A visit to Butch Gray

 A visit to Butch Gray

     Back to the late 60's on up to the 1990's we were avid pot smokers and despite all the warnings we never missed a day of getting high for at least 3 decades. Devotees of the weed know that what we were smoking was vastly inferior to the strains of today that leave a man dreaming groovy dreams after a hit or two. Yet, part of the fun of the early days was the forbidden fruit nature and the inherent danger of making purchses of the boo, hemp, weed, tea ganja, grass, merry-juana. The meet-ups always contained the possibility of getting busted and the joy of making a score was exciting, This would be followed by the moments of truth when the heads would roll up the joints after dumping a bag onto an album sleeve, seperating the stems/ seeds and lighting up the j's. Sometimes it was ho hum but others were surpisingly filled with an exhilaration when the high was better than expected. There was a case that Greg liked to muse about when I had a big bag of some weed I got from a Mexican-American vato known as Rod who popped open a kilo and threw me a big chunk to try out. I just put the stuff in a drawer and forgot about it until my stash dwindled and my young buddy boy and I had to reach for the mystery bag. I kept it in a vintage jar that was supposed the hold library paste and it remained fresh. This stuff was so good Greg called it "the superpot!" and we told no one and smoked it all by ourselves. The motivation to get loaded was powerful and forced us to drive anywhere in the county to get a supply of "the stuff ."  It may have come from Ed Carroll who was being his hippy self in Venice pre-Midvale but the word went out that there was a cat in Venice who always had a good supply of plain old Mexican dirt-weed. His name was Butch Gray and the great thing about his operation was the ease of placing and collecting an order. You called a number, let Butch know how you got his number and told him what you needed. You then drove over to an address in Venice, proceeded to a side window of his house and there Butch Gray would take your ten bucks and would hand you a lid. Simple as that you had enough to roll maybe twenty joints and maybe something to put in a pipe for the ride home. Greg patronized Butch Gray several times and was a satisfied customer that would have given the pusher man a 5-star Amazon rating if it was today. The other side of this resin stained coin was the case of "the Bear and Kikuchi" who were a couple of scroungy hippies who were friends of roomate Bruce Alpert. They had a pound for sale and I grabbed it, paid them and went home to find it was unsmokable seed tobacco. True to the entire hippy scene, they just  ripped me off and refused to take the bunk back or return the money. Sometimes you got the peanuts, sometimes you got the shells. Bruce by the way always had a briefcase filled with very high grade pot called "red-hair" at the time. He never shared it with us and kept the case out of our reach.