Surf-Burn Horticulture
Within months of first trying pot, I developed an urge to grow my own. It wasn’t so much an urge as a cultural imperative among my fourteen year-old friends, who had all grown tired of buying forty-dollar quarter ounces of mumbo from a dealer named Cal, who we never saw. The pot was good, once we deseeded it, but after the forty went up in smoke (numerous times), some among us took to germinating some of those Colombian seeds, and planting them in the fertile soil of the Santa Monica Mountains. Clint Ruben was the first to reap a harvest, so as the next summer rolled around, we consulted with him in his garage.
“The key is to kill the males,” he said, and passed me his homemade bamboo bong, complete with a pot leaf laminated to the front.
“I like the bong, Clint,” I said, admiring the smooth finish. “Mr. Grossman would be proud — if you could make bongs in woodshop….”
“Isn’t it sweet? See, I carved the mouthpiece for a perfect fit, airtight. Here, let me light you up.” He torched the bowl with a blue BIC, and I smoked through the bubbles until my lunges filled with the sweet, herbaceous smoke.
“Hold it in!” he commanded. The smoke expanded, as for some infernal reason it will, and I coughed up a cloud-full.
“You lightweight!” Bryn said. “Here give it to me.” I complied.
“If you show me your plants, I’ll tell you which ones are male,” Clint volunteered.
“Don’t show him your plants, Dude,” Tad said.
“Tad’s right. Never show anyone your plants,” Clint said, “So, where are they?”
“Actually, I don’t have any plants yet,” I admitted. “I was just wondering if I could have some seeds to get started.”
“He doesn’t even have any plants,” Bryn hissed while releasing a long-held hit.
“Sure, take as many as you want,” Clint said, tossing me a baggie.
I had never grown anything from a seed before; but I followed Clint’s directions, starting with the wet paper towel, transferring the germinating seeds to small, square plastic pots and watering regularly. I kept the pots behind the hedge in our backyard, on a pile of junk in Leo King’s backyard.
Leo King was my eighty-year-old neighbor. He had built his concrete cinder block house by hand, the first on the canyon side of upper Chautauqua Blvd.; and then he painted it a hideous, minty-blue. Leo didn’t like our red rubber handballs going over the wall onto his property, and he’d pop them whenever he got ahold of them. We’d run over, looking for the ball and ask him, “Did you see our ball?” He’d say loudly (because he was hard of hearing): “No — Now you boys better find something else to do.” And then he’d laugh, wheezy, toothless. Years later, we’d find the balls, flattened and stacked, rotting next to a pile of his junk at the edge of the canyon behind his house.
I figured Leo would never notice the pots amidst all his junk; and if he did, he wouldn’t know what the small plants were. No, Leo wasn’t going to be my problem. My younger brother, Orion, a sweet eight-year-old, wandered into the backyard one day as I was watering the seedlings. Actually, I had just watered them and was putting them back, safely on the other side of the hedge.
“What are you doing?” he asked. I didn’t know how long he’d been watching me. Startled, and thinking quick, I answered, “A science experiment. And it’s very secret, so don’t tell Mom and Dad.” I climbed down from the wall. Orion watched me. I patted his brown curls and slinked off into the house. He didn’t follow.
The bust didn’t happen right away. About a week later, my parents called me into the living room. Mom instructed me to sit on the couch, under the spotlight, that didn’t so much illuminate the painting on the wall behind me, as stab painfully into my eyes, blinding me, until through my own tears, my interrogators became blurry, just voices wanting to break me down.
“Who gave you the seeds?” they asked.
I knew that the answers to their questions would create prohibitions. Each answer would betray not just the friendship, but the possibility of a future friendship. Anyone I named would, I knew, be banned from the Alcalay household. I remained silent, or as silent as a quietly sobbing teenager could be.
“What I don’t understand,” my Mom continued in her exact tone, “is why you put these plants on Leo’s property. How could you be so stupid?”
“How did you find them?” I finally blurted.
“What do you think? Orion, little Orion, comes to me and says, ‘What is Rony’s experiment?’ I said, ‘What experiment?’ and he showed me. And don’t you think that I don’t know what it is. I grew up in Mexico! I know that disgusting smell very well, and I’ve smelled it on your breath!”
My father, a large Bulgarian, who had up to now remained silent, thundered, “That’s enough! I don’t know what you do with these so-called friends of yours, but from now on, you will not go out after school. You will remain here. Do you understand? As far as we are concerned, you will not be returning to Paul Revere next year. We are looking at a military school.”
The grounding lasted a couple of weeks, until a beautiful afternoon, when I wanted to go skateboarding and Mom gave way. I realized that the way to open the gates was to hold out the promise of fraternizing with desirable friends, who were either Jewish or morally impeccable. So I’d utter the names of Gary Morrison or Paul Wexler — nice boys, who impressed Mom with their manners — even though, like the rest of the Surf-Burns, they smoked their share of the evil weed.
I held off for a few weeks, then resumed with greater secrecy. I’d eat an orange off the tree before walking up the driveway to the house, where stoned, I might have to face Mom with her keen sense of smell. In the immediate aftermath of the bust, she always called me to her and demanded to smell my breath. Our oranges would foil her breath tests.
By Spring, my parents had already scheduled an entrance exam for The Harvard School. Feeling my future determined, I rebelled in the best way I knew how: I grew pot again.
This time, I embarked with a partner, a swimmer named Michael Thompson, who lived up the street. We rode bus 18 together and would often smoke out before catching the yellow bus to school. One time, stoned out of my gourd from a few too many hits of really good Thai stick, I boarded the bus and made my way to the back. I couldn’t sit all the way in the back, because Ninth graders like John Tormey, Richie Nelson and Steve Gregory claimed those seats, and wouldn’t give them up without a fight. So I sat a few seats up and laughed, because all the kids around me — the girls and the guys, even the tough guys in the back — had suddenly transformed into simians, with simian eyebrows and gestures. Amid the rumble of the bus, with its TV windshield panning across green Westside neighborhoods, this crowd of semi-intelligent, cackling, public-school simians gesticulated and gossiped, and turned to look at the howling simian that was me.
“What’s wrong with him?” a monkey-girl to my right asked. I looked at her and laughed even harder, my belly beginning to ache. I managed to say, “You… look… like … a monkey!”
“What an asshole,” she said, looking hurt and more monkeylike than ever. The bus driver shot a look back.
“Mellow out, Dude,” Mike Thompson said. Mike wasn’t your typical Surf-burn. A competitive swimmer, he came to pot later in life (at fifteen), but he dedicated himself to our project with all the doggedness of a fatherless child doing laps. We woke early (and he got mad if I was late), then trudged into upper Rivas Canyon, behind houses, to a small plot of land on a hillside, where our five precious plants grew, surrounded by our protective chicken wire. We carried plastic gallon jugs filled with water, one in each hand, every morning to the same spot, and watched incredulous as the saplings became three feet tall and bushy from the pruning.
“Why don’t you take me to see them?” Clint asked. “I won’t rip you off.”
“Nah, just tell me: how will I know which ones are males?” I said, gaining respect.
Clint told me, precisely, the secret knowledge of how to engineer a perfectly female crop, sans seeds. With some hesitation and regret, we counted leaves and inspected tiny buds, then yanked with great force the sturdy males from the ground. Three females remained and they grew tall, and they bore the sweet-smelling, seedless fruit, with their plentiful red hairs and crystalline shimmer. And we resisted the temptation to pluck this very tempting fruit, waiting until the branches bowed from the weight of two foot buds.
We dried the plants slowly, in the dark of Mike’s attic, and dreamed of the money we’d make selling our stock. Our science experiment yielded three pounds of killer sensimilla, but no one was buying; everybody we knew had grown a stash of their own. We smoked until our lungs grew sick and then, proud of our crop, we gave it away, baggy by baggy, until we were dry.
