I Have Fun Everywhere I Go

by Mike Edison

  More than any of the other intrigue that swirls around High Times, everyone always wants to know what is up with the ads for the fake weed that are peppered throughout every issue, promising the best in “legal highs.” They look good, like genuine Thai Stick and top-grade weed, and they have names like Hydro and Wizard Smoke. They also peddle crap like “herbal ecstasy,” “herbal opium,” and “herbal hashish,” and their ads look fantastic—lush and sticky and inviting, just like the real thing. But it’s all a load of crap.

  Still, people buy this shit and, apparently, a lot of it. There could be more than one hundred pages of ads a year for fake herb, several hundred thousands of dollars in advertising. And no matter how shady the business seemed, it was legal, and they always paid promptly.

  There are a few theories as to why this was such a successful hustle: the most prevalent around the High Times office is that the bunko weed is sold to gullible rubes and underage unfortunates who think they are going to get high from it, or that it is bagged and sold by unscrupulous drug dealers as is, or used as some kind of hempy Hamburger Helper in order to stretch a little weed into a nice baggie that can be sold for a lot more dough.

  The stuff looks good in pictures, but I can assure you it is junk. It’s not even pleasant to smoke.

  The “buds” themselves are a variety of oddball botany, but mostly common herbs like sage and varieties of hops and dogbane. These plants are pressed and stamped into “buds” and packaged gorgeously. And they aren’t cheap: twenty-two bucks for a gram and a half of fake bud, thirty bucks for an ounce of their bottom-line dirt, up to seventy dollars a lid for the “good stuff,” which can mostly be bought, sans nifty marketing, for a couple of bucks at a well-stocked herbalist.

  There was always a campaign by Hager to get rid of these ads, since they were considered a chink in High Times’s otherwise impenetrable armor of high-minded hippie values. Within the marijuana community, there were always rumblings from our detractors, mostly other start-up cannabis mags, who accused High Times of being amoral capitalists and complicit in marketing fake drugs to kids. But in all my years at High Times, I saw few if any complaints from actual readers about these ads or the products. It is likely that anyone who got suckered was too embarrassed to speak up, but the manufacturers would swear up and down that the majority of the business came from repeat purchases by people looking for legal alternatives to marijuana.

  I would have loved to get rid of those ads, but what was going to replace the revenue? There was no way in hell the High Times ownership was going to bow to the pressure of a Hager-manufactured pseudo-scandal and chase the ads out, given the kind of dough they generated. Nor were they anything new: ads for “herbal highs” had been in the magazine since the first issues produced by Tom Forçade. They had always been an accepted part of the business. The only difference was that the marketing had reached incredibly sophisticated levels. Nonetheless, Hager would always submit these ads as evidence of my failure as a publisher.

  Dumber, though, than even Hager’s naïveté to think that we were going to give away that kind of business was Bloom, who would breathlessly show off his complete lack of acumen and savvy to The Washington Post, blurting that the ads were a rip-off that didn’t get you high. “They’re kind of taking advantage of gullible readers,” Bloom said. “It’s a borderline scam,” he added, at once calling High Times readers stupid and implicating the magazine in fraud.

  And yet the magazine was doing better than it had in years. Ozzy was a home run, and the next two issues I edited proved that it was no fluke.

  There were no tricks: every day I tried to put something better in the bottle. I was careful to maintain an editorial balance, to bring in new readers while holding on to our loyal base. I was not turning my back on anyone. I remained faithful to the high quality of grow stories Hager had fostered. One cover I helped engineer was classic—a robust, budding plant shot in front of a spectacular explosion of tie-dye color. I wasn’t trashing the old hippie color palate out of hand, I was just trying to expand the repertoire and keep things in perspective.

  It was all about balance. Ours was a big tent, and everyone was welcome. The Ozzy issue, for instance, also featured a Hager-sponsored conspiracy story about who really killed Martin Luther King—as if thirty-five years later High Times suddenly had the scoop. This piece was mocked mercilessly on Saturday Night Live in a sketch based on an imagined High Times editorial meeting—and they were frighteningly accurate in their depiction of drawling, drooling editors too stoned to do much besides wait for a new break in the Kennedy assassination case. I laughed my ass off. Actually I was flattered that Saturday Night Live would even bother to spoof us. Bloom, however, was furious. “Fuck them,” he bellowed. “What right do they have to make fun of us??”

  At home, things were alternately very good and very dark. _____ was now fully immersed in her career as a law student and was acing every class, but she was still suffering the extreme highs and lows of bipolar disorder. When she was swinging downward, it was horrible. The least of it would be crippling episodes of self-doubt, and I would take her out to a romantic dinner and remind her that she was a superstar. We always left the restaurant holding hands, but I was always aware that we were walking on thin ice.

  Sometimes I would be leaving for the office and she would still be in bed, sobbing, “Maybe today is the day I will kill myself.” How was I supposed to react to that? Not go to work? I spent a lot of time lying next to her in silence just so she wouldn’t have to be alone with her brain.

  There was no way to predict the mood shifts; the disease took her up or down without warning. It was bad. I certainly couldn’t tell my friends what I was going through at home, there was no way I would have betrayed her trust. Sometimes she would be very happy and working hard for weeks and weeks at a time without any sign of depression.

  We took a trip to Jamaica together on a High Times junket. I was looking forward to getting out of New York for a few days with her. Changing the scenery boded well. We’d get into the island groove, eat some jerk chicken, drink some good rum, smoke the ganja, hit the beach.

  From the moment we got to the airport, where we met up with the gaggle of High Times staffers who had signed up for this pothead perk, it was a stoner clusterfuck, with people forgetting things and losing their tickets, getting lost on the way to the gate, and stopping randomly to admire shiny objects. We were on our way to Jamaica—couldn’t anyone wait a couple of hours to get baked? Don’t be ridiculous, dude. Standard High Times justification was “It’s always 4:20 somewhere.”

  Behind the dust cloud of stoners stumbling to the gate was the Marketing Witch, clacking along in last year’s high-heeled sandals and a bright yellow tube top. She quacked at her husband to hurry up—he had a bag on his back and bags hanging off of each arm, and he was struggling with something that looked like a steamer trunk. He looked like the overworked bellboy in a screwball comedy. She sipped contemptuously at a frozen drink while she waited for him to catch up to her at the ticket counter. I felt bad for the poor bastard. The Jews who built the pyramids had a better deal.

  When we landed in Montego Bay, we were harassed the second we touched ground by Rastas peddling big bags of dope.

  Although it fuels the tourist economy, marijuana is illegal in Jamaica, and I was advised to wait until we got to the quasi-resort where we would be staying. It would be far safer, and anyway, airport weed was strictly blood clat, bad news. It was too expensive and never the real deal. Wait for the Lamb’s Bread—the good stuff—and then buy a big bag, enough to last the week. Something about the size of a love seat should do it.

  The beaches in Negril were pleasant enough, but there was fantastic swimming and snorkeling off the cliffs. We took a one-day scuba-diving class and had a good time scooting around twenty feet under the surface with a torrent of multicolored fish, breathing through fifty-pound tanks strapped on our backs, yet nearly weightless in this other-Earth environment. Since my caree
r as astronaut had been pretty much a non-starter, this was a good consolation prize. And it made _____ happy—she found that leaving our landlubbing lives behind was a nice break from the avoirdupois of law school.

  But not surprisingly, she took an immediate dislike to my coworkers. “They don’t respect you. It’s weird. They don’t take you seriously because you’re not stoned all the time. And for all their One Love hippie talk, they don’t even respect this place.” She was right. She usually was. Chief Hippie Hager, for example, was particularly cavalier with his code of karma, eating conch fritters and conch sandwiches every day even though there were signs posted everywhere saying not to, because conch had been overharvested and the local population was in danger. “I don’t care,” he told _____ when she asked him why he was ignoring the eco-warnings. “I’m only going to be here for a few days.”

  “You deserve better,” she would tell me. “When I graduate from law school, I’m going to be making a lot of money. Then I’ll be able to take care of you for a change. You can quit this job and focus on writing and playing music.” It sounded good. But then, I am often a victim of my own optimism.

  15

  EXTREME CHAMPIONSHIP

  POT SMOKING

  I fucked up. I failed. I wanted Happy Monkeys. Instead I got monkeys who wanted to kill me. It’s my own fault. I let myself be pushed up against the wall, and I pushed back. But I’m not sure what else I could have done. To not have would have been to admit failure before I even began.

  To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, I firmly believe that he who bosses least bosses best. But this situation was out of control. The magazine was never on time—it was like watching one of those Discovery Channel wildlife shows where they slow the film down so you can see how the animals’ legs work.

  In the annals of High Times, my situation was far from unique. In 1979, Tom Forçade’s widow, Gabrielle Schang, moved into the publisher’s office and after only a few months at the job took her frustration out in print, scribing a heated opinion page. “When I was invited to become the publisher of High Times last year,” she snarled, “the magazine was languishing in the clutches of a clique of aging hippies, unable or unwilling to grow out of the burnt-out knee-jerk radicalism of the ’60s . . . Frankly, I think they were suffering from amotivational syndrome.”

  Indeed, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Given the short-term memory loss endemic to an organization whose collective reefer habit could have swallowed the Mexican economy, I shouldn’t have been surprised that no one felt the slightest tinge of déjà vu.

  Our production costs were through the roof, jacked with late fees from our printer, who was becoming increasingly concerned that we were piling on so much stuff at the last minute that they were not going to be able to do the job. We had to stop missing deadlines and put an end to the frenzy that always surrounded the press dates, when the production department would hurriedly try to cobble together a magazine by replacing nonexistent editorial pages with house ads. The tardiness repeatedly pushed the magazine to the edge of missing an on-sale date, which would have been a costly disaster. Michael Kennedy actually suggested that I create a fake calendar and begin lying to the staff about when the real deadlines were, but it was just too distasteful to me to treat a group of allegedly professional magazine editors like children, even though in the winter, when it snowed, work stopped and everyone ran around the office like grade-schoolers hoping to be sprung for the day.

  At SD&B, a staff of seven—several of whom were out of the office traveling a lot of the time—put out thirty-six magazines a year (twelve issues of SD&B, plus six each of the monthly SD&B International and Refrescos y Cerveza, plus twelve issues of a monthly tabloid targeted to retailers), as well as a yearly trucking and distribution guide, two trade-show guides (not to mention that we organized shows ourselves and were responsible for booking speakers and creating panels, a full-time job in itself), and a heap of special projects like one-sheets, media kits, direct mail pieces, bulletins, and dailies for industry conventions, which were a huge pain in the ass. On top of that we did several special issues in Chinese for the Asian market—they were extrapolated from SD&B International, and I shepherded them through a translator and a Chinese proofreader. I can only assume I got it right, since no one ever complained.

  It was incredible that a staff of fourteen editors, art, and production people (plus a team of freelancers) could not get out twelve issues of High Times a year (plus two Best of High Times, which were reprints of old issues) on a timely basis and without near catastrophe.

  Besides Bloom, and Hager, who was not keeping office hours but was lurking about keeping his presence known, Dan Skye and Steve Wishnia were the other senior editors. Aside from the fact that they both looked like the “before” picture in an ad for Grecian Formula, they could not possibly be more different.

  Dan Skye was forty-something and wore his gray hair in a ponytail, Freedom Fighter style. He was a talented writer and photographer, a very good pot journalist, and one of the hardest workers there, as long as it served his best interests. He lobbied vociferously to have his photos on the cover of High Times, which were often very good but not always the best choice. Like Bloom, Skye was a chimpanzee who yearned to be an orangutan; he felt that he should be the next editor in chief, and the two of them always seemed to be fighting.

  Skye did mean-spirited impersonations of everyone on the staff. I caught him doing me once, and I have to admit, it was pretty good. I think he captured my essence, hyperventilating about making the magazine better and sounding a lot like an old Jewish man who had just discovered a hair in his soup. I wish he had just taken it to heart rather than building a stand-up routine around it. To mock the sanctimonious stoner stylings of Steve Hager, he screwed up his face like a clenched bunghole and babbled incoherent narco-nonsense, like “The herb is a sacrament, it is the goddess of the counterculture.” If Hager had caught his act, he probably would have clubbed Skye over the head with a hookah.

  Wishnia’s hair exploded off the sides of his head in an unkempt symphony of frizz, making him look like some sort of mad scientist who had blown himself up in a failed bathtub chemistry experiment. Also an intelligent guy, easygoing, with an artsy streak and a punk rock past, but he had a lot of trouble articulating his ideas over the roar of aggressive editors who seemed to be in a constant struggle to bully one another into submission. Which is too bad, since he often had good things to say. But because he didn’t share the pot-fueled delusions of grandeur the other editors were infected with, he was often drowned out.

  One of Wishnia’s responsibilities was to copyedit stories before they went from the editorial department into art. Proper copyediting is a rigorous job that requires a fairly anal and exacting approach to grammar and proper usage and what is called style. Maintaining style is one of the cornerstones of good publishing. Unfortunately, with everything running late all the time, he was often browbeaten into being not much more than an expediter of rush-job journalism, and even at the most basic level, the magazine suffered for a lack of precision.

  When we say “style,” what we are talking about is consistency throughout the book. All magazines have style sheets, which are used as guides to keep, among other things, spelling consistent. For example, The New York Times uses “Al Qaeda,” The Wall Street Journal prefers “al Qaeda.” The High Times style sheet specifies the difference between Hoffman, as in Abbie the “radical activist,” and Hofmann, as in Albert, who is described not so accurately as the “discoverer of LSD.” Which is like saying that Eli Whitney “discovered” the cotton gin. At High Times they really do believe that acid grows on trees.

  Chris Simunek was the cultivation editor. In other circumstances I think we would have become good friends. He had known Dave Insurgent pretty well and had actually played for a little while in one of Dave’s later, ill-conceived projects. But while I was at High Times, he brought little to the party—a shame, for he was undoubtedly the m
ost talented writer of this lot.

  Hager had spoiled Simunek by assigning him to write a series of ersatz Fear and Loathing–style stories that usually involved Simunek dropping acid and going somewhere to write about it—Cancún, Memphis, Burning Man, Jamaica. Sometimes the resulting articles were quite good. Sometimes they were overly contrived and uninspired. But unfortunately, that’s all he seemed to want to do now, and every story he pitched involved a cache of dangerous drugs and his name on a plane ticket. Nice work if you can get it, but all those sweet assignments had also turned him into something of a prima donna. At editorial meetings, he slumped in his chair and shot down every one else’s ideas.

  As cultivation editor, his main function was to be in charge of the Grow America section of High Times, arguably our most popular and important department. Most of the weedy warlocks who could unlock the profound grimoire of harvesting potent buds had trouble turning their sweet science into comprehensible magazine stories, and Chris was there to straighten them out. I think he resented having to rewrite other people’s junk prose, especially that of our on-staff herbalist, Kyle Kushman.

  Kyle had been a successful grower himself—and it was Simunek’s job to encourage Kyle and turn him into a writer. But Kyle, taking his attitudinal cues from his mentor, once told me that “as long as High Times won’t give me a raise, I intend to do the bare minimum. I don’t want to hear shit about coming in late or leaving early.” I was flabbergasted. I suggested that saying this to the publisher was probably not the best road toward a fatter paycheck, and that 30K a year (plus benefits; five weeks off; surplus centerfold weed; occasional jaunts to Europe, the Caribbean, and beyond; and the local luminary status that came with working at the World’s Most Notorious Magazine) was a pretty good deal for an “associate editor” whose remedial English would have otherwise stopped him dead at the door of any community college in the country.