Reefer Madness

Disclaimer:  As I've mentioned before, not everything on this blog is exactly child-friendly.  Be warned.  Furthermore, I am in no way condoning and certainly not encouraging anybody to smoke pot.  That being said, I was a 21 year old university dropout at the time and . . . oh, what the heck, there are gonna be some pot stories on this blog, and here's the first one:

I'd venture a guess that if I were to ask a hundred people how much pot they think gets smoked on the road by travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen, as many would be shocked that it happens at all as would be shocked that it's not ubiquitous.  I'd say that of the dozen or so road trips I went on in my six months, there was weed on about half of them.  It mostly depended on the crew members of a given trip.  Some would be opposed, in which case nobody did any, some were cool with it, and then there were the potheads.

Like Andy Bailey.

Bet let's talk about Andy and his weed another time.  Today I'd like to tell you about Courtenay.  Courtenay isn't a person; it's a city on Vancouver Island where I went one time back in the days when I was a travelling door to door encyclopedia salesman.

I'd been on the job for a couple of months, and had smoked up with some of my crew mates two or three times by that point, as well as a total of two times in my two years of University before that.  That is to say, I was by no means a stoner, so when Andy Bailey said we were entering one of the "weed capitals" of Canada, I wasn't sure what that could mean.  To me, back in those innocent days, the idea of people nonchalantly and fearlessly smoking up with strangers was something out of a Cheech and Chong movie, not reality.

So there I was, knocking on doors in Courtenay, and as happens (not nearly often enough to make my time in the sales cult lucrative)  I got into the home of a young couple whose baby was sleeping upstairs.  I found them to be the perfect

(suckers)

customers: they were receptive to my pitch, not too poor, not too rich.  And it's a fairly long and involved pitch at that -- at least an hour, as much as two, to get a $2100 commitment at the end.  By about the half hour mark, I was feeling quite good about it, just rolling along, so to speak, when all of a sudden the husband pulled out a bag of weed and started rolling a joint right in front of me without saying a word, continuing to pay attention to my pitch, as though he were just taking a sip of coffee.

I was well and truly flabbergasted.  Nothing in my life had prepared me for this moment.  I made the conscious decision to pretend I didn't notice what he was doing (which was about as realistic as not noticing him throwing pebbles at my face) and continued my pitch, while trying to project onto him some sort of mental force field: "Don't spark it up!  Don't spark it up!"

Of course, it's not that I didn't like weed myself, or that my moral sensibilities were being compromised in some way.  (I can hear you laughing.  "Moral sensibilities?  From a travelling door to door encyclopedia salesman?"  Hardee har har.)  It's just that I was trying to make a living, that is to say trying to make a sale, and I couldn't imagine a couple of stoned customers deciding to make the commitment at the end.  So was I ever relieved when, after he had finished rolling the doobie, he set it down on the table beside him.

And there it stayed for about 5 minutes until, with the same nonchalance as when he rolled it, he picked it up and lit it.  He took a couple of puffs and passed it to his wife, who did the same.  All this time, my mind was racing (continuing to calmly pitch my "home educational library" all along) thinking to myself, "What are you gonna do if they pass it to you?  What are you gonna do if they pass it to you?"

Of course she passed it to me.  What kind of host would she be otherwise?

It was decision time.  They didn't cover this situation in training.

I took a big puff, and passed it back to the husband.  The

(elephant in the room)

joint made its rounds 2 or 3 times, never mentioned, almost invisible, as I continued pitching the product, and the couple kept nodding in all the right places.  But hoo-ee, was I ever stoned!  I felt I was floating somewhere near the ceiling as I pulled out poster after poster ("Now how much would you pay?  Wait!  Don't answer yet!  Just look what else you get!") working my way to the close.

Finally, I got to the end, which was almost anti-climactic.  When I asked for the sale, they agreed as though they had just been waiting for me to ask.  They signed on the dotted line, and I walked back to the motel room with a buzz, the happy expectation of a payday, and one hell of a story.

A Jew in St. Walburg

One time, back in the days when I was a travelling door to door encyclopedia salesman, I went to St. Walburg, a town of about 650 people in northern Saskatchewan.

Now, let me preface this by saying that I'm Jewish, but 16 years ago, when I was selling encyclopedias, I wasn't that Jewish, if you know what I mean.  I might have gone to synagogue once or twice a year, did something or other Jewish on some of the major holidays, but not much more than that.  But I certainly felt Jewish, and one Jewish thing I did every single day was to wear a silver Star of David necklace, and had been doing so for years.

But I'm no idiot.  When out in the rural areas of BC, Alberta, and Saskatchewan (not a lot of Jews out there), I kept the Star of David under my shirt.  Until, that is, I walked up to a door in St. Walburg and saw a mezuzah.

I must have stood there staring at it for a whole minute.  I hadn't seen the slightest hint of a Jewish presence in my 5 months (at that point) of encyclopedia sales in any town smaller than 200 thousand, much less 650 people.  My curiosity was almost palpable.  I had to know: what were Jews doing here?  And not just Jews, but Jews with a mezuzah, of all things, on their door!

Well, out came my Star of David, and I knocked on the door.  A kindly elderly gentleman came to the door.  I felt a small tinge of disappointment, since I wasn't going to make a sale that day.  (Our encyclopedia package was geared towards families with small kids.  More about that in a future post.)  But nevertheless, I had to satify my Jewish curiosity about these people.

So I got myself invited in, and the man's equally elderly wife made me some cocoa, and we all sat down to chat.  I didn't really know how to bring up my main question, so we just shot the breeze for a few minutes.  I was, however, getting the firm impression that they didn't exactly seem Jewish to me.  Finally, after all my pathetic attempts at steering the conversation towards Judaism failed, I just came out and said, "Pardon me for asking, but are you folks Jewish by any chance?"

"No," they said.  "Why do you ask?"

Why do I ask?  Why do they think??  "Well, you know that thing you have nailed to your doorpost?  With the Hebrew writing on it?  It's called a mezuzah, and it's usually just Jewish homes that have them."

"Oh, that!"  Yes, that.  "Well, our daughter was visiting the 'holy land' a few years ago, and someone sold it to her.  They said it was a good luck charm, and that we should put in on our doorpost."

Well, that's when I realised that the Jew in St. Walburg was just me after all.