Hong Kong Speakers filled with Saigon Red, and Spanky Almost Gets Me Killed

Teenage Existentialist #4-- Not Current Events.

Smoking pot is another story, it was more tied into draft cards, Vietnam and living as a petty criminal, outside the law. There was a time early on when soldiers in Nam were buying giant speakers and stereo components when they went on leave to Hong Kong, stuff we did not have here in the States, and sending them back home, and they’d pack the speakers with Saigon Red, a variety of pot that left Mexican smoke in the dust. A pair of speakers packed with Red could be worth several thousand dollars, back when you could buy a steak for 8 bucks. This changed our culture twice over, in an entwining cultural shift of big loud stereos and great Mind-Blowing Pot. I’m going to guess about 1969 or 1970. One guy we knew worked for his dad’s health club, and he made a lot of cash money, so he had the capital to “front a key” (purchase a kilo), and deal it to the rest of us in “lids” (a sandwich bag with a bit over an ounce for $20 to $25). Once, we tried out the latest shipment in his room where we listed to Rare Earth’s record “I’m Losing You,” I was floored, flat on by back for maybe two hours from just a couple hits, and I was looking at a lamp in the ceiling that had a map of the world, and I could not tell which are the continents and which were the oceans. It was intense. And I was 15.

Once you decided you were going to try any drugs, you crossed a line. Like when you started smoking cigs. You were not going to try to fit into the Straight World. Up to that point, everything we did was to try to fit in- getting good grades, reading the right books to aim at the higher academics or the business world, driving a car, building your resume and getting a job, aiming for college, the football culture, being an Eagle Scout. We weren’t hippies, hippies were too passive. We were Freaks, hippies but with a vengeance. Vandals. I found a kindred soul later in Hunter S. Thompson when I read in Rolling Stone, that he was running for Sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket, and he had to pledge not to take psychedelics While On Duty.

We would try anything that came to us, though there wasn’t that much coming through. I was lucky enough to never try heroin because it never showed up; and opium too, that was hard to get. I stayed away from coke because I was too afraid of getting a heart attack like my dad. And coke was the selfish drug, pot wads they generous drug. But pot whenever we could get it, which wasn’t too often. That’s what I’m prepared to say at this point, Feb. 10th, 2025.

Anyway. I’m telling this stuff now because at my age, I have fallen into the trap of trying to explain myself, like all old guys do, while I can still see. Which is getting dodgy. I’ve had a few old guys try to tell me everything they know, whether I am interested or not. Like Dad. Somehow that experience has not deterred me.

Now, the first time I almost died was when I was three, in 1958, in simpler times, and t’s my earliest memory. Eisenhower was President. I was watching The Little Rascals on a black and white TV, and Spanky had to carry an alarm clock around. Every time it went off, he had to pour out a spoonful of medicine from a hand-sized bottle into a spoon and swallow it. The alarm kept interrupting his fun, he had to sit down in he middle of a baseball game and stuff, turn off the alarm, pour the medicine into a spoon, and take it, and he was really getting tired of it. So the third time it went off, he poured out a spoonful, looked at the bottle, drank what was in the bottle, looked at the spoon, and tossed away what was in it with contempt. As if to say, I’m done with this crap. A lovely, tiny little rebellion against the Authorities, against regimentation, against the grown-ups, against The System. It was very attractive.

So I seemed to know where there was a hand-sized bottle of orange something, I thought it was orange pop, Nesbit’s, in the kitchen cabinets. What it was, was Mom’s bottle of ant poison, which in those days was made with strychnine. She kept it in a cabinet that was at least 10 feet off the ground, to keep it away from us kids. The cabinet was a floor-to-ceiling wooden built-in, installed around and over the kitchen sink, maybe 1949, made of a nice white pine with a soft brown stain, because back then wood was still cheap and abundant, cheaper than plastic, and it had drawers on the right side that were big and went down to the floor. I had learned to pull out the bottom drawers, one-two-three, not the top one which was the junk drawer, and use them as steps, from the floor on up to the counter, because it was my job to empty the dishwasher. I was not yet three feet tall, I’d stick my head all the way in, my feet up in the air to get the plates out of the bottom, so I had learned to put the dishes on the counter, then climb the steps so I could stand on the counter and put all the plastic dishes on the shelves above the counter space. The counter was where Mom made bread dough and where the toaster lived and the blender, to make frozen orange juice for us. And I also knew that I could stand on the counter and reach the top cabinets next to the ceiling, where the bottle of orange-something was.

So the next thing I remember was sitting on the back step, pouring the orange contents of the bottle into a spoon, drinking what was in the bottle, and throwing what was in the spoon away, and with Spanky-like contempt. Monkey see what’s onTV, monkey do what’s onTV; I’m an American. When questioned later, I said “I thought it was Nesbit’s!” which was the popular orange pop we had in our house, and the ant poison was orange. My brother David remembers discovering me and telling mom.

The next memory I have is of throwing up in the car, Gramp drove and mom crying. The story I heard later was that they pumped my stomach at Methodist Hospital, and if I had been 20 minutes later, I’d be blind, and 40 minutes later I’d be dead.

That’s what I was told. I was also told that afterwards people kept asking me why I drank the ant poison, and it happened so often I finally said in a tone of pure irritation, “Because I thought I was a Ant!”

#30#