While visiting with an old school friend of mine who had moved to Paris two years before, Lovegod pulled out some odd looking cigarettes. Hand-rolled they were. And pungent to the senses.

“What’s that?” I inquired.

“It’s reefer. Jane. You know – pot. I got turned on in Rome by the theatre people. It’s great. It’ll really loosen you up.”

I didn’t know I needed loosening. I checked all my bolts right away but they seemed okay.

He proceeded to light one and took a deep drag, then passed it to my friend, who also took a drag, as she was a smoker and used to doing this sort of thing. Her boyfriend then took a drag and the smoking thing arrived at my door. I took the half smoked joint and did as my compatriots had done. We went around like that until the only thing left was a tiny stub at which point Lovegod pulls out a tiny clip and holds the stub so as to get the very last curls of smoke into his lungs by sucking at it noisily.

In a little while we were all laughing like crazy about absolutely nothing. Lovegod disappeared into the kitchen, reappearing in a few moments with a bowl full of sliced fresh peaches and another of whipped cream. We made a night of it first with the peaches and next with strawberries. My bolts may have loosened up, but Lovegod wasn’t interested in anything but food that night.

By the time we left Paris, pot had become a staple of our evening meal. If we hadn’t gotten back on the road I’m sure I could have gained ten Parisian pounds. We smoked our way through the south of France and headed for Spain, where we smoked through some of the most intense heat I’ve ever experienced, and finally took the ferry over to Tangiers, where a contact from the theatre led us to an American poet and his Russian mistress who were living on about twenty cents a week, which included a Moroccan nanny for their three kids. The poet took Lovegod off into the country where they met a Moroccan farmer who sold him a donkey load of marijuana for twenty dollars, probably more money than that man would see in a year. Maybe two. The poet even took a cut.

We spent the rest of the week sitting in our tent rubbing the dried leaves and flowers off the branches and sifting them down into a bowl. After five days of this grueling handwork we had four pounds of freshly dried pot and nowhere to put it.