by Mike Edison
I paid the bills, made sure she had what she needed, and then never saw her for most of the week. Even the cats got short shrift. She wouldn’t even take a moment to pet them on the way out the door. She used to dote on them and take time every day to play with them and babble in kitty talk. Now she just pushed them aside. In her focus to get through her day without being sandbagged by her own chemical imbalance, she had turned to ice.
At work I had few friends, but I was still dedicated to righting the ship and was getting good results, at least on paper. Business was strong, and even if the staff wanted to screw me with my pants on, at least to the owners I was still the fair-haired boy.
As we approached the twenty-fifth anniversary, sales were booming, circulation was climbing, and we were going to throw the biggest party of all time. When it was all through, High Times would be at a peak of profitability and we would have earned the respect of our colleagues and peers. In publishing circles, we would no longer be forced to sit at the kids’ table.
What I didn’t see coming was Steve Hager.
One day Michael Kennedy called me up to his office for a meeting. At High Times, these executive huddles were often a ruse. There might be some pretension that we were actually “meeting,” but the decisions had already been made by ownership and were just being delivered. There was no real discussion.
Unfortunately, a lot of the decision making was based on the knee-jerk emotional impulses of the other owners—Forçade’s family—who hid behind the screen and were clueless about what actually went on in the office. They had never asked for High Times but had it thrust upon them after Forçade’s death, and they seemed a lot more concerned with quelling any employee unrest and keeping things quiet than with running a successful business. Hager was an especially squeaky wheel, and he needed a lot of grease.
For all of Michael’s good judgment, his radical proclivities, and his ability to see things with lawyerly logic, he often acquiesced to his partners, who had actually issued a High Times mission statement braying that the magazine would become “a model for dysfunctional and currently unemployable persons” and boasting of a “convoluted chain of command.” This was the squares stooping to patronize the stoners and what they perceived to be the stoner lifestyle, their ill-conceived attempt at saying “See? We understand.” It was unnecessary and disgusting, really, since there is no shortage of talented, responsible people who like to smoke pot.
But they got what they wanted.
Michael began reasonably. “The job is too big for you. It is too big for anyone—being both the publisher and the editor is just too much.” He took time to compliment me, however, on how well I had been holding it together. “You’ve done a remarkable job in turning things around,” he told me.
Hager sat with his arms folded. I could tell that it was killing him to keep quiet. Michael continued: “We want to bring Steve back,” he said evenly. “This is not criticism of the job you’ve done; we are very appreciative of your hard work. But we think this is the right time, leading up to our twenty-fifth anniversary, to make a change. You have a party to throw, there’s a lot to do. You’re doing great with the advertising department. We want you to be the publisher; we know you are going to be a success.” Nice words, I suppose, but it hurt. Something I loved was being taken away from me.
I had been foolish to think that I could do it all—it was running me ragged, working late and on weekends, trying to keep a hundred balls in the air—but the magazine was looking and selling better than it had in years. My idea, though, would have been to let me loose on the editorial side, the job I had interviewed for in the first place. That was not going to happen. Once Michael broke the news, Hager was off his leash and he leaped on me like a famished tiger.
“High Times is not notorious. Dude, that is so negative. We should be like a family magazine.”
I have a lot of difficulty thinking about High Times as a family magazine. I offered this: “Since we started running ‘The Most Notorious Magazine’ line, sales are up. From the very first issue.”
Michael cross-examined: “Mike, do you think that’s the reason we’re selling more?”
“There would be no way to prove that. But it sure as hell didn’t hurt. We were right about Ozzy, Steve. We’ve got to get this magazine out of the sixties. For chrissake, High Times didn’t even exist in the sixties.”
Michael watched us, waiting for Hager’s response. The colors in Hager’s face were intensifying. He was beginning to look like one of his tie-dyed T-shirts. Finally, out of the dark recesses of his brain, where apparently his frustration with me had been bubbling violently for months, he belted, “YOU CAN’T BE THE EDITOR OF HIGH TIMES. YOU DON’T EVEN LIKE THE BEATLES.”
There is no way that Michael, who had endured enough lunacy for a lifetime, could have seen that coming. I certainly didn’t. He looked at me with a raised eyebrow.
“What the fuck has that got to do with anything? I have to like the Beatles to have this job? Who’s the fascist now?” I took a beat and calmly reasoned with Michael: “I don’t hate everything they’ve ever done, but I think Sgt. Pepper was a mistake. ‘When I’m Sixty Four’? You know, it’s just not good music.” Michael shrugged congenially. It would have been a hard case to argue against. But Steve wasn’t having any part of it.
“You will never be the alpha dog here,” he growled. I was becoming very uncomfortable in that room. Hager was prone to drama, and I guess his time spent as the commandant at Doggie Village had really gone to his head.
Back at the office, it was up to me to make the announcement that Hager would be back as editor in chief. “Meet the new boss,” I said. “Same as the old boss.”
I saw some happy faces, but also a lot that were terrified of Hager’s dopehead despotism. He was like one of the apes at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, except that, given the chance to toss his bone into the sky and elegantly usher in a gigantic evolutionary leap, he chose to take that bone and club the living shit out of the monkey sitting next to him. Once, he had been a visionary. Now he was just a bully.
The transformation was complete: he had morphed hideously from the mellow marijuana idealist into a sanctimonious creep who didn’t run a magazine so much as he did a glassy-eyed auto-theocracy.
There was no talking to the guy. He insisted on being called Phoenix and would babble on incoherently about CIA plots, stoner reality shows he was going to make millions from, and his dream of moving the High Times office to Woodstock.
Hager’s first move was to strip off my tagline and replace it with the impossibly flaccid “Celebrating the Counterculture.” The younger staffers groaned. He was moving in reverse, repositioning the brand without consideration for market viability, contemporary tastes, or how stupid it sounded.
Hager was obsessed with the word “counterculture,” and even the most timid of the editors was sick of his myopic definition of it. It was suggested to him that the counterculture didn’t end in 1970, the sixties ended in 1970. At one meeting convened expressly to discuss the highlights of said counterculture, Hager shot down every idea that managed to percolate its way up through the editorial staff. And there were some good ones after the Beatles called it quits: the eighties Do It Yourself grassroots punk movement that had been even more politically pointed than its predecessors, the empowerment of the DJ, the rise of designer drugs, the advent of raves as the new “happenings,” and the new wave of grunge music that had exploded out of Seattle. When Nirvana knocked Michael Jackson off the Billboard No. 1 spot, surely that was a great victory for the counterculture: FLANNEL SHIRT–WEARING DOPEHEADS WITH ELECTRIC GUITARS OVERTHROW THE ESTABLISHMENT AND CHANGE MUSIC HISTORY FOREVER.
“Nah,” Hager said. “We’re not going to do any of that. Anyway, our readers don’t like punk.”
Never mind High Times’s radical rock ’n’ roll past, this bit of doper dogma was glommed from the failure of 1997’s “Pot and Punk” issue, which stands up as one of the most ridiculous
covers in the history of the magazine—of any magazine—Pancho Villa and the wooden shoe filled with pot notwithstanding.
Picture this: a disenfranchised youth, head shaved, looking off into the No Future with a pile of buds on his dome, artfully arranged to look like a bright green marijuana Mohawk. Even if you had no idea how High Times readers felt about punk rock in general, you could be sure that they didn’t want to look at a picture of an ugly dude with pot balanced on his head. But that was Hager’s High Times, a binary system—you were with him or you were agin’ him. Dissent was not permitted.
Somehow, through all of this and after much lobbying, I managed to score a cherry assignment: for the annual High Times travel special, I was to go to Spain to write a long feature story about the pot culture that was blossoming there. Who better than I to report on the Spanish drug scene?
Pot and hashish were decriminalized and smoked everywhere in Spain. Bars were often choked with the smell of the omnipresent Moroccan black. But now, for the first time, high-grade homegrown marijuana was becoming popular. My friends there who knew about my gig at High Times were constantly sending me spectacular pictures of their grow rooms.
It seemed as if every town had a cannabis boutique that went far beyond the pipe-peddling head shops of the past, specializing in setups for closet farms that could harvest ounces of sticky buds. Dutch seed companies specializing in superior strains like Northern Lights, Blueberry, and White Widow were reporting booming sales in Spain. There was even a successful reefer magazine, a High Times knockoff, riding the trend.
I took off for the trip with plans for a no-stone-left-unturned campaign to interview everyone from shop owners to growers, from hardcore activists to stoners in the street, and, of course, a powwow with the editors of the new Spanish pot mag. My article would be comprehensive and describe not just the relative quality and prices of the standard-issue hash and the new marijuana, but would place the phenomenon in the historical context of a country that had a dictator until 1975. Their cultural revolution hadn’t even begun until the 1980s. The scene was exploding.
I was in Spain for seven days. Jorge Cervantes, the High Times cultivation expert and columnist, was living in Barcelona at the time. He is an incredibly nice guy and a botanist of no small ability. He introduced me to some key people, and through my own contacts and ability to prattle in the local language, I met a dozen more. I saw spectacular indoor grow operations and an outdoor pot farm in the mountains of Catalunya. Every day I hit the pavement. I shot twelve rolls of film, pictures of buds as well as the new guard of Spanish hippies and stoners—and some very pretty girls in fields of weed. I worked my ass off and came back with the goods.
After a hard week of writing late into the night, when I wasn’t busy doing publisher stuff, I had just about completed the story when Hager stopped by my office and casually told me not to bother, they weren’t going to use it. “Yeah, just give me a couple of paragraphs. It’s only gonna be half a page.”
I was livid. What the fuck had I been doing in Spain, running all over the country for a week chasing potheads, when I could have spent my afternoons chasing tapas and chicas instead? Never mind that it had cost the company several thousand dollars to get what they could have had for free—I could have stayed in New York and coughed up half a page with just a few phone calls. This was just passive-aggressive bullshit, Hager’s way of pissing on me. Still, I respectfully asked him to read my story and look at some pictures before he made any decision to kill it. Presumably, he had sent me there for a reason—it was an awfully expensive way to get me out of the office for a week, and I had worked my ass off. I set the bar high and brought home the best story of its type.
“No,” he told me. “I already made up my mind. You got a problem with that?”
“You don’t even want to look at it? Even on the off chance that it might be good for the magazine? I’ve spent a week writing it. It’s great stuff—it is very exciting what’s happening there now.”
“Oh,” he said, in a tone so patronizing that I knew I was about to get hosed with dull wit. But there was no way to anticipate the full meltdown I was about to witness. “So YOU’RE upset? YOU got to go to Spain. And now you’re mad at ME??! Well, I guess I’m a bad doggie!” At which point he grabbed himself by the seat of his pants with one hand and began spanking himself with the other.
Again with the dogs. I had never seen a grown man behave like this before, except possibly John Cleese in an old episode of Fawlty Towers. Hager paraded himself around the room like that, spanking himself and hopping around, the whole time yelling “Bad doggie! Bad doggie! Edison gets to go to Spain, but I’m the bad doggie!”
I was at a loss for words. I felt kind of sad for him, actually. Something really terrible must have happened back in Doggie Village.
I watched him carry on for a few minutes, until I could not possibly bear it any longer.
“Steve,” I finally said, “get the fuck out of my office.”
16
BRUTUS WAS RIGHT
Men should never wear open-toed shoes. It is always a mistake. The last guy who did it successfully was Jesus Christ. The year after He died, trendy Romans were already declaring them sooo last millennium. All the fashion-forward Citizens of the Empire knew it. Unfortunately, Julius Caesar was never that hip, matching his primitive Birkenstocks with a bedsheet and accessorizing with a bunch of leaves and branches on his head. It is no wonder he was stabbed by the much more style-conscious Brutus. I would have done it myself given half a chance.
I reckon that someone with as much antipathy for the male sandal as I have should never have accepted a job at High Times, where the perennial summer footwear is some kind of hemp rope and straw contraption that would have been out of date in an Italian vineyard two thousand years ago. But you take the bad with the good. All I could do to bring these folks out of the wilderness was lead by example in my Chuck Taylor high-tops.
A great victory for the Cause came in the form of a U.S. government–commissioned study about pot that concluded that “marijuana is not a gateway drug”; that it was not particularly addictive (if they had stopped by the High Times office, they might have come to a different conclusion); that it had medicinal value; that it was not as dangerous as commonly used drugs like Prozac or Viagra, not to mention alcohol and tobacco—which, they wrote, were gateway drugs— nor did it have their same potential for abuse. The report said without ambiguity that everything the government has been telling us about pot was a lie.
Naturally, the very moment the report came out (officially titled Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base), assholes like “Drug Czar” Barry McCaffrey started back-stepping and demanding more research, denouncing the very report that his office, specifically the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, had sponsored. We’d seen this before: in 1972 Nixon asked for a report on pot, and when it came back saying that “neither the marihuana user nor the drug itself can be said to constitute a danger to public safety”—and advising that marijuana ought to be at least decriminalized, because turning young people into convicts was a lot worse than having them experiment with pot and letting them grow out of it naturally—he threw it in the trash without reading it, started the War on Drugs, and, unfazed by the momentary interruption, went back to compiling his enemies list.
I called my friend Gretchen at the New York Post to see if they were going to be doing an article on it and who the reporter might be. I definitely wanted High Times to be part of the story. For a change, we had won some bragging rights.
Things worked out better than I could have imagined. Gretchen, who at the time was the photo editor, said that if we could come up with the right image and get it to them immediately, the story might make the cover and High Times would get the photo credit.
I went straight to the Design Dude and asked him what we had in the way of archival shots of iconographic pot leaves—the classic, in-your-face, seven-leaved pot plant that had been the
proud emblem of pot smokers everywhere and the inspiration for T-shirts, stickers, and cheap-looking silver jewelry since the advent of the head shop. If we moved quickly, I told him, we could own the cover of the Post.
This is what I got: “Dude, I’m kinda busy. I’ll check later.”
“No, not later, now.”
Damn, I hated having to be the Boss, but self-important slacker hopheads like the Design Dude forced my hand every goddam time. I was really getting sick of this bullshit. If I had asked him to come to my office to check out a pile of new weed for the centerfold, he would have jumped out of his chair like a mutherfucking bunny rabbit. “News” isn’t sexy, but it is how we win the minds of the public, and this was the best shot—the only shot—we would enjoy for a long time. We were not going to miss this opportunity.
After he made it clear that I was annoying him, he gave me the photo, which had been sitting on his desk the whole time. I had the production department scan it, and I e-mailed it to the Post. About an hour later Gretchen called back and told me, “You’re in. You got the wood.”
“Wood” is newspaper slang for the cover.
Later that night I met Gretchen in a bar, and we waited for a messenger to bring us copies of the Post’s first edition. The Post prints several editions, the last one being the “Sports Final,” and depending on what happens during the night, sometimes the cover will change. We were hoping that our pot leaf would make it through until morning. Her cell phone rang. We were good. We’d be on every edition.
About an hour later a messenger came with the paper, fresh off the press. It was the prettiest thing I had ever seen, a giant pot leaf with the headline FEDS GO TO POT: FUROR OVER DRUG CZAR’S PRO-MARIJUANA STUDY. Rendered in a high-contrast silhouette, it could be seen from a mile away. It screamed marijuana. And along the side it said, “Photo courtesy High Times magazine.” Yes! Score one for the good guys.