The Legend of Uncle Arnie - July 12, 2007
"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.
Posted by BC Woods at 9:03 PM
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Comments
Very nice. We're in the same boat on the drugs thing. I saw a few typos but I'll let someone else point them out for you. I'm going to bed. I hope everything is going good at home. Your short stories are awesome and I'm really glad you have found so much to write about.
BC: There are a lot more stories ahead my friend. I've just been very tired from roofing these past few weeks. I'm going to crank out a new one tonight if I can.
Posted by: Wayland at July 12, 2007 10:12 PM
haha good story. Although, in a controlled environment, it might be interesting to see what actually WOULD happen. But I guess better to play it safe than sorry.
BC: Yeah, it's always been my guess he had some other form of psychosis, but this is the way it's always told and I've verified with several people about what he did when he actually snapped, and it always surprises the fuck out of me.
Posted by: eugene at July 12, 2007 10:17 PM
Dude, just smoke some... What are you, a pussy? You must be gay. Only non-gay people don't not smoke weed.
BC: Wait... so doesn't that mean I'm straight? Read the last sentence again, my friend.
Posted by: Dealer Dan at July 13, 2007 12:42 AM
Funny one. Though, you were incredibly polite to the fuckups who drove you out there and wasted your day.
Just curious, are there many more stories about mike?
Keep up the awsome work.
BC: There are a thousand stories about Mike. I haven't even told the one about where he went blind for a week.
Posted by: Dillon at July 13, 2007 12:51 AM
my family sort of had the same thing going on, 'cept my uncle created his own religion with dogmatic principles and himself as the only worshiper/prophet.
Not in the judao/christian or even the cool eastern/metaphysical/guru/crystal-worshiping type either, more like the quazi-islamo fascist/homeless street preacher type. He's the only pothead I know that carries around a bible and koran to not only roll a joint from it, but to actually read it. Its sort of sad to see and hear about it happening to family, right?
Posted by: Tone at July 13, 2007 01:07 AM
mike goes blind for a week? that has to be at least 10 or 15 stories!
Posted by: Pseudo Jew at July 13, 2007 02:10 AM
Love the story B.C. I also had an uncle that went off the deep end after smoking a lil bit of the sticky icky and to this day he claims he can talk to trees.
Cheers to you for not giving in and smoking that crap. It's boring as hell anyways.
Posted by: Anonymous at July 13, 2007 10:40 AM
Taking something that is seemingly mundane and making it sound interesting is the mark of a good writer. Well, at least it is for me. Thanks for another good read.
Book deal soon?
BC: We can only hope.
Posted by: _tom at July 13, 2007 11:08 AM
Dude, just smoke some... What are you, a pussy? You must be gay. Only non-gay people don't not smoke weed.
BC: Wait... so doesn't that mean I'm straight? Read the last sentence again, my friend.
Triple negative, still means you're gay.
"don't not" cancel each other out, leaving "Only non-gay people smoke weed"
BC: I understand the second to last sentence means "gay" but the last sentence cancels itself out witht he double negative.
Posted by: SB at July 13, 2007 11:46 AM
Wow. That should be an after school special.
BC: I tried to stay away from that feeling. I recognize that amost all people can smoke weed and have it just be a recreational thing... I'm just pretty sure that it would make me in to a raving lunatic.
Posted by: unrogers at July 13, 2007 04:01 PM
Good for you to sticking to your guns, and not succumbing to "peer pressure". You ought to make a video, and talk to highschool audiences on the horrors of substance abuse.
Posted by: Marisa at July 13, 2007 06:30 PM
I was really fiending for an update, so thanks :) Also, why not just wait till they were high, relaxed, and slow witted, then steal the car.
BC: They're pretty good guys and they would have given me a ride after they were done. I just don't like being around substance abuse. In short: I'm weird as hell.
Posted by: Sod at July 13, 2007 08:11 PM
Your friends are assholes. I like sharing my weed, but it's more a matter of, "Have some, if you want."
I've never heard of someone going so crazy from dope. It's pretty ironic that he wanted to uphold the law while smoking illegal drugs. (As I understand it, the laws are much stricter in the states.)
And I can't help but wonder how many of those Bigfoot sightings were actually Rachel.
Posted by: Cori ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.daddydonthitme.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at July 13, 2007 08:52 PM
If you smoked weed, you would run over the little kid on the bike after leaving the drive-thru.. I have trouble trusting a teetotaler.
Posted by: Ethan at July 14, 2007 05:28 AM
Wow, now I understand why you're a teetotaler. Good move.
BC: Teetotaler? Is that like a tattle-tale?
Posted by: tiare at July 14, 2007 05:00 PM
What the hell's a kid on training wheels doing riding past a drive-thru with no parental supervision anyway? That commercial really oughta be about bad parenting, not weed.
Posted by: Super Fighting Robot at July 14, 2007 05:09 PM
I admire your will power
BC: I'll still gobble the fuck out of a bar of chocolate... so my will really isn't that strong for anything else.
Posted by: Donita at July 15, 2007 12:46 AM
Wow, the only drug I had ever heard of doing that sort of thing is acid. My friend has really bad back-trips from that stuff.
Teetotaler- n - One that refrains from intoxicating substances, usually for the fear of what might happen if they use them. (I'm one as well.)
BC: Thanks for the definition.
Posted by: Grog at July 15, 2007 04:02 PM
At least they didn't drive you all the way out to Tahola, or even worse, Humptulips.
BC: Have you ever thought about how strange that is? I mean, the name of the place is literally Hump Tulips, and no one bats and eye. If it was called Fucking Flowers I think people might reconsider.
Posted by: Goose at July 16, 2007 04:00 AM
Great story, keep them coming. As far as your uncle goes, I had an aunt who took an oxycotin that was given to her by her doctor. To this day she still swears that she had pirates in her living room trying to get her. This woman is like 70 years old too.
Anyways, I hope you get a book deal one day, and I hope your family doesn't bust your balls to much about your stories. Except Rachel, fuck her.
Posted by: Putter at July 16, 2007 06:51 PM
It was a 5 mile walk just to get to the paved road, and your two friends didn't pass you on their way back out? I don't buy it
Posted by: Anonymous at July 17, 2007 03:29 AM
It was a 5 mile walk just to get to the paved road, and your two friends didn't pass you on their way back out? I don't buy it
BC: They did, I just cut it out because it interrupted the flow of the story, and it wasn't really important. I ended up walking the whole way, anyhow.
Posted by: Anonymous at July 17, 2007 03:29 AM
Heh, I've tried marijuana once (I'm in British Columbia who hasn't?), nothing special about it. But I understand your concern about it. I've heard it has triggered latent schizophrenia in some but who knows. If you have a family history of crazies may as well stay away.
Also BTW I've learned with those sort of friend you have to get that commanding voice and say "Behave" or "No" or something, it usually works.
Posted by: Kanthalas at July 17, 2007 07:12 AM
I've also never smoked for fear of addiction. My parents had issues back in the day and it just plain doesn't interest me. Good decision I'd say. Been waiting for an update...solid once again.
Posted by: CSkan at July 19, 2007 05:20 PM
Sanity is overrated. I've vomited in a parking garage because I thought I was Tyler Durden, and tried to convince some people that the map of my town looked very similar to the cover of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. All thanks to marijuana. Pot doesn't make you insane, it just exacerbates your insanity. Just make sure you aren't somewhere where you can cause harm (like at work) and you'll be fine.
Posted by: Fatman at July 20, 2007 11:59 PM
you should have cut their gas line when they weren't looking, or at least slashed their tires. Why be the only one walking all the way home?
Posted by: Pi at July 22, 2007 09:04 PM
Good man. I'm much the same way, though perhaps a bit more extreme, haven't even tried alcohol or a cigarette.
BC: Neither have I.
Posted by: GringoDownSouth at July 23, 2007 02:02 PM
Even though my family doesn't have a history of going mad on drugs they do have a history of dying from them. So i can honestly say I would have done the same thing in your situation. Besides...I don't need drugs to see things that aren't there.
Anyway; I've been a lazy SOB and haven't written up a comment for anything you've written until now. I just wanted to say, I enjoy reading your writing. As plenty of people have said before me; you have a way with words and your visualization is beautiful. I've been working on getting such vivid imagery into my own writing and I'm kind of jealous! Though i suppose it helps that everything you write about actually happens...
Ok; i have nothing else to say. -thumbs up-
Posted by: PoetJones at July 24, 2007 06:35 PM
WOW. I had no idea you never tried weed. Then again your family is pretty intense as it is. I smoke to chill me out,I've never see anyone go buck wild off of weed unless they're newbies or it was good dank or laced w some shit. Anyway, funny story. I guess you're a pretty great story teller so you dont need drugs anyway. B.C " I live above the influence"
I dont but I can handle myself. Still love reading this my drug free friend! Take care kiddo!
Posted by: Syd at July 25, 2007 02:18 PM
At first, I have to admit, I thought you were being a pussy. But after reading the story to the end, I can see where you are coming from. And as of today, there may be some science showing echoing what you described happening your uncle.
"Pot may hike risk of psychosis, research finds"
Posted by: Snakehead at July 27, 2007 03:19 PM
i hope you stope hanging out with, trusting or even talking to those guys after they did that to you.
BC: They're really not that bad. If I had insisted on getting a ride, they probably would have given me one, except I didn't want to be in a car with two stoned people.
Posted by: celestial-salamander at August 2, 2007 02:13 AM
Dude, just smoke some... What are you, a pussy? You must be gay. Only non-gay people don't not smoke weed.
BC: Wait... so doesn't that mean I'm straight? Read the last sentence again, my friend.
It took me a while, but I think he's right (not in what he says, but in what he means). There's a double negative in the last sentance so I think it can be rephrased: Only straight people smoke weed. Therefore, as a person who doesn't smoke weed, you cannot be straight and are therefore gay. (I guess that makes me gay too then. It tells you something about your life if you have to find out your sexuality from someone you've never met before on the internet).
Posted by: Anonymous at August 5, 2007 07:50 PM
That guy's grammar was indeed correct. However, the person before me is incorrect; it can't quite be rephrased as "Only straight people smoke weed." That is because double negatives, though they imply a positive, are not the same as if no negatives were used at all. Simply saying "Only straight people smoke weed" does not imply people who do not smoke are gay, only that gay people do not smoke. For example, you could say only Asians eat with chopsticks. That doesn't mean that all Asians eat with chopsticks but simply that no non-Asians eat with chopsticks. I believe the best way to rephrase it would be as only straight people refrain from not smoking weed.
Posted by: Anonymous at August 6, 2007 03:09 AM
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