GROWING OLD IN CANNABIS COLORADO
A short story by Sheppard Hobgood
Willy first set eyes on her seven years ago in the natural food store. He was squeezing a head of lettuce in the produce aisle. There she was, reaching for a fat squash next to a sweaty produce man with a droopy mustache and a sly smile. Willy did a double take. Ever so slowly, a produce aisle relationship began to develop. Over the months and years, the relationship expanded to the vitamin aisle and then to the detox aisle with fifty products promising physical purity and mental acuity. The relationship solidified into a pleasant stalemate of sorts. Willy looked for her and Lana looked for him. The store wasn’t large. It was tiny compared to the local supermarket. Despite the entropy, sailing from aisle to aisle to find her was an adventure in advancing age.
Lana produced sly smiles, mostly a reaction to her casual comments in chance circumstances to men who were bored with their lives. Ha, as if men were owed anything more than a clever comment! Lana had not been well served by her three husbands in any of the commonly observed criteria for which men are judged. All three of them failed her financially, emotionally, as a father to her three children and by most other conceivable measurements. Other than having been moderately good looking all three of them were duds. They were John Denver Rocky Mountain High wannabes without voices and without guitars. This is not to say that she didn’t have a favorite ex-husband. When pressed for details he was the only one who beat her. After all, Lana once told Willy, “he wore the pants and he had a drinking problem. When he swapped marijuana for alcohol he mellowed out and never touched me in anger again.”
Willy is alone now, previous relationships having been terminated through no real fault of any party, neither his nor any of his women. He thinks of himself as a non-entity, another soul biding his time and taking up space on the planet until the grim reaper snatches him up. His favorite woman, Margo, is gone. He thinks about her now and then. He compares Margo to other women who have drifted through his life. How will Lana stack-up against Margo?
Willy has a fear of solitude. The increasing solitude of old age is often unbearable.
Lana Lane! Are you for real? He has known Lana for seven years. In the last seven years, Lana has aged ten years and Willy has aged twelve. Despite their old wrinkled faces, they both hope for one more relationship or at least a friendship.
Wednesday, for the very first time, Lana and The Willy finally decided to take a day trip. They drove to the swimsuit optional hot springs pool near Penrose, CO. Sly smiles come easier when people are naked. Are we making memories of our absurdities? Willy was tagged with the nickname “The Willy,” not long after the cult movie, “The Big Lebowski,” hit the movie houses. There were certain similarities that Willy shared with The Dude. Willy was not a copy of the movie character, but he may have been the original model.
This story is about the second day-trip, only a week later. They are making progress in this budding relationship. She sat close to him in the Ford Truck as the twosome headed west on the four-lane toward the mountains. She sat close enough, but not so close that the folks in the Mercedes on their bumper would mistake them for high school kids. Pueblo County is a county of contrasts. A high percentage of the population drives beaters and the inevitable one percent slide their butts onto heated leather seats and ride the bumpers of the less well to do.
“Stop, stop, stop, please, please, please,” she implored.
Why doesn’t she just ask me to stop? Does she need to pee, or what’s the problem? Margo never went nuts like this over needing to pee. He slammed on the breaks and turned left. Some obscure soul inside the Mercedes lay on the horn. The windows were tinted, their gestures muted by opacity. I always figured that folks who tint their car windows had something to hide if only an obscene gesture.
“Well Willy, I can see you haven’t been here before, turn right onto the frontage road,” she told him as she grabbed his knee.
The duo walked into the marijuana store with the big green cross on the building’s façade. After a brief review of their IDs by the bouncer/guard/Walmart style greeter, they found themselves in line between a group of Texans and a foursome Okies. They were all young, nice looking, lots of tattoos and they showed Willy and Lana a degree of deference due to their advanced ages. The leader, the Texan whose tattoos were most faded, said, "like man, when we get our weed we're headed back home to pack up stuff and we'll be back within two weeks."
"Righteous," Lana said.
Have you ever noticed how tattoos fade? First, the yellows droop into a jaundiced veneer. Then the bright reds begin to look like a single rose left on a coffee table for a month. There’s no hope for the greens. They fade as fast as a dollar bill in a sweaty pair of tight-fitting blue jeans. After a few years, everything is a vague washed out blue. Humans have been indulging in body adornment for tens of thousands of years. Go figure. You would think we would have the non-fade colors figured out by now.
The Texans and Okies used phrases that included words such as, “like man; righteous; dude; gnarly and heavy.” This lingo could not have come directly from the 1960s like Lana and Willy. They must have picked it up from movies like The Big Lebowski. May the Dude abide.
The fairly new marijuana laws give everyone in Colorado the right to buy and consume this pungent weed. When Willy was a kid riding the ski lift up the mountain on a windless morning the chairlift passed through zones of fragrant marijuana smoke. That was 60 years ago. The weed has been in Colorado forever. Now it’s legal. As Willy talked he wanted to toke up with Texans and Okies, but also wanted to appeal to their better-selves to simply walk out the door and make something of their lives. These Texans and Okies don’t know it now, but there are much better ways to spend one’s time in a beautiful state like Colorado without chemical substances coursing through their pre-frontal cortexes, or wherever the THC snuggles up to one’s psyche. They could be jumping on rented Beaver Creek ski boards with the same money they are spending in this pot shop.
Lana and Willy bought about $100.00 in various marijuana products. These treats included Straight Grass, Root Beer Grass, Vape Pen Grass and Jelly Bean Grass. Old Lana flirted with the shop-keep, same skills she uses on bar-keeps and produce aisle anglers. One of the younger Okie boys whose tattoos still held some color kidded with her. Even the kid had a sly smile for Lana.
Lana anted-up twenty dollars and Willy was happy to throw in the remaining eighty. As a former 60s hippy steeped in the ethics of “free love,” he couldn’t help but feel he was laying waste to his well-developed 1960s morality by laying out the lion’s share of cash, but then again, his hippy days had ended in failure when he was drafted into the United States Army. Willy felt his character development was conflicted from that point on and well into the second decade of the new millennium. His cognitive dissonance was abated by the weed, but then again, his cognitive everything else was also abated.
On the previous Wednesday, the two of them had lazed around the Hot Springs Pool, AKA, The Well or The Dakota Hot Springs. They were naked as Jay Birds for three hours with their delightful companions, some of whom had become friends. Even though the water was as clear as a mountain stream, the sun’s glare prevented Willy from ogling any of his female companions. Had the water been muddy he wouldn’t have felt so cheated.
The duo’s first stop today was, once again, the Marisol pot shop. On the way home to Pueblo, they stopped at Marisol again. Count them, four stops at the pot shop on two dates. Do you see a developing problem, not only for Lana and Willy but for the good people of the State of Colorado?
Willy was stoned out of his mind on the first trip and they almost had a collision with a city bus. Both of them were as high as a kite, so what do you expect. Their vehicle was almost T-Boned turning onto Lake Ave. In a desperate attempt to get out of the speeding vehicle’s way he stepped on the accelerator and cranked the steering wheel of the Ford truck as if he was at the helm of the Titanic trying to avoid the big iceberg. Lana screamed like a high school girl in a horror film. It was as if a gaggle of zombies were lurching toward her. He was a damn fool to be driving stoned and vowed never do it again. Someone could get killed. Could be a child or an old grandma. Grandma’s are old like Lana, but God forbid he ever hit a kid. Lana didn’t like his lackadaisical driving habits when he was sober, much less when he was stoned. The last time Willy drove stoned was 50 years ago while in college in Gunnison. This old, sometimes mean, sometimes nice, but good-looking old hide could easily get him in trouble.
Willy knew deep down that blaming bad behavior on his wife, mate, or girlfriend was sexist. He was in touch with the deeper knowledge that he had inherited a few serious character flaws from his daddy. The writing was on the wall from the time he was ten, twelve at the very latest.
The lovely Lana, realizing she had almost been in a serious accident began to rip on him and his super marginal personality for four solid hours as they drove to and from Salida, CO. She was merciless in pointing out his multitudinous character defects. The only truly peaceful part of his day was when he was alone in a convenience store where he went to find the boy's room. She told him in a very patient tone of voice, “you don’t listen to a word I am telling you. You interrupt me constantly. Everything is about you, you, you.”
She continued, “you interrupt me mid-sentence, at the beginning of the sentence and at the end of a fucking sentence. You use the phrase me, me, I, I, in your conversation constantly. You are a bipolar pain in the ass. You are as narcissistic as Donald J. Trump."
Donald Trump, he thought, well screw you. He only thought this and didn’t utter the thought aloud. Besides, The Donald had supplied him with $500.00 in pure pleasure once as he stopped by the front door of The Donald’s Atlantic City Casino to pull on the one-arm-bandit one more time before he left for Manhattan. Willy tried to take this criticism lightly by telling her, "you are so much more effective than a psychiatrist. I have never had such great psychological attention in my life." None the less, he was pissed about being picked on for four hours, going and coming to and from the high country. Willy finally shut his mouth and drove in silence. He was steaming inside, jaw clenched, hidden only by his double chin. While silencing himself in a futile attempt to please her she launched into a long story of her roadie experiences with Michael Jeffrey Wilson. Among his many pop songs was one of his favorites, She Ain’t Gona Hurt My Heart No More, No Way. He listened with rapt attention, jaw still clenched, teeth lightly grinding, finally hanging on every word as she recounted stories about how Michael Jeffrey Wilson had his way with her. Then Lana popped the question. "Like Dude, would you like to try that?"
He answered, “The Dude, man, will try anything. By the way, were you and Michael Jeffrey Wilson stoned when you participated in these unnatural acts?”
“Well hell yes,” Lana shot back, “do you think I would do something like that without being stoned?”
“Pardon me sweet pea, but I’m thinking these amorous acts are so lewd that ancient tribal cultures failed to conjure them in their wildest imaginations. No wonder it ain’t in any kind of bible. Takes some pop-star from the 20th century to dream stuff like that up. Can you pass me the vape pen?”
She paid no attention.
He thought encouraging her to tell stories of her past might not have been too smart. By then he was tired of listening to this diatribe of insanity. Willy thought he was the person with the diagnosed mental illness. Lana, on the other hand, swore she was certified sane. He had a vague recollection that MJW, based on something he read in the Nat’l Enquirer, had developed an inadequacy involving garden variety pleasures. He remembered reading that MJW sought after more exotic gratifications. He imagined that Michael Jeffery Wilson wore that predictable sly smile that Lana specialized in.
He wondered why MJW went to the dark side. Could it be too much marijuana, or then again is there such a thing as too much marijuana? Lana was still attractive at her advanced age. She must have looked super good back in the distant 1960s. But now she was lurching up on seventy.
She told Willy that MJW had a small “whatchamacallit.” Blah blah blah.
“Maybe it was just out of focus and looked small because of the weed,” he suggested.
“Have you ever had a gay experience?” Lana asked.
“You mean did a gay guy ever walk up to me on the street and hit on me or do you mean did I ever do anything out of the ordinary?”
Willy told her how Sammy Malone in 8th grade tried to talk him into fooling around a bit so Don would be ready for his first real woman.
“I told Don the best way to be ready for his first real woman was to find his first real woman first. I told him I had zero interest. I assured him that I certainly respected his verve and his desire for a closer friendship. I wished him well.”
Willy told her how he used to walk home from school with Billy Horton after their high school swim team workouts.
“He turned out to be gay, but he eventually became a professor of architecture at a very prestigious school in New York. He always had his shit together. Billy didn’t really know he was gay back in high school. He hit on my sister, making a valiant effort to grope her in the back of his parents Mercury station wagon. I only learned of his amorous behavior years later when my sister told me she wasn’t attracted to him and couldn’t understand why because he was so good looking.”
Later in the day, Willy found himself staring at Lana’s fingers and her fingernails. He noticed that her hands were not very feminine. Her personality and her physique were still dreamy at the advanced age of sixty-nine or seventy but her hands were masculine. Her masculine hands! Did this have something to do with the grilling on LGBTQ encounters? Go figure. This realization started to play on his mind. Here he was, spending large sums of money on pot, as measured by a poor man, on a creature entering her seventh decade.
This story may seem degenerate as measured by the ability of the human imagination to conjure foolishness, but it’s not a totally fictional work. It’s partially based on facts, and facts should be honored and sometimes reported. Aren’t all fiction writers prone to drawing on real-life experiences? Willy had no “alternative facts” to work with. Considering the new administration, he felt an expanded duty to present unadulterated truth. He wanted to apologize to anyone who cared to hear this story about a scattering of too much Homo sapien reality. Shakespeare explored the dark side well, something or other about “whoremaster man,” comes to mind. The new president must be confronted with the proper acceptance of bonified facts, however unpleasant for him, and pleasant for the rest of us mere mortals. He wished the new president was afflicted with the standard set of Shakespearean flaws. He could understand him more easily if he was a Lear or Macbeth. Lana is easy to understand.
Willy is like the president. He likes to mix facts with fiction. Willy has a fondness for fake news. When he mixes fact and fiction he becomes amazingly confused. The author of this story is sorry for not being totally sure of what Willy was trying to tell him. Willy had been mixing facts and fiction so long that even he was unsure of the veracity of anything he uttered at any given moment.
Pity the poor fools in Don’s administration who must re-spin his flawed utterances while maintaining a believable countenance.
Mercifully, she didn't bring up any other roadie experiences, although she assured Willy she could recount even more adventures and then suddenly; “Dude, would you like to hear about a country western star I dated?”
Willy coughed, in a practiced east coast sort of way and said, “Lana hon, tell me about your teenage years. Where’d you go to high school? I bet you were a good student.”
Lana recounted for at least a half hour about the beach that she grew up on in her neighborhood on the Jersey Shore. In rapid succession, she named many of her girlfriends.
“Gosh, there was Sally, Jo Anne, Betsy, Missy, Princess, Natalie, Georgie, Sammy, Karen, and Catherine. They were my very best friends.”
She rattled off the names of the many boys of summer that they hung out with on the beach. Will interrupted her several times and she scolded him once again.
Willy catered to her all day. Willy liked her. He took her to a storage shed high above Salida, CO where she, high as a kite, pointed out her old house and the haunts of her earlier, happier days when she was raising her children. She was stoned the whole time and they stopped once again on the way home at Marisol and loaded up on various forms of weed later in the afternoon. She likes the Vape Pen. It seemed to leave no odor in the vehicle, although he imagined he was getting a tiny bit high on its foggy residue.
“Can you smell this vape pen?" she asked.
“No, I can’t smell a thing," he assured her as they motored down the road. He wondered if a little electronic vape pen igniter or something like it had brought down missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Are vape pens even legal in Malaysia?
Willy found her nowhere near as funny on this date/work detail as she had been on the previous Wednesday. She was not funny because she had not passed the vape pen to him when he asked for it. They were both afraid of being killed in a catastrophic accident, so he stayed straight. They spent an hour retrieving extremely used furniture from one storage shed near Salida, CO and took it to another storage shed a hundred miles away in Pueblo.
“The furniture has sentimental value to me.” Then she pointed at an antique bowl purchased for her by one of Herman’s Hermits. Evidently, this hermit was trying to improve his social life by hanging with Lana. Who knows if she was telling me the truth. After all, Willy rarely told the truth, so he assumed that other people didn’t bother with truth-telling either. People who used to pride themselves in telling the truth, now feel they have a license from the Commander in Chief to fib a little now and then, maybe even tell whoppers.
This woman is an incredibly dysfunctional pothead. She is paying nearly $500.00 per month in storage shed rental fees and living in a dive on East 18th St. while waiting for more suitable quarters. After stopping at the Pueblo storage shed they drove out to her new home on the sunny side of town. Fortunately, Ted, Bill, and Samantha were there to open the gate and help them get some of the remaining furniture off the truck. They live on property off Bellvue St. on Pine Ave, in a blue house next to a bunch of alligator hot spring ponds. They were very nice people and if Willy’s social status improves he thought he would like to make them part of his social life.
Lana gave Willy a very nice back rub at one point while he was doing 85 in a 65-mph zone trying to speed up the mission. Three crotch rockets flew by them at around 140 MPH. They both wondered if the riders would live through the next tight turn. The motorcycles had a fair chance of negotiating the curves if they weren’t too stoned. Right then Willy decided to buy a motorcycle, but something more fitting a senior citizen, perhaps a Harley-Davidson trike. Lana might look good snuggled up to him riding on back.
She fed Willy junk from the Natural Food store all day. He never realized that natural food stores pedaled so much junk in the name of health. Without warning, she shoved her tongue into his ear, grabbed his crotch and kissed the side of his face, all in genuine gratitude, with a passion formerly reserved for the likes of Michael Jeffrey Wilson and other band leaders. He didn’t know if it was him or the high-speed motorcycles that had ignited her amorous mood.
“Lana hon, when I was a boy I lived in down east Maine. I worked for a farmer by the name of Johnny. He gave me sage advice nearly every day.”
“Ayah boy, as long as you have a truck, you’ll always have a friend. Ain’t that the wicked truth?”
“Now and then, when I was looking a bit tired after felling five or six trees with a chainsaw he’d remind me, “it’s a great life if you don’t weaken, ain’t that the wicked truth!”
Lana continued to pick on Willy in a merciless incessant manner. How can she afford this marijuana habit? She is a leftover 60s hippie with even less in the way of resources than she had as a young woman in Salida. Having raised a boy and girl on restaurant tips, sans regular income from a male, Social Security is not inclined to help her find an improved lot in life. Her three ex-husbands, spaced respectably apart, all get the lion’s share of retirement income. She worked twice as hard as her men and has less than half the retirement income that any one of them have. What is wrong with this picture? Willy couldn’t blame her for being critical. She really got screwed by her men and the crazy safety net that congressmen voted into law. Lana sees Willy as part of the problem, he mused. These women’s marches ain't going to help you now sweet-cheeks. It’s too damn late.
“The gold mine between Salida and Old Monarch grew bigger each year,” she said. “It grew exponentially. Yep, it’s a damn big gold mine! It’s publicly traded, and the Koch Brothers use it as a hedge when the oil and gas markets are a bit rocky for a week or so now and then.”
“Do you follow the market?” Willy asked.
“Like Dude, I follow the health food market. I know all the prices”.
She scoffed at him for not knowing what was mined in the gigantic hole. She compared him to a tourist complaining about the slow traffic on the curvy mountain roads as everyone gawked at the scenery.
While dragging absolute junk out of the Salida Storage shed Willy was struck in the Adams Apple by a ladder she swung in his direction. Her carelessness got me again, he thought. Fucking Pot Head! He only breathed this sentiment under his halting breath. He didn’t want her to think him vulnerable at the tender age of 71. Willy’s airway constricted slightly and his throat hurt like a son of a bitch. He knew he suffered from paranoia, but wondered if she would have the presence of mind to call an ambulance, or 911, or anyone at all if he fell to the ground gurgling and clutching at his throat. What a fucking air-head.
That wasn't enough abuse. He got jammed between some boxes, lying prone on his belly, trying to carry her giant rug into the storage unit back in Pueblo. There was an extra hundred pounds of dirt buried in the wool woven Karastan area rug. Some of it, no doubt, windblown gold dust from the mine. He tried desperately to get to his feet, only to feel nothing happening. A mild feeling of panic ensued. The thought of embarrassment in front of this woman was only secondary after learning all day what she really thought of him. With one mighty final effort, he got a knee far enough forward to force himself upright. The storage shed Doberman licked his face.
“I think I’ll take up yoga,” he remarked to Lana. The dog wanted another Mary Martha Coconut Bar.
You wanted to know what she is like! Now you know. Don't go near her again! You don't need to be picked on again for half of all the hours in the day. You're not that desperate, really. You don’t need to hear about trysts with long-dead pop stars who sang various renditions of Rhinestone Cowboys.
At the end of the day, he returned her to her East 18th Street home. A pissy-old-man neighbor spun his wheels, kicking up gravel at Willy’s truck getting into his parking spot as Willy backed out. He thought about getting out of the car and grabbing the old S.O.Bs cane from his claw-like hand and pummeling him with it. There is nothing more distasteful and pathetic than watching two old men rolling in the dirt trying to settle a score.
“I hate being old!” Willy saw her second huge dog. She has two big dogs!
His father used to say, “anyone who owns a dog is a fool. Anyone who owns two dogs is certifiable.” His father always owned a dog, and sometimes two dogs.
Lana was finally out of his truck and several miles behind him. He was still in a bad mood when turning left onto Santa Fe in route to Carl's Jr. where he spent $8.50 for dinner on top of all the junk she fed him. He felt a sincere need to settle all her health food junk with true American junk food. Call it a nightcap.
A young driver in a big-ass Ram laid on his horn even though Willy had the right of way. The driver flipped him off while waving his hands insanely. Willy hoped the ass-hole would follow him. The guys better judgment won the day and he went the opposite direction. Colorado law has severe criminal penalties for young people who injure old men. Willy pushed the limit on this legal privilege whenever possible.
By the way, Lana waved to him gaily as he drove off. For a moment in time, he thought she might like him. He still has her Vape Pen and her scarf.
“Maybe she’ll hunt me down in the hope of retrieving her possessions,” he thought.
Talking aloud to himself, “If she doesn’t call or come by my house in a day or so I’ll call and tell her I have her marijuana. That’ll get her attention. Maybe another story or two about a dead rock star wouldn’t be so hard to listen to after all." Willy smiled a sly smile.
