Thus ended my life of crime

Backstory: I started out life as your basic amoral sociopath, and comported myself thusly for a good twenty years. Since then, in dribs and in drabs, bad behaviors have dropped away. Larceny, both petit and grand mal, check. Booze? Yep. Crystal meth? Oh, throw me a hard one! Check.

As vices go, I’m down to Mountain Dew, weed and “Heroes.” And the same programming geniuses at NBC who are causing so much trouble in late night have just renewed the pathetic “Heroes” for yet another interminable, embarrassing season of turgid, overworked scenarios and uninteresting characters. The only thing I can think of that would be more embarrassing than admitting I still watch it would be working on it.

I’ve also all but given up on getting off the Mountain Dew. No matter what I do, my teeth continue to be a disaster area, and it was mainly at my dentist’s urging that I commenced trying to curtail my intake of the noxious brew. If shit is gonna continue to drop out of my mouth whether or not I’m swilling my beloved Slurm, I prefer to go toothless fat and happy.

Of my three remaining vices, the only one that remains illegal is the weed. And I’ve tried to quit that before but it didn’t go too well. An intervention was arranged to confront me and make me go back on it.

You ever know somebody who could be the nicest bloke in the world but then get mad at the drop of a hat and turn into a giant asshole? That’s me. That’s me, when I’m not on my meds. Over the years, I’ve tried a lot of different stuff to modulate my behavior, all of it legal, all of it prescribed by proper family doctors and shrinks. Not a one of them ever worked near as fast or as effectively as the contraband medication does.

So I went to our family doctor a few years ago and asked her if she could write me a scrip for medical marijuana. Christmas Island happens to have legalized it for such purposes—although we haven’t gone totally off the reservation, we still won’t let gays marry—and I was anxious to take my business out of the back alleys and into the boutiques.

It should be mentioned here that I used to meet my guy in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant just off the freeway. He was a huge black dude with massive dreads in a town that is maybe 1% black, and my guy is clearly neither a student nor a professor. I couldn’t get him to drive all the way to my house, he was so afraid of getting busted for Driving While Black by the local constabulary. And his house, too, is obviously off-limits. Drug dealers can’t afford a lot of suspicious foot traffic in their nice, residential neighborhoods.

So anyway, at that time, my doctor turned me down. My recollection is she gave some reason relating to her lawyer advising her against it; it was still W’s America at the time, and I thought her caution prudent.

I tried again last month and [SPOILER ALERT] my crazy still doesn’t qualify me, but my chronically-screwed lower back pain does!

The same doctor read me the riot act as required by law, carefully phrasing all her cautionary notes as hypotheticals, then wrote me out a scrip—good for a year on Christmas Island—and wished me a happy new year.

Thus making an honest man of me at last. Who would have thought I would have reached that lofty distinction after only 47 years? Not me, brother.

The statue below is posted outside the “goods” room of the local Collective. It about gave me a heart attack the first time I rounded the corner. I figure it’s a way management can ascertain whether you’re already high when you arrive.

Check.

Past it, the large room with the little glass-case kiosks at the far wall was lit dramatically, like something from a movie. I noticed another, taller glass case off to the side, filled with plants for sale. Apparently I am allowed to own up to x number of pot plants as well, but I’m pretty sure our landlord would take a dim view of me giving that a go. He seems like a pretty conservative, old-school kind of guy and I’m strictly in playing-it-safe mode still.

The various “strains” of weed are displayed in the illuminated glass display case in large glass jars full of the most perfectly-manicured buds I’ve seen since I grew my own back in the early 80s. And they all have cool names like “Purple Kush,” “Super Diesel” and my current favorite, “Kryptonite.”

The clerk, a lovely, friendly young lady, allowed me to inspect the perfume of the various glass jars and was a wealth of information on the origins and effects of each strain. After she weighed out and filled my order, I handed her a roll of twenties then said, “Huh. I bet you take plastic here, too, huh?”

She said yes, and not only that, because it was legal, there was even a sales tax attached!

If my mind hadn’t been blown before, it was then.

I happily assured her she was doing the Lord’s work and drove home with my medication safely—and legally—stored inside my glove box. And I began to consider what it was going to be like to not be an outlaw anymore. For one thing, I was no longer risking my son ever seeing me sitting on the wrong side of a jail cell. I’d been worried about that ever since he was born.

I never liked the outlaw part, I realized. I was scared shitless every time I met my guy in the Taco Bell parking lot. One time I got there first and had to call him and yell, “Abort! Abort!” The place wasn’t just swarming with cherry-tops, there was also a Department of Corrections bus there loaded up with prisoners enjoying the ersatz Mexican cuisine. Probably a lot of them on the way to the pokey for pot-related offenses.

No, I’m not going to miss being an outlaw at all.