with real actors, began to make a comeback. People wanted to see other people working without a net—and yes, right in front of them.

Tableaux vivant, once, well, dead, were first revived in medieval hippie fairs, then quickly spread to rock shows—the traditional, unassailable bastion of live performance. These days of course every aspiring actor goes through tableau training, the best-known part of which is undergoing the torture of children's tickling attacks while maintaining a perfectly frozen pose.

All we did with the museum was go with the flow, bow to the currents of culture. And it's worked out, cost-wise. No need to constantly upgrade the technology. Just hire new actors when the old ones get, well, too old.

Oh sure, it's quirky, it's quaint, Pop says, spoiling for a fight.

Modern, too. I manage to lob in.

Don't use that word around me.

Sorry. But you have to admit, it works. People like it.

That's it, he hisses. We're outta here.

And just like that, we are. Pop knows every hidden door in the museum building, every way out, every escape from the travesty he considers this show to be, even though he can't stop visiting here. In a stride or two we're blinking against the daylight, standing in an alley behind the Cosmos restaurant, where yet another youngster-employee lounges, obviously on his break, smoking a tobacco cigarette.

Those things'll kill ya, Pop tells the kid as we slip past him and regain the sidewalk. The kid never adjusts his three-foot stare.

Well, I say, That's further than we got last time.

Pop is looking about as apologetic as he gets.

You're a patient kid, he says, rather sadly. To put up with your crazy old dad.

I don't say anything. What can you say?

Pop has the last word.

Take my advice: don't let yourself ever get this old. It really cramps your style. Fuck it. Let's go home.

Chapter Two

Seek and ye shall...

It's an old story: A group of outcasts stumbles upon a place long abandoned, finds the ruined landscape useful, and creates a new civilization on the rubble of the past.

They took the easy lumber out of here before WW Two. By the time we showed up it was mostly thirty-year-old regrowth, with a few original stands intermingled, Pop says, with an expansive sweep that you can tell by his wince gives his arthritic shoulder an unexpected workout. Ouch.

We're back home, considering what to have for lunch. This can sometimes take a while, depending on Pop's mood. Today he's clearly in a contemplative one. Perhaps precipitated by the museum visit.

The summer days were long and hot. But the morning mist, man, that was the key. Made our shit different, made it more than just dope. Not to get poetic, but to smoke it was to inhale the essence of this forestland. We lived, some of us anyway, in hollowed out, giant redwood deadfalls, with ceilings ten feet high and fucking indoor plumbing!

And, lest we think that his story is stale, tired, irrelevant, one only has to poke around our small but world-renowned hamlet to see that his take on this period of American history is possibly being replayed today, right here.

Because, as my dad has just now leaned in to say, Keep it under your hat, kid, but Supra is back. And that, my friend, changes everything. Once again.

A lot of words are about to tumble out, and I, a half-assed, passed-over, dinosaur fossil journalist, will dutifully record every one of them. But a bit of backfill might explain some of the blanks that my dad takes for granted when speaking to his only child.

You see, I too am a product of my times. Raised up here in the north coast woods, I am crawling my way uphill toward the Big Six-0, even as Pop tiptoes along the high, dangerous ridge running between his ninth and tenth decades. Raised by twentieth century hippies, I never really inhaled, so to speak, the culture of my parents. And yet I still managed to get in on a slice of the business that followed close on the heels of the one my mother and father saw come to full flower in the nineteen-seventies and eighties.

Because the pot business, as it was called back then, really only lasted in its purest form for four decades or so, surviving the millennium's turning, but not by much, at which time California, as always, led the way—or stumbled blindly forth, depending on which history you read—to quasi-legality, followed by the groundbreaking legislation passed in Colorado and Washington in 2012, and then the free-at-last moment in 2016 when the Feds finally threw in the towel, repealed nationwide prohibition, and let the states have their right to inhale (or not) the smoke of the innocuous little plant.

So, what my dad is talking about and has been talking about all these years, with his steadily aging friends and their wives or companions, is really just the briefest period of the American chronology. And no wonder he misses it. Don't we all miss our youth?

Pop is looking around, suspiciously, as though someone might be sneaking up on him. He's agitated. But why?

It's as though he has something inside him that needs to come out. Something that has been lodged in there for quite a while. All you can do when he's like this is to let him shake it loose.

"Where was I? Oh yeah, I was boring the shit out of my son. So, as you know, your Mom and I were Southlanders, born and raised. Two dumb kids in love, with Disneyland nearby. One day as usual we got high and looked up. Skyward through the smog—our comfort blanket normally. What could we see? Not a fucking thing. Just the belly of another jet coming in for a landing, bringing yet another load of Midwesterners to crowd our beach, fill our freeways, fuck up our scene.

So we left. It's probably hard for you to believe but we carried everything we needed in one small shoulder bag, and no, I don't remember what was in the bag—except my camera. And no, we weren't alone on the road. Because as fast as people were pouring into the South, people were fleeing, handing off the place to the newcomers, who, no matter how long they ended up staying, never got over how cold the California Pacific Ocean is when you first jump in. Yeoww! Ha ha! Surprise, assholes!

He pauses, still with the hunted look. He seems to hurry the next bit. It's as though he wants to get it down on paper (which is to say into my nearly obsolete, barely functioning omnicorder) before he runs out of time.

As I said—or maybe I didn't say it yet, huh—there were a few hundred others with us, huddled on the onramp, our thumbs pointing north. Days passed, weeks, and the crowd began to thin out. Until it was just the two of us, walking alongside a two-lane road, with fir trees like a hundred feet high on either side. Of course, just on the other side of that fringe of old growth it was clear-cut for fucking miles, but who were we to know a thing like that? We had lived our entire lives in a coastal desert. We were ignorant. We saw what was in front of us, took it at face value.

Eventually we walked into a town, this town, our town, as it turned out. A gas station, a general store, and a chainsaw museum. That was it. The first person we met was Albeit Bean. Yeah, the very same. And the first thing he does is to pass us what looks like a rolled up magazine on fire. Back then, somebody handed you something like that, you put it to your lips and inhaled. The rest is ...

But Pop has teared up; not only the rest, but everything else, as it turns out, is history to him at this point, and he can't go on.

Suddenly Mom appears on the scene from the rear of the house and sits down next to my dad. She looks at the two of us and sees everything. She pats his hand and smiles at me with her cool detachment, and all is right with our little world. Consisting, increasingly, of our commodious back porch and not much else.

I know she will pick up where Pop has left off, if I ask. In truth she has been doing this for most of her adult life. But for the moment we three sit in silence, while the marvelous fir-scented air flows around us, and our bustling town, overrun as always with strangers, provides the background noise that has become the soundtrack to our lives.

Chapter Three

How far the highlands?

It is said (in overheard rants delivered daily by an unreliable narrator outside the Hashbin Café) that They (or was it just He?) came from a purer space. That They had had a vision, of a more perfect union, and that when things went south, or in terms Californian became more like the Southland and the original mission statement They crafted back in the day was tossed into the trash by standard-issue American capitalists, that They (or at least one of Them) lit out for the Back-of-Beyond Higher Hinterlands, or wherever, and have lived there ever since. As pure, cleaner-living hermits.

Pieces of this myth, like most myths, are undeniably true.

Not that you get to the truth by hanging out on the fake-old, and therefore fake-sagging front porch of the permanently quaint Hashbin, because you don't, as a rule. But something in the eyes, in the buggy pupils to be exact, of the burned-out octogenarian freak Wheatberry who hangs out there bumming twenty dollar donations from the tourists, tells this observer that maybe, just maybe, the latest rumor concerning Them, It, or Him could actually be true this time.

The fact that I personally saw old Wheat lighting US currency on fire after a morning of panhandling—dropping the bills one by one over the re-sawn redwood railing while chuckling behind his snowy beard—has a lot to do with my suspicion that his normally incoherent mutterings and other, more substantial rumors circulating in our town might have some basis in fact.

It just may be that The Pure Folk—okay, let's admit it's likely a single individual, but since the jury's out on that detail we'll leave things plural for now—have returned to this world-famous hamlet-that-dope-built, after lo these many decades. And that, going further into reckless speculation but what the hell, they have brought Supra with them.

This might just cover the what. As to the why ...

I'm working on it.

*

One day, decades ago now, I woke up with a nagging question lodged in my head. Today, I have a tendency to ignore questions like this, to let them lie there and fester. But back then I actively sought out answers.

I decided to peddle my mountain bike up an old logging road that led out of town, until the deep ruts merged into a rock-strewn dry streambed, and I had to abandon wheeled travel for the day.

I slung a daypack over my shoulder and pushed through the second-growth scrub and wandered around a maze of indistinct paths for several sweaty, bug-infested hours until I was stopped short by the sight of a day-glo yellow object lodged in a small bush. Picking it up I found myself holding an appropriately weathered twentieth century golf ball.

Excited—the lost civilization that I was seeking, or at least its ruin, must be near—I struggled another hundred yards or so further on, a flash of metal caught my eye, and there was my bike, right where I had leaned it.

It was then I realized that if the Back-of-Beyond Higher Hinterlands of legend were easy to find there would be vacation homes all over them by now.

And therefore why not simply let them be, this lost tribe, the Pure Folk? Assuming they (he) still exist(s)? He wants solitude, he thinks he's better than everybody else, as many present day senior citizen townies, his contemporaries, have maintained through the years, then why not just leave him to it?

The answer is simple.

Supra has apparently reappeared on the world stage.

Reaction? None? A collective blank stare?

No surprise, I suppose. Merely a confirmation that my dad, for all his old-guy ramblings, is correct. This is a history that needs to be told.

*

Mom, who has finished patting Pop's hand and enjoying our quality family time, picks up the story.

"Your father always tells it this way—as though he and I were joined at the hip from the age of eighteen, and that we had the same motivation for leaving home. This is because your father is a romantic. And romantics value the past above all things.

"He saw what was, what had been: the Southern California of his youth. But even that had never actually existed—at least not as he remembered it. When what he had imagined, disappeared, his only thought was to go looking for another version of paradise. But—as Kerouac so eloquently put it—this was it: the edge of the continent. Sit on the sand, look out over all that blue. There was no West left.

As you know, your mother doesn't have a romantic bone in her body. I went with him, your dear old dad, because I was simply curious. That, and I loved him. More or less. Most of the time.

(Note: Mom's groundbreaking books—her early anthropological commentaries on the counterculture and later erotic fiction, are of course a testament to more than just an idle curiosity. A cat is curious. My mother was—and is—an intellectual. And she knows what she's talking about when it comes to the subject at hand. Her favorite literary critic—now deceased—once called her the ultimate chronicler of the age of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.)

Actually, initially, Mom continues, "to be accurate, when we first arrived in town we didn't know it was him—Bean—because it wasn't protocol, to introduce oneself, in that subculture, at that time. Instead, generic monikers, such as 'Man,' or 'Old Lady' were often used instead.

But having said that, we soon found out who Albeit Bean was, and, more importantly, what he represented.

He didn't represent. He was the thing itself.

My dad has returned. Well, stopped sniffling anyway. He no longer has the look of prey fleeing a predator. Mom, after all, has settled in. We can all just relax.

We both look expectantly at Pop. He waves us off. He's back, still with a hand in the game. That's enough for now.

As I was saying, Mom smiles, apparently remembering something else entirely but not sharing it with us, not now and probably not ever, "we were ignorant yokels, not being from here—being raised in Orange County could conceivably mean you're not actually from anywhere—and we knew nothing about the local politics, the push and pull of power, the genetic battles that had already, in 1969, begun.

However, and this may be important, as soon as we inhaled what Bean was offering, which was later identified as Supra, we knew it was likely that, given a choice, we would wind up in the Bean camp.

You live with people, in this case my parents, your whole life; you hear the stories and the names that inhabit the stories. Then at some point it comes to you. You simply haven't been paying attention. I don't usually do this: I interrupt my mother.

But wait a minute. If you became a Beanite, and you followed the Pure Path, the Supra Highway so to speak ...

Hah! spits my dad, though you can see he likes the phrase.

"Then how come you're still here, in town, a part of it all?