Green IslandScoring Weed From Tom Waits
June 20th 2010 03:43
We had just moved into rented accommodation. It was the start of the university year. Perhaps our first year. There was a group of us – me, my brother, big Steve and others I can’t identify. We are all in our glorious first bloom of youth. We walk down a grimy working class road in Britain; the tarmac is wet with rain. It is a dour residential area somewhere near the centre of town. It reminds me of Cardiff.
When we get to the corner of our newly adopted street, my brother points out a tall house on the corner. There is something very uninviting about the place. The door is battered and the garden full of weeds. My brother fearlessly goes up to the door and knocks. I’m not so keen to get into this adventure but it seems that my brother knows how to get drugs so we all follow him.
The door is opened by a huge man. He isn’t huge in the sense of being fat but huge in a movie type of way. He has a big head with short ginger hair and strong features. He wears non-descript dark trousers and an old white vest that needs a wash. He has the physique of a builder – lots of bulk and muscle but not the rippling definition that one gets from the gym. He reminds me of Tom Waits. He does indeed know my brother. The two of them exchange smiles. Tom looks the rest of us over and then lets us enter his house.
And then something terrible happens. Tom ignores his new guests and instead gets in a powerful rage with his kid. Why it is not clear. Tom storms through the house shouting and cursing the kid. He kicks in doors and smashes furniture with his massive mitts while chasing the child around the house. We follow him through the house on his rampage. He eventually corners the kid in a dusty room with no furniture and bare floorboards and proceeds to wallop him. During his arm swinging fury he shouts at the child. The youngster is maybe 12 or 13 years old. It is very unclear what the kid has done, how he has transgressed. We stand in the doorway watching this big maniac slap the child’s backside and keep up a steady psychotic tirade of reprimand in a hoarse shout.
The spectacle goes on for too long. Yet the kid doesn’t pass out. Instead he manages to withstand the attack and maintain his flow of tears.
When Tom has finished dispensing his justice the kid is whimpering. Tom stops shouting and offers the child a choice:
“I’m gonna give you another beating for that. Now when do you want it? There’s no way round it. What day would you like me to beat you?”
Even in the dream I was horrified by this man before us. He was violent and unhinged. I was really sorry for the kid but more than that I feared that the psychopath would turn on us. I had no doubt that he could clobber all of us while eating a sandwich; and it would be a long merciless clobbering that would be hard to get over.
Just as I was thinking these thoughts in the dream, Tom turns away from the child. I was unsure whether the kid had nominated a day for his beating. Tom goes up to my brother and shakes his hand.
“Howya been, kiddo? Ain’t seen yer for a while. Sorry ‘bout that scene. Gotta teach the kids some manners. Why dontcha and yer mates come down to the living room and we’ll have a nice little chat.”
We follow Tom down the stairs and into his back room. There are two old sofas, a brown carpet and a TV quietly going on in the corner.
“Whadya want? I got speed, coke, pills, weed, whatever.”
At this point the dream segues into a new frightening scenario. All my mates are gone. I am alone with the massive abuser who at that moment is being charming. He pulls out a bag of grass. It’s a lot of weed. Maybe three or four ounces. Tom tells me to skin up. He leaves me alone in the room to get one together, no doubt to attending to some small violent detail somewhere else in the nightmarish house.
Meanwhile I have a torrid time making a joint. I make too much mixture and my first attempt falls apart. The papers can’t hold the bulk demanded of them. I halve the mixture and start to roll a cone that is ridiculously bulky, like a cartoon spliff or a Cheech and Chong joint. Then Tom comes back into the room all smiles and pleasantries. That scares the shit out of me and I somehow contrive to spill the entire dope mix on the floor. I apologize profusely as I get on my hands and knees on the dirty brown carpet looking for broken bits of bud. From having too much mixture to roll up with I now have too little. I just want to get out of this house and away from Tom and his thunderous fists and Thor like temper.
At long last the joint is ready to go. It seems like a reasonable effort considering the stress I am under. I light the end and take a couple of drags and pass it to Tom.
“Yer made a mistake there young man. Yer shoulda let me start it. That was bad manners.” Tom said in a level voice smiling the smile of a torturer that enjoys his work.
“I’m really sorry, Tom. I didn’t know.” I try my best to remain composed and not go down on my knees and beg for mercy.
“That’s alright, friend. It was your first time. Yer weren’t to know.”
Thank the heavens. Tom didn’t add anything more to his speech, but both of us knew that his forgiveness carried an unspoken condition that the second transgression of a similar nature would unleash a devastating fury.
After the joint, Tom sells me a big bag of weed for just a few quid. The deal is immense, impossible. I have the proverbial gifted horse and I don’t need to look into its mouth because I know two things with absolute certainty: the dealer is a psychotic nut job and the weed is outrageously strong.
Tom is relaxed and being charming in a growling way. He seems to like me. I feel beholden to him for the massive bag I have scored. I can’t remember paying Tom but I hope I did because I wouldn’t want him coming after me even in my dreams, especially in my dreams.
The interview with a monster comes to an end and he points to a door that hadn’t been there before. It is a door with a frosted glass half panel and chipped frame. Tom tells me that everyone leaves from that door. I shoot out the door and go down the side of the house and through another door at the end of an overgrown garden and back out onto the street.
The dream continues with me and big Steve going to the university to get some food and check out the bird action. Steve is in a hurry so I have no time to stash the bag of gear back in our student house. Instead I stuff it into my coat pocket. The pocket bulges from the volume.
After that the narrative peters out and I start to wake up.
Why am I telling you about my dream? That’s difficult to answer in a sentence. There are a number of things that struck me. I should mention at this point that I have never studied psychology in any type of vigorous academic fashion. I have read a little bit of and about Freud the fruit. Many years ago I enjoyed reading Jung’s autobiography but I can’t really claim to know how to interpret dreams. So forgive me if I get it all wrong. I hope that your tolerance is more benign than Tom’s.
The first thing that struck me was how my brother and I and all the other characters in the dream accepted what Tom did to the child. Because he was a dealer and because he gave generous, indeed uneconomically generous deals, he was alright. Not only that, but Tom had a superficial charm that seemed to allow us to cowardly overlook his horrible crime of beating the kid. It takes a brave person to stand up to a bully when the bully is incomparably stronger than you and is able to wield that strength without hesitation. Is this my hidden guilt for having to get involved in an underground and illicit trade that probably offends my morality? Who knows what crimes against people and nature were perpetrated along the way to get that bag of weed in my pocket. Criminal enterprise can be a nasty business.
The beaten kid could be me or some part of me. The fact that the kid is reaching puberty is a detail that is hard to ignore. The child is on the threshold of adulthood and sexuality. This is where I don’t want the coke-addled theories of Freud getting in the way. It seems stupid to interpret Tom as my father. He is indeed a father (a very bad one at that) but I have no desire to kill him and I can’t spot my mother in the dream; unless, my mother is the big gorgeous bag of weed, the securing of which makes everything all right. And if the dope is my mum do I want to have sex with it or just smoke it? Well smoking is an obvious symbol for oral sex and we all vaguely know that dream details are full of sublimation, where one thing becomes another. I guess my point is that if we all held to Freud’s theories we would indeed go mad, possibly suicidal.
The child’s subjection to tyranny and the outrageous choice he has of picking the day of his second beating has a significance that I cannot even begin to fathom. If the child was me, then at least I have the small comfort of knowing that I withstood the onslaught. I was never abused as a child so perhaps the child is my bad conscience. Perhaps the figures of Tom and the child are two aspects of my psyche. Although my gingerness is hidden under years of mildewed dreads the fact that Tom is also a red head might mean something. What does it signify if I am both the oppressor and the oppressed? Ying and yang? The duality of man? Schizophrenia? I’ll try not to beat myself up over getting to the bottom of this particular quandary.
It is odd that the brute bully is the only figure in the dream that has any type of morality. He is all about perceiving wrong and punishing that wrong. The onlookers are trying to be amoral, to withhold judgment out of fear and expediency whereas Tom would interrupt any situation to point out a lapse in behavior. His finely tuned moral compass lets nothing go unnoticed. He even showed forgiveness by not laying into me for starting the joint. Is this how the bad guys justify what they are doing by believing they are guided by principal? Is the fact of restraining from violence a righteous thing when done by the very unrighteous? And the fact that I didn’t know that I was causing offense by smoking on the joint first cleverly shows that morality is a marvelous tool for intimidation when the rules are never made clear. If you don’t know what is wrong or right how can you protect yourself from accidentally breaking a rule?
Does the fact that I exit the house from a different door to the one I entered have any meaning? And the fact that the door appears from nowhere. Doors of perception? Experience leading to a new perspective? Who knows.
What sickens me most about the dream is that by the end of the hammer horror narrative I have convinced my dream self that Tom is a good contact and that it would be a great idea to visit him the next time I’m in need of some drugs. I’m so stupid in my dream that I have overlooked the fact that Tom just lives at the end of my road. There would be no escaping his fury if I did step over the line. But then again that just shows how useless a university education can be when you’re scoring weed from Tom Waits.
My apologies to Tom. You are a hero of mine and I'm sure you smoke drugs but don't harm children.
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