Lucky mountain highs

Oh to be in Colorado. He wished as much on the first day of the new year. Never mind the cold, the long queues outside the desiderata shops. He imagined himself bundled up as warmly as possible, maybe even delighting in the sight of blinding white all around, and feeling pure as driven snowflakes.

It would certainly feel good to purchase weed without being held to punitive account. For once, to dodge the outlaw provision that if one doesn’t believe in statutes than one doesn’t have to be a statue. One moves along the ideal paths unburdened by lesser mortals’ unhinged sense of the right stuff.

Oh to be back in Colorado. As on that winter’s day in 1978, cruising through Aspen from Iowa City headed west, stopping by a hillside and romping on a bobsled with a five-year-old son. Seeing deer tracks, marveling at joy.

Oh to be back, and to purchase the good right stuff over a counter, at $50 for an eighth of an ounce, the legal limit for a non-resident. That would be about 3.5 grams, of kush or whatever with high THC content.

He marvelled too at the rock ’n’ roll of ages, how numbers could evolve through time to such ridiculous levels, with all those zeroes. Why, at $50 for 3.5 grams, that’d be P2,200, so that a kilo of what’s called chonx or dyuts in peso-land would go for as much as P660,000, well over half a million bukols. 

Oh for the good times. He slid back through five decades, to a large V-8 with him and five other teen-aged cohorts from State U. on a slumming mission from Diliman, Q.C., all the way to A. Mabini St. in Ermita, Manila. There, on the corner off what used to be Tower Hotel, stood a guy who peddled marijuana sticks at two pesos each. That was in 1964.

They’d pick up half-a-dozen, one thin joint each, and drive all the way back to higher ground, 20 minutes max. Until they parked late at night by the UP Chapel, that glowing spaceship of a comfort zone.

They lit up inside the car or on the grounds, inhaled deeply, coughed once or twice, and soon they tittered, chortled, guffawed. Even when no jokes were exchanged.

Then they filed mock-solemnly into the circular sanctuary, took a pew each, gazed up at the ceiling that looked like rough lunar landscape illumined calmly in blue. And they saw shapes — elephants, dragons, Bob Hope’s ski-slope nose, a harlot, boobs, whatever their imagination allowed. And they pointed these out to one another, and argued, then broke out into fits of laughter once again.

The high lasted an hour or two. Then they drove down to West Avenue and parked by the Kowloon House kiosk for warm chicken siopao, two filling buns to an order, or sets of beef or pork siomai. And if there was wugok with the taro and crispy-flaky brown crust, that was what he’d order for his share of munchies. Downed with cold Coke.

Some nights they’d repair back to Cabby’s house in the Scout roads district and drank gin and/or rum. Untul Cabby stewed a couple of cans of Libby’s corned beef with minced potatoes and cabbage, lotsa water colored and flavored with ketchup, plus siling labuyo. And they’d feast again, with freshly boiled rice, till the proverbial wee hours.

In 1970 he took his love podner to Sagada for the first time, eight years after he had first tried out the Olympian setting of fog and mist and rice terraces and different, much nicer countrymen. 

In 1962 and 1964 there was still no dope being offered in the mountain hamlet, or anywhere else in the Cordilleras. No pioneering St. Joseph’s Guesthouse either, not yet in Sagada. The mountain high was all-natural: pure air, crystal-clear vistas, limestone towers and pine forests.

But turning into the ’70s, the “grass” became additional offering, complementary to Easter lilies, homegrown, on the sandy banks of the river before it went underground. And there were a hundred Peace Corps volunteers on a summer confab — two of whom, Bill and Pete from Montana, were the ones who first offered the holy smokes.

Back in Manila, he’d still see them in their quarters in that same Tower Hotel, where he’d visit with a pasiking or woven backpack from Sagada filled with a newspaper-bundled brick of MJ he purchased from a dealer on Filmore Street on the fringe of Makati.

He’d buy a kilo for a flat thou, take a cab to A. Mabini, saunter right through the glass doors of the hotel in those sans-sikyu days, pre-Martial Law, take the lift and buzz Bill and Pete in their 14th-floor room. They’d spread out the long stalks, and the two rangy guys standing 6-foot-4 would partition the lot, for their colleagues who had placed orders.

He’d get reimbursed his capital of a thou, and get some stalks as his reward. Plus the continuing Fil-Am friendship that was celebrated with tokes up on the roof deck as the sun set on Manila Bay.   

In 1970, too, he factotum-ed for an alternative to Café Los Indios Bravos on A. Mabini, which had had its day, smokes and all in the mezannine or the upper bedrooms of Delia the dancer and Caroline the visiting Brit journalist, with Henry the filmmaker and Iskho the Humanities classmate.

Friends from UP and DLSU put up the capital for Café Hurri-manna, so-named after buddy Tikoy’s grandma would call it such whenever they locked the den’s door and she claimed to sniff something sweetly strange.

That café-folkhouse on the wrong side of Taft lasted a glorious year, with a brilliant young poet conducting Friday Black Masses and offering palmistry services as Mago Eman. And tall, grinning Johnny would come in the afternoons before the doors were opened to paying denizens and they’d play the Woodstock and Abbey Road albums after lighting up. Good stuff, always good stuff. Buds. Sometimes it was even Thai Udorn, golden and sticky wrapped around sticks. Or Cavite’s buntot-pusa, dark green and just as sticky for all of its prized pollen.

Soon he grew the best breeds in large pots on the sunny side of an apartment driveway in Teachers’ Village, QC. Savvily, he ended the male plants’ existence early, as one would papaya. And the females would grow bushy and tall until they were ripe for picking in four months. Ripe for uprooting, that is. And he’d hang the stalks upside down to dry, wrapped in newspaper. 

While working in Singapore in the late ’70s, sometimes his German and Dutch hosts would have good buds, or a buddy in Manila would airmail him a packet of music cassette tapes that had a few rolled joints wedged in.

Crossing over to Johore Bahru, he’d venture into a kampong where they sold “silver bullets” — terrific stuff wrapped in tinfoil as small tapering cylinders. And he’d first sample the herb with the villagers, and they’d trade words like “matah” and “bulan” and laugh together.

In Songkhla across the border into Thailand, he purchased a decent bag of homegrown and managed to take it back to chaste Lion City. And his European friends were impressed and happy-giddy as they lit up for weeks at Hume Heights on the edge of the Bukit Timah jungle where durians thudded down in season.

In Amsterdam he smoked publicly at the Dragonfly brown café, then spent the night pulverizing the stuff and sealing it odorless between stiff hotel brochures for airmailing home. And it got through. As it always did, from Rotterdam, from San Francisco, from LA, from Vancouver.

In San Fran a poet-buddy set him up with a Pinoy ex-seaman who had been granted a medical MJ license, so that he slept blissfully for four nights in a doorless bedroom in a basement filled with pots of growing sinsemilla. In Vancouver, early this millennium, he bought legal dope off Commerce Avenue, citing a sprained ankle as his disability.

Oh, all those throwbacks through half-a-century of good highs and vibes, with bosom friends and strangers of the same loving tribe with that antic spiritual mindset.

Oh to be in Colorado, singing John Denver’s songs. Or in Uruguay, praising a mayor who drives an old Beetle. Oh to be in parts of a world that will eventually catch up with sanity. That is, the kind laced with that fine reefer madness whose only threat is to all things munchable — cakes and cookies, siopao and siomai.