by Mike Edison
Any other boss in the world would have fired Kyle on the spot for such an ill-advised stump speech, but even as publisher, even with Michael Kennedy’s continued allocutions that I had to “be the Boss,” I did not have the juice to cut him loose. After the DiRienzo fiasco I was told that there would be no more firings, this was the staff, make it work. And goddam it if everyone on the floor didn’t know it, too—the place had more leaks than the Nixon White House. Just as Holmstrom had warned me, the publisher had all the responsibility to keep the magazine profitable and running smoothly, but none of the authority to back it up. It was a management structure designed for failure.
And then there was Pot Star. Pot Star was actually a High Times reader who had landed an internship at the magazine and somehow parlayed that into a job, although I’m not quite sure what that job was. On the masthead he was also listed as associate editor, but he was as much of a mascot as he was an “associate” anything. Pot Star was six feet and three hundred pounds (including the funky beardlike thing growing out of his chin) of Texas stoner, and in his early twenties was the youngest member of the staff. I loved Pot Star because he was the “everyman,” a High Times reader who had landed his dream job of smoking dope for a living. Hanging out with Pot Star, you could get a good feel for a large part of the High Times audience, who were mostly made up of like-minded delinquents. I was hoping to groom him into taking a larger role in promoting the magazine.
That was the motley core of a staff that also included a senior citizen who sometimes slept in his office (a leftover from previous epochs, whom no one had the heart to send home); a news editor who was quickly being made obsolete by the Internet; and a few freelance writers and editors who came to meetings, but whose lifestyles would never tolerate anything as bourgeois as a steady job.
There was also a managing editor, whose main job was to traffic stories between the editorial and art departments and was charged with the responsibility for keeping the magazine on time. In my tenure at High Times, four different people held that job, none of them entirely successful, since they invariably got sucked into the 420 vortex and fell prey to the hobgoblins and punctuality deficits of the perpetually stoned.
Wanda the Evil Accountant would bellow constantly that it was the production department that was screwing up, since that’s where the money was being spent on late fees.
As usual, Wanda had it wrong. The production director, an unreconstructed metalhead named Bobby Black, was the one guy on the floor who had his shit together. Bobby Black wore his hair halfway down his back, blasted a sonic wall of stoner rock from his office, hit the daily 4:20, and did his job remarkably well, especially considering the pressure he was under. The production department is the last link in the chain between the magazine and the printer, and it was his job to collect and prepare all the digital files that needed to be sent to the printer, to keep track of what had gone out and what was missing, and to check the proofs as they came back. If there was a problem, the printer called Bobby Black, sometimes in the middle of the night. His job was not easy, but he kept things moving, a near impossibility given that the staff at large generally considered any sort of schedule an oppressive nuisance.
After my first year at High Times as publisher, I recommended to the owners that Bobby Black be given an extra Christmas bonus. Normally, everyone got a bonus equal to one paycheck, but he had been doing an especially great job holding things together as we kept adding pages to accommodate new ads, which also needed a lot of attention to get right. Bonuses were uncharted territory at High Times, and at first they balked, but I fought for him and managed to get it through. The owners were worried that if the rest of the staff found out about Bobby’s extra bonus, they would feel entitled to one as well, and would be somehow less motivated to work. I told them that wasn’t bloody likely.
By far my biggest blunder was to deliver faithfully Michael Kennedy’s edict that there should be no pot smoking in the office.
When I was at High Times, I almost never got stoned during the day. If I busted corn at 4:20, I could pretty much count on having to tussle with an angry advertiser at 4:35. If I wanted to hit my goals, I needed to stay sharp. Actually, by that time I wasn’t smoking all that much pot—when it became a staple, it ceased to be special. For me, at least, the novelty of being able to get stoned at work wore off quickly. No matter how much pot you smoked, you were still at work. It was a fool’s paradise.
But Michael’s mandate had nothing to do with discipline or sobriety. It was all about liability, and he was adamant about it. When I shared this with the staff, they just laughed at me. “This is High Times, dude.”
Michael was especially serious that there should be no pot in the office, especially “felony amounts.” Does that sound obvious to anyone who ever ran a business? Especially one that made its nut by photographing large quantities of world-class marijuana month after month and was famous for its advice on how to grow same in your bedroom closet? That was legendary for putting snowdrifts of cocaine on the cover and in the centerfold? For the better part of twenty-five years, High Times had joyfully quoted local prices and user reviews for every drug imaginable in the always popular Trans-High Market Quotations department, only more recently dropping the hard drugs to focus on superstrains of weed:
LSD—Fresh from the lab, $2–4/tab. Amphetamines—white crosses and black beauties, $2–4. Methaqualone powder—Do-it-yourself ’ludes, $500 oz. Lebanese hash—Hello old friend! $130 oz. Thai sticks—Beware of Mexican poseurs, $180–$225. Cocaine—disco toot, $125/gram. Yukon Swifty—Ultra light green nuggets coated in white crystals. This shit smells like a skunk that got trapped in a cotton candy machine. $350/oz.
Given this font of information, anyone with half a brain cell left dawdling in their skulls should have been able to figure out that we were on someone’s radar and that discretion just might turn out to be the better part of valor.
But I think what really scared the shit out of Michael were the persistent stories of complaints from the office upstairs. Allegedly, a pregnant woman had said something about smelling marijuana, and when Michael heard this, his business had flashed before his eyes.
I could see the headline now:
PREGNANT WOMAN INHALES MARIJUANA SMOKE FROM POT MAGAZINE, GIVES BIRTH TO FRISBEE.
“Mike, I don’t want any pot smoking in that office,” he ordered. “You have to be the boss. Tell them.” I guess Michael could have told everyone himself—everybody respected Michael. But he’s smarter than I am, and he gets to play the Good Cop. After all, he was the Lawgiver. I was just an unpopular Orangutan.
The High Times crew were masters of stealth smoking. The best of them could have gotten high on the crosstown bus without incident. What made this possible was one of the twentieth century’s greatest innovations: the Mute.
Like the No-Bounce Street Hockey Ball before it, the Mute was a revolutionary leap forward in recreation science. The Mute was gimmicked up from a two-liter Pepsi bottle retrofitted with parts from surplus Israeli gas masks. You could take a hit from a bong and exhale into the Mute and there would be no smoke, no smell, nothing. It worked like a charm. If the teenagers of the world ever got hold of this technology, it would undermine parents everywhere. It was brilliant.
The Mute was the brainchild of a marijuana enthusiast with an entrepreneurial bent who lived in a remote part of upstate New York. His idea had been to sell these contraptions through the classified ads in the back of the book, and he had sent a sample along with his check. When the 420 crew at High Times realized that the dingus actually worked, they ordered a dozen of them, and every editor had one sitting next to his desk.
Do you have any idea how many bong hits you have to blow through an Israeli gas mask filter before it gets clogged and no longer works? These things were designed for use in World War III, but the High Times cannabis commandos went through them like Kleenex. When the Mutes stopped working and everyone was waiting for a new shipment (apparently the Israe
li military just wasn’t making enough gas masks to meet the demands of the High Times staff), they began to fashion their own, inferior models, crafted from cardboard tubes and fitted with Snuggle brand fabric softener sheets held in place with rubber bands. Not only did this fail to mask the smell of pot, it also made the office smell as if Willie Nelson were doing his laundry in the conference room.
Sometimes it wasn’t even the smoke—people would come by with freezer bags filled with buds so stinky that it smelled like a baby was having its diapers changed. Even the elevator reeked. It would be nothing to walk into someone’s office and see a dealer breaking up a pound of Purple Haze into small Ziplocs. On payday, the office was like an open-air drug market.
Michael’s no-smoking policy was a pipe dream. It was useless. All it had accomplished was to make sure that the daily dopers on the floor hated me. I was now officially a fascist. When Snoop Dogg came by the office one afternoon with a cigar box full of buds, I simply gave up and joined the party.
Another full-scale battle flared when John Holmstrom had the audacity to suggest that we do a story about . . . professional wrestling! It was as if he had suggested that we change our tack and apologize to the Drug Enforcement Agency, throw a fund-raiser for the National Right to Life Party, and host a buffet for the entire military-industrial complex. The staff yelled and screamed and kicked so much you would have thought they were all training to be wrestlers themselves. Bloom, one of the only “legitimate” sports fans on a staff of anti-jock stoners, was the loudest opponent. “I hate wrestling, and I don’t want it in the magazine. It’s fake!” he would bellow, as usual, just not getting it. Wanda the Evil Accountant, who had never met a lynch mob she didn’t like, chimed in with her valuable editorial opinion: “I don’t think there should be wrestlers in High Times,” she spat. The way she said it made it seem distasteful, even for a woman who I suspected ate broken glass for breakfast. Even Hager made a special appearance in the office just to fan the flames with his preprogrammed peacenik agitprop and declare that wrestling was “warrior culture,” his catchall phrase for things that didn’t suit his lifestyle—e.g. alcohol, tobacco, firearms, heavy metal, and processed sugar.
Holmstrom’s timing was sensational—Vince McMahon and his World Wrestling Federation had at that moment the most-watched show in cable television history. Their Monday-night broadcast had actually scored higher ratings than the establishment’s standard-bearer, Monday Night Football. Now if that wasn’t a Blow Against the Empire and a sure sign of a Counterculture Revolution, then maybe LSD really did occur naturally, and all you had to do was know where to look.
McMahon had performed something of a miracle. He had admitted publicly that wrestling wasn’t “real” and was now calling his business “sports entertainment. “ This was a sucker punch to the naysayers and anti-wrestling snobs who had thought that when McMahon coughed up and confessed to the world’s worst-kept secret—that wrestling was fixed (God forbid!)—the business would just evaporate. But exactly the opposite happened. Unhampered by local sports authorities who required licenses and state-approved physicians at every event, McMahon had freed himself from miles of red tape and bureaucratic nonsense that had kept his carnival in check. After all, no one was trying to stop Metallica, or the circus, or the Muppets on Ice. It was just show business.
Far from fleeing the arenas, the fans loved it. Everyone already knew that wrestling wasn’t “real.” They just didn’t give a rat’s ass. They had the Dostoyevsky-esque Faith.
That year, Vince McMahon became a billionaire and made his debut in the Forbes 400 as well as being featured in Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and a slew of other “straight” magazines. The Foreign Object, I am proud to say, had scooped them all by putting Vince on the cover of our first mimeographed issue, sixteen years earlier.
Obviously I supported Holmstrom. Never mind my own obsession with the art—I wasn’t editing the magazine so I would have something to read, I was following Ron Ronson’s prescript to “know thy reader.” It may not have been regular viewing for the elitist urban heads at High Times, but I knew there were a lot of bong-hitting frat boys watching TV through a cloud of smoke and rooting for Vince to get his ass kicked, and we could turn them into High Times readers if we could just persuade them to pick up our magazine.
This was Vince’s other greatest innovation: he was now actually wrestling, further blurring the lines of what was real and what was fake by working a gimmick as the evil boss of his own Wrestling Federation. On his show he made the wrestlers—his employees—literally kiss his ass. Vince would pull down his pants and demand that everyone on his payroll get on their knees and pucker up. It was completely outrageous, a legitimate billionaire CEO running around with his pants around his ankles demanding to be treated like some sort of god by his employees. Vince quickly became the most-hated heel in the history of the game.
His main foil was Stone Cold Steve Austin, a beer-swilling, pickup truck–driving ass-kicker who in another era would have been cast as a bad guy. Pitted against Vince, he became wrestling’s biggest hero since Hulk Hogan. Who wouldn’t want to see the boss get the shit stomped out of him? It was the greatest gimmick of all time, and you would have thought that the High Times staff might relate to it as a parable for workplace rebellion. But perhaps they knew me better than I gave them credit for. After all, I had already used that shtick in Main Event and had come out on top. I owe my career to it.
Holmstrom’s genius was in finding the pot-smoking wrestler, Rob Van Dam, who was working a “420” gimmick with an outfit called Extreme Championship Wrestling—or, as its fans called it, “E C Fucking W.” Van Dam was our guy. He was a flashy, high-flying wrestler who wore psychedelic tights and, sailing off the top rope in some spectacular feat of gymnastics, would declare, “I just smoked your ass!”
ECW was a small promotion that worked out of venues like the old Elks Lodge in Queens, where they turned a thousand-seat theater into an “arena of pain.” The shows there were no-holds-barred and out of control: flaming baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire were the norm. Wrestlers would leap off the balcony, twenty feet in the air, to smash their opponents through folding tables that had been set up at ringside and covered in thumbtacks. There was no such thing as a “foreign object”—there was no longer a need to hide weapons. Wrestlers just let it all hang out in the open: street signs, frying pans, snow shovels, fluorescent light tubes, cheese graters, garden tools—there was no end to the creativity that went into thinking up potential new weapons. One night I saw a wrestler busted open with a child’s toy lawn mower. Another enchanted evening, a plate of nachos.
“Rob Van Dam is just your average, long-haired, pot-smoking hippie who’s always at peace with himself,” Holmstrom wrote, “especially when he’s kicking somebody in the face!” It was a great bit. The story went on to detail not only Van Dam’s athleticism and outside-the-ring pot activism, but his hordes of fans who held up signs that said “RVD 420” and shouted, “Let’s smoke pot!” when he entered the ring. It was insane to think that this did not have a place in High Times.
Van Dam turned out to be a very humble, intelligent guy, and after the matches Holmstrom and I would get stoned with him out behind the Elks Lodge. (Holmstrom wasn’t really a pot smoker, but he always made an exception for his favorite wrestler.) Thirteen years in the magazine racket, and I was still hanging out in parking lots getting fucked up with professional wrestlers. Talk about being true to your school.
The fans at these shows were positively rabid. Not a single one of them was without an ECW T-shirt of some kind. This was no fad, this was a genuine revolution within the industry, much like punk rock had been in its glory days. Eventually, all of the mayhem that was being innovated by ECW was co-opted by the WWE, just as punk rock was absorbed into the mainstream. In fact, short of putting ECW out of business, Vince just wound up buying the entire promotion, and eventually he made Van Dam his champion. Holmstrom’s story was a smash. For a change I had b
acked the right pony.
At home, the mental health index was sinking into the red. _____ had also taken to self-medicating with marijuana, and although it may have mellowed her out in the evenings, it was making her withdrawn and unwilling to deal with our very real relationship problems.
Law school is brutal, like boot camp for shysters. It is an insane way to live for three years. But _____ was acing her exams and fighting her way through her own personal demons on her way to a great career.
When she asked me if I could bring some reefer home, I couldn’t say no to her. When you see someone who has been in so much pain, you don’t deny them relief. But it put up a cloud between us. She’d smoke and zone out to the TV, then fall asleep. We were barely communicating. Our romantic life evaporated.
I suggested that she lay off the reefer, but she told me it was the only thing that calmed her down at the end of the day. After fourteen hours of studying contracts and torts, who wouldn’t want to smoke a fatty and relax?
I suggested that we needed to find a little time to spend together, on us, and work on our relationship. She told me that if a relationship was that good, it shouldn’t need any work. When I suggested that even under the best of circumstances, this was a wickedly naïve assumption, there were promises that when she graduated, things would get back to normal and we would be able to spend time together and go on vacations and enjoy each other the way we had when we were falling in love. She knew I was making a lot of sacrifices. In the meantime, I just had to be patient with her, law school was rough.