Disclaimer: as before.
One time, back in the days when I was a travelling door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, we went to Prince George, British Columbia. Good thing somebody brought weed.
Prince George is an old logging town that grew into a small city, and occupied that perfect middle ground where it lacked both the excitement of Vancouver (and other cities) and the charm of all the little towns and villages where we did most of our work. We were there for a week or so.
It was only my second or third road trip, so I was still just getting the hang of it, and I was still basically a pretty innocent kid. In my two years of University before taking this job, I had smoked weed a total of two times, and had never really gotten stoned ("got stoned" for the British readers of this blog).
As luck would have it, a one-tripper that I remember almost nothing about except that she looked like a sitcom lesbian and brought a baggie of twiggy swag. Betcha didn't know how many different kinds of people end up as travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen for at least a road trip or two.
Our first night at the Prince George motel, Ms. Crewcut pulled out her baggie and rolled a big fat doobie. We passed it around and I enjoyed it, but once again wondered if there was something I was missing. After a little while, I was felling a little hungry, so I decided to go to the gas station down the road to get a little snack. It's when I got down to the street that I realised just how profoundly stoned I was. I couldn't wait to get back to the motel room to share the good news, but of course I really had to get that snack. Where was I? Oh yeah, snack! Where was I going again? Ooh, look at the pretty sky! Needless to say, it took some time before I made it back to the motel room with a full belly and ready to boast to all who would hear about just how stoned I was. My crewmates shook their heads at my puppy dog naivete.
By the end of our week in Prince George, I was an old hand at that whole weed-smoking thing. Just wait till I tell you about how we moved on to Andy Bailey's bong.
This is getting better and better.
ReplyDeleteReading "on the road" by jack kerouac and i thought of you, honey. Want to be a pressure cooker demonstrator?
ReplyDelete"Dean did the most ridiculous thing of his career the few days I was there. He got a job demonstrating a new kind of pressure cooker in the kitchens of homes. The salesman gave him piles of samples and pamphlets. The first day Dean was a hurricane of energy. I drove all over town with him as he made appointments. The idea was to get invited socially to a dinner party and then leap up and start demonstrating the pressure cooker. "Man," cried Dean excitedly, "this is even crazier than the time I worked for Sinah. Sinah sold encyclopedias in Oakland. Nobody could turn him down. He made long speeches, he jumped up and down, he laughed, he cried. One time we broke into an Okie house where everybody was getting ready to go to a funeral. Sinah got down on his knees and prayed for the deliverance of the deceased soul. All the Okies started crying. He sold a complete set of encyclopedias. He was the maddest guy in the world. I wonder where he is. We used to get next to pretty young daughters and feel them up in the kitchen. This afternoon I had the gonest housewife in her little kitchen-arm around her, demonstrating. Ah! Hmm! Wow!""
A pressure cooker demonstrator? Honey, I think you just gave me my new career path!
ReplyDelete