Ganja Tales

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Little Miss Smarty Pants, aka The Professor’s Daughter

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Part II of my Seattle story

Little Miss Smarty Pants, aka The Professor’s Daughter

First sale? My heart leaps. She is one of those child-women with barely a hip or a breast to display in her storefront window. But proud, imperial. Erect carriage, shoulders held back.

“My father is a college professor,” she declared, locking eyes with mine. And when she drew her voice from its scabbard I saw that it was a stiletto: thin and  sharp and deadly.

A wasp, then — complete with stinger.

“Cool,” I said. “So you’re probably a reader.”

“Only certain things,” she informed me.

Look Lady. I get it. You don’t read trash from fools. Neither do I.

“Well good for you,” I reply. “I’m rather discriminate myself when it comes to my reading choices.

I didn’t tell her that I teach English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha or that libraries are cathedrals I’ve worshipped in all my life; that I can’t breathe without reading; that I’ve read more books than anyone she knows or ever will know.

No, I stay minimalist around people like her.

Who cares? No one.

What’s the point? There isn’t one.

I hand her a copy of Ganja Tales, saying:  “You’re bound to like some of these stories, then.”

But she won’t take the book. She puts her arm out to stop it: the palm of her hand up. Can you believe it? Years of work and She doesn’t want to touch my baby.

 And then the ultimatum. “If you can show me one word in your book I do not understand,” she says, “I’ll buy it.”

Man, why you got to be like that? I want to tell her that I was a working journalist for 13 years before I went back to school for an English M.A. and began teaching college writing courses for over a decade; that the nine stories in the Ganja Tales volume can’t surely be all that bad; that I just maybe had some idea of what I was doing. (Who cares? No one.)

I tell her about the value of keeping sentences and words short in fiction, that it’s always been this way, that most great writers keep comprehension around the fifth-grade level because they want to sell books, not impress people with big words.

I told her I was no exception, that if she wanted big words she should read a few academic treatises on, say, quantum physics; or perhaps tackle a passel of research papers from Ph.D. candidates in molecular biology. But big words in a collection of cannabis short stories? Please.

Anyway, Little Miss Smarty Pants, aka the Professor’s Daughter, glares at me for a microsecond, sticks her pretty little nose even higher in the air and walks away with an irritable “Humph!”

Crestfallen, I glance across the sidewalk just in time to see the Green Goddess move, startling yet another group of fascinated people who gasp in amazement and gently place money in the bowl at her feet; but slowly, so as not to startle the aloof majesty of this green idol.

Look man, like I said: I wrote a book. That’s it, that’s all I got — a book. I can’t jump into a bikini and paint myself green to appear naked. Well, I could, but neither you nor I would like that. It’s so not me. Besides, it would only make me feel cheaper and dirtier than I already do.

The Long Road Back to Omaha

Three books. That’s what we sold that day. Can you imagine the ride home my wife and I had? We didn’t want to load all those boxes back in the Blazer and return to Omaha with them. We wanted to return to Omaha with a pocketful of money for another press run!

You know, my dramatic cannabis screenplay, Ganja Tales, has Seattle as journey’s end for Tony and his epileptic sister. I have no idea why I wrote Seattle in. That town broke my heart – and my bank account! We went bankrupt shortly thereafter. Come to think of it, that’s how the Blazer got repo’d. What can I say?

And no, my wife didn’t leave me for being a loser. She’s still here, still doing all she can to help make my writing dreams come true. After all these years. As Confederate President Jefferson Davis says to the crowd in my cannabis comedy, Southern Bud, while lauding Miss Juicy Fruit for rescuing the Ganja Tales books from the Yankees: “Now there’s a woman!”

Anyway, there’s one guy who bought a book that day in Seattle, and he actually reconnected with me just last year – 16 years later. He’s Jake Wiest, from Portland, although he’s been living in Germany the past year, as I did once. Please look him up. Do anything you can for him. He’s most deserving. He bought a Ganja Tales book from me in Seattle 17 years ago and reconnected years later. Now there’s a guy I’m proud to call a friend!

But mark these words of woe, Dear Friends, and remember: It’s true some repo men in Omaha will take your car; but they got some 420 cats at the Seattle hempfest who will carve the heart clean out of your chest.

To you who still go to the magnificent Seattle Hempfest — one of the finest in the world, they say – with its VIP tents, elite smoking booths and all the right players in the 420 world to gawk at; to you who half-step the narrow paths at Myrtle Edwards Park, please: If you happen to see an old, bruised heart on the ground, pick it up and mail it back to me, would you?

Just address it to: “The Depressive Insomniac Who Lives in Omaha.”

A Poem for Seattle

I went to skip a pretty rock across a Seattle pond

To watch it hopscotch: bing! bing! bing! in glorious flight.

 

But it sank instead, and I watched the ripples

With dread. Those ever-widening rings of depression

Lapping toward me. I turned to run but couldn’t.

My feet were rooted to the ground. Numbness was rising.

Legs, thighs, waist and chest. Then the heart.

 

Ever-widening rings of depression: killing my spirit

Numbing my soul, strangling laughter. Murdering mirth.

Lonesome Ghosts in Old Buildings

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Lonesome Ghosts in Old Buildings

Karl and the Paddle-Wheel Steamer from Saint Joseph

OMAHA – Karl rode up on a paddle-wheel steamer in 1870 to work in the massive Union

Pacific maintenance train yard here when Omaha was a claptrap shanty village of wooden piers, saloons, stables and whorehouses sprawling along the muddy west bank of the Missouri River.

Freezing winter, sweltering summer, he swung that hammer, slamming the great Iron Horse locomotives back into service on the track hauling cattle and grain. It was the Iron Age, and forges roared.

Then Karl, dreaming of his baby, longing for his wife —  saving his pay check to bring them up from Saint Jo — caught a fatal pneumonia and died, shivering blue, in his one-bedroom apartment one bitter-cold January morning.

Problem was, he didn’t cross over. He waited, for 150 years, in the apartment pictured below — waited at the window overlooking the Missouri River valley from whence his sweetheart and baby girl would come.

Karl wasn’t a bad sort. (The bad ones are down in the basement in the storage bins. You only go down there with a friend and a flashlight in case the electricity fails, and God help you if you ever get stuck down there alone one night.)

It’s just that Karl became inconvenient when my son and his fiancée moved into the apartment. I mean, there Karl was: bumping around all the time — not in a mean way, you understand; but just aimlessly floating from one window to another. My son didn’t see him, but his fiancée did. She sees lots of things like Karl.

So my wife worked at the time with a woman who saw the same things my son’s fiancée does. She came over and the three of them stood in a circle holding hands, calling Karl. They prayed, they chanted, they became light-energy. (I wasn’t there. I had no business being there. I am incapable of channeling Divine Feminine Wisdom and Spiritual Love.) The ladies — Sandra, Melissa and Laurie — told Karl the tables had turned and that it was his family waiting for him now, waiting for their long-lost Karl. So go, Karl — just go. Via con Dios and bon voyage!

Resistance at first, but then . . . release, the spiraling updraft of Karl’s spirit taking wing, flying home at long last.

Do you have ESP? I often wish I did. Of course I’m a great believer in the spiritual component of life. That belief led me to get spirituality into my Ganja Tales screenplay, the story I wrote before my two cannabis comedies.

In Ganja Tales, spirituality appears in the form of Tiffany, an ex-stripper. She has a great scene in the screenplay up on a pole. Friends, if I had a quarter for every time I rewrote that scene to make it as perfect as I could I’d be able to buy a ticket and come visit you. I cried like a baby for days when I killed her, so real she’d become to me.

Tiffany is the B Character, the one who teaches protagonist Tony a lesson of love that mends his broken heart.  So they’re smoking a cigarette late the first night out of Omaha. They’re in Western Nebraska and I have to clash them up because this is drama and only conflict is interesting; so the conflict is that Tiffany is spiritual and Tony isn’t – not after what he saw as a combat medic in Iraq. So they clash in dialogue and the scene wraps up and Tiffany says “That’s fine, Tony, but tell you what. I’ll be waiting for you, just remember that.”

And he says “Waiting for what? For me to come around?” And she gives him a drop-dead stare and says: ”That’s right, Tony. Waiting at the bus stop for you to come around.”

Film is such a great medium to play with. Complex, but fun. Like the opposite sex, right? Ha!

And yes, I’m glad you asked. I also used a ghost who wouldn’t cross over in my Ganja Tales screenplay. My particular ghost was a 10-year-old white girl who was kidnapped by two Sioux braves one night when she left the wagon train to draw water from the creek along the Oregon trail, kidnapped and never repatriated.

“I don’t suppose you see that little girl down there by the creek?” Tiffany asks Tony. “Nope,” he says. “Can’t say I do.” Tiffany explains how the girl’s ghost comes back every year looking for her family, how she died with the Sioux years later when U.S. Cavalry attacked her village one day with sabers flashing, cutting down women and children.

“Tony!” Tiffany cries. “The snow was red with their blood!”

Now it’s his turn to play a card. Tony gives her the drop-dead look and says: “Funny, you saw blood-soaked snow; I saw blood-soaked sand.”

Do you live in an old place with ghosts?

I do. Picture two long apartment buildings facing one another and set vertical to the street as you walk in. Room for six residences on each side. It was built a hundred years ago for railroad workers. So of course people have over the decades died here, cried here, killed themselves here or been killed here: and yes, created life here. Probably lots of it.

Indeed, like you, no doubt, where I live is a tiny speck of a teeming microcosm in the planetary petri dish. But what a microcosm!  It bursts with life. I can hardly sleep at night. Sometimes, swinging in my traces, the wind whistling and Orion wheeling by overhead, I hear dead residents, their whispers and dreams, begging me to shine light, begging me to tell their story and set them free.

I’m pretty sure the ladies got Karl home a few years back. But if perchance you should see him, point to Saint Jo and give him a friendly push, won’t you? I’m sure he’d appreciate it.

~~

Here’s an interesting article about steamboat travel on the Missouri river:

“Steamboat Travel Was Dirty And Dangerous, Especially On The Missouri River”

 

Here is a forge story I wrote a few years ago, “Pound It Down, Daddy,” for a local rag.

 

 

 

 

Death on the Bridge in Omaha

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Death on the Bridge in Omaha

Greetings, friends. It’s good to see you. Having been in Nebraska for almost 30 years, I  appreciate your company. It’s hard to find kindred spirits here. And Colorado right next door. WTF!

The nutshell recap: in the past three years I’ve written three 420 screenplays: a drama (Ganja Tales); a comedic farce (Southern Bud); and a comedy/satire (The Osipenko File).

What do you think? If I lived in Colorado, would I get all the reading and writing done there that I get done in Omaha? Hmm.

Consider that yesterday I walked to the downtown Omaha library at 6 p.m. It’s about a mile away, takes about 20 minutes. The wind was blowing so hard I had to hold my ball cap on my head; light rain, 60 degrees. Sometimes you don’t know who you’re going to meet on the bridge spanning the railroad tracks below: meth heads, crazy folk, homeless, dinged out; people wearing clown hats riding bicycles, someone dragging a suitcase. You name it.

What would you get done if you lived in a place like Colorado, a place where you could buy legal weed without fear of getting busted? I would like to know. I’ve been smoking crappy illegal weed all my life; the notion of buying killer buds just down the street kind of boggles my mind.

Do you see bizarre things too, like I do? It’s rough where I live. I often think I’ll die on that bridge when some crazy person stabs me. It’s a long bridge, and you can see them in the distance coming for you, coming straight at you. And you’re suspended in the sky on a bridge, as if in a dream … the wind and the sky. And you have to cross paths with that person who may kill you.

But anyway, at the library I went straight to the writing section, got a screenwriting book and read it for two hours until 8 p.m. close, then walked home as darkness fell. In bed by 9 p.m. reading another screenwriting book by my bed. Lights out at 10, up at 4:30, writing by 5 a.m. A dog’s life I tell you! Would I do all this if I could, instead of walking to the library, go to a weed shop like in Denver and buy any number of killer dank buds? Doubtful! Ha ha ha!

Discipline. That’s what I need: Red Svetlana (The Osipenko File) lashing me with her whip. Oh she hurts so good!

My whole Ganja Tales screenplay is about a 420 freedom journey. I suppose that’s the journey I dream of making one day – a mad dash for a cannabis-free zone.

I have no idea why you are here, but if you saw through my eyes you would have seen  the woman last night on the bridge coming toward me from a long ways off just after 8 o’clock on my  way home. And she was talking loudly but no one was with her. Talking loudly to nobody and nothing, walking toward me. Gesticulating with her arms. Agitated. Yelling.

She comes abreast and stops. Black hair, dark eyes, broad, almost flat brown face. Peruvian or native American. 

“Hey!” she yells at me. “Got a cigarette?”  

No, I do not. I hold up my hands. Sorry.

She looks at me uncomprehendingly for a moment.

The wind blows and she spins away with it, yelling, striding down the sidewalk held in by the chain link fence on the right and the concrete barrier on the left.

And I have no knife in my belly. So it was a good night, right?

Funny. Just talked to my son and told him the title to this piece. He was a bit incredulous. “Well, that should cheer your readers up!” he exclaimed.

Good. Did my story work? Are you feeling right cheery now?