Growing Weed In Boonville Around 1982

Frank grew up in Chicago and came from a (surprisingly common) wacky family full of big success and big hypocrisy and personal failure. His grandfather was a Chicago tycoon who made vast amounts of money from tar for roofs and asphalt, greased by standard Chicago corruption. He ended up as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago and then devoted his life to charity as a hell of a good Catholic. In fact he gave his entire fortune of $41 million (a vast amount at that time) to the Catholic church except for $10,000 to each of his kids. Frank’s parents were a mess, but Frank did go to college and became a dope smoking but staunch Marxist who got arrested and had his leg broken in the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention police riots.

Frank came to the Bay Area sometime in the late 60s. He worked his way up through the American flag merchant marine, went to officer school in Vallejo and became a first mate on US cargo ships. It was a really good paying gig because the US merchant marine — what was left of it — was super protected and subsidized. But he did the standard dumb sailor thing of boozing and carousing away all his money when he was not at sea. He joined AA and decided to buy some houses with his money so as not to squander it all and by 1980 had about five houses in San Francisco and Oakland. It was the kind of thing you could do with minimal smarts in the sixties and seventies before capitalism had become the cruel predatory travesty that we endure today. 

He also stumbled on the glory of Boonville. He was looking for a place about a hundred miles from SF and Boonville fit that. He bought 40 acres about a mile north of town, sloping down from a ridge with some woods at the lower end. His monthly payment was $81. He filled a U-Haul truck with lumber from a navy building that got torn down on Treasure Island, drove it up to Boonville and figured out how big a cabin he could build with that much wood and then proceeded to build it, largely with a chainsaw since there was no electricity. He did a pretty good job!

Louie was the son of Frank’s brother and at about seventeen he had acquired some fairly advanced juvenile delinquent/outlaw tendencies and had to escape life in Troy, Ohio and came to stay with his uncle Frank in the late 70s. He was a strapping fellow whose most noteworthy trait was that he was fantastically handy at all things mechanical or construction related — and actually really eager to be helpful. 

He got a job as a mechanic at a Honda dealership in Berkeley, but he also became Frank’s all-round handyman and property manager. Frank was often working on ships, and it left a lot of stuff for Louie, still basically a kid, to deal with. Louie didn’t even get cheap rent out of it, and he had a full-time job, but he did indeed learn a lot about construction and playing landlord for his uncle who would call him from a sweaty phone booth in Algiers or someplace and yell at him about making payments on some second mortgage or something. 

The idea for growing dope on Frank’s land actually came from a Swedish guy named Bear (the American version of his name Bjorn) when he was hanging out with Louie at the Starry Plough, an Irish Republican lefty bar in Berkeley. Bear was a mellow guy (he smoked lots of dope) who drove an old beater Chevy Malibu and had an equally mellow dog named Rainy Day. Previously he had been involved in growing dope in Humboldt County under awful sounding conditions living under plastic sheets basically, so Boonville was a step up.

I was only peripherally involved that first year, coming up from the Bay Area from time to time to help out, but it was pretty damn fun. It was a modest effort, only 60 or 70 plants and mostly just in little clearings among the trees because of the fear of CAMP helicopters. There was a little tree house watch tower and Bear created listening devices from tearing apart old cassette recorders and car batteries. One time we went into Ukiah to get some camouflage nets and stuff at an army surplus store. The guy behind the counter got out his Colt 45 and chambered a bullet and set it down next to the cash register. Old school anti-hippie thing it seemed, but this was the early 80s and we were more in the punk rock mode and found it fairly amusing, though Bear, it’s true, was really mostly an old school hippie (but more rigorous euro version).

Keeping the plants safe from deer and wild pigs and potential poachers and the forces of law and order produced a mostly pleasing mixture of anxiety and excitement. There were regular guests from the Bay Area. There was no electricity, but we cooked up activities like a late night wild pig hunt with flashlights and special slugs bought for the one gun: a twelve gauge shotgun. Fortunately no pigs were roused, but in retrospect how idiotically dangerous that was!

If we had to worry about payments for the land or getting enough out of the harvest to live on for a year it would of course all have been different, but we were Bay Area kids having a rustic adventure and it was mostly heck of fun. The next year was when it got, uhhh… “interesting.”

There was a smallish fire in one of Frank’s properties in Oakland and Louie was tasked with rebuilding the place. Frank was at sea, so Louie spent a bunch of his own money on building materials, not to mention his labor. The Louie/Frank thing was getting murky. Louie felt like he was piling up doing stuff for Frank and not getting much back for it. Frank’s motto was “pleasure before business” according to Louie , which wasn’t so bad, but he was feeling used by his uncle the “café debater Marxist” who was also a real pioneer of the “angry white guy” mode.

So that second year he told Frank that Frank needed to pay Louie back the $30,000 that Louie felt owed or he would take Frank’s share of the profits from the harvest. Relations were friendly but that bit hovered over things.

That second year was a more modest growing effort, mostly just Louie with my assistance and a couple of patches more brazenly in the open and closer to the cabin. We became good friends with our only nearby neighbors and fellow weed growers Francisco and Amina. Francisco was a Spaniard gone full in on the hippie thing, rebelling against his bourgeois upbringing. His father was a famous physicist and going to live in Mexico. There he met Amina, escaping her middle-class family from Trinidad. They bought a van, painted La Tortuga on it and sold jewelry. They met someone from Boonville in Mexico who said come on up, it’s great. They rented a cabin and some land just above Frank’s place at the top of ridge. 

As harvest time got near we would take turns hanging out with them where they had a great view of the road. It was easy to see whoever was coming for a mile or so before they reached us. Francisco would have his mini-14 carbine which he said had such high velocity the bullets would go through the engine block of a car. Hmm. I don’t think he ever used it. The only time we used our shotgun was to shoot a shockingly large rattlesnake right near our cabin. Killing such an impressive creature seemed fucked up.

Harvest time approached, doubly tense because of fretting about how this Frank-sharing-the-harvest thing would work out. He came up a couple of weeks before to discuss. It did not go well. It devolved into an hours-long argument between Frank and Louie. I had never seen anyone as thoroughly enraged as Frank. Maybe it was the way the light was hitting his spittle — weirdly that is what I remember most — geysers of Frank’s spittle. And it went on and on. Frank was a reformed alkie but he did drink endless 12 packs of diet Pepsi and smoke plenty of cannabis. Maybe it was the diet Pepsi. So nothing was decided though there was a date that the weed would be ready to transport. 

We needed a plan. We figured Frank would come early, as soon as we cut down the plants, so we decided to cut them down and leave a day before that. So we did. And as Francisco reported, Frank did indeed show up the next day. 

But we had a tarp-covered pickup filled with marijuana that needed to be dried. My parents happened to have a big unused room over their garage in Orinda. They were very law-abiding but this was a big old emergency, so I basically told them it had to be done. They were horrified and my father was a world class worrier. But they let us. 

Orinda was a super white bread Republican East Bay suburb and the laws against marijuana were for real then. But my parents were indeed good liberals, the kind who had met campaigning for Adlai Stevenson in the 50s and taken us to anti-Vietnam war demonstrations when we were young. They were indeed scared and pissed off though.

Frank and Louie did not talk for years but they kind of sort of reconciled eventually. A few years later Frank, in his 70s, had horrible chest pains and went to the hospital where they put stents in his clogged blood vessels. He got out of the hospital with a prescription for some stuff that his doctor told him he absolutely had to take “or else.” He never filled the prescription and “or else” happened: he dropped dead. In his will he gave his properties to the stepdaughter of one of his ex-wives who he wasn’t even particularly close to. Apparently she lost most of them because she never paid any property taxes. Louie manages construction jobs in the Bay Area. He did some work for rich people and because he is so competent and trustworthy they all just pass him on to other rich people. It’s a living.