The Marijuana Chronicles (19 page)

I’d been a huge fan of Pepperpot and Jackson comedies since I was a kid and was starstruck from the moment Jackson had walked into my office. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m no celebrity ass-kisser. Far from it. I grew up in one of LA’s storied canyon communities, lousy with big-name entertainment industry icons, all milling about at the local food mart. But Pepperpot and Jackson had that seminal impact on me as a kid that wields the ultimate influence on any fan—a history of preadolescent enthusiasm bordering on obsession. And while Jackson’s fortunes were way down at this point in his career, during their heyday, the comedy team had amassed a monumental following of ticket-buying enthusiasts and potheads.

Several days later, Jackson’s daughter Gladys called me, and for the next few weeks we wound up spending many late nights together, sometimes wearing clothes but mostly naked, with me giving her pointers on script analysis, and after several Bacchanalian all-nighters, I became unequivocally convinced she had what it took to truly succeed in Hollywood, and with a concerted effort and a little luck I managed to land her a job interview with Cecil B. Glazer’s production company. It was a relatively easy thing to do because Gladys was bright, beautiful, and sexually uninhibited, and Cecil was the cad son of a billionaire with a weakness for nymphomaniacs. When Gladys got the job, Godfrey Jackson was thrilled.

It was at this time that Jackson was becoming totally obsessed with catching up to his former partner and arch nemesis, Aaron Pepperpot, who had leveraged his post–Pepperpot and Jackson comedy career into a solo one by starring in a series of hit films and prime-time television shows. As Pepperpot’s stock rose and Jackson’s fell, people in the industry openly opined to Jackson’s face that Pepperpot had always been “the funny one.”

When my company organized a screening of Jackson’s
You Best Shut Up!
at a prestigious theater on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, the venue was filled with studio heavies, a smattering of Blist celebrities, and his former sidekick Pepperpot, who had played a bit part in the movie as a professional courtesy to Jackson. Jackson had made a lot of people a lot of money over the course of his career and even though the chances were slim he’d do the same thing on his own, this savvy crowd knew the possibility existed, however remote, that he could be the next big Hollywood rebound story.

But not this time. Each bad joke on screen elicited a groan from the audience, soon followed by the disruptive rustling of people heading toward the exits. As the theater emptied out, it became painfully obvious that redemption had once again eluded Godfrey Jackson. When the curtain closed and the lights came up, Pepperpot gave Jackson a condescending pat on the back, said, “That’s show biz!” and walked out of the theater with a look on his face that could only be described as schadenfreude.

Several months later, with the corpse of
You Best Shut Up!
still warm, Jackson was back in my office once again, this time proposing that we cowrite his next screenplay. His wife Leona, who called all the financial shots in the family, agreed to pay me a small per diem, which would be deducted off the top of the sale price when the script sold. And it would sell. Jackson was certain.

At the time, I was on a corporate career path, and not enthusiastic about the prospect of living an untethered existence, sipping lattes at the local coffee shop, cooking up the next shortcut to greatness; Jackson was offering me a life of creative self-direction. This wasn’t a devil-may-care date with destiny. This was
a calculated risk
and I actually believed in Godfrey Jackson’s talent and ability, that he could tap into a gigantic audience with the right creative content. And that’s where I came in.

Even though it had been years since any of Jackson’s solo efforts had shown a profit, he was still convinced a studio would give him twenty million dollars to make
our
movie, as long as it was mainstream enough to capture the hearts and minds of the next generation of twelve-to-eighteen-year-olds. And so, with this core demographic as our Holy Grail we developed an outline for a comedic screenplay about a black guy named Delray Johnson—a character we specifically wrote for Eddie Murphy—a crass, street-smart con man who is mistaken for Asian when he smokes pot and gets tangled up with a bunch of weed smugglers from Hong Kong. Antics ensue.

Initially, I found the entire premise offensive and racist, but Jackson said my “politically correct” resistance was proof positive that I was a closet racist, because any comedian with an ounce of credibility knows that racism is a
reality on the street
and that comedy isn’t funny unless it’s real.

We called the screenplay
Hong Kong Bong Song
.

I was totally committed to writing a saleable screenplay, putting the legendary Godfrey Jackson back on the map, and getting on the map with him. He may have been a block of ice in Hollywood, but to me he was still the coolest guy who’d ever lived and I couldn’t get enough of his Horatio Alger rags-to-riches stories. He told me all about his early days growing up dirt poor in the mixed-race, working-class Pittsburgh suburb of Homestead, raised by a heroin-addicted hooker grandmother who rode with a biker gang and was famous around town for giving the best toothless BJs in the history of whoring. Jackson also gave me endless dish about Pepperpot, the son and grandson of executioners at a state penitentiary in Georgia—not your typical Pepperpot and Jackson audience members. And that “Pepperpot” had grown up as “Aaron Buckley Montgomery” in a middle-class suburb and had never even seen marijuana, let alone smoked it, before meeting Jackson, the true root-ball of their successful nine-year pot-fueled run.

Yet no one in the Hollywood mainstream really gave a shit about truth or authenticity. To the industry, where perception is everything, Pepperpot was the winner and Jackson was the loser, one notch above your average one-hit wonder.

The more time I spent with Jackson, the more I realized how lost and hopeless he was, and I began to focus all of my creative energies and professional ambitions on propping him up and convincing him he had the goods to make his way back onto the big-dog grid. Pepperpot and Jackson movies and records had made their distributors boatloads of money. With the right property, I was certain these same shark operators would welcome Jackson back into the tent with open arms. As for his low-trading stock as a comedic actor, there was no denying his legendary history as a performer. The same thing had happened to Frank Sinatra, had it not, and Elvis? Former megastars who had crashed and burned and were all but forgotten before rising out of the ashes and achieving new heights. No question, Jackson was just one project away from celebrity redemption!

After several weeks of slogging our way through the first draft of our screenplay, Jackson noticed I didn’t seem the least bit interested in smoking pot—and the thing people talked about when they met Godfrey Jackson was pot. They’d launch into their “unique” stories about how the first time they ever smoked marijuana was listening to
How High Are Ya??
or watching
Big Beef
Bong-O
in their big brother’s bedroom. To fans, Godfrey Jackson was the human embodiment of pot.

This added to my appreciation of his underdog comedic legacy; but in truth, pot didn’t interest me. I was too “uptight,” he said, and frankly, I was getting on his nerves with all of my talk about Sid Field and Aristotle.

I’d smoked pot a couple of times in college, though it wasn’t something I ever really thought about. But when Jackson decided I needed to get high to free up creatively and invited me to join him in a toke, I consented.

Jackson took a small stash box out of his cabinet, plucked out a choice bud, and packed it into the glass bowl of his bong. It was dark, almost black ganja, which I later learned was the legendary “Lamb’s Bread” from Jamaica—the all-natural gold standard of the outdoor, pre-Kush, genetically enhanced, hydroponically produced seed varietals.

Jackson smiled impishly at me as he lit the bowl and took an epic hit, keeping the smoke in his lungs with several short sucks of air for what seemed an eternity. Just when I thought he couldn’t possibly hold the smoke any longer, he sucked it back down into his lungs again and held in a cough with a grunting, sipping sound, waited for several seconds, and then finally blew the smoke out, nodding sagely my way, eyebrows raised. Then he handed me the bong. I held it apprehensively and watched the glowing red bowl of burning black bud from across the upper lip of the water pipe, and with Jackson watching, I slowly inserted my face into the bong hole, lips first, hit the Bic for good measure, waved it lightly across the already burning bud embers, and sucked in an enormous, seemingly endless quantity of gray THC-laden fumes. Then, following Jackson’s lead, I held it in my lungs for as long as I could, which in my case was about two seconds, tried to suck it back down again but couldn’t handle the pressure in my lungs, and coughed spasmodically, sending a prodigious plume of smoke into the room. I gasped for several seconds and then coughed and coughed and coughed before finally regaining my composure and realizing, almost instantly, that I was
extremely
high.

Jackson smiled knowingly as he shelved the bong, and without a moment’s hesitation began to riff mad comedy off the cuff with giddy, inebriated abandon as I typed away. As usual, I had no idea what he was talking about, but whereas before I might have resisted his humorous impulses as tedious or unfunny or just downright lame, now his goofy humor sounded like the funniest shit I’d ever heard in my life! I laughed and laughed as his hairy face lit up and he said, “We’re going to hit the jackpot with this one, mon!”

When I went home that night I was still high. The next morning, as I spent an hour spreading peanut butter on a piece of toast, I realized I was
still
high. I know it sounds implausible, but I was high for an entire week. I went to sleep high. I woke up high. Each day I drove from my little house in Venice, California, up along Pacific Street and down California Street, onto the Pacific Coast Highway and up the winding coastline to Topanga Canyon, then up the mountain pass to Jackson’s house, nestled behind a gigantic grove of big bamboo, all the while high as a goose.

Meantime, Jackson was right. For the final stretch of our writing effort, the pot loosened me up. It probably didn’t make the script any better but it certainly made me think it was funnier, and soon we had finished
Hong Kong Bong Song
.

We were both confident the script had turned out well, so we organized a reading with ten of our friends, mostly mine, put joints around the room next to a plate of pot brownies, and laughed our asses off from fade-in to fade-out. After securing the rabid enthusiasm of our core demographic—the incredibly high—we went to market with a pot comedy disguised as a mainstream comedy.

Jackson called some of the most powerful decision-making executives across the painted hills of Hollywood and gave them “the opportunity” to read our script, but after several weeks of deafening silence it became clear that no one was going to give us twenty million dollars to make it. In fact, no one showed even the slightest interest in optioning the script, which
is
pretty funny (and still available). But the experience solidified our friendship—and I developed a lifelong affinity for good bud.

Years later I was living in New York City, where I’d moved to become a “serious writer,” which is to say a seriously unemployed writer. It was a year after 9/11 and the world as we Americans knew it had changed forever. The Patriot Act had just passed through Congress and was signed into law by the Bush administration; the terrorist threat facing the nation was quantified daily by degrees of color on charts and graphs; neighbors who you’d never met suddenly wanted a peek up your ass crack to see if you were packing a dirty bomb. New York City’s social anonymity suddenly became a thing of the past, with the harsh light of fear-driven paranoia casting ugly shadows in every direction.

It was against this backdrop that I sat down one morning to enjoy my daily ritual of black coffee, a toasted bialy, and the
New York Times
, when I noticed an article above the fold on the front page announcing the arrest and deportation of Godfrey Jackson. The story reported that Jackson had been apprehended in his Topanga Canyon home by federal agents and immediately deported to the storied detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for being a “Drug War terrorist,” an “enemy combatant,” and for being, most critically, an “illegal alien” (which qualified him for his stint in Guantánamo).

The newspaper story gave the details of the government’s preposterous assault, which featured several hundred armed agents descending on Jackson’s hillside Topanga mansion wielding assault rifles, billy clubs, and stun guns. Apparently, when Jackson confronted the commandos, demanding to know the charges, they zapped him in the groin with a stun gun, threw him twitching into a large burlap sack, and flew him straight to Guantánamo.

The federal agents informed his flustered wife Leona and their belligerent son Munsey that Godfrey Jackson had spent his life promoting the use of marijuana and by doing so had been identified by the office of the attorney general as an “illegal terrorist alien”—and because he was not a citizen of the United States he would be held in a steel mesh cage, exposed to the elements for “as long as it takes,” and all the while surrounded by “towel heads” with an affinity for “back-door action.”

Sending Jackson to Guantánamo for being an illegal alien was an outlandish act, perpetrated by a too-big-for-her-boots US attorney who, like most US attorneys in the history of US judicial overkill, was solely intent on making a name for herself, in this case during the nation’s heightened War on Terror, by getting Jackson to do a “perp walk.”

There was just one catch in the brilliant US attorney’s otherwise flawless prosecution: Jackson was
not
an illegal alien. He was born in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in the Jewish suburb of Squirrel Hill; he was a US citizen, and could prove it. His grandmother and parental guardian may have been a scandalous, toothless hooker, but she was also born in Pittsburgh and she had the paperwork to prove it.