The Perfect Stone / viewzone

November 4th

I waited around for a day, but my guys were a no show. Probably partying with their pot broker at some other grow they were looking into, but it had me worried.

"Wouldn't be a good idea to come here." I left a token message late the night before, trying not to sound panicked. I couldn't bring myself to tell them what had arrived at the ranch.

Someone had driven him, unannounced, in a Candy Apple Suburban. Who it was remains a mystery as the windows were tinted and they didn't get out. The vehicle was brand new, had 'drug dealer' written all over it. No license plates.

He needed no help climbing the stairs up to the bedroom. The cane he brandished was apparently just for show.

One of the neighbors had volunteered to clean his room in hopes of getting some legal advice and spent an entire day doing so. She wore a respirator after heeding my warnings.

"Are you sure it wasn't Legionnaires disease?" She said while hosing the air conditioner filter out on the deck. The water coming out of it was black as oil.

We gave him a tour of the nine greenhouses the next morning and then took him to the concrete foundation, where the propane blast had occurred.

The White Devil just stared. I knew it would be a risk but one I had to take if I was to survive. I made sure Calico was packed too and had instructed him to stand behind us.

The structure looked like it was for some royal internment and not a replica of some synagogue. The gold trimmed door looked quite inviting in the evening light. It was still warm inside and the living menorahs within made it inviting. We all went inside. The air was pristine.

Mike turned towards me. But there was no anger in his face. Not even surprise.

"You listened. You heard me dictate the plan!"

Some impromptu angel assisted me. "In great detail. We set it up according to the exact specs and moved the starts from the grow room. Were led to where you had hidden the greenhouse material under the deck."

Through some inexplicable, heliotrope phenomena, the plants leaned towards him. I had to hide my tears because I no longer saw a lawyer before me. Maybe he did meet the Lord when the docs were cleaning his guts out. I couldn't believe how well he looked, after months in the hospital and re-hab. It worried me a bit, how strong he was. I braced myself for some more dictation.

Instead, Mike knelt at one of the plants and inspected the kolas. "You have a way with plants bordering on the impossible."

All I did was sprout and water the things. What else could rent-a- shabbas goy do?

"How did you know?" He looked rapt and I wanted to believe that some metanoia had taken place and that the devil was gone out of him.

"Mike. I don't mean to be the bearer of bad news, but you are in great danger. You should have told me you were coming back."

"How? I've done nothing but good here and everyone on this mountain knows it."

"When I tell the locals that I saved your life, they ask me why. Everyone on this mountain."

"How do you think I've survived all these years, the raids, losing my daughter, the DEA thug that messed up my shoulders after handcuffing me?"

I pulled out my detective badge and showed it to him.

"Thor Sawyer. Never heard of you."

"The mountain reveals the truth sooner or later."

"Who you working for? No informant could grow plants like this."

"I'm your only hope of saving this ranch." I pulled the only card I had left out of my jacket: the receipts from the credit card Mike had been banging. "They're mafia. My guys. And, this greenhouse isn't kosher seeing how you got it. Neither are these plants."

"I said not to worry. Take me down to the barn."

We all piled in the beat up Explorer and weaved our way down to where the water truck fills up. We followed Hunt inside after he unlocked a huge sliding barn door. The stalls within were jammed full of fertilizer bags, pots, hoses, augurs, giant fans and swamp coolers. All but one. It was a clean and in the center was a human like figure but about 10 ft. tall. No cob webs or bird droppings on it like there were on everything else.

Hunt went inside and uttered something arcane to the dormant mesomorph. Could have been archaic Yiddish for all I knew. The very crown of the golem's head lit up. And then the fingernails.

Calico puffed on his vape and put his hand on his gun, but I shook my head.

"I wanted to open up a pot bar called The Stoned Homunculus and have this Cupie doll be the nightly act. Bang some cocktail glissandos on a piano for Sun City crones. I could live off the tip jar proceeds."

I couldn't process it because I still wanted to see Hunt as an angel.

Why wasn't the thing dried out? Had it been hibernating for the entire grow season? I was routinely scanning with my night binocs and never saw it roaming the ranch. I had been sleeping next to this thing in the guest house, when I moved there from the camper. The kolas it was made of were resinous, hard and full. Hunt pulled a bud from its navel and jammed it into a pipe and handed it to Calico.

This thing felt like it was sucking the marrow out of us.

"It's an old yogic trick of mine, by the way. Has gotten me out of a lot of duty so to speak. Court, alimony, child support, preliminary hearings, taxes and even the creditors." Mike said and tossed the receipts on the ground. "Even entire grow seasons. I'm a lawyer. I don't get paid for what I do, so why should I work?"

He lit the pipe. He handed it to me but I passed it on to Calico. "I pull the diseases in from various star systems: Rigel, Orion. The sepsis was from Markarian 421." He took another hit when Calico passed it back to him. "The cure too." He said on the exhale. "Just need to know how to work those black holes."

Then I knew. It was when I was holding his hand in the hospital. That's when I got pulled into the dimension of his indelible pathology. Didn't have the discernment to recognize it. I thought it was the Red Malawi/Mic I was smoking. I was stoned on it when I showed the Puerto Rican kid the previous year's stash of pot in pickle barrels. I was stoned on it when the kid jacked it all, then looted the house after one of the trimmers came and got him from Hemet. He took the Mountain Lion skull, arrowheads, masks, the bow and arrow and the wooden flute too. And all of the equipment used to make the edibles I wrongly assumed did Mike in.

"Mike. Pontea stole all of last year's weed when you were in the hospital. Stole a bunch of stuff out of the house and all the edibles out of the freezer."

Hunt took his wallet out and pulled a credit card from it. The sefiroth on it was glow in the dark. The usual green. He waved it in front of the golem's eyes.

"Did you hear me?"

It hit before I got a reply. The unknown language that Pamela was chanting in. I heard it like it was there in the barn. Her disembodied voice. I heard the drumming too. Just needed the eye lightning to complete the picture. And her hideous bobble head.

"I did the So Cal shuffle on your guys and flim flammed them good. It's the Mendocino way. You should have seen them when they came to the hospital. All standing around my bed. I got them crying. Distracted them enough on the sweetheart deal hand shake we did. Nothing in writing! "

Mike took another toke and pushed the pipe my way. "No bad seed in this breed of pot. The Esau strain. You really should try some."

We walked back out and the golem followed behind about ten yards. It shook its arms and legs when it got outside and looked around. A Bigfoot with a fondness for buggering meth wrecks.

Calico looked up at the gallery on the mountain. It seemed he was trying to do some blink version of morse code to alert the jury within. He held his hand with the bullet wounds up too, maybe to triangulate something.

"You abandon this grow now and you won't get paid. By me or your guys. And good luck in court if we get raided. I'll throw you both under the bus."

The golem opened its mouth. Mike handed it the pipe and it took a toke. I wondered if it was a fumigate version of cannibalism. It liked its own stone though, seeing how it smiled.

I looked over at Calico and he was shaking, sweating. He took a long puff off his vape and the lenses of his glasses fogged. All the black ops detonation drills in the military he bragged about. None had prepared him for this.

November 2nd

Let the extortioner catch all that he hath:
And let the strangers spoil his labor.

Psalm 109:11

I didn't get much sleep. The hostage situation seemed insolvable. Spent the night trying to remember Pamela's incantation gibberish but nothing came to me. I could see Hunt on the deck of the house, pacing back and forth while on the phone. I knew all the old horse trails and most of the growers were done for the year, their plants already cut down, dried and processed. I was willing to risk getting shot trying to get to the highway. Mike changed the lock codes on all the gates and my truck wasn't big enough to bash them down.

Iron Peak to the south was radiant in the morning light and the clouds coming up from the valley seemed to avoid it. But there was no humming coming from Split Rock.

I went into the Grow-a-Gogue with my bible. I paged through it helplessly. The plants still had another month and a half until harvest. The 21st day of Kislev to be exact. I had planned to sneak in and snip the prize Shamash buds and haul them on my back up in bags I made from the leftover velvet and over the ridge behind the ranch house. I knew all the animal trails up there. Stash the bags in the mountain lion dens. Trim the buds myself up there. I could even more than 4k. I could get 10k a pound even more with the right pitch. Sell it to Madonna's Kabbalah club and I'd be in forever as a grow celeb.

But there was Bud Foot as I called him. And it was a male because I saw him pissing one night while Hunt was taking spring water readings with Calico. And he could move. Saw him climbing a tree for fun, spanning ninety feet in a few seconds and ape swinging from the branches like it was nothing.

My heart had to be clean, all the way, to pull this harvest off. I spent the whole grow season forgiving others and forgiving myself, praying and most of all, blessing those that cursed me. I poured over Hunt's Kabbalistic formulas and diagrams I had found and prayed some more.

I left something out about the Boy Wonder, Kris Pontea. The kid had Asperger's syndrome I'm guessing and that's why he did it. He would hide in his room all day and trim all night. His face was cratered with pock marks and he had some serious welt scars on his shoulder blades. The kid told me how he would grind up his Ritalin and mix it with ear wax to enhance the buzz. He had to have heard Hunt fall that night as I've said before. And he did nothing.

After all the DEA flyovers on the 4th of July weekend is when he split. I watched him rip an old saddle off of a chair on the deck and toss it in the back of the pick up truck. His speed freak friend Taylor just stared. His eyes were so hollow. That's about all I can remember. Why couldn't I piece what was going on? I just said goodbye to them and went back to the guest house like nothing was happening.

I got a text from Taylor about a week later asking me to call him. But I didn't.

I prayed for days and eventually got the prompting early one morning. I sneaked past the main gate and walked all the way to the spiral petroglyph near the Spyrock school and sat by it.

"I'm so sorry." I said to the boulder the glyphs were etched on. "I tried. I tried cleaning up all of Hunt's garbage on that sacred land. Out of the woods where it had blown. Only to watch it blow back in again. I dug up corroded batteries out of the soil, leaking containers of diesel fuel, buckets of industrial grease, rusted Hamilton tanks still full of pesticides. I prayed at the spring head for a healing to take place. And, I saved a the White Devil's life. For that I'm the most sorry of all."

Walking back as the sun rose, I could see two people about a quarter of a mile away. No resistance overcame me so I continued on. They waved at me. Figured they were grow workers, seeing how dirty and tattered their clothes were.

"What's up?" I asked.

They both smiled. No teeth. Identical twins from what I could deduce.

"Got a cigarette?" I asked.

One handed me three out of a pack of Golden Deer. "You're going to need them." He said and grinned.

"You know anything about a Bigfoot roaming around up here?"

Their faces melted. It was odd enough of a caricature to keep me going with the ploy. I gave them my phone number. Made sure they keyed it in the right way on their phone. And I made them call me on the spot so I had theirs.

"Hit me up and we'll work something out."

I didn't tell them about the ballerina costumes that the neighbor found when she cleaned Hunt's bedroom. But I did tell them about all the crystal meth packed in the foot locker in his closet and gave them each a little sample I had with me.

Walking on, I was certain that the Great Spirit arranged it, in a way beyond any expectations and assumptions my ego could ever conjure.

November 20th

Calico and I cut and hung all nine greenhouses of the late blooming weed, Death Star, in 14 hour shifts. Hunt brought in the usual renegade trimmers and slaved them. During breaks, I would visit the Grow-a Gogue behind the caretaker's house several times a day. The plants were wondrous like no others, but I felt such deep pain. The pain of betrayal.

I knew my guys were mafia and were just using me as some kind of sleight of hand. One had an archipelago of casinos rivaling Harrah's. The other was a fashion designer that made a killing off of Mexican dirt heroin on the side. Their dad was some investment banker who prayed to Allah every morning before his daily milking of the Dinar, some savvy, shrewd move he came up with during the first Gulf War and implemented years later. The Babylon Killing he called it. He killed it for sure, in a Billionaire's Club kind of way.

I now wonder if they were the ones that delivered Hunt to the ranch after making some kind of covert collusion. The fishiness of it all was constrictive. Not that I was paranoid.

I climbed every morning to the top of Split Rock to pray that the truth be revealed and could see Pamela's summit resplendence across the valley. Wondered who she and Manfried were busy exploiting after I split. There was an odd rainbow film in the clouds above Starling Ridge and it didn't feel right.

November, 24th

Getting the Sasquatch brothers into the Ballerina costumes was the easy part seeing how emaciated they were. The grain alcohol and meth I gave them served as ample persuasion. They cackled and did a little dance together, eyes gleaming. The slippers were too small though, so they clunked around in their work boots. I did a selfie with them and sent it to my bosses. Figured it would throw them way off, wherever they were, enough to allow me to carry out with the plan.

I daubed some Musk oil behind the tweekers's ears and put some pheromone spray I found on Hunt's beside table on them too. Lots of it.

In the night, me and Calico took them up to the nipple across from Split Rock and had them stand there holding hands. They started doing pirouettes . I figured that would broadcast the pheromone and the Musk oil enough and confuse the 500 lb. black bear we had seen roaming the property. We were after bigger game.

Climbing down a bit to take cover, I waited. It wasn't long until the intended prey climbed up top. Bud Foot waved his arms like an angry gorilla and for the first time I heard something emerge from his throat. I prayed that the brothers remembered the incantation and they did before he could assault them. The meth must have made them lucid for the both chanted it in unison. The archaic Hebrew sounded poetic. It flowed beautifully like one of the psalms of David put to music.

Bud Foot went down to his knees and I climbed back up.

"Not a bad high you are." I said to it. "And now it is time."

I looked into the subdued golem's eyes and no longer felt it was trying to suck me dry of my spirit. Now it was pleading for release from Mike's spell.

We could see the lights on in the ranch house and Hunt was silhouetted as per usual, pacing back and forth on the deck.

Bud Foot sprinted lithely down the jagged path and disappeared in the darkness. We all took turns watching through the night binocs. It was under a minute when he arrived on the deck. It grabbed Hunt and hefted him above his head with arms in full extension. Then he ran, jumped an entire flight of stairs and entered again into the dark.

It only took another minute for the golem to reach the summit of Split Rock. Bud Foot wasted no time and did a spin and hurled the lawyer over the edge. The plummet was rather disappointing, but we all heard The White Devil crash land hard. The Sasquatch brothers did some more pirouettes and held their hands out for some more meth. I already had a pipe loaded and fired it up for them.

We heard Hunt groaning. Amazing he survived a fall from that height. The indian mummies emerged from the cave entrance, their stiffness dissolving instantly. They climbed out on the wall to watch. The huge serpent that emerged from the base gobbled up Hunt like an Anaconda. It slithered out into the open, glowing the same green as Hunt's sefiroth card. We could see the emergent patterns on its back. Bud Foot jumped up and down in triumph above.

Then, out of the snake's rectum emerged the lawyer turd we all had been waiting for. I wanted to display the thing in a museum. Maybe I could deliver to the DA in Ukiah.

I was impressed with the snake's digestive abilities. Breaking down such a slimeball with its stomach acids so rapidly and excreting the waste product with remarkable efficiency. We could hear the indians cheering and they climbed down the cliff face . Split Rock hummed and all the rocks became alive. Once again.

I lit the last of the Golden Deers and high fived my friends. I had brought my travel guitar that I used to play for the plants and performed a celebratory ditty for my friends:

Spyrock Road
(D minor tuning)

Way up yonder on Spyrock Road,
Those pot growers done lost their souls,
They calculate you coldly with empty eyes,
For all they care about is the bottom line,
Maximum yield in the shortest time.

Better not cross any property lines,
Because your sorry self you may find:
Beaten, bound and naked
On Highway 101.

The only way out of Spyrock,
Is the way you came in.
White Devil's making deals,
You'll never win.

Up on Spyrock Road
Don't lose your soul
Up on Spyrock Road.

There's so much fear in the mountain air,
And that's why no one ever smiles up here.

Whatever happened to the,
Peace, Love and Harmony thing?
That the Hippies thought
Marijuana would bring?

Up on Spyrock Road
Growing more cold
Up on Spyrock Road.

The only way out of Spyrock
Is the way you came in,
Spiral Petroglyph in the
Morning Sun.

Time to go to the
Mountain Baby Rock
and call the spirits back in,
The ones hiding in the ocean.

Up on Spyrock Road.
Don't lose your soul
Up on Spyrock Road.

Maybe the spirits hiding in the ocean would return to the mountain and stay for a long time now. Thanks to Bud Foot, the Ballerina Brothers and the cosmic intervention that had just taken place. I wouldn't stick around to find out though.

I just couldn't.

December 24th, 2014

Zose Hannukah

I had just enough gas to make it to the base of Starling Ridge. Then my battery light went on. Somehow I made it up without dying. The gate was still open. I guess the polarities were in my Christmas Eve favor, hallelujah. I got out and put the angel back on the post. The saran wrapped book was still there a year later and I picked it up and tossed it in the truck. The dogs wagged their tails and followed me as I rounded the corner by the solar panel and could see a light on in the house up top.

I parked exactly in the same place I did a year prior and walked up. There was Pamela, in the same chair and in the same place as well. She was tapping more rhythmically on the drum, using both hands to do so this time.

Sliding the door open, I stepped inside and wiped my muddy boots, then kicked them off. I sat in the chair opposite. The tea water was steaming on the counter. I pulled out some of the Shamash bud I snipped earlier in the day, crumbled it up and rolled a spliff and watched it light itself. I took my first ever puff of Perfect Stone and handed it to Pamela. "One hundred percent organic."

"I'm already there." She sniffed and continued drumming.

Stepping outside, I was able to more appreciate the high. The galaxy was way lit that night and I could see the dogs even though there wasn't any moon. I walked back to Pamela's Ba-Gua garden that she wanted me to finish before I split last spring. The wild pigs had decimated everything but the hot peppers, which still hung from their dried stalks. They even ate the roses I planted around the garden beds. The ones that her son Manfried spit on one day. Sitting down in the intended center of this construct, I could hear a wind chime that Pamela had me put up near the water tanks. It had a glass hummingbird that hit against the metal tubes.

The aeolian chiming helped me realize that the ruin of it all didn't matter anymore. It was if the anger, bitterness and unforgiveness of a lifetime had dissolved with one hit of Perfect Stone. I had the back of my pick up full of it. But there was no way I could sell it. It didn't seem alien though, this conscience thing. More that I had no means to integrate it in a way where I could survive long term in the bloodless and cutthroat world of marijuana growing.

All my guys's pot is stashed in pickle barrels in the woods back at Split Rock, about $800,000 worth. So no pay, no bonus, means I'm stranded here broke, once again, with the hag on the hill and no way out. At least they wouldn't find me here.

"The White Devil is dead." I left a message for them and threw the phone down into the ravine. I felt hung by the drumming above, unable to move.

The only way those cannabis menorahs lit up like Mike said they would was when I told him all the truth. About what Kris had done and that I saw it all. Yet I could not say why I didn't try to stop him. Only now, perfectly stoned, do I know. It is because I could not see into the fucked up kid's heart or Mike's or anyone else for that matter. Not even mine. I could not see what drives people to do what they do. I could blame it on the evil of the place or the Pomo or Jezebel curse or even the chthonic snakes noodling about in the aquifer, waiting for the kill. Rather, it was the primordial wound we all collectively fester, in one form or another, blinding me. The wound that so deeply shrouds our origins. A wound that maybe the Perfect Stone could someday heal.

If I only knew the real way out. I reached into my pocket and took out the seeds Mike Hunt had given me when he was flat out on the grow room floor. In the starlight, they took on an ethereal hue, and appeared as living constellations in my palm.

I tossed them too, down the ravine. They would grow on their own if they wanted to.

Under the right conditions.

Thor Sawyer is a writer and cannabis activist. Please check out his blog @: www.cannibad.wordpress.com

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