About a year and a half ago, I ran dry of herb and needed to restock quickly. I called all my usual guys and the only one who could help me out was Rooster. At the time, Rooster was a very sketchy connection between some equally sketchy dealers in Pine Hill. I didn’t quite trust the guy, but he always managed to get me stuff in a pinch, so I kept him around.Anyway, we got to some random apartment in a run-down complex. I expected that we’d just meet the guy, pick up the stuff, and be done with it; but you never know when you go into these kinds of situations. So we got to the apartment and met Rooster’s contact, Moses. He invited us in.
The apartment was miniscule. Moses offered us a seat on the couch. We sat there and waited, uncomfortably. Next to us was an open doorway leading into the small kitchenette. In there was an overweight woman with tattoos running up her arms and a massive star-of-David pendant around her neck, conversing with Moses and another skinny black guy. Also in the corner was an elderly man with a bright red wig, a prosthetic arm and a tracheal voice-box. I still don’t really know why, but the guy with the fake arm and the voice-box scared the living shit out of me. They drank beer and carried on for several minutes before Moses came out to tell me and Rooster that his “boy” would be arriving with the stuff shortly. He offered us beer and then went back to the kitchen.
For another ten awkward-as-hell minutes, Rooster and I sat on the couch and waited. We made some small talk, but Rooster wasn’t really the kind of person that you had productive conversations with. He liked to talk about cocaine, and I told him a thousand times that I wasn’t into that kind of stuff. Luckily, Moses’ “boy” arrived, but Moses and Rooster would need to go meet him at another apartment. In the meantime, I’d have to wait.
So I was waiting around in this living room for Rooster to get back for about twenty minutes. People kept walking by me to either leave or go somewhere else in the apartment. I tried to at least smile at them and say ‘hello,’ but they didn’t acknowledge me even when I made an effort. It started to get unbearably weird, and then I saw a stout foreign-looking man with a distinctive birthmark emerge from the bathroom. It took me a moment to recognize him, but I realized that this man was former Secretary General of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. As he left the bathroom, he waved his hand in front of his face and announced, “In there, you should not go.”
I stood up and greeted him, offering to shake his hand, addressing him as Mr. Gorbachev. He threw up his hands as if he were in trouble, “You’ve got me,” he chuckled, “I have no money, only coupon to Red Lobster. You would like?”
“Nah, I’m good, bro. I’m just shocked to see you here,” I told him.
“Shocked? So am I,” he said. “I sign up for new HMO in Russia, suddenly only pharmacy I can visit: Mr. Moses, Pine Hill, NJ in America. How ridiculous. This man Moses, not even doctor, I must believe.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “What are you picking up?”
“The chronic,” he said, opening a Ziploc bag containing a full ounce of the most beautiful weed I’d ever seen. “You partake, no?”
We didn’t even ask if we could blaze in the living room, we just lit up and nobody questioned it. The weed that Gorbachev scored was top notch. After the first hit from the former Soviet leader’s pipe, I began coughing violently.
“Is good, da?” he asked me. I nodded, unable to speak. “Da. The guy told me, ‘Is Diesel, is good,’ I say to him, ‘it better be, no?’”
“…Is that a question?” I asked.
“Eh…. No. Sometimes my English, still not so good.”
After taking another hit, I inspected the pipe. It was a dark wooden tobacco pipe with a bowl that was painted bright red and featured a golden hammer and sickle on it. “That’s a pretty sweet pipe there,” I said.
“This thing? Bah. Khrushchev gave to me in ’65… fine craftsmanship, so I keep.”
“So wait, Khrushchev blazed?”
“Are you not kidding?” Gorbachev asked me.
“I don’t know… I mean… I’m not kidding if that’s what you’re asking me.”
“Ha! So little do you know,” he chuckled. “Entire Kremlin was nothing more than smoke shop. We sit around hitting massive hookah in the center of General Secretary’s chamber. We call it ‘Soviet People’s Hookah,’ which was misnomer for it was only for us.”
“Really? That’s what you guys were doing in there?”
“Of course,” He said with a shrug. “After missile crisis in Cuba, Khrushchev re-thought whole socialism plan. We were out of rubles, Americans shove missiles up our ass, China whining about us not calling… we stopped caring.
“Krushchev, he says: ‘If we invest monies in marijuana, we would be straight up baked for next couple decades.’ Nobody had better plan, so that became plan.”
“That sounds fucking awesome,” I said.
“Was good, yes,” Gorbachev said, then started laughing hysterically. “This one time, Brezhnev bring large tray of brownie edibles as gift. But before he can give them out, Chernenko already started eating them. Before we can stop him, Chernenko already has eaten half the brownies.” He laughed again. “Brezhnev’s face turn red like beet… was hilarious. He chased Chernenko all around Moscow with antique WWII Rifle and bayonet shouting, ‘taste the people’s fury, pig!’
“Oh such times take me back.”
“That’s crazy. The whole time we thought you guys were going to parachute Spetznaz commandos into our backyards.”
“Like Red Dawn? Da?” Gorbachev said, inhaling, and then exhaled: “Wolverines!” I started to laugh. “By the end, whole Cold War was joke. We could not care less. Americans, though, you go and elect cowboy actor Ronald Reagan and pretend to get all tough.
“He says ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down wall,’ so I pretend I don’t know what he mean and fuck with him, you see. I say ‘Wall? What wall? You want wall down? Why did you not say so in first place? Let’s tear down wall. Whole thing was fucking mess to begin with. Let’s make it big thing, da? Bring in your David Hasselhoff… hold concert… it would be like German Woodstock.’ Then he said, ‘okay’ and that was that.
“Of course, took several years to book Hasselhoff for show. Something about Knight Rider TV-movie deal, I do not know.”
“So that was it?” I asked. “That was the end of Soviet Russia?”
“Hmmm? No,” he said. “In truth, everybody died. All the old guard, they died off one by one. First Brezhnev, then Andropov, Podgorny, Chernenko… eventually just me, Vasili Kuznetzov and Yeltsin. And Yeltsin, he would not smoke the chronic. Yeltsin was all about the drink. Eventually, I kick him out for breaking Miami Vice collector’s plates in fit of drunken rage.
“Then just me and Kuznetzov, let me tell you, the man was pussy… always whining about not getting good hit. Never before have a met a man who does not understand concept of ‘puff and pass.’ Such foolishness! Finally, I become so fed up, I call Yeltsin and tell him: ‘fuck it, is all yours,’ and give him country.”
“That’s crazy,” I said.
He laughed. “Is crazy, right?”
Around then, Rooster and Moses came back. Rooster, looking pale and worried, told me that we should go right away. I said goodbye to Gorbachev and we exchanged Myspace usernames (he still hasn’t responded to my friend request). On the drive out of Pine Hill, Rooster told me that he had accused Moses of short-changing him on the deal and that he just barely got back to the apartment without being cut up. I asked him if he got the weed, but he just shook his head. I tried to explain to him that I had just met Mikhail Gorbachev, but he didn’t know who the man was until I described him as, “that bald dude with the fucked-up birthmark on his head.”
“Is he famous or something?” Rooster asked me. I decided to drop the subject right there.
And that was the time I smoked a bowl of headies with Mikhail Gorbachev at a shady apartment in Pine Hill, NJ.
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