A Fight, Some Spliff, and a Lesson for Super-Coach

I guess I was about 15 the first time I got stoned.

It was after Babe Ruth baseball practice. I had just whupped a kid that picked a fight with me.

As luck would have it, I kicked his butt at baseball practice in front of "SuperCoach."

SuperCoach was new to town, and had a son who was a year younger than me, but was a MUCH better athlete. But this kid was an arrogant, worthless punk. You know the type. All ability, no drive. Folks, this kid was an asshole.

He emulated his SuperCoach father evidently. Example: After the kid I was fighting and I had beat each other all over the spectator area of the baseball field, and into the outfield (and the sprinklers were going full-blast in the outfield...making a pretty comedy-filled spectacle for the peanut gallery), SuperCoach marched over, broke us up and demanded to know why we were fighting.

Well, the obvious reason was that we were 15 year old boys, and didn't like each other. Not one bit. But I didn't think that it was any of Super Coach's business. And I told him so. He wasn't amused.

I wasn't much amused either. The testosterone was really flowin'... I felt like a million bucks at that point, was pissed off, and was ready to keep fighting. I had that "bring 'em all on!" attitude going.

We all glared at each other for awhile...and then separated off to different parts of the field to go through the requisite "When he said....I shoulda said..." thought processes.

After practice (I stunk during practice. I was a little preoccupied) a buddy of mine took me out in the country to another buddy's house and we all got silly smoking cheap Colombian Gold out of laboratory equipment they stole from the high school. I specifically recall blowing smoke into a cat's face to get him stoned. The cat would get right up into my face and inhale deeply.

I thought the whole episode was really cool. So I got some seeds from one of my friends and decided to open "Karl's Dope Farm."

At first I planted the seeds out in a pasture. But Dad turned some cows into that pasture and they ate the dope down to the ground.

Back to my buddies for some more seeds.

This time I got a whole film canister full of them. I also got a lot of advice.

"You have to germinate 'em first."

"What does that mean...germinate?"

"You know...put the seeds between two paper towels soaked in water for a few days. The seeds will sprout, so then you plant 'em. They won't grow unless you do that."

"Whaddya mean, they won't grow? Are you telling me that marijuana plants have been solely dependent, throughout history, on south american indians germinating them between two wet Bounty paper towels?"

"Uh, you've got a point....But I heard you gotta germinate 'em first."

I shined the "germinate 'em first" plan on, but I still needed a completely cow-free zone to plant my cash-crop.

Then the perfect idea struck me. I'd simply plant them in the attic in used 5 gallon ice cream buckets (we had about a million of them...Dad's a big fan of Lucerne Neopolitan).

The attic was perfect. It had fantastic light coming in four sets of gable windows, it was oppressively hot and humid, and we never turned cows into the attic to graze.

So I filled about 10 buckets full of Dad's "super-fertile-zucchini-growing" garden soil, and schlepped them through the house to the attic and planted my seeds.

WHOA Nellie! They grew like... well, like weeds. It was a veritable dope jungle up there inside of a few weeks. I hauled gallons of water up there, one bucket at a time, up the step-ladder in my walk-in closet, through the little 1 by 2 foot hole in the ceiling (that I probably couldn't squeeze through now if my life depended on it), across the ceiling joists to my crop.

Well, it had to happen-- Mom caught me.

She remembers it differently, but she asked how come the ceiling had new cracks in it and specifically asked me if I had been messing around in the attic.

I said that I had, and when she asked what I was doing up there, I told her "growin' dope."

I was so proud of what a green thumb I had, that I wanted someone to know, even if I got in trouble.

So she asked if any of the other kids knew about it. I told her that I didn't want them to know.

She told me to keep it quiet and take it easy on the ceiling.S

o, that was cool! It was OK with my parents if I grew dope in the attic.

Karl's dope farm REALLY got serious after that. I started using "Miracle Grow" to increase my yield. Hell, it seemed like the movie "Little Shop of Horrors",. Every time I went into the attic, the plants were bigger and healthier.

Then, one day, Mom was coming in the driveway and looked up into one of the gable windows and saw a plant sticking up and a bottle of Miracle Grow. She decided that I was being too tacky about my farm at that point, and told me to move the plants into my room. By this time I had reduced the plants until there was only one plant per bucket. So I brought my remaining plants into my bedroom. They were about 3 feet tall at this time, and ready to bud.

They promptly died. One and all. It was a massacre. So much for my farm. I lost my farm in the late seventies along with all of the other farmers. Crop failure, you know. Very sad.

So, I picked them, dried them and stripped the leaves into a trash bag. The whole crop yielded about a tenth of an ounce. I smoked it all at one time. Got incredibly stoned, and fell out of the pickup into a gravel parking-lot on my head while two girls from school rifled my pockets for whatever I had been smoking. I couldn't stop laughing.... 'cause it was all gone.

But back to the sad-but-true saga of SuperCoach...Later that year (after I fell on my head) the Babe Ruth coaches all met to elect the all-star baseball team. I did a pretty good job pitching that year, and wasn't too bad a hitter, so they all voted for me as a first-string pitcher.

Well...all the coaches except one.

My coach (who was only nineteen years old at the time, and a pretty good guy) asked me "Jeez, what did you do to piss SuperCoach off? That guy went on for half an hour about how he wasn't going to coach all-stars if you were on his team, and what a crappy attitude you had, and how you’re the problem with America."

I told him about the fight earlier in the season. He laughed, I laughed, after all...what did it matter? I was on the team, SuperCoach notwithstanding.

Later that evening, I told Dad about my conversation with my baseball coach. I was just trying to make conversation, but Dad really took the whole episode seriously. He marched upstairs, picked up the phone and dialed SuperCoach.

It turned out, unbeknownst to me, that SuperCoach's worthless kid had been caught by the police for vandalizing an abandoned house on our farm. He and his buddies had broken all of the windows out, and managed to get caught.

The police called Dad to ask if he wanted to press charges. Dad, being a Little League coach, said that if the vandals all volunteered to work one Saturday at fixing up the Little League field he wouldn't press charges.

They all showed up that Saturday and worked all day. All except one...Super Coach's worthless, arrogant, punk kid. Dad didn't pursue the issue.

So, Dad got SuperCoach on the phone, and I was sitting there listening when he said "I understand that you have some criticism of my son. Why don’t you tell me about that?"

Then he politely listened to SuperCoach tell all about what a lousy attitude I had. It took about 5 minutes. I caught bits and snatches of SuperCoach's speech. It was highly critical, and pretty earthy. I also saw my dad hold his tongue during this whole conversation.

When SuperCoach was completely done with running me down with his laundry list of reasons that made me a poor choice for the all-star team, Dad calmly explained about the vandalism of our property at the hands of Super Coach's worthless kid, the promise to help with the Little League field, and SuperCoach's punk-son's subsequent shirking.

Dad said "I don't mind that you have a low opinion of my son. But I just wanted to let you know what a jewel you've raised." Then Dad signed off and hung up the phone.

SuperCoach and I got along all right after that. I think we both had a greater appreciation of the other.

Hey, Where'd All Those Cows Come From? Or "Hey Baby, Wanna Ride in my Limousin?"(the names have been changed on this one, too)

I was working for the family up the road one summer when the strangest visitor they'd ever had showed up.

Now this family was always helpful, endlessly knowledgeable, HARD working, and ran a spotless cattle ranch. The father (let’s call him Tim) was also an "ABS Breeder Service" provider. His preferred breed of cattle was called "Limousin".

Remember the Breeder service and the Limosuin breed. They are important to the story later.

Tim and my Dad would take turns bidding on each others' kids' steers every year at auction (after the county fair), just to run the prices up. Hell, we never ate those steers. Tim and Dad did what was called "turning", which is an uptown, classy way of saying that after paying a LOT for your neighbor's kid's steer you sell it to Armor Hot Dogs for market price. This wasn't a strange practice in the pre-Reagan years since it was tax-deductible, lots of folks did it. I think Tim and Dad(both hyper-competitors) enjoyed the one-upmanship, but the people who enjoyed it the most were the kids doin' the sellin'.

Of course, Tim's kids steers always sold for WAY more per pound than mine or Kurt's (I can't remember them NOT having some sort of "Champion" ribbon attached to the halter of their steers in the auction ring... and the county fair judges probably let our skinny-assed steers into the fair out of pity, or blackmail). But our steers weighed more, coming from a larger breed. You sell beef by the pound... So it was probably pretty even-steven.

Anyway, I worked for Tim one summer (that's how I started this chapter, huh?). One day the whole family was laughing their butts off when I came up to the ranch house. The son (call him Jess) just HAD to let me in on the joke.

Jess told me that a visiting business student had paid them a call that afternoon. Here's the way he told the story (already in progress):

".... So Mom answers the phone and this guy says 'Hi, I'm a business-major from dear old PU and I'm doing a study of rural Oregon businesses. I've interviewed business owners in Enterprise for several days and I'd like to come talk to you about your business, and take a look at your books. I saw your ad in the local Yellow Pages.'

"So Mom said ‘Sure, come on out this afternoon. We'd be happy to help."

"This guy comes out... Typical city-boy business student. Balding, little granny-glasses, tweed. You know the type.

"Mom and Dad sat him down and waited for questions."

His first question was "How many Limousines do you own?"

"About 300."

He was really surprised. "Really! So many? I had no idea. Where do you keep all those Limousines?

'Mom said "Oh, well they are all out in the fields right now."

"You just leave your Limousines in the fields?"

"They finally figured out what was going on-- Mom said "You thought we run a Limo service?"

"The student says "Well your Yellow Pages ad says Highview Ranch Limousine Service."

Mom answered "No, it says Highview Ranch Limosuins, and that we're an American Breeders Service provider."

‘Oh...' says the student. 'I wondered how a small community like this could support a Limo service... That's why I was so interested in interviewing you about your business. Well, since I'm here can I just interview you about your actual business?’

"Mom agreed.... By now the whole family is sitting around the kitchen table with all of the family's financial records in front of the guy.

"So this guy looks at several years-worth of our records and says "Now, I see that during each of the last three years you've sold around 250 cattle. But nowhere do I see you BUYING any number of cattle to speak of. If you're selling all of these cattle... Where are they coming from?"

"Well, hell.... We didn't know what to say. I mean, how stupid IS this guy?"

"Finally, Dad pushed his hat back and said 'Well, when a daddy bull, and momma cow love each other very much...."

Jess couldn't continue his story after that. He actually had to take a knee, then he laid on his side on the front lawn and laughed for what seemed like an awfully long time. He laughed so hard I thought he'd have a stroke and die in the front yard.

'Course, I was too busy laughing at the city-dude to care much about Jess’ health right then.

The big joke between Jess and me for the rest of the summer was "Hey! Where the hell did all these cows come from?" We never failed to get a laugh.

The Highview Ranch also offered American Breeder's Service as a adjunct to their cattle-ranching operations.

For those of you who've never heard of "A.I." here's how that works.

You go to the local ABS guy (like Jess’ dad) and sit down with a catalog (in the interest of not wasting a breeder's time, you should probably already own some cows by this point). The ABS catalog is full of bull....quite literally. There is quite an assortment of pictures of bulls broken down by breed.

You select which bulls you like. Now, ABS is not the Dating Game. You don't get to ask them stupid questions like "If I were a cow, where would you take me for our first cow date?"

You judge the bulls based on their statistics and their progeny's stats, ie: 205 day adjusted weaning weight,average birth weight, etc. Also you can look at the bulls personal stats: weight, age, astrological sign (hey baby, I'm a taurus...What's YOUR sign). These bulls are the worldwide cream of the crop.

Then the ABS guy gives you a price per ampule. That's right, ampule.

'Cause what you're buying is semen. Yup, grade-A bull spooge. Choad. Pecker snot. Spunk. Like I said, you're buying the cream, and that's the crop.

Then the semen is shipped to the ABS provider in great big aluminum coolers filled with liquid nitrogen.

Now, I'm sure that a cow would MUCH rather team-up with the real bull than get AI’ed (that's Artificially Inseminated) because one part of the actual insemination procedure calls for the breeder to put a shoulder-length plastic glove on, smear KY jelly (from a tube that would make you laugh and a cow cringe.... KY sells a package that's about a foot long and as big around as a softball) all over his glove and push his whole arm into the cow's rectum.

This isn't just good ol' redneck fun (Hey, Clem! Watch me pull a rabbit outta this cow's ass! Nuthin' up my sleeve....).

A cow's cervix is oddly shaped so you have to straighten it out by manipulating it through the rectal wall... then you guide a long soda-straw-lookin'-tube with a syringe on the end of it through the cervix and squirt the semen into the cow's uterus directly.

The breeder's do this "sphincter stretchin'" all day (talk abut a crappy job...."Hey! You're just gonna have to handle it yourself... I'm up to my armpits right now). They say that the hardest part is shoving your arm up a butt while the cow on the other end of that butt doesn't want you to. I've seen these guys have to straighten their arms, lean forward and WALK toward the cow. It's like a whole day of bench-press. I think maybe women make better A.I. breeders. Smaller biceps.

So, sometimes a daddy-bull and a momma-cow don't REALLY have to know much about each other after all.

Swimmin', Surfer-Dude Transplants, and Pissed-off Badgers. Redneck 101. The names have been changed to protect the innoncent.

The public pool closed at 3:00 PM every day during the summer. It was heated, but it was only open during the summer. Go figure.

When we first moved to Enterprise there was an OLD public pool. It was open for a short time after we showed up. Then someone found typhoid or anthrax or syphilis or something in it. The cause of the contamination was determined to either be the huge, canyon-like cracks in the bottom of the pool or the 6 foot strands of kelp growing out of them. Thus, the pool was condemned.

Skateboards hadn't been invented yet, so there wasn't anything to do but levy local taxes and build a crack- and kelp-free pool on the site of the old one.

It took about 5 years. At least it seemed like 5 years to a young kid. It was probably more like 6 hours. When the new pool opened I wore a pair of cutoff jeans to the new pool's Gala Grand Opening and paid for a one-day pass at the window. After I went inside, showered and emergedready to jump in the water, the lifeguard told me I couldn't swim in the new and beautiful pool with cutoffs. Something about plugging up the pumps.

So I went home (which was only a block-and-a-half at the time) and got into my old swimming suit. When I got back to the pool I went into the locker room, showered (again!) and came out the other side ready to do some serious laps in the baby pool.

The lifeguard sent me home again because I had a Band-Aid on my knee. Something about oozing sores and contaminated pools and public health.

I'm sure there was a method to his madness, but it sounded like a conspiracy to me. So I did what came naturally to a six-year-old... I started crying AND developing a seething hatred for lifeguards.

I still can't watch Baywatch without locking up my firearms. I hate lifeguards. No, I mean it. If you're a lifeguard just don't tell me. If we meet at a cocktail party, say you're a lawyer or a politician, or perhaps a sodomite. A used car salesman would be a good choice.

Just don't let it slip that you are a lifeguard. Anything but that.

Lifeguards suck. And they work at municipal pools, so municipal pools suck too. It’s the same principle as being tainted because you're a friend of Bill Clinton. It’s a "guilt by association" thing.

I suppressed my hatred of all things lifeguardy, and patronized the pools (on the days that I had no weeping wounds or un-hemmed shorts) over the years. Mom made a HUGE deal out of making sure all of her kids could swim. I guess I can't blame her. Who wants a kid that loves lifeguards, but can't swim?

So I learned to swim. Later, after Dad dug the pond, we did most of our aquatic recreation in the pond which, except for the leeches, was a pretty good place to swim.

I preferred leeches over lifeguards. Leeches are actually enthusiastic about weeping sores, and I've never met a leech who was opposed to cutoffs.

When my buddy Mel and I got old enough to drive (and therefore to be tried as adults) we decided that life was too dull so a stupid and futile gesture was required on a semi-regular basis. The local pool was a likely target.

Every few nights we'd park the car a few blocks from the pool. We always parked the car next to the river that ran through the park where the pool was located. Our modus operandi was to jump the pool fence, climb up the lifeguard's ladder onto the roof of the pump house, raise some Hell, do a few high-dives, jump back over the fence about the time the cops showed up, hotfoot it to the river, then float downstream to the car, leadfoot it out of town until our hair dried, then come back into town so I could buy a Pepsi and Mel could take a dump at the local pizza parlor.

It was always the same.

There was a big difference between Mel's family and mine. If MY parents knew that I had broken a misdemeanor ordinance about swimming in a pool (which everyone else swam in too...just at different hours than we were using it) I would have been given the old "Death by Mambo"treatment. Mel couldn't WAIT to tell his parents, 'cause they'd laugh their ass off and have a hilarious family bull session over the whole thing. You know...boys will be boys.

When I was a junior in high-school the county hired a hospital administrator named Richards from San Clemente (yes, Nixon lived there) California. He had two "gnarly surfer dude" sons my age.

Dad invited the Richards over for a barbeque on summer night. Before they showed up Dad asked me to make friends with the sons and make them feel right at home. I don't remember what I expected, but I'll bet it was negative. California was a pretty maligned state in Wallowa County because of the stupidity generated in the land of fruits and nuts. It still is.

But the Richards boy (and the whole family for that matter) were really nice people, and a lot of fun to be around.

So Mel (my brother) and I piled into Mel's car along with Ken Richards and Mel's little brother Don. We headed toward town and tried to think of ways to impress this new kid. We stopped at the Little Store for some Soda pop (I got a Grape Crush) and discussed what really cool stuff we should do that evening. Breaking into the pool seemed like a good idea at the time.

Richards was totally against the idea, but...what the Hell....he wasn't driving. Mel was. And no amount of over-cautious "Man, I can't get arrested my first night in town...My dad would kill me" arguments were gonna keep us from showing mister surfer-dude Richards what good-ol'redneck fun was like.

Off to the pool we went. He stayed in the car.

The cops showed up after about two dives each, and chased our young asses all over town. It was a pretty narrow escape. Richards left the car to hide in the weeds along the river at one point. Hell, we were really pissing the cops off I guess. No one likes to be made fun of. Even in a small town police officers have better things to do than chase kids all over town because they swam in the city pool, after hours, while wearing cutoffs. I'm pretty sure they were taking it personally. We were dodging searchlights and roving patrols for about an hour.

Richards was about to cry he was so scared of getting in trouble.

To make a long story short (and why not...I've already told most of it) we got away. We all piled into Mel's Dodge Colt station wagon (with the big dent in the hood where I tried to slide across it like Paul Michael Glaser in "Starsky and Hutch") and skeedaddled outta town.

Just outside the city limits there was a hill with a big road-cut in it. As we crested the hill a huge old hoary badger ran across the road in front of the car.

Mel laid on the skids and we all piled out of the car (which was now sitting on the crest of a hill, with all four doors standing open, in the middle of the road...Mel never was too good at finding a safe parking spot). We all took off after the badger at a dead sprint. I had grabbed the Grape Crush bottle off the floorboards of Mel's car before I got out.

The badger looked over his shoulder at a bunch of long-haired rednecks chasing him and decided that discretion was the better part of valor. He got to the edge of the road cut (which was a soft, loamy soil) and started digging like the devil...or at least a bunch of hicks fresh from a misdemeanor...were on his trail.

We got there only a few seconds after he started digging his escape-route. We started wailing the tar and nicotine out of that big ol’ nasty badger.

Mel, Don, and I were all crowded around him punching him, and I was whacking him with a ten-cent-deposit Grape Crush bottle (back when they weighed about a pound empty). Thump-thump-THUMP-dig-dig-Thump-dig-THUMP.

Richards just stood there and watched while making California surfer-dude noises.

"Whoa dude! he's gettin' away!"

Like any of us really wanted to keep him.

I'd been bitten by a hamster once or twice...I had NO desire to be bitten by a badger the size of a small sheep. The badger was REALLYtrying to get away now. And he was actually making pretty good progress.

THUMP! thump-DIG-DIG-thump-THUMP!

He was almost so far into his new hole now that we couldn't reach him. I couldn't use the bottle because there wasn't room to swing it inside the narrow hole.

That didn't stop Mel, and Doug from punching him some more. When he got his hole deep enough that his butt was about a foot inside the hole Mel reached inside the hole to grab him and pull him back out.

Even though Mel is a smart guy, no one ever accused him of being a genius. But that was one of the STUPIDEST things I've ever seen done (and I've been around the stupidity block...yessiree).

Badgers have loose skin. Loose skin allows you to turn around and bite whatever is holding your ass.

Mel got a handful of badger ass and gave it a good tug.

Later I'd learn that what happened next is normal. Time slowed down. When in the presence of danger or stupidity (or both) the human brain processes information more rapidly than normal causing perceived time to move more slowly. The resultant effect is like watching everything in slow motion. Psychology majors call it "tachypsychia." Badgers are couldn’t care less about the psychological aspects of this sort of thing, preferring to be more pragmatic and direct-action oriented. Badgers are funny that way.

That badger nearly broke his spine turning around in his skin and focusing his effort on trying to bite Mel's hand clean off. Mel pulled his hand off that badger's big ol’ butt with about one nanosecond to spare. The badger bit thin air with a *snap* that sounded like a rat-trap being tripped. Mel pulled his hand away so violently that it almost spun him around from the momentum.

The badger must’ve decided to change strategies, because he started coming out of his hole toward us. I guess he'd had enough of our reindeer games.

So four wet rednecks and a surfer-dude turned their collective chlorine-smelling asses and ran like hell back to the car. And peeled rubber....well, we peeled as much rubber as a Carter-era Dodge Colt could peel. Let's round it up... Call it four inches of rubber.

I have no idea what that badger thought about the whole thing (I can probably guess), but he ended up showing us a thing or two that night. Teeth.

Richards couldn't stop talking about it. "Whoa! I've NEVER seen anything like THAT, dude..."

You guys are crazy...Did you see the gnarly old TEETH on that thing? By the way, what's that thing called? A llama? Can we do it again?"

Over a couple of years of intensive, exhaustive training Ken Richards turned out to be a pretty good redneck. And we MADE him.

We were so proud.