Heart of Dankness Page 3
I turned in my paperwork and was allowed to access the inner sanctum.
The funny thing is, once you’re buzzed through the door, you step into a black metal cage. When the door behind you closes, the cage is opened. I wondered if they’d gotten this technology from a zoo. It might not be tough enough to deter serious criminals, but it would definitely keep a tiger from escaping.
I stepped out of the cage and into a dim room. The only real light was coming from the case that held large Mason jars filled with various strains of marijuana. It had all the charm of a tropical fish store minus the fish.
The budtenders were young Filipino kids who looked like they should have been studying for their midterms and not chucking buds into green plastic vials, yet despite the nonstop turnover and the customers stacking up behind me, they were all smiles.
“What kind of sativas do you have?”
The budtender reached under the counter and pulled out a jar filled with bright green clumps of marijuana.
“Green Crack. It’s pretty popular.”
He unscrewed the lid and I sniffed at the Green Crack. It’s a terrible name for a strain. It’s green, obviously, but why associate a benign herb with an addictive coca paste? Or maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe Green Crack conjures up an image of a determined little sprout reaching up toward the sun, breaking through a tiny fissure in the hard concrete of the modern world. Is Green Crack a Pixar movie or a product of urban blight?
Although I didn’t think the name was any better than Green Crack, I decided to try a gram of Trainwreck. The budtender was unsure whether it was the original California Trainwreck or the strain developed by Green House Seeds in Holland but, because I was a new customer, he gave me a gift bag with rolling papers, blueberry-flavored pre-rolled cones, and a lighter. It was a thoughtful gift, but when I got home and looked at the Trainwreck in the daylight, I realized that it wasn’t the best-looking bud and it had almost no scent. It definitely wasn’t dank.
If the American Eagle Collective was like the busy trading floor of an exotic tropical fish exchange, then the Organic Healing Center was a serene and well-lit yoga studio, with a few nice touches, including a modern couch, warm hardwood floors, and soft pale green curtains. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they’d hired an interior decorator to do the place up.
The dispensary room was large and bright, the well-organized display cases as clean as any I’d ever seen.
The budtenders could have worked as extras in a movie of the week about the Mexican mafia, but they were friendly and welcoming, and I was impressed by their knowledge and the fact that they took real care handling the product. Where the kids of the American Eagle Collective were handling buds with their fingers and flicking them into plastic vials, the budtenders here used tongs and tenderly placed the buds into little green containers with nicely printed labels. The color of the plants popped, and when I leaned over a jar for a closer look I was hit by a fresh and pungent scent.
I left with two grams. One was called Super Jack, a cross between a strain called Jack Herer—named after the hemp activist and author of the seminal marijuana masterpiece, The Emperor Wears No Clothes: The Authoritative Historical Record of Cannabis and the Conspiracy Against Marijuana—and Super Silver Haze, which won the Cannabis Cup in 1998 and 1999. I also took the budtender’s advice and got a gram of Maui Wowee, a pure Hawaiian sativa.
I have to say that when I took the strains home and sampled them, I didn’t find them to be anything extraordinary. You’d think with the kind of pedigree these strains had that they would be amazing, but for some reason they just didn’t live up to my expectation. They were good, don’t get me wrong, and the budtenders were really nice, but they didn’t even begin to approach the level of weed I’d experienced in Holland.
I was invited to visit the Gourmet Green Room, a dispensary in West Los Angeles, to sample a strain they’ve developed called Zeta. The GGR has three different locations, one in Venice, one in San Diego, and this one, just off the 405 freeway. It’s a dispensary that boasts more than one hundred strains of cannabis and is, according to the proprietor, the hot spot where young Hollywood goes to get their medicinal marijuana. I’d heard raves about Zeta, but I’d never tried it. That’s because you can only get it at GGR, and even then you have to know someone. It’s an off-menu, behind the velvet rope, VIP-type weed and is, supposedly, one of the dankest strains to come out of California in years.
I was met outside the building by an affable security guard who looked a lot like a pit bull. He checked my doctor’s recommendation and then opened the door. I walked into a tiny foyer and passed my paperwork through a slot in yet another bulletproof window. I was starting to get used to this gauntlet of small rooms, bulletproof glass, and steel cages.
Once my bona fides had been vetted, the pit bull apologized for putting me through any inconvenience and I was let into the dispensary. The Gourmet Green Room struck me as kind of a misnomer. It wasn’t particularly gourmet looking and it wasn’t even green; it looked exactly like what it was—a converted industrial space. Even though I didn’t go down any stairs the space had the look and feel of a basement. Maybe it was the linoleum floor and the diffuse lighting, or maybe it was the absence of any discernible character, ambiance, or charm. But once I looked behind the counter I understood. The room was empty so that customers could focus on the massive wall of various marijuana buds in large glass jars behind the budtender. It was impressive.
I met the owner, Mike, a compact and wiry guy who looked like he could just as easily have been the owner of a chain of pizzerias. He was outwardly friendly and easygoing, giving off a just-one-of-the-guys kind of vibe, but I could tell that underneath the firm handshake and jovial bonhomie was a shrewd operator. He pointed me to the lounge where Doug, the vapemaster, was holding sway.
“This is the last call. Next week we won’t be allowed to medicate on site.”
“Why not?”
Mike shrugged. “We’re only nine hundred ninety-four feet away from a Chinese Baptist church. We need at least a thousand for the new ordinance.”
The Los Angeles City Council, prodded by Carmen A. Trutanich, the headline-hungry city attorney, was attempting to crack down on the explosive growth of medical marijuana facilities by reinterpreting the rules they operate by. Unable or unwilling to tackle the problems of violent street gangs and serious crime, Trutanich and his office were taking the easy way out, stealing a page from Rudy Giuliani’s playbook and trying to make the city more “livable” by putting the squeeze on soft targets and low-hanging fruit. Despite a fierce legal battle and several injunctions, in October 2011, Los Angeles County Superior Court judge Anthony J. Mohr ruled in favor of the city, and both the American Eagle Collective and Organic Healing were slated for closure. The fact that they were trying to close legitimate businesses in the midst of one of the worst recessions in Los Angeles history didn’t seem to register with the city council or the mayor, who’d jumped on the anti-dispensary bandwagon.
I looked at Mike and shook my head.
“They’re on the wrong side of history.”
Mike’s face lit up. “I like that. I like the way you think,” he said.
I entered the lounge and noticed a large-screen HD television broadcasting the red carpet arrivals at the Oscars. Penelope Cruz, looking lovely in a deep red gown, posed for the paparazzi in front of gigantic statues of gilded alopecia sufferers, as other celebrities were herded past like prize pigs by their handlers.
Doug had been waiting. Lean and grizzledly handsome, he was a surprising choice for vaporizer operator of the GGR lounge. I would’ve expected a young stoner, but Doug was easily in his early sixties.
He stroked the short gray stubble on his chin and looked at me, barely suppressing a smile.
“You ready to try some Zeta?”
I was indeed.
Demi Moore strutted her cougar stroll on the red carpet dressed in a ruffled salmon-colored freak-out. The dress look
ed like a cake you’d order from an insane asylum.
As the Volcano vaporizer—which looks like a sophisticated version of every kid’s fourth grade science fair project—warmed to 380 degrees Fahrenheit, Doug ground some of the Zeta in a small silver grinder. He was an intelligent and loquacious fellow, to say the least. In fact, he never stopped talking.
“I think marijuana is the next phase, the next step in human consciousness. You know? The secret’s the sativa. It takes you up. Zoom. You soar, but you’re in control. You’re high but you’re not stoned.”
On the red carpet, someone I’ve never heard of grinned at the camera in a sharp-looking tuxedo. Then they cut to commercials.
Doug continued. “It knocks down the blocks, whatever it is that’s blocking you, and you can be more creative. Don’t you think? I mean, for me that’s how it works.”
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as enthusiastic about anything as Doug was about cannabis. If the marijuana movement needs a head cheerleader to rally the team or someone to act as the bong-spinning drum major at the head of the parade, he’s the man.
I’m not sure about creativity and cannabis. For me the jury’s out. “I’m looking for dankness,” I said.
“Ah, yeah.” Doug handed me an alcohol swab to clean and sterilize the vaporizer mouthpiece. He shrugged. “Flu season.”
I wiped down the little plastic piece and handed it back. Doug carefully packed the ground Zeta in the vaporizer chamber and affixed a plastic balloon on top. He put the chamber in the mouth of the volcano and flipped a switch. The balloon began to expand, filling with the mist of Zeta, something that I realize sounds like a role-playing computer game popular with fourteen-year-old boys.
“See if this is dank enough for you.”
Doug handed me the balloon and I took a long inhale. I exhaled and got a blast of fresh sage and lemons. The flavor was fantastic. Another inhale and I could feel the scamper of THC rampaging through my nervous system.
Zeta delivered a soaring high that was lucid and euphoric. Now this is what I’m talking about. I could tell that Zeta was predominantly sativa, but I was curious what else was in the mix.
“What is it?”
Doug leaned back and exhaled a lungful of mist.
“I think it’s Sage crossed with Blueberry and Trainwreck. But I don’t know for sure.”
The fact is, if he did know, he wouldn’t say. Zeta is a top-secret strain developed by someone named Buddy, grown somewhere in California, and only available at the Gourmet Green Room.
On the television, George Clooney was working the red carpet. His smile had never looked shinier. Behind him, Sarah Jessica Parker grinned like a death skull, her bones looking like they were trying to poke through her skin. I almost asked Doug if we could turn the TV off, but then Woody Harrelson brought his swagger and a knowing twinkle to the proceedings. Woody’s presence was reassuring. Perhaps he’d had a little Zeta before he got out of the limo.
Doug leaned forward and, lowering his voice to a near whisper, told me that Mike was thinking about entering Zeta in the Cannabis Cup. A win would be a big deal for the Gourmet Green Room franchise. It would put them on the map.
“What do you think? Think it could win?”
Helen Mirren put a hand on her hip and cocked her head as a million flashbulbs exploded around her. She looked lovely.
I took another hit off the balloon and tasted the sage and lemon again. Zeta made me want to eat roast chicken.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Yeah, I think it could.”
I continued to visit various dispensaries, looking for a strain that might come close to what I’d had in Amsterdam, but Los Angeles, it seems, was in the midst of a Kush craze. Californians like their weed strong and sledgehammer heavy. It was the opposite of the euphoric uplift I’d gotten from the Zeta, or the herb in Amsterdam.
I tried a bunch of different Kush varietals. I sampled Diesel, NYC Diesel, and a strain with the great name Chem Dawg.
Besides Zeta, the only strain that even came close to the experience I was looking for—the only strain that I could say approached dankness—was one called Headband. Headband had taken third place at the 2009 Cannabis Cup and was allegedly a Dutch remix of a California strain: California genetics treated with an Amsterdam aesthetic.
And still, Headband wasn’t quite it. I was pretty sure it wasn’t “diggity dank”—an expression that the University of Oregon Department of Linguistics slangsters had said was used to indicate super-high-quality marijuana—but was it dank?
I didn’t know. How did weed get dank? What happened that made some marijuana so different than the rest?
I decided that I needed to go back to the source, back to the home of the men and women who toil in the hidden greenhouses, grimy basements, and rooftop gardens of Amsterdam.
Holland, with its relative tolerance of cannabis consumption, has created the climate for a culture of growers and botanists to experiment with different types of cannabis, to seek out rare and exotic strains, and test-market the results in the coffeeshops. These are men and women whose passion is discovering and growing dank weed. There’s a reason that the Cannabis Cup, the benchmark competition for the world’s best weed, is held in Amsterdam. It was time to go back.
Chapter Five
The Grey Area
Although I’ve heard Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport referred to as “shithole” by a number of people, it’s one of my favorite airports in the world. There is nothing quite like stumbling off a ten-hour flight—which for me means I’ve been awake for almost twenty-four hours—and entering Schiphol’s main terminal. It’s like waking up and finding yourself in a steampunk wet dream with a heavy dose of Blade Runner chucked on top. By that I mean it’s both modern and old-fashioned, with a layer of sci-fi rococo futuristic nonsense ladled on top. The bones of the airport look like an old steel Eiffel-designed train station, but one with a dozen layers of modern Tokyo signage-riot running amok. It makes you recalibrate your head, to adjust to the vastness of the architecture, the in-your-faceness of the multilingual information streaming at you, and the sheer volume of travelers going to all parts of the world.
That there’s a subway station and a shopping mall, a library, and some sort of casino in the terminal just adds to the chaos and fun. The first time I arrived at Schiphol, it took me a half hour to find the line for passport control and customs.
When I told people I was going to Amsterdam, the first thing they asked was “Is your wife going with you?” When I said no—she has a job that ties her to Los Angeles—I got two distinctly different responses. One was “And she’s okay with that?” The other, which came with a kind of twitchy wink of the eye, was “Awesome.”
Amsterdam. The name alone seems to conjure up fantasies of debauchery and licentiousness—the city that offers guests the opportunity to wallow in a trough of hedonistic pleasure. Amsterdam is a Bacchanalia, an orgy of sex, drugs, and stuff your mother warned you about.
Amsterdam was founded sometime in the thirteenth century. In a typical Dutch example of pragmatism over poetry, the city got its name when the Amstel River was dammed and the locals were called “the people who live near the Amstel Dam.” Since then Amsterdammers have survived a few bouts of plague, the rise and fall of tulip mania, invasions by Napoléon and Hitler, and a misguided attempt at urban renewal.
I rented a basement apartment on a small side street called Utrechtsedwarsstraat just a hundred feet or so from a bustling shopping street called Utrechtsestraat. It is a beautiful part of the city. The streets are lined with stately seventeenth-century homes with wisteria vines climbing up them and pubs with big windows that face the canal. There was a small park nearby with beautiful trees and tulips sprouting in flower beds.
For me, this intersection could not have been more perfect. There was a pub on the corner called De Huyschkaemer that served a really good sandwich and fresh Grolsch beer. If I turned left I would find a chocolatier, a bookstore (with some English
titles), and a very nice wine shop. If I crossed the street there was a tapas bar, a bakery, and a place called the Coffee Salon that made the best espresso I’ve ever tasted. In other words, all my favorite things—beer on tap, wine in bottles, books in English, and coffee in a cup—were just a thirty-second walk from my door.
My landlords were young, handsome, and charming: poster boys for gay marriage. In fact, I started to suspect that it was all a little too perfect, like there must be rats or mold or something unpleasant and moist in the newly redecorated basement flat, but the only disconcerting thing I found was a carton of something called “Vla” in the refrigerator.
A closer look and a quick browse in a Dutch-English dictionary revealed Vla to be vanilla custard.
I wondered if this might be a harbinger of things to come. Most Dutch people speak English, which gives you a sense of familiarity, and they look kind of like Americans, just a handsome, fitter, taller, and more cosmopolitan version. I imagine Amsterdam is what Seattle might look like if everyone there was some sort of super-stylish metrosexual. Yet it’s a foreign country, an alien culture, a society with customs and rituals that can seem totally bizarre to an outsider—like providing guests with a fresh carton of Vla.
I considered renting a bicycle. I wanted to have as close to a “real” Amsterdam experience as I could, and it seems like the entire population rides a bike. I’m not joking. There are literally thousands of dented, weather-worn, turn-of-the-last-century two-wheelers stacked up on every street and locked to every square inch of wrought iron railing in the city. Rush hour in Amsterdam is notably light on carbon emissions; car traffic is thin, while the bike paths are clogged with riders.
Like I said, I considered renting one, but I realized I didn’t need one. My apartment was a pleasant twenty-minute stroll through the heart of the city to where most of the coffeeshops are clustered.