In his book Boxing Babylon, Nigel Collins used a quote of mine from a magazine story I wrote on the late Philadelphia boxer, Tyrone Everett, who was shot to death by his girlfriend when she found him in bed with a transvestite.
Collins had at one time been the editor of The Ring magazine, the bible of boxing, and Boxing Babylon was a compilation of his takes on the various “bad boys” of boxing like Stanley Ketchel, also shot to death, Harry Greb, a supremely dirty fighter who died on the operating table, and boxing tragedies like Benny “Kid” Paret’s death after being brutally knocked out by Emile Griffith, and Jimmy Doyle’s death at the hands of Sugar Ray Robinson, perhaps the greatest fighter ever, who claimed he had dreamed of killing Doyle the night before the fight and had to be convinced by a priest to go on with the ill-fated match.
So it was an unexpected surprise when Nigel Collins posted on Facebook last year that he was in fact the author of Travels With Mary Jane, subtitled “Confessions of a 70-Year-Old Stoner,” and with a byline “By the Old Head.” It was published in 2015. He had decided to come out of the weed closet when it looked like marijuana was going to be legalized in New Jersey, where he lives.
Having had more than a passing acquaintance with “Mary Jane,” I got the book from Amazon. It is a dope memoir par excellence, told in a voice that is both serious and playful. It is not – I repeat, not – the Cheech and Chong ramblings of a dope-addled old man. Nigel Collins has led a productive and respected life as a working journalist, all the while enjoying the pleasures of his beloved Mary Jane.
That enjoyment also led him on various smoke pilgrimages, the first to Morocco from whence he and his new friend Terry actually smuggled pounds of hashish back into England, Nigel Collins’ birthplace, although he’d come to America at age ten. His tales are part cool travelogue, as well, a stoner’s view of places that his Mary Jane travels have taken him. He has the journo’s eye for the telling detail, often in a way that is very close to poetry. He’s something of a philosopher, too, at one point noting that “The past is forever.”
Nigel Collins has a great feel for place, and both his straight and stoned guided tours of Morocco, Amsterdam, and Mexico are enlivened by well-researched historical sidebars that he weaves effortlessly into the ongoing narrative. Like any traveler worth the name, let alone a dope pilgrim, he gets to know the essence of where he is in quick order. That is perhaps the difference between a traveler and a tourist – and a dope pilgrim like Nigel Colllins – the tourist sees; the traveler experiences. In that sense, he is the Bruce Chatwin of weed.
While Travels With Mary Jane is indeed a confession, as in the sub-title, it is at once a stirring series of adventures, each a story woven into the essence of memoir: the need to share, to demonstrate, to whisper or murmur or shout into the reader’s ear a significant experience in a telling, memorable way. The past is indeed forever, hovering behind the curtain of memory, and the memoirist parts the curtain and explores the caverns behind it, lit by the torches of experience and imagination – and hopefully truth.
In his first adventure, Collins and Terry, two young jitterbugs in Morocco, had a switch knife popped on them by a Tangier hash dealer deep in the recesses of the legendary, mysterious Kasbah itself, and then the smiling Blue Hat, as Collins calls him, cut the string holding the package of dope with the long blade.
“It’s just part of their negotiation technique,” Terry said. “These guys are born hustlers and try to fuck with your head, like when he pulled the knife. It’s just mind games; don’t worry about it.” Terry, it seemed, had an inborn insouciance that a very worried Collins lacked all the way back to London, ergo they returned as successful dope smugglers.
Travels With Mary Jane opens with an older and settled Nigel Collins back in Amsterdam with his pal JR, a stoner pilgrim himself and a quiet presence. It has been forty years since his first and only Amsterdam visit and Collins is quietly euphoric. “I felt like an unofficial ambassador for all the stoners I knew who had never been to Amsterdam, as well as those who had and knew what they were missing.”
Collin’s two Amsterdam experiences are more cultural adventures than the potentially dangerous Moroccan trip, topped off the second time by “my first legal toke of marijuana in forty years as a cannabis consumer.”
He goes on: “The city is an architectural marvel, a place where postcard perfect and coffee shop funk reside together in harmony. It makes for a cultured yet comfortable vibe, one that beckons you beyond the next corner with promises of new sensory delights.”
Not so in old Mexico where the culture that Collins experiences is the one familiar to any Texas-stationed GI: ugly whores and bad dope. Drafted into the Vietnam-era Army and stationed at Fort Sam Houston outside of San Antonio, Collins and three other troopers rent a Fort Mustang and head south of the border for the usual tacky pleasures available in Nuevo Laredo.
They make it back to post in one piece and Collins proceeds to exit the U.S. Amy with an honorable discharge thanks to cooperative NCOs and a medical officer who shows Nigel a legit way out of the service.
The circle game goes round and round and Nigel Collins ends Travels With Mary Jane by re-uniting with his long-lost first dope traveling pardner, Terry, this time in a woebegone crumbling house in a small Mexican village. The years have not been kind to Terry. But have they been softened by Mary Jane? It is enough to ask.
xxx
An excerpt from Travels with Mary Jane…
Bo Diddley is Dead
It all started outside the Anne Frank House on a beautiful spring afternoon. I didn’t really want to be there, but JR wanted to take the tour so I tagged along, figuring that if I waited for him outside negative vibe wouldn’t blow my high.
Like most Boomers, I had known about Anne Frank since I was a kid, seen the Millie Perkins movie and read Anne’s diary for a high school assignment. Not that I needed such a horrific tale to remind me of the evil incarnate that was Nazi Germany. My father served in the Royal Air Force throughout World War II, my mother lived through the Blitz (Uncle Wally didn’t), and I played in the ruins of bombed buildings as a boy in England.
But visiting the house where doomed Anne and her family hid from the monsters who roamed the very same cobblestone that now carries me from coffee shop to coffee shop is not my idea of holiday fun. Bummers will occur naturally as the wheel turns. Why seek them out?
Instead, I sat on a bench, watching the line of tourists move slowly past and into the house at 263 Prinsengracht, where they paid 9 euros to see Anne’s secret refuge from the same insanity that is still devouring the world. A pleasant buzz lingered from the cannabis I’d smoked before leaving the apartment. A warm breeze caressed my face.
There was a woman around my age, maybe a little older, also sitting on the same bench, and she struck up a conversation.
“Are you going in?” she said and glanced at the house.”
“No I’m waiting for a friend. It’s too depressing for me.”
“I know what you mean. I’m not going in either, but my daughter wanted to, so I’m waiting for her.”
She paused briefly, probably trying to decide whether or not to say more, and then continued.
“I used to ride my bicycle past here all the time when I was a little girl.”
“You’re from Amsterdam?”
“Originally, but I moved to Michigan years and years ago. I’m just visiting.”
“Were you here during the war?”
“Yes I was a child.”
“That must have been very difficult.”
“Yes, the Germans came to our house one dav and took my father away. They sent him to a work camp in Poland.”
“Jeez, I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. It was a long time ago, and besides, he survived.”
“What happened?”
“It was winter and all the prisoners were either starving or freezing to death, so my father and some other men decided it would be better to die trying to get away rather than dying in the camp. They walked away from a work detail, hid during the day—farmers helped and fed them—and traveled at night. It took him weeks, but he finally made it back home. When my mother answered the knock at the door, she didn’t recognize him at first.”
The woman paused again and laughed softly.
“You know how kids are,” she said. “The thing I remember the most was chat he had to be deloused in the backyard before my mother would let him stay in the house. I can still see him, naked and shivering as she washed him down with some sort of special soap.”
I chuckled with her at the mental picture she had held on to for so long, a moment of humor amid fearful circumstances. But our mirth ended when a woman in her late 30s approached, dabbing at her mascara-smeared eyes with a tissue.
“It’s so sad,” she said, glancing at me as her mother stood and wrapped her arms around her.
“I know, honey. I know. Let’s go and get the kids.”
The mother looked over her shoulder as they slowly walked away and mouthed the words “good bye.” I waved and smiled weakly.
What a mind fuck! Instead of visiting a ghost house, I’d had an encounter with a living witness to th nazi occupation of Amsterdam. I felt mildly disoriented, and it was good to see JR heading my way a few minutes later, the same deadpan expression on his face as when he went into the house.
”How was it?” I asked.
It was a stupid question but it was the best I could come up with.
“It was okay.”
As we walked back to the apartment, I told JR about the woman, but he was no help in sorting out my feelings.
“How about that?” was all he said.
The freaky thing was that, even though the woman spoke of a terrible time when unthinkable things happened, talking to her was a warm, pleasurable experience. It made me feel happy, sad, and guilty at the same time, an unfamiliar jumble of emotions that was hard to pin down.
A dark mood had descended certainly but not without occasional flashes of insight to help light the way. The woman’s story was one such beacon, the gift of hope passed down from her father, through her, to me—a random beneficiary who just happened to be sitting on the same bench.
The next sensory mind fuck was much more belligerent and lay in ambush, waiting for us to step out of the elevator and onto the hallway outside our third-floor apartment.
It smells like a dead body!” I gasped as the revolting stench washed over us like an olfactory tsunami.
Quickly, well, as quickly as an old stoner and his procrastinating pal could manage, we scurried inside. Thankfully, the appalling stink was held at bay by the tight-fitting door and the breeze blowing blowing in the partially open windows. Safe in the bosom of our rented sanctuary, the stink bomb in the hallway was temporarily forgotten.
I dug out my pipe and stash and put on a Hank Crawford/Jimmy McGriff CD. A couple of pipes of Northern Lights later, I was gazing out the windows, feeling the groove, and digging the scene on the street below, JR sat at the table, editing the manuscript that would eventually become the first half of this book.
Northern Lights is an early hybrid, approximately two-thirds sativa and one-third indica, first developed in the 1970s. Some locals, spoiled by the profusion of products available in the Netherlands, look down on this venerable strain of weed, but the Northern Light #5 that I was smoking was a former Cannabis Cup winner and a very spacey high.
Even so, what I saw taking place outside my window was not a hallucination. Northern Lights isn’t that good. What I saw was really taking place.
A young woman dressed in a white wedding gown hung from a tree growing next to the canal. It took me a second or two to realize what was going on, but I needed confirmation.
“Hey, get a look at this. They’re hanging some chick from a tree.”
JR rose reluctantly from his chair, a semi-disgusted expression on his face. That’s the way he reacts to seemingly ridiculous situations, as if they’re an insult to his intelligence, some sort of childish prank. But it’s only a front, a defensive maneuver to give him time to think. He’s all too aware of the likelihood of the unlikelv.
“I ·think it must be a photo shoot of some sort,” I said when JR reached the window.
Sure enough, there was a group of people scurrying around the girl in the tree like worker bees servicing a doomed queen-fixing her hair, rearranging her gown, and, most vitally, supporting her weight, so she didn’t actually hang. But what if the ladder or somebody’s hand slipped?
“Good grief!” said JR.
He gave the mock hanging a perfunctory once-over and returned to his task without further comment, leaving me alone at the window, trying to ward off an uninvited and deepening funk. Apparently, the clowns behind the photo project hadn’t figured out a way to get a full-body shot without breaking the model’s neck. I felt sorry for her. She deserved better. Still, that did not stop me from fantasizing about fucking her while she was wearing the wedding dress and matching white pumps.
When the CD ended, I turned on the TV. A second later I wished I hadn’t. CNN was broadcasting a mini-tribute to Bo Diddley, who had just died at his home in Archer, Florida.
I had hoped to watch SpongeBob, which is fall-down funny in Dutch, especially when you’re whacked out on high-grade nederweit. But instead, I ended up with another blister on my heart Even JR seemed genuinely disconcerted.
“Oh, no!” he wailed, his face twisting into a pantomime mask of agony.
It’s his stock response to bad news, and when he does it, he screws his eyes shut and dips his head down and sideways.
“Yeah, it’s a fucking bummer,” I said. “He was a true American Master. Did you ever see him live?”
JR shook his head sadly and made the face again.
I was lucky. I had seen Bo three times over the years, and each performance was better than the last. The final time was outdoors at night, about nine or ten years prior; Mike was with me, and we’d eaten some pot brownies. There was a big crowd of around 6,000 wildly cheering Bo on, and he responded with a powerhouse performance.
I can still see him standing in the orange spotlight, linebacker legs, spread wide and planted, hollering into the night sky and thrashing his rectangular guitar loud enough to be heard on Mars. The sound came up through the ground he was standing on, from the earth itself, passed through his body, and as transformed into something as primeval as it was irresistible.
“Bo Diddley was the fucking King Kong of guitar players!”
“Hev that’s a good line,” said JR, without looking up. “You should use it.”
I made a dismissive sound and reached for my stash.
“Want to get high?”
“No thanks. I want to finish this.”
I turned off the TV, slid a Jimmy Smith CD into the player and took my time rolling a fatty. I used a cocktail of Northern Lights, Amnesia and Ice (a Skunk/Northern Lights/Shiva hybrid) and twisted it up in a couple Spanish King Size Slim Papers.
The joint wasn’t perfect, not like the machine-rolled ones Mike makes. Shit, Mike’s joints looked like Camels. But mine was fat and firm, packed with well-manicured weed and tailored for a clean draw.
When I’d finished the joint and the spit had dried, I fired it up with the bootleg ‘Marley lighter I’d bought at a souvenir shop near the Dam. I knew better, but I was hoping a massive infusion of cannabis would chase away the shadow of the Reaper. A half hour later, the CD was over and I still hadn’t finished the joint—lost in the music, temporarily transported to a place, where only the music and my body existed.
But when the music stopped, the magical barrier evaporated and other worlds flooded back, including a faint whiff of the abomination in the hallway.