Daddy Don't Hit Me - July 12, 2007
The Legend of Uncle Arnie
By BC Woods
"No way, guys. I don't do drugs. You know that." My obstinance to substance abuse was well known in my high school, and likely the reason that Ryan and Andrew were so intent on breaking me. Surrounded by thousands of acres of forest, with a walk of at least five miles down a dirt road before my feet even found pavement again, the words seemed to lack resolution.
Andrew took the joint from Ryan and approached me, proffering the drug to me in a more reasonable manner. "We're way out here in the middle of nowhere, and I know you don't carry a cell phone. We're not going to drive you back into town if you don't take a puff." He pushed the joint toward me with an even greater resolve.
For every step he took forward, I took two backwards. His resolve was strong. Mine was stronger. "Nope. Not doing it. Sorry."
At this statement, Ryan lost all patience. "Jesus fucking Christ, BC! We're out in the middle of the goddamn woods. Just fucking take a puff, and we'll take you to the bookstore like you wanted us to." A little over fifteen minutes ago they had seen me walking toward the local Waldenbooks, offered me a ride, and then proceeded to drive me out into the middle of Wishkah on the pretense of a "quick chore."
To say that Wishkah is wilderness is an understatement. Relating that it has been, for the past fifty or so years, a hotbed of Bigfoot sightings puts one a little closer to the truth. Around me an army of trees too thick for three men to wrap their arms around all at once, soared up into the sky, blotting out the summer sun. It was not hard at all to imagine that one of man's primitive ancestors had managed to hide from civilization in those dark forests, and was still hiding there.
"Get off your high horse, BC!" Andrew shouted, making as if to throw the joint at me, and then as if realizing how much it cost, stopped mid-swing.
Putting both of my hands into my pockets, I sighed heavily. "Sorry guys, not doing it. I'm going home now." I turned my back to them and started my way back home.
"You fucking nutjob!" I heard them cry. "It's just a goddamn puff! Everyone has fucking done it! Everyone! It isn't going to hurt you!" Shaking my head, I continued to walk. Not everyone had the last name Woods. After a few minutes their curses were locked behind the thousand wooden bars of the evergreen trees that separated us.
My family history with substance abuse has been less than stellar. While the overwhelming majority of people can enjoy an evening of marijuana use and not go immediately insane, my family differs from the norm extraordinarily. For example, after going on his first real date with my mother, at the end of his six day marriage to her cousin, my father decided to procure a nickel bag of pot to celebrate the beginning of their relationship. After the two shared a few puffs together, my father became decidedly convinced that his mother was somewhere outside waiting to pounce upon the two of them and then promptly tried to drag my mother under the bed with him to hide. His reasoning, he explained, is that since she was always too lazy to look for him under his bed as a child, she surely would not be able to find him there as an adult. He still has no understanding of why he thought his mother was outside of his house in the first place, or exactly what she was going to do to him.
The stories continue from there, ranging from my mother claiming to be Jesus Christ when she was drunk, to the time Rachel got high on mushrooms and ran through the forests outside our home, screaming at the top of her lungs, convinced that all the twigs on the ground were snakes trying to eat her alive. No story of substance-induced psychosis, however, has anything on my uncle Arnie's.
In the early seventies, my very distant uncle Arnie, at the age of thirty-one, decided that the time had finally come. He was going to smoke marijuana. Exhausted at the monotony of his dull factory job, and deciding that--financial realities being what they were--he still needed a way to escape even if he couldn't quit as he longed to do, he finally settled on drugs. Taking a pass on all the harder drugs available at the time, to avoid the hazards of true addiction, he finally settled on the all natural, pure smelling, mellowing marijuana.
For the entirety of his life Uncle Arnie had been indistinguishable from the crowd. He crested every bell curve. His face, neither handsome nor ugly, had the sort of normalcy that makes one practically invisible. Neither stupid nor intelligent, charismatic or dull, Arnie lacked the sort of personal characteristics that set others apart from their fellow men. All that ended the first few days after he decided to smoke pot.
In the same way that a friendly doctor by the name of Jekyll once consumed a magical drink to become a gruesome fiend named Hyde, Uncle Arnie breathed in the fumes of a plant that made ordinary men silly and hungry, and went completely, raving mad.
Uncle Arnie could no longer even pretend to be mentally occupied at his factory job. He tossed restlessly at the assembly line, cursing under his breath. Occasionally, with a conspiratorial gleam in his eye, he would lean over to one of his coworkers and hiss, "It's time to make the streets safe again!" When his coworkers only stared at him in slack-jawed surprise, wondering what had happened to the unextraordinary man who had sat by them for the past ten years, he would dry wash his hands, murmuring about the need to "take back the streets." Exactly when the "streets" were lost or who they needed to be taken back from was a subject on which Uncle Arnie chose not to expound.
To fuel his newfound addiction, Uncle Arnie switched his role as a mere consumer of marijuana to a producer of it. To his wife's horror, their closets and bathrooms became home to a number of heat lamps and cannabis plants. No longer able to don a leisure suit and enjoy a night of disco, Arnie grew ever more estranged from his wife.
Concerned calls began to pass back and forth between relatives, wondering if Arnie had in fact, "lost it." A week, they reasoned, was too soon to go mad, and marijuana hardly drove people insane as the government at the time claimed it did. In a few weeks, they assured his wife, Arnie would go back to normal. All the while Arnie wandered around the house, a joint always slung low in the corner of his mouth, tending his cannabis plants like a Chinese master with his bonsai trees. As if to keep match with the plants, the concerns of the family began to grow.
On the dawn of a seemingly ordinary day, several weeks into his addiction, Uncle Arnie decided the time had finally come. He would do what none of the cowards at the factory had the courage to do. He was going to take the streets back.
With a can of white paint in one hand and a brush in the other, Uncle Arnie kneeled down next to his classic style station wagon and painted a simple white, five-pointed star on the driver's side door. The star symbolized his newfound office.
Later that day, wearing thick sunglasses, and sporting a plaid shirt, Uncle Arnie informed his boss at the factory that he quit. With the cool look of a man who has spit in the face of the Devil and lived to tell of it, Uncle Arnie told his boss, "There's a new sheriff in town," before kicking open the office door and getting back into his station wagon/cruiser. I can only imagine Arnie's boss, sitting behind his desk, blinking for a whole minute at the sheer enormity of what had transpired, asking everyone who walked past his door, "What the fuck just happened?"
Several times that day, Uncle Arnie could be seen driving up and down main street, hollering out of his window for cars to "pull over." For the most part he was met with honking horns and a shower of middle fingers. The few that actually complied were all friends of his, worried at his sudden change in behavior.
"Arnie...what the fuck are you doing out here? Aren't you on shift?" his friends would ask.
Brushing aside all questions, Arnie would simply ask, "Do you know how fast you were going, Sir?" while lowering his sunglasses to the tip of his nose.
"Are you high? How the hell are you going to pay rent if you're out here?"
Arnie would sniff contemptuously, raising an eyebrow. "Sure you were, pal, sure you were. Can I see your license and registration?"
"I'm calling your wife."
"Looks like I'm going to have to write you a ticket. Sorry you couldn't do this the easy way." Pulling a pad of white objects and a pen from his back pocket, Arnie then used the top of his detainee's car as a writing surface. Then, shoving a white cloth-like substance into their hands, Arnie tipped the brim of his imaginary trooper's hat and said, "Just keep it under 30 next time, pal."
I imagine his detainees were always startled to find that the ticket they had been given was in fact a napkin, scribbled on one side with a various number of stars, crescent moons, and comets, and a red lemon-shaped Dairy Queen symbol on the other.
The family, of course, was called in the end. Several of my other uncles had to show up and restrain Arnie from causing any more harm. Fighting all the way, he was eventually forced into the back of his own car and driven home. His heat lamps and marijuana plants were destroyed, and while this caused him to mellow, he never really became sane again. His job was lost to him forever, and in the matter of a few months his wife had left him too. At all these things, Arnie could only wrap his arms around his legs, bury his head into his knees, and sob inconsolably about what a damn shame it was for an officer like him to be taken off "the force."
No one really sees Arnie anymore, except maybe at a wedding or a funeral. He tends to sit alone in corners, looking suspiciously at passersby, putting napkins into his pockets when no one is looking, no doubt dreaming of his glory days on patrol.
As I made my way home through the forest, I tolled out the thousand relatives of mine who had found their drug of choice and gone mad with it. I could only imagine what would happen to me if I did the same. Given my obsession with superheroes, I don't think I would be so far off from Uncle Arnie. With my thousand eccentricities amplified, and my social inhibitions removed, I can only wonder at what I would become.
I can only surmise that I would put on a Superman t-shirt, decide I was, in fact, Kryptonian, and then attempt to listen in on police scanners to foil crimes with my superpowers. Instead of writing tickets, I would no doubt fall back upon superhero puns. Perhaps, after throwing a jaywalker into a fountain, I might even laugh, "Looks like you're all washed up," before swishing a red sheet around my shoulders and pretending to fly away. It might be a fun couple of hours before I was dragged away in a straight-jacket and thrown into solitary confinement.
By the time I finally got home it was fully dark, and I had walked ten miles. I collapsed, exhausted, into my bed and fell asleep. The next morning I awoke sore, but still relatively sane, all thanks to Uncle Arnie...the man who taught me that no matter how mild the effects of it might be on a normal person, it would most surely drive me mad.