Buds the size of your fist!’ He had a point. I just didn’t know anything about electricity. Eddie said he did. He said he had it all worked out. He said he would buy a pair of rubber gloves and the biggest loppers he could find and go out all ninja-style one night and cut that light down. That was Eddie. He was always in it to win it and down for a good caper.”
Mark said: “Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound too good.”
“No,” the stranger replied. “It wasn’t. But back then you were either a ganja guerilla or not. And we were down for it. We considered ourselves part of the 420 resistance.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yep,” the stranger continued. “Times were sure different. And Eddie . . . he just had to have that light. That thousand-watter was his crack cocaine, the itch he had to scratch.”
He leaned forward and took a long drink of beer from his glass. “Jeez they make good beer nowadays!” he exclaimed, a statement that made me wonder where he’d been. I filled his glass back up.
He then told us how Eddie started researching how a typical municipal electrical grid worked. Eddie was already somewhat of an electrician and he could damn sure throw up a roof in a hurry. Handy, that’s what he was. Then one night after supper out of the blue Eddie says he’s gonna try and get the light tomorrow night.
“And I says to him: Eddie, let’s look at it tomorrow night. We’ll go down and you show me what you wanna do and we’ll talk about the plan. You’re gonna need my help, right?”
Eddie says yes, of course dude.
“So we go down the next night close to midnight. We drive back and forth on the street and I’m taking pictures of the station out the side window. We get back to the house and study the pictures. Eddie shows me his ingress and egress route.
“Eddie,” I says. “I’m worried. You’ll have to cross an open field to get to the light. You’ll be very visible.”
Of course he told me not to be a pussy and balls out is the only way to go.
Then he said tomorrow night was the night and it rolled around like it always does and Eddie’s dressed in black and got his gym bag sagging with weight in hand and he’s standing at my bedroom door.
“Get up dude. We gotta go,” he says.
I says “Eddie, what time is it?”
He says it’s one in the morning.
Mark guffawed. “So it’s one a.m. and you guys are going to go cut the light with loppers?”
“That’s right.”
“Holy shit.”
“Rock ‘n’ roll, dude,” the stranger says. “Balls out and no fear. That was the deal. Live hard, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.”
“If you say so,” I interrupted.
“So here we go,” he continued, explaining how he and Eddie parked in a secluded parking lot behind an apartment complex, got out and crested a small hill. “We crouch behind a row of bushes and look down below us about fifty yards out. Fire Station No. 5 is bathed under one-thousand watts of halide glory, white as the moon.”
“Wouldja look at it?” Eddie exclaimed. “Just look at it.”
“I’m looking, Eddie,” I says. “I’m looking.”
He opened his bag and took out a ski mask, fitted it over his head and adjusted the eye holes. Then he reached back in and pulled out rubber gloves and a huge pair of loppers.
“Holy shit!” Mark said.
To this I added: “Your friend Eddie was nuts!”
“Oh I know,” the stranger said. “And you can be sure I asked Eddie if he was sure about this. Of course Eddie said Hell yeah, Dude, Fuckin’ A and buds as big as your fist. And then he was off, creepy-crawling low and scrambling across the field to the light pole standing on the edge of the parking lot.
“He wasted no time when he got there. Kneeling at the base of the pole, he unscrewed the four screws holding the access plate, then removed it. And there was the electrical cord, that great spinal column of power that brought electricity to the bulb above him.”
The stranger explained how Eddie looked up to the light and got temporarily blinded, then quickly looked back down again, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes.
“The power of that light was incredible for Eddie,” he said. “I couldn’t help but think of Icarus . . . or a moth, perhaps – a moth to the flame.”
He said he then watched Eddie open the wooden lopper handles wide and push the steel jaws into the hole to cut the cord.
“From my vantage point behind the bushes in the distance I held my breath and crossed my fingers, saying Go Eddie go! to myself,” he said.
The stranger paused there and shook his head. “Fuck!” he exclaimed.
“Jeez, Mister,” Mark implored. “What happened?”
“When Eddie cut the cord there was a huge pop like a twelve gauge shotgun blast followed by instant darkness.”
“Holy shit!” I exclaimed.
He paused a moment before going on. “Well, I waited and heard nothing. So I began hollering Eddie’s name. Still hearing nothing, I ran down to the pole, and there was Eddie all passed out. I was shocked that firefighters weren’t streaming out of the station because that light made one helluva noise going off.
“And man, I am like freaking out. So I grab Eddie under the pits and I’m trying to drag him off toward the bushes and I’m not even halfway there and now firefighters are streaming out of the station toward me. Oh, and there’s some cop sirens, too. They’re coming closer and closer.”
“Jeez Louise and Holy Cow!” Mark shouted.
“God damn! That’s a story! I cried, pouring him more beer. “So what happened?”
“Well, you know after all that they were waiting back at my place for me and had torn up the garden. My attorney later said he tried to get me in drug court but the cops had been busting so many growers that drug court was full.”
“So then what?”
His mouth turned to a straight line then and I could almost hear the molars grinding when he shrugged and said, “I had to do three-to-five in the state pen.”
“Wait a minute. How big was your garden?”
“Eddie and I had four vegetative plants about two feet tall each. So I ended up doing a year for each plant.”
“May God have mercy on your soul!” I said. “That’s so hard to believe.”
“It was indeed,” he said. “And days go by so slowly in jail.”
“And
