Mary Jane's Magnificat

SALAD DAYS - Setting the place and background convincingly

Our story begins in a small town in the West. The exact whereabouts are not as important as the fact that it is the West where a market was opened. A race has begun, a shot has sounded and the sprinters are off to stretch their necks out farther than all the rest. Only the product in the market was not a new one. It's an old item that was smoked back before people turned grapes into wine and possibly barley into beer. It's known by many names: hashish, marijuana, cannabis, Mary Jane, weed, wood, pot, dank, reefer, dope, herb, grass, ganja, bud, blaze, kush, sinsemilla, dank, skunk... So much that this could be a book about the many names of pot, or it could be about the fact its medicinal qualities were written about by someone in China nearly three thousand years before the birth of Christ. But it's not about either of those mysteries. It's about a race in the West when marijuana was legalized.

The thing is this was a race about pot, and there's kind of an assumption here that you're aware of its effects. Weed is not exactly known for motivating smokers to action, so there will be no story of a cunning entrepreneur cutting a way to the top of a mountain and owning a gargantuan share of the market at the end of the day. No, although those daring souls must have been out there, this is a story about someone much more normal. Sam is so normal, in fact, he smoked too much pot.

Sam Tucker wasn't really known for much around this town. He liked to say material accomplishments weren't his thing, and no one ever jumped up to meet him when he walked in the room. He was always scruffy with a beard that wasn't meant to be there and a short mop of brown hair that pointed in all directions. He wore faded blue jeans and half-tied sneakers. He was dark-skinned like D'Artagnan but he rarely talked about it and on the inside, he believed he was brave and dashing. Most of the time he wore a tee shirt with something sarcastic or a concert on it. Today it was black, barely containing a smiling cheshire cat smoking a fat blunt.

Walking by Sam's side by side was his best friend and well-known cohort, Bill Bremerton. From the ground up, he took the easy path at every turn. Unlaced, scuffed-up boots and cargo pants with holes at the knees set him up halfway, and he filled out a black hoodie for the rest. Pink-faced from the sun or a little drink, he wore a perpetual light-hearted scowl that was easily broken by a nervous laugh. Somehow he managed to appear charming and boyish. Maybe it was because he kept his hair cropped close and his face shaved.

These two men in their late twenties, who walked together, were unmistakable in any town. They were the two kids from high school who never grew up. Peter Pans - eternal youths but in the bodies of men. In most cases, something so cliche shouldn't be stated outright, but the ubiquitous nature of overgrown adolescence means they're in every race. Might as well point it out.

The town they stomped around is away from the coast, it was somewhere in the mountains but not isolate, and the firs surrounding the modest buildings betrayed the forests of Washington, Oregon or Northern California. Brown brick and grey stone buildings laid at the center while businesses and apartments stretched outward. The foot traffic on the sidewalks was light but steady like a busy rush before lunch on an otherwise quiet day. Cars and trucks waited at the traffic lights. It was business as usual.

On their way to their usual watering hole, Sam and Bill passed a hardware store in an old building, which is spotless and sanded smooth but appearing with visible layers of paint. Well-dressed and groomed persons of varying ages and ethnicities walked by on the modest cracks of the sidewalk or in and out the large wooden door as an old brass bell dinged faintly. The hand-painted writing on the large glass window resembled a throwback from the gunslinger era, but inside, the man behind the digital cash register nodded with enthusiasm and wears a 1950-something accountant's green visor. Everyone smiled in a nostalgic haze while surrounded by modern technology. On the other side of the same building, a small cafe bustled as customers walked inside and back out to the roped-off patio to choose empty wrought-iron chairs around identical tables. A server bent over a folding wood sign and chalkboard out front and wrote hurriedly. Even farther down the sidewalk, a barber shop glistened where old white men burst into laughter. A red, white and blue, barber pole rotated outside the door. As the coming and going of Main Street continued, Sam and Bill swam like salmon against the current, with effortless and primal energy.