I Have Fun Everywhere I Go

by Mike Edison

  This was a huge coup—we had basically manipulated the front page of a major metropolitan newspaper. I think the Provos and the Pranksters would have been proud, but back at the office, our success was greeted with the usual lassitude. The Design Dude complained that the photo credit was too small.

  But Michael Kennedy got it. The Post with our pot leaf was everywhere. You could not walk down a street in New York City without seeing it. He called right away. “Congratulations, Mike. How the hell did you do that?”

  “I still have a few friends left,” I told him.

  “Don’t worry,” he assured me. “Stay the course.”

  The timing of the Post cover could not have been better. That was the day I was scheduled to be a guest on Al Goldstein’s Screw spin-off TV show, Midnight Blue.

  Midnight Blue was a staple on New York cable television. It was on several times a week at midnight and was seen by a surprisingly large audience, a silent majority who would never cop to watching smut on television. It did not hurt that the advertisements—so numerous they threatened to overwhelm the actual program—were lurid X-rated teasers for “escort services” catering to every possible racial proclivity. Anyone channel surfing after midnight was likely to stop and gawk, at least for a few salacious moments. Between the graphic come-ons for hookers and phone-sex lines, Al would rant and rave, jiggling like a hastily constructed marionette whose strings were being pulled by a palsy victim, tearing into politicians and celebrities with an incredibly foulmouthed stream of venom and humor. It had turned him into a popular cult figure in New York. Every time he opened his mouth, it was a lawsuit waiting to happen.

  Al had been asking me to come on the show for some time, and I had been looking forward to it. It was damn fine luck that the day we were taping, I had a prop as good as the Post with our pot leaf on it. And I brought the Pot Star with me—if he was going to be the face of High Times’s future, I wanted him to get used to being on television.

  Pot Star looked fabulous in a gold lamé Oriental smoking jacket and outsize rose-colored sunglasses, like the psychedelic kingpin of an intergalactic drug cartel. With his dreads tied back behind his head and sticking out every which way, he was an outer-space acid guru preaching the gospel of High Times. And Al was a gentleman. Just back from Amsterdam, where he had been a guest of High Times at our Cannabis Cup event—where awards were handed out for the best strains of marijuana—he put his sewer mouth in park and demurred to Pot Star’s expertise. “I can’t distinguish the high between Purple Haze and White Shark,” he asked, uncharacteristically humble. “Am I unsophisticated?”

  “It’s hard to tell the subtle differences. It takes a certain palate to discriminate,” Pot Star told him, playing the connoisseur card. “You can stick your nose in the bag and smell it and check the density of the buds, see if they’re too dry or too wet, or not cured properly, which leaves it with a leafy taste . . . The problem is people give you pot and you’re walking around with a trash bag full of weed, and you smoke thirty joints a day . . . I wake up in the morning, and the first thing I do is take a few bong hits, and then I go to work. I smoke all day long. I’m constantly stoned.”

  Between every segment there was a bumper cut from Reefer Madness, shots of American flags, fishbowls filled with bright green pot, gardens, indoor grow rooms, and a montage of Amsterdam coffee shops and marijuana rallies in Washington Square Park. Our Web address flashed on the screen repeatedly while Peter Tosh sang “Legalize It.” It was like science fiction, a TV ad from an advanced civilization where pot was legal. And it looked a fuck of a lot better than anything that had ever come out of the High Times video department.

  I spoke about how High Times reached a wide diversity of marijuana enthusiasts. Pot Star gave good advice about beating a drug test (if you can’t stop taking drugs, drink tons of water and never give your first morning’s urine). Al talked about how he uses pot to slow time when he’s having sex. And then we showed off our pot leaf on the cover of the Post, and the Jews did their shtick:

  AL: Today is a great day. Look at the cover of the Post.

  ME: When the Post wants pot, they come to us . . .

  AL: You guys have been right all along. The government is as full of shit about drugs as they are about masturbation.

  ME: So, Al, does masturbation lead to harder stuff? Does it lead to fucking?

  AL: Not in your case.

  After that bit of vaudeville, Pot Star demonstrated his joint-rolling prowess and twisted a banana-size hooter, which we smoked like Hopper, Fonda, and Nicholson sitting around the campfire in Easy Rider. Al looked right into the camera and delivered the coup de grâce: “Mayor Giuliani, you piece-of-shit scumbag, I hate your fucking guts. I’m gonna smoke this joint—it is an illegal act. Fuck you.”

  Don’t forget that before 9/11—when he somehow seemed to be everywhere at once, shining with an uncharacteristically empathetic presence (and before he shed the last vestige of humility and decency and turned himself into an international celebrity, and the terrorist attack into a profit stream, by exaggerating beyond the pale what his actual leadership role was, earning the ire of cops, who already hated him for greedily taking all the credit for lowering New York crime stats, and the firemen, who wanted nothing to do with him after he began promoting his political future by shamelessly glomming on to their glory and tragedy)—he had already overstayed his welcome by showing his true colors as an unapologetic prig and power-mad megalomaniac. He was convinced that government had the right to silence its critics—he made a ludicrous attempt at banning protests from the steps of City Hall; his administration withheld public information from journalists; repeatedly refused permits for demonstrations (and was repeatedly ordered by the courts to issue them); and vainly and illegally slapped gag orders on cops and city employees critical of it. Eventually the Giuliani administration lost thirty-five First Amendment cases brought against the city. Few people in American history have held so much contempt for Freedom of Speech.

  The most famous of these cases was his attempt to evict the Brooklyn Museum from its premises, claiming that it had no right to exhibit “offensive art”—in this case Chris Ofili’s painting The Holy Virgin Mary, which used elephant dung within the composition, a reference to traditional African rituals and materials. (Incidentally, in the same exhibition, Ofili had another work with the names of Cassius Clay, James Brown, Miles Davis, and Diana Ross written on clumps of the very same stuff, and no one seemed to mind.)

  Giuliani took the position that He as Mayor had the authority to decide what could be shown in the city’s museums. (Incredibly, he never actually saw the painting; he had only heard about it secondhand.) He went so far as to create a “decency committee,” much like the Reich Chamber of Culture, whose job it was to suppress “degenerate modern art” under the Nazis, or the Taliban’s Agents for the Preservation of Virtue and Elimination of Vice. Both the state supreme court and the appellate court hammered Giuliani as a tyrant. He was the most recent in a long line of Republican hypocrites trying to legislate morality, and much hated for his efforts. The stick up his ass was costing taxpayers millions of dollars in frivolous lawsuits.

  It did not help his deluded posturing as a vessel of Catholic virtue and family values that he literally paraded his mistress around New York while he was still married (he took her as his date to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, an act so crass that the Daily News said it was like “groping in the window at Macy’s”). He only later informed his wife (his second) of his intention to separate from her—at a public press conference. She sued him for divorce, citing adultery.

  Our interview with Al lasted forty minutes, but each week they showed only one five-minute blast of us between the hooker ads, so it took two months to show the whole thing. Since Midnight Blue ran the same show twice a week, we were pretty much saturating the late-night sleaze market. It seemed that everyone had caught at least a glimpse of it. During its eight-week run, I could not walk anywhere in Manhattan
without someone stopping me to shake my hand.

  And we were the cover story of Screw that week, a vividly executed Peter Max–style celebration of the weed, illustrated by regular High Times contributing artist Steve Marcus. Inside, the best parts of our interview had become a feature story, along with photos of Pot Star, Al, and me toking and mugging for the camera with the front page of the Post. The cover of a recent issue of High Times was reprinted, along with our Web address and a poster for our twenty-fifth-anniversary bash. At the time, Screw circulation was fifty thousand a week.

  One might think that for this groundswell of good vibes and an act of televised civil disobedience in the face of a common foe—Giuliani was also arresting pot smokers at an unprecedented pace, to “run them through the system,” and had become the sworn enemy of anarchists, punks, hippies, liberal intellectuals, and civil libertarians—we would have been treated as conquering heroes.

  Instead, I caught the full force of a verbal shit storm from the Marketing Witch, who had seen this as some kind of opportunity to bury me once and for all.

  “You’re disgusting,” she barked. “How can you go on that show with that pig? Why did you have to bring Pot Star?” She liked Pot Star. We all did; he was the company freak. He had just boasted on television that he smoked thirty joints a day, but somehow I was corrupting him.

  In fact, Al Goldstein had been a longtime friend of High Times; not only had he just returned from the Cannabis Cup, where he was a VIP, but his picture was featured in our coverage of the event. If the Marketing Witch had bothered to look inside the magazine she was responsible for selling, she might have known that. Actually, if she knew anything at all about High Times, she certainly would have known that in the 1980s Al was proudly listed on the our masthead as a contributing editor, and he occasionally wrote the magazine’s long-running Sex column, where he would alternately whine about his “small Jewish dick” and brag about his “storybook sexual encounters.” Not atypical of these adventures: “I was on a Greyhound bus headed to see Barry White at the Westchester Premiere Theater. My young female companion led me down the aisle bisecting the bus’s marijuana-saturated interior to the little bathroom in back. There, while bumping from side to side, my young lady friend proceeded to suck me off, doing a wonderful juggling act as my balls bounced off her chin and smacked against her nose.”

  Back in those days, no one shied away from the ribald and the ridiculous. Mick Jagger even got in on the act, jokingly offering to fellate Tom Petty in a famous 1980 interview.

  HIGH TIMES: Tom Petty gets up there and just stands there and just sings his songs . . . he emanates sex and has a lot of charisma by just standing there.

  MICK JAGGER: I know what you mean. I’d suck his cock afterwards.

  But over the years the tie-dyed revisionism and hophead hypocrisy that had become the hallmark of corporate hippiedom had infected every level of the High Times hierarchy. So outraged was the Marketing Witch that I was dragging our dope magazine into the gutter with Al that she went so far as to call Michael Kennedy to complain about the show and to let him know that I “kept pornography” in my office. This new drama mushroomed until I was accused of creating an “uncomfortable work environment.”

  This was no joke, it was a potential sexual harassment case, and Michael treated it with the appropriate gravity. No matter the motives or veracity of the accusation, Michael had no choice but to have a sit-down with me and Wanda, the acting human resources officer. A complaint had been made, and they needed a record of it to show that it had been taken seriously and dealt with accordingly.

  I was aghast. It was astonishing how low the Marketing Witch would stoop. This was not some catty junior high school feud; it could quickly turn into a lawsuit.

  It did not make me feel any better that Wanda, with whom I had tangled since taking the job, was there in a potentially decision-making capacity, but she put any personal feelings she held toward me aside and handled this with the utmost of professionalism and discretion, for which I was grateful. The Marketing Witch, however, knew nothing from such virtues, and as I walked down the hall past her office to Wanda’s, where I was presumably being called to the gallows, she cackled at me, “You’re gone.”

  There was no way to combat her vitriol without really stepping in the shit and making it worse for myself. But I didn’t want to fight back. There was absolutely no way I was going to take that bait. For all of my shortcomings, which are vast, I have always strived to comport myself professionally. Michael Kennedy agreed. “I cannot imagine you behaving inappropriately,” he told me.

  I was particularly aware of gender politics and the rules that governed the workplace, because I had worked for adult magazines, not in spite of it. At Drake we had many more women on staff than there ever were at High Times. (Aside from the managing editor, who worked in strictly a functionary position trafficking everyone else’s stories, Hager never hired female editors.) Working for a sexually explicit magazine, one had to be especially aware of and courteous to female coworkers, and even in such a highly charged environment, we never had any problems.

  “We publish a very adult magazine,” I suggested to Michael. “I would expect people here to be sophisticated and mature enough to handle all sorts of free speech.” I was not being glib. I could not have been more serious. “And I would never have anything of a blatantly sexual nature in plain sight in my office,” I added. “It’s not my style, and besides, I know better.”

  Michael nodded but didn’t say anything. Wanda, too, was mostly silent. Michael asked me what sort of pornography I had in my office. I showed him the copy of Screw that featured High Times. Far from any sexual images, the cover offered a goofy psychedelic painting of a fat guy smoking a doobie. It looked a lot like an outtake from Yellow Submarine, and it was absolutely relevant to our magazine. Actually, it could have easily been mistaken for the cover of our magazine. I also had a copy of Penthouse, their thirtieth anniversary issue, which we were looking at as we planned our twenty-fifth-anniversary issue. It, too, was absolutely germane to our work. In place of the traditional centerfold model, the cover was an elegant white, with a reproduction of their “gold key” logo. It was about as prurient as an ad for air freshener, and frankly, I have no idea why they even thought it would sell.

  Michael told me to put them out of sight and to stay out of the Marketing Witch’s way. He looked disgusted. I was asked to be discreet and not discuss this with anyone on the floor, but of course the Marketing Witch had already seen to that, blabbing to everyone. At the time, no one said anything to me directly (much later I would hear all about it), but I was getting a sympathetic vibe from a good part of the staff, who knew that a line had been crossed.

  I disobeyed Michael Kennedy for the first and only time and stuck my head in the Marketing Witch’s office. I wanted to apologize to her myself. “I’m sorry,” I told her, doing little to conceal my sarcasm. “When you are in charge of promoting a drug magazine, you don’t get to claim the moral high ground.”

  This was the bad time. Back at home, the curtain was about to come crashing down. There was no escape. Work, relationship—how could I have failed on such a Goliathan level? My friends told me that I cared too much. That I had to stop leading with my heart. No one else at High Times was as invested in the magazine—why should I be? It hadn’t occurred to me that one of my greatest assets could also be my greatest weakness.

  They told me I should ditch my girlfriend and move on, they could see I was unhappy. Of course they weren’t aware of what was really going on, what with the suicidal mornings and the subzero communication breakdowns. Naturally, _____ never wanted anyone to know about her precarious mental balancing act, and I always protected her.

  Bipolar disorder is a nasty disease. I know a lot of guys who would have headed for the hills and written her off as loony tunes, but despite the motocross course of emotions and high-wire acts of mania and depression, four years later, I was still gaga. I missed spending t
ime with her terribly. I couldn’t wait to get our romantic life back on track. I didn’t want to be with anyone else.

  All of the day-to-day drama and the demands of her juris doctor had taken a severe toll, but the worst thing, it turned out, was that as she gained self-confidence, she became so eager to be part of this new group at school and hook a blue-ribbon gig at a high-octane law firm that she betrayed her own values and the person who loved her most. She had become everything that she had hated when I met her: a cold-hearted opportunist, a careerist social climber.

  Law school and psychotherapy had robbed her of a soul. “I don’t feel anything,” she told me at the end. “I can’t. If I did, I’d never be able to do this.”

  When it came to graduation time, she sandbagged me, and viciously. A year before, she had said that she didn’t want to go to graduation; it didn’t jibe with her punk rock sensibility. It made sense—neither of us went in for all that pomp and circumstance. The plan was to escape together and take a deep breath.

  Somehow that plan changed. I got wind of it when she told me that her parents were coming for the ceremony.

  Her parents? What the fuck? For three years of law school they didn’t do shit for her, although her father was loaded. I even had to cosign her student loan. The only thing she ever got from her old man was vague warnings about New York City. Never mind that this was the guy whose idea of paternal sweet talk was to tell his daughter that she was never going to make it as a lawyer. Maybe that’s why she needed him there, to prove that she was on her way. Okay, I got that. I still had some unresolved issues with my father, who I felt never took me seriously, either.

  I told her I didn’t realize that she was even going to graduation. “Of course I am,” she told me. “Are you crazy? After all that, you don’t think I want to go and get my diploma?”