Getting Stoned with John

Getting stoned with John Schlesinger was a bad, bad idea. I knew it would be a bad idea, but John and Mitch insisted, and it's not like I had any veto power. So we got stoned.

Now, John, who was an a**hole at the best of times, became nearly intolerable when his thin veil of self-control was removed by the weed he had smoked. His high pitched cackling laughter was increased in volume and frequency and his desire to piss people off grew beyond all reason.

We went driving to get some munchies and gas. Mitch was behind the wheel. This was not the first time I had ridden in a car driven by a stoned Mitch Clinton (in addition to Crazy Sheldon), and while I shudder at the insanity of it all with my 18 years of hindsight, at the time it didn't seem so strange. And while I'm sure his reaction time was impaired, to his credit, he certainly showed a reasonable level of attention and care to the road, to the pedestrians in his path, and to other drivers. John rode shotgun and I was in the back.

We were making a left turn at a 4-way stop sign with a pickup truck stopped opposite us going straight. As we were in the middle of the intersection directly in front of the pickup, without any warning John leaned over to the steering wheel, gave the horn an extended honk over Mitch's protestations, and to our horror put his other hand out the window and gave the pickup driver the finger. Yessir, flipped him the bird. Oh, and cackled like he had heard the funniest joke ever and was just gonna die. He held his belly and cackled and cackled.

The pickup driver apparently didn't think it was so funny, however. He decided that he didn't really want to go straight after all, and turned to follow us. Mitch was also unamused. "John, I am so pissed at you for doing that. It really shows disrespect for your friends  and makes me sorry I shared my weed with you. Plus, I am driving this f***ing car and you do NOT lean over into my space to f**k around and . . . oh s**t, that guy is following us now! You see what you did? F**k! Now I have to be the one to somehow defuse the situation. Thanks very f***ing much, John." The cackling died down a little, but didn't stop.

Mitch pulled into a deserted parking lot and got out of the car. The pickup pulled up behind us, and the driver got out too. The driver started with "What the f**k is this s**t? What are you f***ers trying to start with me?"

Mitch dialed up the charm and dialed down the ego in full salesman mode with "Look man, I am so sorry. It has nothing to do with me, and was totally nothing personal, you know? My boss is a real dick when he's drunk, and he leaned over and honked the horn and all that against my objections. I'm totally sorry, and I totally understand why you're pissed."

Mr. Pickup seemed somewhat mollified and let it go with "Well, you really need to watch out for that f***er. He's gonna get you all in some serious trouble some day."

And where was I this whole time? Sitting in the back, stoned, eyes wide, feeling like I had landed on a movie set or some parallel universe. Was this really my life?

I'm not interesting

Dear reader, thank you for your patience. Seven months of writer's block and crazy busy life have left my little blog neglected, but not forgotten. Hopefully, we'll be back to regular posting.

I may have mentioned in the past that travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen were not a very politically correct community. We had all sorts of stereotypes about different types of people (wealth, type of car, neighbourhood, and yes, race, gender, and country of origin) to try to model our sales pitch or even give up at the beginning to save time.

One of the groups that we tended to avoid was immigrants. Not always, especially if they seemed really friendly, but as a rule I guess if English wasn't their native language it was just too much of a communication barrier against forming a trusting repartee to make a successful pitch.

One of the interesting little bits of trivia I never noticed until Mitch pointed it out to me was how different immigrants would tell you at the door that they weren't interested.

Not being interested was a very common situation for travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen to be faced with. A significant majority of the doors we would knock on would simply end with "I'm not interested" and there would be nothing you could do, especially if they closed the door after saying it. Not that I'd give up, mind you. Probably more than half of my sales started out as "I'm not interested" too.

In fact, it seems like "I'm not interested" was a sufficiently important part of Western culture that it was one of the first phases that immigrants would learn. I don't recall a single one, no matter how fresh off the boat, who could't say it.

Not that they said it correctly, mind you. No sir. But what Mitch pointed out was the uniformity of the (grammatical? pronunciation?) error among various communities. Punjabis, Russians, Chinese, Koreans, Italians, and more would almost invariably tell me "I'm not interesting" or maybe "I'm no interesting".

Mitch, ever the comedian, would answer back, "That's OK! You don't have to be interesting. I have to be interesting. So mind if I step in for a minute?" It was a laugh riot, I tell you. I liked it so much, I started responding the same way to any foreigner telling me he or she wasn't interesting.

Not that it ever worked, of course.