wind – but after he spoke a huge thunder-boomer belched in the distance and came scudding down Larimore Street in a series of ground-shaking rumbles, followed by an icy breeze that roared like a waterfall flying in off the Rockies. Some people went inside and those who stayed turned up collars or pulled hoods over heads.
“What the hell!” Mark exclaimed, hitting the joint a few times and taking a righteous quaff of his hoppy ale. I smoked and found myself looking over at that curious fellow now looking back at me with his smoldering blue eyes.
“Well, you might as well join us if you wish,” I said to him. “I hate to see a man drinking alone.”
His glass was near-empty and we had a fresh pitcher so I pointed to it and added: “We may need some help with this.”
He came over and sat, saying “Thanks, guys.”
I was glad. Nothing makes a fair mood go foul faster than a person who rejects your good will overtures.
And I missed it at the time but, looking back, wasn’t it peculiar that when he sat down with us the wind disappeared and the thunder with it?
“I didn’t mean to stare,” he said, “but it’s just so hard for me to comprehend you guys sitting out here smoking bud and drinking brews.”
“Why what do you mean?” I asked, filling his glass with beer. “It’s always been this way.”
He sat straight up and his blue eyes turned violet-black. “Oh no it hasn’t!” he nearly shouted.
I’m telling you, that dude put a chill in my veins. You could just tell something dark had got ahold of him.
So I thought a minute about what he’d said, and I replied: “Of course, my parents have told me of the times when marijuana was illegal.”
“You bet it was,” the stranger said. “And all the stuff that came with it. So there was nothing, even lights. It’s not like you drove to the store and bought a thousand-watt sodium or halide.”
“Weird,” Mark said. “You need a good light to grow good weed.”
The stranger shook his head in agreement. “Indeed you do,” he said.
We sipped our beers and the glowing tip of the joint bobbed around to each us as we smoked in silence and happiness and the camaraderie of just being there. The stranger said how good the marijuana was and we sat another minute before I asked: “Well, did you grow weed or what?”
He smiled. “Back in the day, me and my buddy had a bullshit growing room with four plants under fluorescent tubes.”
Mark and I looked at each other. I grimaced and he chuckled.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that; well, by today’s standards you had a three G platform.”
“Oh I know,” he said. “But this was a long time ago and I lived in a Republican state where the prisons were overcrowded and you could go to jail at the drop of a hat.”
“I am grateful I was born in Colorado,” Mark replied.
“Me, too!” I added, then asked the stranger where he was from.
“Military brat,” he said. “Then twelve year’s active-duty myself. So I’m from nowhere.”
I asked him where he was born and he said Greeley and I replied Weld County kid, huh?
He said he wished they hadn’t moved when he was two years old so he could remember something about Colorado, but he didn’t.
“You live here now?” Mark asked.
“Just got here. We’ll see.”
I told him: “Welcome back to Colorado, friend,” and he nodded appreciation while I poured more beer into his glass. I’m telling you there was something curious about that guy. So I asked him if he ever did score a decent growing light and he said sorta and I said what’s ‘sorta’ mean?
He closed his eyes and shook his head back and forth slowly and his lips drew inward, as if tasting a bitter memory. “Well,” he finally said. “If you fellas got a minute I’ll tell you a good old-fashioned marijuana story.”
I looked at Mark who shrugged and said: “I ain’t going anywhere.”
Neither was I. The moon was rising in the sky. Pretty girls were walking by. Me? Content, my friend. Very content. The joint went round a time or two and as we sat and drank our brews we saw the old fellow trying to begin his story. He stared off long and hard into space until finally he got to a place in his head where the movie camera started playing some of it for him.
“Go back thirty-five years ago, before you guys were born,” he said, “to Omaha, Nebraska. I was putting up roof with Eddie. He was foreman of the crew and my roommate.”
Mark interrupted. “I only ever heard of people leaving Nebraska -- not going there.”
“And for good reason,” the stranger replied, adding: “Don’t ever catch me in Nebraska again, or up on a roof. That is some hot damn work.”
But there he was, he said, in Omaha with Eddie the roofer. Eddie was a daredevil. He rode a loud and noisy dirt bike on city streets, skydived on weekends and drove an old green Chrysler with the words NO FEAR emblazoned in a raw slash across the trunk. He wasn’t the brightest bulb. He just had a lot of guts, a bad muffler and a leaky damn water pump.
“Man, that guy was always up to something. And everything he did was held together by chewing gum, baling wire and duct tape,” the stranger said.
Then he chuckled.
“But by God -- never a dull moment! Ready Eddie – that’s what we called him.”
Mark pulled out another joint and fired it up. “So what happened to ol’ Eddie?” he asked.
The stranger took a long, steady pull from it and exhaled slowly, enjoying the smoke.
“That’s some really nice weed, guys,” he said. “I appreciate it.”
He was a friendly sort and we sure didn’t mind talking with him as we were now anxious to hear his story.
Well, he says, Eddie had his eye on a thousand-watt halide high on a pole lighting up Fire Station No. 5 on the western edge of town. That light shined like the sun out there in the wee hours of the morning – lit up the whole damn parking lot. How he was ever going to shimmy up that pole and get the light down after he disabled it was beyond me. You have to understand the times, he continued. If you wanted to grow, you had to go out and get a light by hook or by crook.
“I had friends who snagged all four of the thousand-watters lighting the university bell tower,” he laughed. “University cops chased them all the way off campus. We thought that was cool as shit. Put the whole damn bell tower in darkness. Screw that college. Took all my money to get a degree and I couldn’t find a job.”
I pondered that this Eddie guy was one of those original growers from back in the day that you hear about every so often. How crazy was that? I topped our glasses off and leaned
