two weeks pass...
two months pass...
This awful fucking article in Rolling Stone made me hate weed:
Every day is a stoney day for Moppy and Molly, a happy, silly superstoned senior couple at the University of California at Santa Cruz, but the stoniest of all is 4/20. That's the day that about 500 very baked students gather at 4:20 p.m. on the flattest part of an unkempt hill behind one of the school's dorms, Porter College, in celebration of the unofficial national pot-smoker's holiday, a tradition on campus for more than a decade. Four-twenty is not about medicinal marijuana or decriminalization or combating the White House's anti-drug media campaign -- it's a celebration of weed, plain and simple. "I'm such a lagger," says Molly (which is not her real name), who sometimes does not speak at all, sometimes speaks a lot but very slowly, and sometimes holds forth in gusty, galloping streams of consciousness: "One year, we were so late, and we were driving to the meadow listening to the campus radio, and the DJ woman was like, 'Happy 4:20!' and then she did a bong rip, it was bubbling and everything, and I lit up my pipe, and I said, 'Hold on, dude lady, I'm smoking with you!' "
It's almost exactly forty-eight hours before the big 4:20-4/20 moment, and Molly's at home, chilling on her excessively comfortable couch. She looks like a more attractive twenty-two-year-old version of Mrs. Garrett from The Facts of Life and has the same bighearted giddiness and a smile so wide it verges on maniacal; Molly fell out of a tree when she was five and can bend her arm backward at the elbow, something she'll do to freak people out. Her normally hyper roommate is crashed out on the couch. They're watching Frasier on NBC, which is the only channel they get on their TV - "Monochannel sucks," says Molly, "but at least you don't have to make any choices."
Molly's roommate is hurting because she came home this morning starving, and went to the fridge to scrounge for some cereal or whatever, when, lo and behold, on the top shelf, there was a Tupperware container stacked with freshly baked cupcakes. She devoured them hastily, not realizing they were chock-full of pot.
That she didn't simply assume there was marijuana in the cupcakes is a little surprising, considering it would be one of the few objects in this house not associated with it. "We have the best weed in the world in Santa Cruz," Molly says proudly. "We never scrape. I haven't smoked resin since high school." In her room, hung with a girly mix of pastel tapestries, friends' photos and posters of the Doors and Bj?rk, there's a soup bowl filled with trim, for further cooking. Then there's a vacuum-sealed glass jar with five or six buds, each weighing about two grams and almost fluorescent with THC. There's also a smaller jar of outdoor from Humboldt County - "Yeah," says Molly, "that stuff'll get you blazed" - and a jar of indoor Jack Herer, so named after a legendary pot-legalization guru.
"Yeah," says Molly, "that stuff'll get you blazed."
Molly selects the Jack Herer and sits down with her bong, nearly two feet of clear glass with red squiggly lines on the side and relatively clear water. "This is the best bong ever," she says excitedly, packing the bowl full as can be. She holds it out in front of her admiringly. "Shit, I'm partial to my bong."
With the grace of a swan, she bends her head down and then blows the smoke out in a long, steady stream. "A little afternoon baking," she says, nodding slowly.
"Unnnh," says her roommate.
Molly and Moppy love each other above everything else, but they also love UCSC. A 2,000-acre campus perched on a misty mountain of redwoods overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the school has, through the years, been designated by the Princeton Review as both the number-one Most Beautiful Campus in the country and also as one of the nation's Biggest Party Schools. There are few fraternities on campus, and when you ask someone what they've been doing that day, it's not uncommon to hear "Climbing trees," so it's safe to draw some conclusions about the kind of partying everyone is doing. Until recently, students had the option of choosing page-long "narrative evaluations" instead of grades - Molly, in fact, has never had a graded class. "Between the redwoods, the ocean, the pass/no-pass option, and the liberal atmosphere, I had my heart set on coming here," she says. "Time doesn't seem like it goes by at Santa Cruz," says one of her friends. "Sometimes it feels like the last four years have been one long day." (The day isn't over yet: Both Molly and Moppy are staying on for another term to finish up classes - she failed a couple last year. Moppy, the son of a San Diego heart surgeon and a double major in psychology and economics, actually gets good grades, even though he studies and goes to class stoned a lot. "I have faith that I could write a paper completely stoned, which I don't always," he says. "But if you have the faith, that's all it's about.")
On a rainy afternoon, Moppy trips down a trail, puffing from a pipe set in the crook of his mouth. He's quiet, mostly speaking in one-liners, the choicest of which is "Crazy, dude." The first question he asked me about myself was "What's your favorite holiday?" (His is Halloween; last year he dressed as Hunter S. Thompson.) He's a little like a Weeble, with a bouncy walk, a halo of fuzzy brown shoulder-length hair and a Cheshire-cat grin. "People called me Moppy even when my hair was short," he says, sauntering along. "I guess I kind of live through my name, like a prophecy."
A couple of days before 4/20, like most days, Moppy is milling around campus. A girl named Forest told him there was Irish music playing at a dorm nearby, so he's on a trail on the way there, and she did say the music was almost over, so he should get going, but he's peering at the green-brown tangle of sludge around the bottom of a redwood tree, hoping to glimpse a banana slug, the UCSC mascot and a personal fascination.
At the foot of a trail, a jeep passes by, and someone calls out the window, "We're going to eat your brain!"
"Crazy, dude," says Moppy.
Moppy heads toward Kresge, a remarkably attractive Sixties-style dorm. A gigantic rainbow of multicolored balloons hangs over the quad, where the Irish band is playing to 100 or so students stomping their feet and applauding wildly. "Erin go bragh!" yell three pigtailed girls, in unison.
"What?" says Moppy.
"Long live Ireland!" they yell again.
In one room on Kresge's second floor, which serves as the dorm's white-hot center of stonedness, people are bouncing up and down on milk crates and scattered skateboards as the Dead Kennedys boom out of a stereo. Moppy does a bong hit and holds up victory fingers, Nixon-style. A senior with an aboriginal mess of dreadlocks talks about his plan for after college: "I'd like to get a van and drive to universities around the country and hang out, without paying to be there." A tall, reedy-voiced sophomore takes a bowl of soup out of the microwave; he has a bright-orange sticker that reads DO NOT RESTOCK stuck to the front of his overalls. A few long chains of these stickers hang from the ceiling like a baby's mobile. The guys got them dumpster-diving at Trader Joe's, which is how they get their food: milk crates full of potatoes and corn, boxes of natural juices, anything you could want -- the only thing they pass on is meat. "It's weird, but the bums aren't even on it," says a freshman.
Moppy goes to hit his pipe again, and suddenly he realizes that he took his friend Sasha's (not her real name) blue lighter at a bluegrass festival. He took her lighter. He should give it back. He heads up the trail to her room, panting when he reaches her door, which is almost impossible to open with all the castoff shoes around it: "Sasha! I stonified your lighter!"
Sasha waves from her unmade bed, where she's munching pistachios with garlic flavoring, and she's about to say something when there's a commotion outside: Molly has appeared with her Tupperware of cupcakes, and everyone's dashing toward her, calling her name, grabbing at the box -- "Are they vegan?" asks a short, stout guy. "Sorry, man," says Molly. "I can make exceptions," he says, digging in -- by the time Moppy gets there, they're all gone. "Oh, Mop," says Molly. "Too little, too late."
The next day is the day before 4/20, so there are things that have to be done, for once. First Moppy has to go to the coffee shop where Molly works, to pick up his keys, which he left in her car. In a long black dirndl skirt, with her hair tied up in a high knot, Molly talks about a dream she had last night -- 1,000 people were partying in her house, and this morning she felt like she'd been partying all night. She's got a phone to her ear, on hold with Starbucks, because one of her friends found a piece of a cardboard box stamped STARBUCKS UNIVERSAL BEVERAGE BASE POWDER in a dumpster, and she wants to know what that is, exactly. The coffee-shop manager sits to the side, perturbed. "I had some extra cash and bought him a spa package," she said earlier. "Because he's a sad man."
There's always a little bit of surplus cash around for Molly and Moppy, because of Moppy's minor place on the great Northern Californian weed-distribution chain. He gets his herb from his friend Ben (not his real name) whose dad is part of a pot-growing collective in Humboldt County. Ben brings down about six pounds of pot a month, which he keeps in his closet in a safe the size of a gym locker. He pays his dad $3,000 per pound and generally makes $2,200 profit from selling it in quarter-pounds. Normally, when Moppy comes over to do a transaction, he and Ben sit with a bong, talking trash and truth, but last week Ben had a cold and didn't smoke for a few days -- for the first time in nine years, in fact -- and now he's trying to stay off it. Withdrawal is bringing him down. "I wasn't expecting to sell in Santa Cruz," says Ben, as Moppy hits the bong anyway. "I came to school with just a little personal sack of weed. But everyone in my dorm kept coming over because I was from Humboldt: 'You're from Humboldt! I know you have weed!' "
It's only when Moppy is back home that he remembers he forgot to buy the ounce from Ben that he meant to buy, and he also doesn't have the vegetable oil that he was going to bring from Molly's to cook up vegan ganja noodles for 4/20, either. There's a bunch of macadamia-nut oil with weed in it, except that when he tries to pour it from one container into the other, two-thirds or so spills out on his pants. But it's OK because there's exactly enough left for the cupcakes that Molly wants to make later - "So lucky!" he exclaims. People drift in and out of the living room, on their way to class, or perhaps to climb a tree.
"Bye! Enjoy learning!" Molly calls out each time the door slams. Molly doesn't have class until 5 p.m. today, which makes it hard to keep to her no-smoking-before-class policy. A copy of Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 rests in her lap. "It's crazy hard to talk about race, and that's a topic in itself: why it's crazy hard to talk about," she says. A bit later, she adds, "I like learning, but learning the truth about things is often disheartening." She grins and jokes, "Let's all be Americans! Everything's OK! Everybody smile!"
Molly and Moppy start driving up to campus, slowly. He stops in for french fries at the campus center before heading to a nearby dorm. When Moppy found out where his classes were, he started to look in dorms nearby for rooms to smoke in beforehand. In one room, four sophomore girls are in their bunk beds, under their covers, and he runs from one bed to the other passing their bong. There's a lot of discussion about who's going downtown for burritos and who's staying in bed, and eventually Moppy has to leave for a Psychology and Law class, which he says is really heavy.
Today the class is watching Boyz N the Hood, the John Singleton film about whether black kids in the ghetto can change their fate. At the climax, when a rival gang shoots the movie's symbol of hope, and Ice Cube carries his bloody body home, a tear drips down Moppy's face. Afterward, he talks about how unfair it is that some people get punished in our criminal-justice system and others don't. When he was seventeen, he got caught smoking pot in a park a block from his house; the cops put him in their car even though he was only wearing pj bottoms and no top, but when they drove him home, his parents just laughed, and no charges were ever filed. Then last year, he was smoking a blunt in his car at a local lookout spot with a friend, and cops who he thinks had night-vision goggles spotted them. He had two ounces that Ben had fronted him in his backpack in the trunk, but luckily he hadn't put them in baggies yet, so the cops didn't think he was dealing. The other cool thing was that his friend took responsibility for half of what was in the backpack, and since they'd smoked some of it, his half was just shy of an ounce, which is typically how much you need to get charged with a felony. So they both got a year of probation. It was all really lucky.
These are the kinds of things Moppy wishes he could talk to Molly about, and they have been talking about race a little bit, but she's always on this trip about how unrealistic he is about the state of America, which she thinks is really shit, and she always shoots him down for his essential, immovable optimism. It's the one problem they have between them, actually. Otherwise they're closer to each other than they are to anyone else. Much of their bond comes from hanging out (as friends) the night that Molly's first college boyfriend died in a car accident -- he was driving with a drunk friend who slammed into the wall of a gated community -- the summer after their freshman year. After this, Molly doubled her pot intake. She even wrote an essay called "Why Smoke?" It's a standard term paper with footnotes and a bibliography, but she also writes about her own addiction: "I wake up in the morning when my dreams run out to find another sad day awaiting me. I miss the days when I was young and every moment was magical. Has my spirit become so sick of me, as to run away like this? I am mostly scared at this point. I am scared of growing up and I am scared of myself, because I know that I have almost lost control."
The first 4:20 for Molly and Moppy came at 4:20 a.m. -- they set the alarm next to Molly's bed for 4:12, which was enough time to pack celebratory bong loads and snuggle back under the covers. Later that day, after classes are over, Moppy and Molly pass a couple in the middle of a fight, something about who should be taking care of the dog. "It's 4/20!" Molly shrieks. "It's a good day, man!" They link up with a couple of friends who are having a long, involved conversation about the etymology of 4/20: Ideas range from a police code for possession; the number of chemicals in THC; the number of molecules in marijuana; the address of the Grateful Dead's home in Haight-Ashbury; the date Haile Selassie first visited Jamaica. It's also Hitler's birthday and the anniversary of Columbine. "I think it's a marketing tool for the big pot growers, who harvest on 4/20," says one guy.
"Crazy, dude," says Moppy.
Students are swarming into the meadow from every direction. From the top of the hill, there's a cloud of marijuana smoke hanging just under the tree line, and you can hear the drum circles going and everyone hollering and hugging one another. The guy who had shaved a marijuana leaf and the number 420 into his hair last year is nowhere to be seen, but there's a freshman dressed up like Cheech and a much-discussed twelve-inch joint. Molly, who's wearing a fuzzy white Kangol hat that looks like a snowball, dropped a few of her cupcakes on the way, which is a nice ground-score for someone, but she passes around the rest to Sasha and some bongo players. "I just got here," says Sasha. "We were at home doing solar rips [lighting a bong with a magnifying glass and sunlight], trying to tell from the angle of the sun what time it was. We thought it was 2:30, and it was almost four, dude."
Four-twenty itself is like New Year's at a party without a TV. People start spontaneously hugging. "My fuzz is attracting weird frequencies," says a guy with a white fuzzy hat identical to Molly's, and they rub their heads together. At 4:25, a cop car pulls into the meadow at about a mile an hour. The cop gets out and stands next to the car. There's only one of him. But half the people in the meadow start streaming out nonetheless, like a videotape run in reverse. "Run for the woods!" Molly screams.
A mohawked junior from Kresge pulls down his overalls and moons the cop, before another guy with a marijuana-leaf necklace rips off his clothes and leaps across the meadow like a mad Puck. The die-hards stick around for another half-hour or so, but the cop doesn't leave, and there's a rumor that there's a digital camera set up on his dash to record everyone's photo, so when the afternoon sun starts to dip into the trees, the party's basically over. The guy with the fuzzy white hat heads down a trail to the ocean -- "Later on, fuzzy dude!" yells Molly. Soon it's just a bunch of students sweeping little bits of garbage into big black bags, and Molly and Moppy, sharing a last pipe. "Wow, Mop," says Molly, resting a soft, freckled arm on Moppy's shoulder, "you're the best."
― Gear! (Gear!), Tuesday, 31 August 2004 18:36 (nineteen years ago) link