June 9, 2011

  • Irwin Ravin, the Sacred Herb, and Me

    In Anchorage in 1975, I had been using marijuana for less than a decade – with about a 3-year hiatus in that decade for jail time, prison and homeless, largely smokeless, poverty.  Until Charley moved in with me, I didn’t use it every day, even when I had it.  It was mostly for parties, for social occasions, for concerts, dances… not an everyday thing.  Living with Charley changed that pattern.  We smoked when we had smoke and did without when it was gone.

    (If you feel as if you’re coming in on the middle of a story, that’s because you are.  The immediate lead-in to this episode of my memoirs is HERE, and the right-hand column of my main page contains a narrative summary with links to all previous episodes.)

    The two 40-Watt fluorescent tubes in my living room plant alcove barely supported photosynthesis for a baby avocado tree, a few other little green things either purchased in 2″ pots or grown from fruit seeds, and half a dozen or so small marijuana plants grown in six-inch pots from seeds gleaned from Mexican dirt weed.  I didn’t know much about horticulture, but was reading books, learning how to care for plants.

    It was the time of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline construction boom.  Boomers had been coming to Alaska on the hope of finding high-paid jobs for several years before the actual construction started, making jobs and low-cost housing harder than ever to find.  Charley had the same talent I had for losing jobs or getting pissed off and quitting.  I had a decent, but low-paying, clerical job at Youth Employment Service when Charley’s job at Replacement Glass came to an end.  Not finding other work right away, he decided to try for a pipeline job.

    Before he had done his jail time, Charley had been a cabdriver and member of the Teamsters Union.  We scraped up enough money to get his Teamster’s membership reinstated, and he started going to the union hall every day for job calls.  My basement apartment was dank, dim, and cramped with the two of us and, being furnished and downtown in the Anchorage bowl, the rent was relatively high.  We found a cheaper, unfurnished place, called a “duplex,” actually just a house with a family living in an apartment in the basement, in suburban Peters Creek.

    Our furniture was sketchy, at best.  My big 3′ x 4′ mirrors were hung, one in the front room and one in my bedroom.  I made a bed by piling up several layers of foam carpet padding we found in a dumpster.  There were some built-in shelves and drawers, and we supplemented them with crates and planks.  For living room furniture we bought a camp bed: nylon stretched over a tubular aluminum frame, and hung up the rattan swinging settee I’d had in the basement apt. (The child in the photo is Shanda, daughter of my best friend, Mardy.)

    This is where Irwin Ravin comes in.  He was a lawyer, in partnership with Robert Wagstaff.  Both men were dope smokers and decided to challenge the constitutionality of the state’s marijuana laws.  Alaska’s constitution guarantees our right to privacy, and that was the grounds for their challenge.

    The late Mr. Ravin, my hero and the hero of just about everybody I knew at the time, set himself up to be busted for pot possession.  He drove around with a baggie of weed in his pocket and a broken taillight on his car.  When he was stopped for the equipment violation, he refused to sign the citation, which got him taken to jail, searched, and busted for possession.

    His partner, Bob Wagstaff, represented him, and they won!  Private possession then was technically legal in Alaska, and stoners were so giddy with the joy of it that there was an awful lot of public smoking going on.  I’ll have more to say about that later, but for now I’m sticking to my chronology here.

    Charley went to work driving a belly dump truck at Pump Station 8 on the pipeline.  We splurged on an 8-foot fluorescent fixture, and I potted my 5 wee plants up into 5-gallon buckets, the size of pot recommended in The Cultivator’s Handbook of Marijuana (first edition) for growing potted pot.  I lined them up under the lights, in the part of the kitchen intended for a dining table, nurtured them, talked to them, trimmed them carefully and gave them praise and thanks for what they gave us.

    Charley would fly out to the pump station for two weeks of work and come back for a week off.  I continued the commute across Anchorage from Peters Creek out east of town, to the YES office in Spenard in west Anchorage.  One sunny summer day when Charley had just gotten in from Pump 8, the landlord knocked at the door.  He’d been watching for us, and left his house headed for ours when he saw us drive past.

    He gave us an eviction notice.  “Why?” we asked.  “You’re growing mary-jew-wanna in here,” he said.  “But it’s LEGAL!” we protested.  He explained that our place shared a common ventilation system with the apartment downstairs and our neighbors down there were worried about the health of their children, breathing our smoke.

    I looked at Charley, and saw him looking back at me.  I was no Irwin Ravin, willing to sacrifice my freedom for this principle.  I’d already done time in Oregon for simple possession of less than an ounce of Cannabis — spent about seventeen months locked up, out of a 3-year sentence.  Charley was only recently out of jail on parole after serving six years of a ten-year sentence.  (Details of this are HERE, the same link as the “cabdriver” one above.)

    We gave up without a fight, and with 30 days to vacate the premises, started looking for someplace to go.

    CONTINUED HERE.

    Think of me as a street performer, a storyteller with a battered old hat at my feet.  If you like my stories, and especially if you’d like to see them illustrated with the photos I am unable to scan because I can’t afford to replace my old broken scanner, please donate a little something.  The hat is a link to PayPal.


Comments (5)

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