Nomad Codes

the closest many kids come to having “a guide” for this phase shift from innocence to experience. That’s where subculture steps in, offering collective identities that can shore up the threat of dissolution and excess. The public high school I attended—imagine an open-air Ridgemont High surrounded by sagebrush and rocky arroyos, with seagulls diving for your lunch meat—was a mosaic of pot-smoking cliques, their turf demarcated as succinctly as the multicolored regions in maps of the cerebral cortex: skateboarders, metal-heads, punks, goths, stoners, and the various flavors of surfer—the long-haired Zep fans, the cue balls that dug ska, and the dread-headed ones we called Waspafarians.
    Too tripped out to surf, my friends and I set ourselves somewhat apart. Our campus turf was beyond the smoking section, behind a wall, in the Gel Circle—from the verb “to gel,” synonymous with “veg” and “mold,” all denoting the same state of blazing slack. I suppose we were perceived as druggies rather than simply stoners, but now I’d call us heads. (Since I was issued into the world the same month as Sgt. Pepper’s , my notion of “head” is a reading, not a recollection. For me, heads directed their radicalism toward consciousness rather than society or the defense of nature. Seizing the means of perception with techniques rather than truths, the archetypal head was neither a daisy-lover nor a bomb-thrower, but something in between, wired into cavernous headphones, devouring sci-fi paperbacks, pop physics, yogic manuals, anarchist cookbooks, all while smoking tons of pot and maintaining an account at the campus mainframe.)
    It was this exploratory interiority, coupled with an ironic and parasitic relationship to the suburban circus of SoCal party culture, that defined my closest group of friends for the first few years of high school. Talking weird science, meditating, reading Hunter S. Thompson, Moebius, and Autobiography of a Yogi , listening to Eno, Floyd, Zappa, and, yes, Yes (with the Talking Heads our one concession to new wave), we played the hippies the punks played at killing. Yet we mixed with death-rock chicks and skinheads more than surfers, as if the extremity of our anachronism was our shock tactic.
    And so much of it had to do with drugs: Thai-stick, black hash, Humboldt sens so juicy that even doubled-up in sandwich baggies and shoved into greasy blue jeans, it’d reek up Trig. There was usually speedy blotter to be had, but a beneficent wind might bring Orange Sunshine, purple microdot, four-way Windowpane. As with computers or political organization, the specific rituals this candy produced were quite self-reflexive: scrounging and pooling of petty resources, hunting down the weed man, catching rides through the tract-home maze, scoring, seeking the hidden zones, foraging for implements. We were immersed in an educational system whose ultimate goal is filling in little round circles with No. 2 pencils, and drugs actually offered a crooked avenue to resourceful, independent problem-solving, from knocking on some housewife’s door at 10 p.m. to ask for a sheet of aluminum foil to learning how to make a pipe from an apple, how to use weights and scales, how to research pharmacology at the university library, how to grow plants.

    Most fun of all, pot taught us the guerrilla art of concealment, of disappearing into the fractal curves in the landscape: pockets of sagebrush, sandstone, and pine that have since been almost entirely obliterated by the tumorous development endemic to Southern California. Secret forts became stoner zones: Mars, Red Rocks, the Hobbit Hole, the Mushroom Tree. Like some pied piper of Pan, marijuana leads kids to places gone to seed—vacant lots, stream beds, canyons, underpasses, boundary zones where landscape becomes imaginative clay, suddenly collectivized in the ritual trinity of substance, vessel, and flame. While many drugs are “natural” in their origin, the worlds they conjure may seem artificial. But the cosmos pot opens up is distinctly organic (hence vegging out). You can hear it in pothead hip hop, a fuzzy echo as if some crunchy lichen has run riot over the mix. The resurgence of weed as cultural icon may not be a matter of returning to nature but recovering its flow in the urban milieu: how to slip through the cracks in the concrete, how to grow wilderness in the most degraded or rigidly stratified of circumstances. That’s not a spoon or a