Crystal Meth and Shuffleboard

Back in November of 2005, my girlfriend knew a guy who was selling four tickets to a Rolling Stones show in San Diego for a ridiculous $25 each. This seemingly-reasonable price is only ridiculous because the face value of these nosebleed seats weighed in at a whopping $120/each. Ah, the Rolling Stones...after all these years, all those millions upon millions of dollars, all those quasi-legal offshore Dutch tax shelters... It's good to know they still do it for the love of the music, for something bigger and purer than all of us. Rock on!

For the record, to come clean from the start here, I love the Rolling Stones, despite their greed; they are human, after all. That being said, I am not one of those annoying, get-a-life, super-obsessed fans, not by a long-shot. I only own a few of their records; but I love those records. They are bluesy, they are rock, they are pop, they are guttural, they are sweet, they are everything all at once, which is quite a feat. This is one of the few scenarios where it is okay for somebody, a neophyte, to believe the hype and swim into the deep waters of their catalog without hesitation. I do think they are the biggest and best band in the world, if only because they are a true band, which is pretty rare in and of itself. I would not say the same about the Beatles, for example--they were more of a 'brilliant, volatile duo with passable back-up band.' Ditto for Elton John/Bernie Taupin.

But I digress...this is not a music review site. I apologize. Back to the point:

The reason nobody else wanted to buy these tickets for more money, and why the owner of them couldn't attend the show himself, was that we all lived in L.A. San Diego is a two-hour drive when traffic is great, and traffic would not be great at rush hour, since these babies were being unloaded day-of and the other two people in our group had to work til five. Whatever. We figured it'd be worth it--mostly due to the affordable price, as well as the fact that we had nothing better to do, so why not choose a little adventure?

I was not working that day, because it was a day like most others, and so I volunteered to drive out to the Valley, to brave the Girls and the heat, in order to pick up the tickets from the seller, who was an actor my girlfriend had met on a film set.

As I pulled up to the house at the address I had been given, a chimney sweep van parked in front of me sent my mind reeling. ‘Chimney sweeps still exist? I guess it makes sense...I mean, chimneys still exist, and I suppose they need to be cleaned every once in a while, but “swept?” Have there really been no advances in chimney-cleaning technology since Mary Poppins?’ Maybe--there seemed to be a vacuum involved.

I was further surprised to discover the guy I was looking for was not the one having his chimney swept but, rather, the one doing the sweeping--soot on his face and everything. Hey, brother’s gotta make a dime on the side, right? Acting sure don’t pay the bills...

Mr. Chimney Sweep lamented the fact that he could not attend the show, but was glad the tickets would not go to waste. He had seen them twice on this tour already, in San Francisco and LA, and they were both awesome shows.

Huh? This chimney sweep bought 4 tickets to three shows, at a minimum of $120 each? That’s like...a million dollars!?! How sick is his obsession?

I left as soon as possible, feeling like I had just caught him performing a strip-tease dressed as Little Bo Peep, for some sleazy 60-year-old children’s movie producer, in order to afford to buy his fourteenth ‘mint-condition Castle Greyskull (in box)’ on eBay.

I drove home and waited for the others to gather at our house in Silver Lake. As soon as the traffic got unbearable on the freeways, we embarked on our voyage with high hopes.

Luckily I had remembered to bring a handful of CDs because, let me tell you, as the man behind the wheel, this was one of the most excruciatingly boring drives of my entire life--and I've logged more miles in the last 13 years than most people will in their entire lives. [Editor's Note: He's not lying. It's true.] It was bumper-to-bumper for 126 miles. 126 miles. Bumper to bumper. It is therefore a testament to the caliber of friends in my car that day that it turned out to be a very enjoyable ride.


Representative Slice:

Tito and I rocked out to Thriller at ear-splitting volume in the front seats, while Bertie and Pedro played a movie-themed guessing game in the backseat. We had just stopped at Wendy's, because it was dinnertime and we couldn't fuck around and had to get fast food, and Tito had ordered a large Coke. After making a little room, he quickly emptied a flask-full of Jim Beam into his cup and we drained it. Oddly enough, this was my first bourbon-and-Coke; it was a transcendent experience; I haven't stopped drinking them since; I think it might be the most perfect cocktail in existence; seriously.

Bourbon-and-Coke fan-boy-exultation aside, here we were, laughing, singing at the top of our lungs, dancing in our seats, riding the brake inches at a time, but not complaining, because it wasn't like we hadn't expected the drive to take forever. Also, we knew our patience was to be rewarded with the music of the Rolling Stones, at a cut-rate price, so we didn't care about a thing.

I pulled a joint out from the console between my seats.

"Look what I found!"

Eyes lit up. It was no accident, and we all knew that, but it was fun to pretend like it was. We all got high. Life instantly became that much more enjoyable. The certainty I felt about the fact that we were having more fun than anyone else on the road that day only intensified. While normally I don't indulge quite so much while/before driving, for obvious legal/survival reasons, I felt okay about this exception. After all, this 'drive' amounted to little more than piloting a well-rehearsed pony down a trail with 13 of his barn-buddies, at a kindergarten-field-trip pace. Besides, considering how much fun we had, and how we all arrived in one piece, it was totally worth it; the drive was easily 1/3 of the fun on this adventure, which is rarely the case.


The second third of the fun was the show itself. As we pulled up near the stadium, the historic PETCO Park (hahaha, lol, rotfl, seriously, kill me!), we could hear the Stones had already begun their set. Shit! Somehow, we found a parking spot right across the street and were able to get inside quickly, not that it mattered. Why didn't it matter? Because, despite their advanced age, the Stones played for at least two and a half hours! It was pretty amazing.

Not only was their stamina impressive but, it being a stadium show, Mick worked the crowd with stunning ease and success. The stage was at least 100 feet long, and Mick patrolled it like a guard dog, keeping everybody excited. The stage even moved from the outfield to the pitcher's mound, to switch up the hot seats and share the love. Nice. Don't get me wrong--had I paid face-value for these tickets, I would have been pissed off. We were miles away from the stage, up in Bob Ueckerville, surrounded by people who paid $120 to sit there. Ouch.

The most interesting thing that happened during the show, however, had nothing to do with the music. It had nothing to do with Keith Richards slurring incoherently through the lead vocals during his moment in the sun. It had to do with the second joint I had rolled for the occasion.

Now, this joint was specifically intended for the show, so I had used a special blend of herbs and spices, anointed it with the unsullied tears of an albino newborn...kidding. I'm not one of 'those.' I just thought we would want another one, and we did. It being an open-air concert, and a Stones concert to boot, I figured a little pot would be tolerated. I was wrong. Sort of.

Almost immediately after we found our seats, which took quite some time due to somewhat-understandable confusion among the various minimum-wage-'I-don't-give-a-shit' venue representatives, I lit up the joint and leaned back to savor the scene we had traveled so far to enjoy. A Hispanic man seated behind me leaned forward.

"Oh, man, that smells so good. It's been so long. Can I give you five bucks for a hit? I just gotta have some of that."

"Sure. Sure."

He opened his wallet.

"Do you have change for a fifty?"

"No..."

I gave him a hit anyway. Whatever--I'm all into sharing. Most of the time. As long as the person is nice, which this guy was. I couldn't help but notice, as I watched him puff away a little too liberally for my taste, that he was on a date. There was a woman next to him, and she didn't seem too familiar, you know what I mean? It seemed like they were definitely together, but had maybe just started dating, maybe this was even a first date 'meant to impress,' due to the cost. Another Hispanic couple sat next to them and they seemed to be a foursome, on a double-date.

The guy handed the joint back and it was passed among my friends. On its way back to me, as I waited for Pedro to hand it off, my spidey-sense started tingling. I looked over to my left and saw two cops talking to each other. They were pointing in our general direction. One of them had a flashlight. I knew what was about to happen before it did, luckily.

"Pedro--throw it. Throw it!"

Pedro hesitated, saw the cops, hesitated again, and dropped the joint at his feet just as the flashlight beam lit up his priceless face. I was so disappointed--we were so close! All he had to do was throw it! One of the cops walked over, bent down to pick up the joint, and shined the light in all our faces.

"You, you, you, you...and you...and you, come with me."

Wow. That was thorough. He even pulled out the guy who 'bought' a hit from me and the other guy on the double-date with him, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the affair.

As we all paraded out from our seats to the nearest access tunnel like misbehaving schoolchildren, we were completely unsupervised; the cops walked in front of us. If any of us had had any contraband, there was ample time/opportunity to dump it. But we had been 'smart;' we had only brought in one joint--evidence we had intended to completely incinerate.

Out in the tunnel, near the concession stands, the cops lined us up against the wall. Shit seemed grim. Luckily, I was high. Also luckily, I realized he had nothing on us--none of us had any weed in our possession and he couldn't prove where the remains of that joint had come from. It was found on the ground, it could have been thrown there by somebody else--it was circumstantial and not enough to justify an arrest. A wave of relief washed over me. I smiled and listened to the mouthpiece-cop's hilarious speech as his partner looked on, glad he didn’t have to deliver it.

"Now, we're not going to arrest you guys--we just want the rest of what you've got. So I don't care who has it, just hand it over and you'll all be free to go. I'm not even gonna pretend we're gonna arrest you; if we were to arrest everybody here tonight who was smoking pot, our prisons would be filled. We simply don't have the space or the manpower to do that."

I laughed. So did my companions. Nobody else was smoking pot! Why do you think we were so easily located? We were in a baseball stadium! These tickets cost a minimum of $120! This is a show for law-abiding yuppies! This is hardly some kind of counter-culture 'happening,' where laws are being flouted left and right, in the shadows, and the cops 'just can't keep up.' In fact, I thought, this might actually be the least-cool audience in Rolling Stones concert history. I mean, it at least has to be right up there, in contention, and I was a part of it--this was a thoroughly depressing realization.

I told him we had nothing. He didn't believe me.

"Alright, empty your pockets."

I emptied my pockets, cruelly disappointed him, and he said I was free to go. One by one, he checked through what everybody held out in their hands. It seemed to be taking a while. I could hear the music blasting from down on the field and was itching to watch the show, so I decided to head back out to my seat, to wait for my friends there. I might as well have, right? It's not like they needed my support right then, we were all going to be immediately released, so, whatever, I left.

As I sat back down in my seat, the three teenagers in front of me whipped around, checked me out, looked like they had just seen a ghost, and immediately turned back around and whispered to each other. Aha--it was them. Straight-edge punks by sight, meddling tattletales by deed. What kind of a cool-ass 'I don't give a shit' punk teenager, straight-edge or otherwise, gives a shit whether or not somebody else smokes pot at an open-air concert? I mean, isn't the whole punk ideology based on the individual's intrinsic right to freedom? What a bunch of lame-ass wannabes. I laughed to myself. 'Haha! I got away!' I wondered what they were thinking, those little assholes.

"Do you think he killed the cop? Or bribed him or something? Do you think we will somehow get in trouble as a result? Do you think he might hurt us? Do you think he might break our brittle little skinny-jean-clad legs? I'm scared! Hold me, Jarvis!"

My friend Pedro walked back out and sat down next to me, scared sober. After a while, we headed back over to the tunnel, to see what was taking so long with the others, and saw one of the cops handcuffing somebody against the wall. What the fuck?!

As it turned out, the Hispanic guy who had never even touched the joint was rolling with a rock of crystal meth in his pocket. For some reason, he hadn't felt the need to dump it as we walked from our seats to the tunnel and decided not to leave it in his pocket when the cop asked him to empty his pockets. The cops didn't reach into our pockets to see if they had actually been emptied--I could have had kiddie porn in there and he wouldn't have known. It was on the honor system. What an idiot.

Well, I guess if you're tomcatting around town with a bag of meth in your pocket, you're not exactly smart; and even if you were intelligent to begin with, you probably don't have your wits about you after you've cooked up. And so it goes...the one person totally uninvolved with 'the crime' gets handcuffed and taken to prison, because he was dumb. Kids, if you're listening--don't be dumb. You will pay the price at some point.

I wonder what the meth-dude's date did when he never came back? I wonder if she knew. San Diego is, after all, the methamphetamine capital of North America, and has been for decades (according to The Economist, in issues from 1989 & 2000, as reported on wikipedia.org).

Post-concert, trying to find our way back to the freeway, we stumbled upon the third and final phase of our great evening--a dirty, cool-looking bar called The Jewel Box. Aside from cheap drinks, a diverse clientele, and a decent jukebox, they had a shuffleboard table! I had never played before, but it was not hard to learn; nor, for a stud like me, was it hard to master. We played for a couple hours and discovered it might be the perfect game to play while drinking with friends. I often think about driving down to San Diego just to hang out, drink, and play shuffleboard. The same way I often think about driving up to San Francisco for Chinese food at House of Nanking.

But, as is the case with both establishments, they were discovered at random and therefore greatly exceeded my meager expectations. Now that I have built them up so greatly in my mind, can they possibly hold up? It would be far easier for them to disappoint. But, why would they, why should they? Plenty of places are great and stay great and I go back over and over again. Hmmm.

I pondered this conundrum as we drove home. It was much faster this time, thank Jason Bateman. I went to sleep content--it had been one of the best nights in recent memory.