This one character jumps up onstage and takes the mic from the deejay. At first I think it’s a girl because there’s all this gray hair, and somebody calls her Abbie. But then I hear the voice and see the beard, and I know it’s a guy.
“Avoid all needle drugs,” he says into the microphone. “The only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon!”
Everybody howls. The guy with the microphone collapses into paroxysms of laughter.
“Maybe I should get some new material,” Abbie says when he recovers. “In any case, welcome to Growing High!”
Everybody cheers.
An old black man steps onstage. He wears these wicked cool bell-bottoms but has a tangled halo of ash-colored hair. He picks up the badass left-handed Fender Strat. I expect it to suck because he’s old, but he makes wild sounds with that thing, like he took lessons from The Edge or something. He starts singing about some kind of “Purpa Haze, all in my brain.”
Everything spins. At some point we’re talking to the Abbie guy. I try to explain about the boat, but it’s getting harder and harder to talk, and it all seems totally hilarious.
“It’s cool, man,” he says. “I want you to meet my friend Tim.”
A really old man with skin like paper, wearing a white lab coat, steps up out of the crowd. He’s holding a silver tray upon which are squares of what look like jello.
“Actually, it’s Dr. Leary,” the old man says. Sharp for an old guy.
“You’re probably wondering why we’re all here,” he says. “Myself, Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Hendrix, Miss Joplin.” And he rambles into this long-winded speech I only partially understand. It’s weird—I guess he thinks I should know who he is and who all these others are. So I smile and pretend to be impressed.
Evidently they were part of a group who did math or something. A counter culture, he calls them. Well, back in the ’70s some of them ran afoul of the government and had to fake their own deaths. They had to hide out for a few years until they started this farm, and they’ve been here ever since.
Now this fat old lady with wild silver hair and wearing a muumuu is on the stage singing in this really deep, gravelly voice: “I’m gonna show you, baby, that a woman can be tough. I want you to come on, come on, come on, come on and take it!” And I’m like, wow, who’d want to take that old lady?
“Old hippies don’t die, young man,” Tim says. “They just move to Ohio and grow weed.”
“Wow,” Esmerelda says. “You’re, like, really old.”
The three of us laugh. Old Tim seems to take it in stride.
“The military industrial complex believed Timothy Francis Leary departed this mortal coil in 1996,” he says. “I am ninety-four years old. Do you know the secret?”
We stare at him.
“LSD,” he says. “It allows you to think for yourself and question authority. Taken responsibly, it also gives the patient what has proven to be a longer life. That, of course, comes at a price. To me, each one of you resembles a large, anthropomorphic horned melon.” He holds out the tray. “Jello?” he asks.
We shake our heads and return to the party.
The floodlights and the Chinese lanterns make it seem like we’re all dancing inside this big pretty Christmas tree. Everybody is so nice—I don’t see an angry face anywhere. You know how at parties, some people dance woodenly, like they don’t really want to dance and they’re just doing it because they feel like they have to? That’s me, usually—actually, I’m usually not dancing at all. That doesn’t happen here. Everybody is really feeling the music. Some people look a little better than others—some people just look like they’re having seizures—but everybody is having a great time.
Esmerelda grabs me around the waist, and we rock back and forth to some ancient song with a kick-ass guitar. “Waterfall, nothing can harm me at all, my worries seem so very small with my waterfall . . .”
Esmerelda is a good head taller than me. My nose is at her throat. I’d also technically never slow danced with a girl before. Both of these things would ordinarily have been enough to make me have to pee, but for some reason, tonight, I don’t know, I just feel confident. I don’t care. I hold her close and let the light from the Chinese lanterns hug us.
“I was mean to you,” she says dreamily.
“Yeah?” I say. I’m laughing. Stop laughing, I tell myself, but I can’t.
“I shouldn’t have, like, dissed your rock ’n’ roll band, man,” she says. She stoops and puts her head on my shoulder.
“It’s okay,” I say. “Everything’s cool. Do you ever miss your mom?”
“Sometimes,” she says, “I keep meaning to go back to see her, but I just don’t have the time, you know?”
“Okay,” I say. “But I thought you said she sorta died.”
She tenses up. She lifts her head and shakes it. “I mean my, uh, adoptive mom,” she says. Fingers rub her eyes. “Winthrop, what’s up, man?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to bring you down.”
“No, I mean, what’s up with this place? Who are these people?”
I look at the dancing figures around me. A black guy with dreads and a pair of shades is slow dancing with a little old lady. “What? Everybody’s just having a good time . . .” I say.
Somebody coughs into the PA system. I turn and realize it’s Arthur. He’s smiling and holding onto a cup of something. “Hi everyone out there,” he says, not using his bullhorn. He smiles wide, and this choked little chirp whistles over the speakers.
“I just want to, you know, thank everybody here for all this and stuff. I only wish my friend Kang could be here to see you all. You’ve treated me and my friends—friends, everybody. That’s like a foreign word to me. Back home in Pennsylvania, I don’t have any friends. I’m such a loser. I don’t even go to a regular school—I get homeschooled. My parents are afraid to let me outside because of this problem I have, and even when I go out there all the other kids pick on me and stuff. I was surprised they let me go to the camp, but the old man said it was a special camp and that I was kind of expected to go and that I better not embarrass him. But that’s when I met that guy.” He points at me. “Winthrop, everybody. He’s just, well, he totally rules. Don’t let his height fool you. He took me under his wing and treated me like a real friend. And that beautiful girl there, Esmerelda, she did the same. And now I have friends in all of you!”
Everybody howls and claps.
“Okay, okay. I got a question for all of you. You see, during my homeschooling, my mom gave me this book, kind of like a—what do you call it—a reference book. It provides all this information about drugs. And I can kind of tell that maybe what’s making all this stuff here at your farm so beautiful tonight, from what I read about the affects of that drug cannabis, that it kind of feels a lot like that, you know? Like maybe we’re all really feeling what they call a big contact high? I think I can smell it, that campfire odor.”
The crowd cheers again.
“Yeah? Well, I was, that is to say we were, my friends and me—friends, everybody!—we were hoping that maybe we could buy some off you and stuff.”
Everyone laughs.
Arthur continues, “It’s not for us, you understand. But you see, a couple of our friends couldn’t be here tonight, and they’ve got this boat, and it’s really cool. It like runs on this stuff. Marijuana, I mean. Or something like it. And they’re stuck because they ran out. So maybe if you guys could maybe share some of your supply, then maybe we could help them out so they could get going again and stuff? Maybe?”
Abbie leaps to the stage. “Come on, people! What do you say? Let’s help the little brother out!”
* * *
Since it’s a warm, windy night, we sleep on the grass. When I wake up the next morning I notice the hills. The farmhouse is in the center of miles and miles of these rolling hills, which are covered with row upon row of what looks like green ferns. They’re everywhere on the horizon, all the way down to the top of the house and barn
and the spaces in between them.
That, Abbie explains to us, represents about 20 percent of the US government’s marijuana crop. It’s illegal for farmers to grow it in most states, Abbie tells us, but the feds continue to grow their own for research.
“In exchange for autonomy and immunity, we give them a percentage,” he says. He shakes his head. “The ’80s ruined this country. Everybody traded free love for tech stocks. I could have kept talking and let the Man put a bullet in my skull one day, but it wasn’t worth it. So they offered me a deal and I took it. Here, at least, we can be free.”
He smiles at me, like that incoherent blather is supposed to be profound. I find myself nodding along like I know what he’s talking about. The nice old guy who played the guitar—forget the last name, but he spelled Jimmy with one M and an I—makes more sense to me now.
“This whole place is built on shit,” he says. Every Tuesday night, the farmers burn their surplus. That leads to the kick-ass party.
I put on publicspeak and spill about how the Tamzene is being chased by those Green Police government goons, and Abbie immediately offers us all the weed we want and then some.
* * *
We hustle back to the boat.
“Abbie Hoffman says we can have all the weed we want!” I tell Kang, who is down in the hold changing Seabrook’s bandages.
Kang frowns at me. He turns to Arthur and moves his hands rapidly, but keeps his frown on my face.
Kang says you’re not allowed back on this boat unless you get rid of the acid, Arthur writes on his pad. Now suddenly Arthur can’t talk anymore. What’s with that?
“No,” I said. “Dr. Leary tried to get me to take that stuff, but I didn’t want to start seeing horned melons.”
Kang explains to us that marijuana and hemp aren’t the same thing. They’re both varieties of this plant called cannabis, and they’re both illegal. They also both contain this chemical called THC, which reacts with the stuff in the hemp cooker to burn hot enough to run the boat. So it’ll work just the same. In fact, marijuana burns a little hotter.
The Indian guides the boat up to the little harbor on the north side of the farm.
Well, Abbie Hoffman even trucks it over to the Tamzene for us, people, a big flatbed truckload of enough bricks of marijuana to keep all of Philadelphia stoned for a year. Beat that, Burton Trotsky.
Kang looks at Hoffman with an odd face.
Hoffman holds up two fingers. “Peace, man,” he says.
Kang shakes his head and shoves off.
My head feels like a wad of chewing gum, and I’m worried about whether or not the stuff we inhaled will stunt my growth. Esmerelda tells me that’s something called an old wives’ tale. I hope she’s right.
As for the Growing High farm, it seems sort of sad, you know? It’s a nice place, probably the nicest place I’ve ever been to. Back home in Philly you’re lucky if you get a “Fuck you” from somebody passing you in the street, but there, black, white, old, young—everybody dances with everybody else. Still, it isn’t love that makes you so cool at the farm, but some chemical that sends your mind away for a while. I wonder what the farmers would think of that place just a few miles upriver from them where all the trees have been cut down and all the animals are dying in the oil. They probably wouldn’t care at all.
Down in the cabin the Doctor looks really sick. His wound bled a lot during the night. Arthur, Esmerelda, and I don’t talk about leaving again.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
the doctor
I take the first shift looking after the doctor, which means Arthur and Esmerelda get to be alone on deck.
The doctor is in a lot of pain. Every now and then he moans or grumbles about something. Even though we don’t say it, we all know hospitals are out of the question because, if that is the five-oh following us, the Green Police would have Doctor Seabrook in about thirty seconds.
I’ve never sat with anybody this sick before. One of His Eminence’s favorite flicks is Bridge on the River Kwai, which came out a million years ago. There’s this one scene where an old British officer takes a bullet to the foot, then collapses and orders everybody to go on without him. His Eminence said he admired the bravery, so I guess that’s how sick people ought to be treated. He didn’t say anything when the rest of the soldiers picked him up and carried him along anyway.
Every now and then Seabrook comes to and says something, usually asks where we are on the river, and when I don’t know he tells me to go get Kang. By the time we come back he’s passed out again.
“Ohio,” I say this one time when he comes to.
He sighs and smiles up at me. He’s lying on his stomach, his cheek shoved into the bedding. “Thank you, Mr. Brubaker,” he says.
“How you feeling, Doctor?” I ask. “Does it hurt?”
He rolls his eyes.
I want to ask him about his wife, the one who died, but I remember how he was the last time the subject came up. I try on publicspeak again.
“So, uh, where did you get your degree?”
“My what?”
“Your degree. Your doctorate. Where did you go to school?”
“Why suddenly the curiosity, Mr. Brubaker?”
“I don’t know. I’m just curious, that’s all.”
“McMaster Divinity . . .”
“Wow. Is that a liberal arts college?” I ask.
“It’s a seminary.”
“I never . . . good school?”
“I thought so.”
There’s a long pause. He closes his eyes. I ask, “What’s your PhD in?”
“I don’t have one.”
“I don’t get it,” I say. “When did you . . . what are you a doctor of?”
He opens his eyes again. “Who told you I was a doctor, Mr. Brubaker?”
Well, the public relations video he showed me had dubbed him Doctor Marion Seabrook. He isn’t wearing a stethoscope and doesn’t have a degree pasted to the wall of the cabin, but . . . hell, there’s been doctors all over the place! “Well I—you did! You introduced yourself as Doctor Seabrook.”
“Doctor Seabrook. That’s my name.”
“But . . .”
Seabrook looks at me with eyes that are so sad, I feel horrible for having asked the question. “My middle name is Marion. My surname is Seabrook. My mother gave me the first name Doctor.”
“But . . . but you built this boat. You’re an expert on . . . on . . . energy and stuff . . .”
“I did, indeed, build this boat, and I am, in fact, an expert on energy and stuff. I am a man of science.”
Up until now, the had doctor looked just fine in a mortarboard and robes, but suddenly the wind of that comment blows him down to his skivvies.
Seabrook breaks the silence. “My mother thought the name would give me some dignity and self-respect,” he says. “Odd, isn’t it? She thought it would give me a leg up in life. She was sure of it.”
I think it would be cool to be named Doctor. Automatic nickname: Doc. His Eminence and the Moms named me after a character in a movie, although not a character that helped my self-esteem any. They could have named me something cool like Dixon Steele or Josey Wales or something. But no, they had to name me after Winthrop Paroo, the dorky little kid with a lisp Ron Howard played in The Music Man.
“It didn’t give you a leg up?”
“No,” Seabrook murmurs. “If you ever choose to have children, Mr. Brubaker, do not foist unrealistic expectations on them. I’m living proof.”
“Oh.”
He smiles uneasily. “Don’t get me wrong, her heart was in the right place.” He frowns again. “Her heart was always in the right place.”
“Well, why is it such a bad thing? I mean, I would think it would be nice being named Doctor. People would think . . .”
“People would think you were a doctor,” he says. “Yes, how wonderful that is. Let me ask you this—you just found out that I’m not who I say I am. Has your opinion of me changed in any way?”
I’m still thrown as to how someone who hasn’t studied for millennia could build a device like the Tamzene.
“You don’t have to answer,” Seabrook says. He sighs. “When I tell people my name, they’re always impressed at first, but then they find out the truth.”
“Well, why don’t you change it?” As soon as I turn eighteen, I’m going to jump into my Porsche, drive straight to the Philadelphia courthouse, and file the necessary forms to change my name to the ultracool Razor, the one I decided on after winnowing down a typewritten list of kick-ass monikers, which included Saber, Rifle, and Bubonic Plague.
“But your wife was a doctor, right?”
He closes his eyes again and begins to breathe heavily.
the flood
The river swells because there’s been a big rainstorm. We cruise past a town where it’s gone up over its banks—you can barely see the roofs of some of the houses, the water has gotten so high. Tires, chunks of wood, boxes, and furniture float in the water. People zip around the streets in little motorboats.
Kang has been hiding the Tamzene as best he can when we travel by day. We try to hug the bank farthest from the town and keep under the trees, but a man in a bass boat spots us and pulls up close.
“Thought you might have been supplies,” he says. Greasy brown hair is smeared all over his scalp, and a three-day beard peppers his cheeks. He looks more annoyed that we aren’t who he’s expecting than he does shocked by the weirdness of our boat. “This is the third storm like this we’ve had in the past six months. Each and every time the government always shows up about two days too late to be of any use. This one’s about it for me and mine—insurance has gone through the roof. Only thing left to do is pick up and head out of here. Hopefully someplace where there ain’t no water. Y’all best get someplace high and dry. They say that storm might turn back around this way.”
We thank him and keep moving downriver. Water stretches all the way out through the woods in some places, reflecting the trees and carrying small sheds and old tires that Kang either changes course to avoid or lets bounce off the hull.
We Are All Crew Page 14