...i worked at the Psychedelic Shop. it was actually the very first american head shop. naturally it happened in san francisco, originating on haight street and then unfortunately moving to market street.
about a year after moving to the City in 1992, i walked into the shop and applied for the $5/hr counter position. i was out of my mind stoked to see it was even possible. i had dreamed of working in this historic place...it was the deadhead epicenter as far as i was concerned...especially while i had been living away at my culture-starved san diego state.
so not surprisingly, i got the job and found out pretty quickly the psychedelic shop was anything but heaven.
count the employees: count two crack addicts. count three heroin addicts. count one meth-head. count me, a stoner soon to try pretty much anything save the cocaine-based drugs. whippets were a daily occurance and were even prescribed by the shop owner to the biggest crackhead on staff as a form of deferral. this guy eventually did so much nitrous oxide he started losing feeling in his hands. as a guitar player, that was upsetting to him. that came around the same time he started sequestering himself in the back rooms.
Naturally i was in love with another coworker, a heroin addict, little did i know until it was too late. this guy was a year younger than me, told me he had no idea heroin was so addictive when he started doing it...told me many things. told me i was cute. took me on drug runs (as is my style things "happen" to me, rather than me making things happen), then disappeared overnight, moving home to his mother's to clean up. devastation ensued. that's all i'll say about that.
i had come from a town of 4500 to a college of 45,000 to a town of 700,000 to a job filled with serious drug addicts. no one was flirting with disaster, disaster was already in place. in a way i felt like a new recruit: i didn't really have any idea about all that was going on behind the curtain.
but look at the place. what a dream job for a 22-yr-old deadhead. when the dead came into town we were forced to play dead cds all day long, and felt tortured. just goes to show what perspective is all about.
the entire experience gave me a world i never imagined and yet was completely electrified by. i fell for it.
it ended horribly, as one could only imagine. and i'm gonna skip the entire soap opera middle because it's just too gross...but the way it ended was...sad.
screaming between my boss and me, fuck you's were said, i'm outta here's were said, and then there was me charging out the front door with the keys in my pocket.
i had my roommate take them back for me.
later, when the boss wasn't there, and i had moved down the street into a loft with no furniture...i snuck back and, with the help of old friends still on staff, stole '70s bank furniture out of the basement where it had been kept for decades, long before the psychedelic shop ever rented the place.
my psychedelic friends helped me haul it down market street towards the longitude and latitude of my new life.
the psychedelic shop: my most exciting class and biggest memory zit.
ps. non of this story should be any indication as to the integrity of mr. ron thelin, however. somehow, and i'm not sure how (a soul sold to the devil?) a "friend" of mr. thelin's inherited the shop and turned it into the nightmare it came to be at its end.
No comments:
Post a Comment