This Might Get a Little Heavy

by Ralphie May

  I met Lahna and the babies on the concourse, and we all went through security together, no sweat. I kept an eye on the departure time displayed on the screen at our gate, and when we got safely inside the forty-five-minute window, I pulled out my wallet and did the math: twenty hours of travel divided by twelve-hour THC effectiveness equaled approximately one and a half THC strips. I peeled off a strip, then tore another one in half, and French-kissed those skunky bitches like we were at a seventh-grade dance.

  With two babies, Lahna and I preboarded. Because of my size and because I was the headliner, goddamnit, I was sitting in first class. Because she is a saint, Lahna was sitting with April and August a little farther back in Economy Plus. By the time we all got situated, the forty-five-minute fuse was burning close to zero.

  When the flight attendant handed me the first-class meal menu, I just handed it back to her. “Look, I do not need anything from you on this flight. I’ve had plenty of water and I’m about to fall asleep and really don’t want to be woken up. Send my food and ice cream sundae to my babies in the back.”

  This was my last clear memory.

  * * *

  I woke up to the sound of the landing gear screeching down on the tarmac in Honolulu. I started slowly getting it together, rubbing my eyes, asking people where we were—you know. the usual stuff. The flight attendants came through the first-class cabin returning coats to passengers. and one of them stopped at my row.

  “You were so funny!” she said.

  “Like … on TV?”

  “No, on the flight!”

  “Oh my God, what did I do?” Tightness filled my chest and panic rose in my voice. I was never much of a drinker, but I knew enough alcoholic comedians in my day to know the sound of a man who had no recollection of falling asleep and no clue that anything could have happened in the interim.

  “All right, you just did this one thing.…”

  Dammit, woman, I’m not a copilot, quit cockteasing me and spit it out! “What was it?”

  “Well, the pilot came over the PA system and announced we’d reached our cruising altitude at thirty-eight thousand feet, and you yelled, ‘Some of us are a little higher, nigger!’” Like every well-trained professional white woman I’ve met, she swallowed that last part and dropped the —er, but it did nothing to reduce the shock, because I knew how I said the N-word in my act and it was loud.

  “Oh my God. Do I need to apologize to some people?”

  A nice black couple were sitting across the aisle from me on their honeymoon. I thought for sure I’d committed a hate crime or something, but I guess the couple were dying laughing, and the man was taking pictures of me while I was passed out, so no apology was necessary.

  You know how on some flights the flight attendants come through the aisles with mints right after you land? On this flight, after they returned coats, the cabin crew handed out pineapple samples. That’s when I knew I had gotten retarded high because, holy shit, there is nothing better than pineapple when you’re stoned, and I could have overdosed on pleasure when the first bite of pineapple hit my lips.

  I zombie-walked off the plane and nearly forgot to wait for Lahna and the kids. I still didn’t know where I was. I was just following people. I couldn’t even read the sign for Guam correctly on the connections board because my eyes were tearing up I was so high. The same exact thing happened on the next flight. I drank some water, took a piss, gave the flight attendant the same speech about not being disturbed, passed out, and woke up on the tarmac in Guam.

  When we landed, I had Lahna and the kids go ahead while I went to the lavatory to straighten myself up a bit, wash my face, freshen up with a baby wipe, your basic whore’s bath. I felt as fresh and delightful as could be, which gave me enough mental clarity to realize I needed to flush the last of my THC strips before getting off the plane. I pulled out my wallet from my pants pocket and fished out the packet of strips. Holding them in my hand, I saw immediately how I got so fucked-up. Because I generate so much heat and pressure with my size, the THC strips had begun to meld to one another. No single strips were left in the pack anymore; they were all doubles and triples. So when I did the math at the gate in Los Angeles and took one and a half strips to last me the entirety of the trip, I had really taken anywhere from three to four strips. That would get a blue whale high.

  Even though Guam is a US territory, everybody who passes through there has to clear customs, including American citizens. Lahna was waiting for me at the bottom of the escalator that fed into the customs arrival area.

  “Do you have anything?” she said.

  “Uh, my backpack.”

  “No. Drugs,” she whispered.

  Drugs were the furthest thing from my mind in that moment. I’d just passed an amnesty box, two bathrooms, and multiple trash cans on the way down from the gate, and I was feeling all proud because I’d remembered to ditch the THC strips in the plane toilet. I assured her that, no, I’d left everything I had in my car in Los Angeles.

  “Are you sure? Because there are drug-sniffing dogs everywhere.”

  “Aww, where are the doggies?” I didn’t even engage with the drug talk from Lahna, that’s how sure I was. Plus I hadn’t seen our bulldog, Hoochie Mama, in weeks, so I was happy to see some cute dogs.

  Lahna was sufficiently convinced, and we made our way through passport control into baggage claim. Right away I saw this beautiful shepherd mix, a little girl, and I whistled to call her over: “Come here, baby.”

  She was smelling a pile of luggage, doing her job like a good little girl, so I went eighty feet out of my way to go over and pet her. When she saw me, she sat right down.

  “What a sweet little pup. You need some love, don’t you? I bet nobody pets you or hugs you, do they?” She was so cute, I was sure all she wanted was a little ear rub. “You’re a good doggy, yes, you are, you’re a pretty girl.”

  Forty feet away I saw another dog and motioned for it to come over too. “Come on over here and get you some of this love!” This one, a boy, came right over and sat down, just like his sister. Obviously they weren’t siblings, they were entirely different breeds, but in my mind because they were so good, they had to be related. I’m thinking, These dogs really get it, I’m a dog lover. They know I love them. THEY GET IT!

  To the uninitiated, like me, the assumption is that a drug dog will go nuts if it picks up a scent. It’ll start barking and scratching at a suitcase, or something like that. But that’s not how it goes at all. When they get a positive scent for drugs, they immediately sit.

  A few seconds later, the dogs’ handlers come over. Both pups are seated, and I’m petting them in between explaining my unique connection to the animals. “See, fellas, you just gotta know dogs. I’m a dog person and these dogs get that.”

  Meanwhile the handlers—otherwise known as US Customs and Border Protection officers—stood there stone silent, just letting me talk. They must have felt like they were in the twilight zone, or like someone was trying to punk them. In retrospect, I could only imagine the conversation the two of them were having just with their eyes:

  Agent 1: “Can you believe this guy?”

  Agent 2: “Nobody is this fucking stupid.”

  Agent 1: “How much weight do you think he has on him?”

  Agent 2: “I don’t know, but he probably smoked half of it already.”

  Finally the agents interrupted my snugglefest.

  “Sir, are you in possession of any illegal drugs or narcotics?” the girl-dog handler asked.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure you don’t have anything?”

  “No, absolutely not.”

  “Sir, is this your bag?” the other handler asked, motioning to my backpack.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Sir, could you please pick up your bag and bring it with you over to this separate lane for us?”

  Still, I wasn’t thinking anything of it. I looked over and saw Lahna with an expression on her face that sat somewhere be
tween “What’s going on, Ralphie?” and “You have to be fucking kidding me, Ralphie.” The handlers handed me off to another agent for screening.

  “Before I open this, do you have anything in here that I should know about?” the agent asked.

  “No. It’s great to be here in Guam.”

  “You don’t have anything in here at all?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You’re sure you don’t need to go to the bathroom before you come through here?”

  “Nope. I went to the bathroom on the plane. Feeling fresh!” I was starting to get confused. Was this one of those Asian local-custom things, where they just keep politely insisting until you agree to whatever they’re asking?

  “So when I open this bag, I’m not going to find anything in here, am I?” the agent asked more directly.

  “Oh, no. I had some weed in there, but I took it all out before the flight.”

  “Do I have your permission to open this bag?”

  “Of course you do.”

  * * *

  The agent opened my backpack and started his search. He took out some papers, then my headphones, then a book, then a sealed “smellproof” bag containing approximately one-half ounce of marijuana.2 Well, shit. I thought for sure I had cleared everything out of that backpack, but I guess I didn’t get it all.

  The agent held up the bag like he was lifting a bass out of a lake. Then he angled it toward the light so he could read the writing scribbled on the outside of the bag:

  “‘To: My nigga Ralphie. Love: Uncle Snoop’? What’s this?” the agent said, knowing full well what this was. Snoop’s weed must have found its way down to the very bottom of my bag on the drive from Stockton. I was caught dead to rights, so I decided to have a little fun with it while I sweated out my asshole from the humidity.

  “Just eyeballing it, Officer, that looks like about fourteen grams of killer weed to me, but honestly, if I was going to sell it to you, I’d tell you it was eighteen or nineteen grams because that’s how I roll.”

  “This looks like very high quality marijuana.”

  “Yeah, it’s really good shit. I wouldn’t open it if I were you. It’s the stinkiest weed I’ve ever smelled.” I was just trying to be helpful. Did he listen? Of course not.

  Within minutes the entire customs area smelled like someone had replaced all the water in the sprinkler system with the contents of an angry skunk’s anal scent gland … then started a fire. They had to switch on the negative airflow after that—the thing they use to clear hazardous chemical fumes so people don’t die.

  Another agent arrived shortly thereafter to assist, and that’s when they started tearing everything apart. From their conversation it was clear they were looking for seeds, which I guess is what they screen for most often down there to prevent growers coming in. (Oh, Guam, you’re so cute. No grower you’ll ever need to be worried about is importing seeds.) I tried explaining to them that they wouldn’t find any seeds in my possession, and if they did, it would be a miracle, because I don’t smoke anything with seeds. They weren’t interested in my explanation. By the end of it, this was the most offensive part of the whole encounter. Take me to jail, do whatever you have to do, fellas, but let me keep my dignity at least.

  Once they cleared all the pockets and removed the big stuff that they could see, they started shaking out the bag onto the table. A bunch of shake came out, plus some little tiny nugs of bubble hash. The THC value of really good weed is around 24 percent, but in that hash it was probably closer to 85–90 percent. If the weed was a 9mm bullet, the hash was double-aught buckshot. The agents were literally holding my bag upside down while weed kept continuously falling out. I probably had enough in there to get twenty-five people high as shit, and I didn’t even know I had it. It was all just in the bottom of the bag.

  The agents had a hard time believing I didn’t know any of that stuff was in the bag. I understood where they were coming from. When you’re a poor stoner you’re acutely aware of your weed stash and its whereabouts. No nug, no bud, no bit of keef, goes unaccounted for. But I wasn’t a poor stoner anymore. I was a rich stoner, and when you are a rich stoner every day is like Easter—you find random weed Easter eggs everywhere. If you’re really unorganized, you can lose more weed in a day than you used to smoke in a week when you were poor. Those are some uptown weed problems, let me tell you.

  The lieutenant in charge came over to the table just as the other agents finished shaking out my backpack and the marijuana shower stopped. He had the first agent hold the bag up, then took out a little club from his utility belt and gave the bag one last hard smack. A whole bunch more weed that had been lodged in the seams and crevices of the backpack fell out, along with a torn foil packet and what looked, at least to the agents based on their reactions, like large chunks and crumbs of hash. But the lieutenant and I knew better, and we both started laughing.

  Lord Jesus, this is such a fat-guy move: the torn foil packet was not some ingenious drug-storage method that contained the large crumbs of a brick of smuggled hash. It was the broken Mylar wrapper of a commercial-grade, American-manufactured toaster pastry. It was fucking Pop-Tarts. Fat-guy stoner that I was, I had grabbed it from the hotel’s complimentary breakfast buffet in Stockton the morning before and stuffed it into my backpack on my way out the door, thinking that it was a viable breakfast option for the road. In all the traveling over the previous twenty-four hours, the Pop-Tarts had gotten crushed at the bottom of the bag and the Mylar wrapper had torn open.

  The two agents began scrambling through what was now a sugary jigsaw puzzle, trying to distinguish between weed remnants and pastry crumbles. They actually thought I put weed in the Pop-Tarts.

  “Officers, why would I put marijuana in a Pop-Tart? In America people don’t eat those to get high, they eat them because they are high.” Besides, I’d heard that everyone in Guam smoked weed and it would be supereasy to score. Why would I bother packing any?

  The next thing I heard was “Mr. May, please come with us.”

  * * *

  A third agent, a big Samoan-looking dude, led me into an eight-by-eight-foot room off to the side of the customs area. It was all white, almost antiseptic. I had a bad feeling about this room. It felt like the kind of place where rights get violated. I walked through the door and was met by the handler of the shepherd mix who started this mess. He was putting on a latex glove.

  Oh, fuck, a strip search.

  In the moment, my primary concern wasn’t for me. When you’re a fat guy, there are no such thing as flattering, loose-fitting clothes. When you get dressed and walk outside, everyone knows exactly what shape you are. You don’t need to be a mentalist to envision the folds and the rolls.

  My concern was for the agent tasked with conducting the search. I had been sitting on planes for sixteen hours, breathing in that stale recycled air. I was in a car with leather seats for five hours before that. During the initial search of my bag, I’d been sweating like a nun in a cucumber farm. I tried to freshen up a little when I landed, but there was no getting around that I still stank. My titties smelled like vinegar. I had a nut sticking to a thigh, and I was in dire need of some powder. It was brutal.

  They made me strip everything off: shirt, pants, belt, shoes, all the way down to my underwear. Wisely, the agent started with my head and worked his way down. You do not want to start the night in Funkytown; you want to end it there and get out before the lights turn on.

  We started in total silence. When he got to feeling up my titties, he finally spoke. “Do not make any sudden movements.” He lifted my arms. Sudden movements? I haven’t made a sudden fucking movement since 1987, unless you count that time in ’96 when I tripped on the ice in Toronto at the comedy festival. What the fuck are you talking about “sudden movements”? Like I’m a ninja, like I’m going to pull a sword out from under my titty meat? Stop.

  When they didn’t find the katana scabbard I was using as an underwire full of drugs, I thought for
sure we were done. Wrong. The underwear had to go. That poor man who had to search my underwear. I caught him out of the corner of my eye examining the waistband. It seemed like my underwear went on forever.

  “Sorry, man, ain’t nothin’ brief about them things.”

  Apparently genital inspection is a different job in whatever union these agents were a part of, because the first agent stepped aside and the big Samoan motherfucker took over.

  “Turn and face the wall and place your palms against the wall.”

  Oh, God, this was about to go from strip search to chocolate-star search.

  “Listen, Officer, if we’re gonna go more than one knuckle deep here, can we at least get a little grease on that finger or something?”

  The first agent cracked, which I felt was a good sign, but the Samoan dude didn’t flinch. That got me good and scared. It was a small request, a courtesy more than anything else, since Samoans are not known for their thin, dainty features. He ran his finger along the entire length of the crack of my ass. Right at the butthole, he gave a little push, like he was pressing an elevator button, just to remind me I was alive, you know?

  Again, I assumed we were done. I mean, where else could drugs be hiding? Again, I was wrong. Fucking Magellan over here took his fingers straight down the Cape of Good Hope headed for my little horn of Africa, stopping just long enough to check my taint. There was nothing there—nothing anyone would want to smoke or sniff anyway.

  Then he grabbed my balls. Well, grabbed is too strong of a word. He took them gently into his hand like little baby bird eggs. If you were going to check out some dude’s balls for drugs or paraphernalia, how long do you think that would take? Three seconds? Not according to the Customs and Border Protection inspector’s manual, apparently. This guy needed much, much longer. He had my balls in his hand for a good twenty-five to thirty seconds. He gave them a nice slow roll, like they were Baoding balls that he was trying to make sing. I’ve picked ripe peaches that I’ve handled less softly than this Samoan handled my balls. It was actually quite professional. I think he could tell his extended inspection was getting a little uncomfortable for everyone in the room.