The amber cornfield to Fran’s right rustled in the slight afternoon breeze. High in a walnut tree to his left Fran spied a squirrel wrestling with a monstrous nut it would need—one of many–to survive the upcoming winter. He interrupted his train of thought temporarily to cast judgment on how brutal the upcoming snow season might be. Wasn’t there some old Farmer’s Almanac truism that associated squirrels and the aggressiveness of their fall nut-gathering with the severity of an impending winter?
But then Fran remembered where he was and began writing laboriously again on his sheet of paper, yet as he did so the time machine encroached rudely into his consciousness, hijacked him, and hauled our protagonist away to another side of the world and another side of his character…….
……….he enjoyed a good, thick joint now and then. Not so much lately though, not since he had married and fathered kids of his own. It had all started for Fran over in Vietnam, where they used to smoke dope all the time. Prior to that—before he went to ‘Nam in August of 1968–he was just a hopelessly naïve farm boy heavily steeped in the Roman Catholic religion. Sure, Fran loved to get rip-roaring drunk on cheap beer every now and then and raise a good ruckus, but that was about the extent of the matter insofar as personal vices.
But over in ‘Nam?
…..in ‘Nam?????
Hell, what else WAS there to do in that godforsaken shithole?!?!
You’d go out trudging through the goddamned jungles and wading through the fuckin’ rice paddies every single day and get randomly shot at by those fuckin’ little gooks hiding up in trees and stumble onto carefully-concealed booby traps—see buddies of yours get blown to bits right in front of you and then, adding insult to injury, get splattered in the face with their guts and their brains and their fresh, sticky blood…….and then you were supposed to go back to base camp, pour a hot cup of coffee, and play tiddly-winks and sing church carols until midnight while listening to Lawrence Welk and his jolly band of geriatric jackass accordion players nattering away on Radio Saigon???
Noooooooooooooooo…….
NO FUCKIN’ WAY!!!!!!!!
A good joint helped take the edge off the day, made you forget—for a few hours, at least—the terrible shit you had been forced to witness earlier in the day.
Therapeutic, is what it was…..
Morally wrong to smoke pot, you say?
“MORALLY” WRONG?!??!?!?!
Fuck you, too, you judgmental asshole!!!
What exactly is immoral about smoking marijuana anyway?????
To Fran Blahnik, smoking dope was completely harmless. Whatever you chose to put inside your own God-given body was a strictly personal decision and no one else’s goddamned, self-preaching business!
According to the Gospel of Fran (Chapter One, Verse One), it didn’t matter one iota if you lit up a thick joint of lush “Panama Red” and hit a humongous toke……or threw down a whole twelve-pack of Grain Belt beer at one riotous sitting……..or guzzled down the last few remaining drops of whiskey from a liter of Jack Daniels after first killing the rest of the bottle…….or voraciously inhaled two packs of Camel cigarettes a day…….because the end result was undeniably the same. They—along with every other mood-changer Fran Blahnik was personally aware of—allowed you to escape the monotony of the daily grind, if only for a few hours; to take a brief, well-deserved “time-out” from the tedium of everyday life and just relax in the moment.
But Fran didn’t really give a shit whether others agreed or disagreed with his moral stance on the issue. He certainly respected their right NOT to smoke pot or get pissy-faced drunk or live a life steeped in so-called “vices”; that was their business—they could do whatever they wanted with their own bodies so long as they didn’t infringe upon the rights of others–and his business was HIS business and his alone.
Yet, having clarified that, Fran Blahnik hadn’t brought the smoking habit back home with him when he returned from Vietnam, not like a lot of other veterans he knew.
Hell, why should he?
He didn’t need marijuana to live a happy, fulfilling life in southeastern Minnesota, had no use for the stuff there. Life was just fine and dandy for him sans the cannabis. He was doing great on his own, wasn’t in dire need of any emotional crutches or artificial highs or dramatic mood changers.
Y’see, Reader, over in ‘Nam that whole experience was akin to living in a debauched fuckshop with no rules whatsoever, so Fran obviously felt no compulsion to follow any. But back home in the United States–in bucolic, conservative southeastern Minnesota, no less–the laws on the books ordained that smoking marijuana was illegal and a criminal activity, and even though Fran Blahnik personally disagreed with that silly edict and thought such thinking ridiculous and puritanical and old-fashioned, he had been raised as both a strict Catholic and a grateful citizen of the United States inured to faithfully honor and obey the prevailing laws of his native land.
Case closed then; let’s operate exclusively between the boundary lines and not ruffle any feathers was kind of the way Fran viewed the living dynamic he returned to in the United States following his tumultuous sojourn in Vietnam…..
Yet when Fran moved onto his forty-acre hobby farm north of sleepy Spring Valley, Minnesota and spied verdant copses of towering native marijuana plants thriving throughout his cattle pasture, the temptation became too great for our decorated Vietnam veteran to resist. In tandem with his younger brother Fred, the grateful pair harvested a small quantity of pungent “Minnesota Green” for eventual personal usage. Eventually this humble stash found its way into the attic of Fran’s archaic house, where it was left hanging between the building’s rafters to dry naturally for future smoking.
And before long–amidst the hustle and bustle of busy lives and vibrant living–the contraband hanging in Fran’s attic was completely forgotten about…...
Fran was standing outside the shell of his still-smoldering house that unforgettable day as August of 1990 plunged perilously close to its rendezvous with September–understandably despondent as he stared implacably at the pathetic sagging structure– when he was approached by one of the local volunteer firemen from Spring Valley. The guy thrust a small plastic bag under Fran’s nose and loudly demanded, “IS THIS STUFF YOURS?!?! Found it up in your attic!!!”
Stunned out of his reverie, Fran peered downward. His blood pressure subsequently spiked ominously; Fran could feel his heart begin to bounce to-and-fro inside his chest cavity while it disobeyed sinus node orders and skipped a beat here and there, sometimes two or three at a time. The hack fireman was thrusting a small bag of marijuana at him.
Fran shook his head slowly back and forth and mumbled “No……..”
But even as he did so, as he did his best to plausibly deny the accusation……he already knew his proverbial “goose was cooked”. There was no way in the world this condescending buttfucker standing before him would ever believe a word he said.
The catastrophic house fire had resulted from a Lilliputian malfunctioning fan in an upstairs bedroom—a fan meant only to help cool the room as the sultry “Dog Days” of August wound down—but of course the sneering jackass currently staring him down would take the next logical step and believe he was utilizing the thing to dry marijuana in his attic.
Fran had felt very much dejected just minutes before, but his mood now plummeted to an unprecedented level of abject depression–a frightening crater of despair he had never come close to experiencing before in his not-short lifetime. Even as the amateur fireman continued to grill him annoyingly—“Go ahead, Fran……just admit this marijuana is yours to use for personal pleasure and I promise you I won’t tell anyone else about it!”—Fran ignored the persistent noise as he went about mentally connecting the dots to this regrettable puzzle. He knew exactly in what direction the debacle was undoubtedly headed.
His reputation around Spring Valley was as good as ruined now……
Fran wouldn’t admit a single goddamned thing to the jerk waggling a finger in his face, of course, yet that wouldn’t prevent the guy from hurrying back to Spring Valley and loudly blabbing to anyone who would listen: “You know Fran Blahnik, that weird Vietnam vet who lives on the small secluded farm seven miles north of town on County Road #1? Well, the dumb son-of-a-bitch was drying a bunch of marijuana up in his attic and, next thing you know, the stupid bastard accidentally burned his entire goddamned house to the ground!!!”
Hell, Fran decided he might as well personally publish the story of his house fire as a bold headline on the front page of the next week’s edition of the Spring Valley Tribune for as much exposure it was liable to garner, not to mention the staggering speed with which rumors swiftly multiply and thereupon sail around uninhibited in a cloistered agrarian village.
As the volunteer fireman finally stalked away—obviously disappointed and minus the confession he so dearly coveted—Fran stared down at his gravel driveway as tears welled up in his eyes and searing anger burned uncontrollably inside his chest. Not only had he lost his house today—and with it the overwhelming majority of his personal belongings to boot—he had also irretrievably sacrificed something far more important to him personally: The platinum reputation he had spent a whole lifetime so painstakingly constructing.
But unlike the house and that panoply of aforementioned material goods, his sullied reputation was something which could never be fully resurrected or rectified by insurance pay-outs or replaced intact…….
Fred's Soapbox 