More Tales from the "Old Daze"

Thanks for the positive responses. This is another glimpse of stoner life in the early 70's.....oh yes, it's true too !!

Madman in the Kitchen
At least when you saw something like the gas mask you would know what to expect, not so with a chocolate cake. We loved to cook and early on we discovered cooking with pot. For my brothers sixteenth birthday we baked a two layer deep chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. We replaced half the flour with two ounces of powdered weed and poured another half ounce into the frosting.
Yes, there was a green tint to the cake but the flavor was untouched. We had to warn people, more than once. One fellow ate most of a slice before he realized it was so powerful. He immediately called his boss to take the next day off and then put dibbs on the spare bedroom. I saw a number of folks eating a second slice saying they couldnâ??t taste it at all. After a bit we put a 45 minute wait between slices, there were just too many people falling to the ground. When 2am came one young woman was out cold on the couch and the people she came with were gone. Rick and I loaded her into my green VW bus and drove to her parents house. We debated doing an â??Animal Houseâ?� and just dropping her on the step after ringing the door bell. We didnâ??t because her mom was not big enough to carry her inside and there were no shopping carts nearby. In the end we rang the bell and waited for someone to open the door. Eventually her mother came down and let us in. With one of us at the head and the other one at the feet we carried her to the couch. This was not the first time Dianne had been carried home so her mother was not as hysterical as she could have been. We reassured her as best we could, although in retrospect it may have worried her even more.
â??Donâ??t worry, Mrs._____ â?? we told her â??She will be fine in the morning, she just had one too many slices of chocolate cake.â?�
She stood in the living room in her bathrobe altogether too stunned to ask anything else and we let our selves out.
Bob who had earlier in the night put dibbs on the spare room was sleeping peacefully on the floor of the kitchen. At three hundred pounds we were not about to try to carry him up stairs so we threw a blanket over him and went upstairs to sleep.

Bet you canâ??t finish one

On another occasion an aquaintance bought me the rolling paper from Cheech and Chongâ??s Big Bambu album. He challenged me to roll it. It was the size of a double album cover, almost as big as a sheet of newsprint from the Sunday Tines, about fourteen by twenty two inches. I went to the closet and brought out a fresh brick, I could see this was going to take more than a bag. I broke a quarter off the kilo and proceeded to remove the largest stems and seeds. Well, most of them any way, by the time I started throwing handfuls of weed into the paper I had cleaned almost half a pound. After a while it took shape as a cylinder three inches across and twenty two inches long, and yes I put most of that half pound into it.
For the next two weeks when people would come over and ask to smoke some pot we would bring out the remains of the joint and puff on it for a while. One day a friend came rushing up the stairs to announce the smell of our weed was overpowering the bakery downstairs and we had better get the windows shut right now, before we stoned all of Main Street. It took fifteen days of hard smoking but we got it down to a six inch roach and decided we were done smoking it. I then sent the remains off to my brother in boarding school and he wrote back that he got ten joints out of it and it kept him stoned for two weeks.

When the Bear Smokes
By â??72 I was living in a commune of sorts in southern Vermont. The original farm had been sold and broken up and the old farm/boarding house had been converted into a dorm like rental. There were at least ten bedrooms, more like fifteen, and then there were the people living between the rafters in the attic and even in closets. A local band would practice in the living room. It was the sort of house where an additional five people might not be noticed for a day or two.
Dogs, cats, ghosts filled the house. The kitchen was huge, with a table that could seat twenty people. Benches and chairs were scattered around the kitchen table, it was a homey and friendly place.
Vermont winters can be blustery and cold, and this particular evening was an excellent example of that. There were half a dozen of us sitting around one end of the kitchen table, drinking cheap wine and smoking large joints. The kitchen door blew open and a well muffled individual strode into the room. It took a moment to get the door closed and get a look at our visitor before we realized he was a stranger. After a few how do you do's and general introductions we became aware of his purpose in visiting us.
"Opium" he said sluring a little. "The real thing. Fresh off the boat. When I asked up at the college they said someone here might be interested."
The long term residents of the house were a varied lot, and on the second floor was one of the senior tenants. Because of his size and shape his nickname was" Bear". His parents had been missionaries in China and he had been raised in Hong Kong. Bear stood over six and a half feet tall, and tipped the scales at about three hundred pounds. He was working at the local paper mill and could lift a six hundred pound roll of paper over his head in one smooth motion. His given name was Scott Henry and he sat at the head of the table. The word "opium" had a strange effect on him that I had never seen before. His eyes seemed to bug out a little and he focused his gaze in a most intense fashion on the visitor. Conversation at the table ceased. Finally he spoke.
"If what you have is real opium...I will buy every gram you have and not bitch about the price. BUT if it's crap I'll toss your ass into that snow bank so fast your head will spin." He paused and stood up.
"I'm going up stairs to get my wallet and my antique opium pipe." he said as he headed for the stairs.
It was with a certain trepidation that we awaited the outcome of this next encounter. We watched our visitor with interest, as he pulled off his over coat and asked for a glass of wine. He was a skinny kid, taller than some and lanky. He seemed quite relaxed for someone who was about to be tossed into a snow bank.
We heard the stairs creak as Bear made his way down the back stairs to the
kitchen. He stopped at the kitchen sink and put some water into his antique
opium bubbler and headed for his seat.
The rest of the residents were silent and very little conversation ensued. Henry lit a candle on the table in front of him. The visitor produced a cigar box half full of bamboo tubes sealed with red wax into which a tiger had been impressed. He broke open a tube and pulled a dark gray mass the size if his pinkie finger on to a rolling tray. Henry took the tray and began to examine the gray tube. He held the cylinder just above the flame for a few seconds, then he sliced off a small wafer and rolled it into a pea sized pellet. He placed the pellet in the bowl of his pipe and applied a flame just above the pellet as he drew in. The pellet stretched and bubbled, but returned to its shape when the flame was removed. As Henry held his breath he began to smile. He handed the pipe to the visitor and he took a practiced hit off the pipe.
For the rest of us it was quite a learning experience. If you held the flame too close you would set fire to the pellet. The smoke was heavy and very thick, like a soft dark hash, and would choke or gag a smoker in an instant. More than one person exploded in a fit of coughing, or blew back into the bubbler. But once you got it figured out, wow. I understand why opium was used as an anesthesia for amputations in the early days of surgery. You want to hack my limb off...sure go ahead ! The rest of that evening is a little hazy, I know the pipe was refilled one or two more times, but after that; nothing. I had some interesting dreams though.
The next morning when we staggered down to breakfast the visitor was passed out in the living room and his cigar box was empty. Bear on the other hand was up with the sun and ready to go to work. For the next several months periodically we would notice a sickly sweet aroma oozing from under his door, but he never brought his opium pipe to the kitchen again.

That particular story was a learning experiece for me. I did not know that opium was used for anesthesia. Sounds like powerful stuff.

Oh yes Anesthesia, multiple patent remedys, entertainement.
Intersting fact: the Bayer Chemical Company produced the first compound to combat morphine addiction. Product's name? HEROIN. Bayer, yes the asprin people!!
Doctor G(reen)

Bayer produced heroin? That is an interesting fact. Wonder what they thought when people became addicted to it like morphine? But personally, I can't see how anyone would be addicted to morphine. I was on morphine after my car accident and after about 2-3 days I was like take me off this shit I feel like a zombie. To each his own, I guess.

Are these storys true?

Doc, you rock.

True? Truth is a very nebulous concert.
There are two quotes you should know in relation to these tales
â??If you can remember the sixties you werenâ??t thereâ?� Wavy Gravy
â??Truth is stranger than fictionâ?� Hunter Thompson
I will admit to minor poetic license, The basic tale is true, and why not tell it. The
statute of limitation has kicked in and I canâ??t be jailed for these actions.
Perspective: I smoked my first joint in 1968, after I came home from Southeast
Asia (Viet Nam) where I had hitched around as a civillian grooving on the
Buddhist and Shinto temples. Sounds too weird to be true? I should scan my old
passport and add it for documentation.
So follow the threads, itâ??s fun and honest. Share with your friends, thatâ??s why I
write these; make you laugh and smile as you toke.