Chapter 3 - Hammer Time

Hammer lived on the South Coast. That is the South Coast of Big Sur to you people who are not in the know. It is the last stretch of America off the grid, and the residents like it that way.

I first met Hammer when I was an activist at good 'ol Berkeley, Go Bears. The Vietnam War was really pissing me and a lot of my friends off. As far as we could tell, those little people on the other side of the world were no threat to our way of life, and the domino theory was the worst bit of propaganda since Joseph Goebbles convinced Germany that circumcision was evil. We had meetings and rallies. Sometimes we marched down Telegraph Avenue and got gassed. Usually we just got stoned and listened to Dylan, Baez, and of course the good 'ol Grateful Dead. We were getting a good education. Before Governor Ronnie “Rayguns” Reagan purposely ruined the California University system, (because he did not like smart people) it was the best higher education there was. Plus, we never had to write home. Mom and Dad could just watch for us on the 6 o'clock news and they knew we were ok.

Hammer was a non-student. That was what we called the people who just came around for the fun of carrying a sign and trying to get laid. But Hammer was a Prankster, one the original Merry Pranksters “on the bus” made famous by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

He came around to our little group at Cal because we were not part of any of the bigger angrier cliques. We also had the best marijuana and the prettiest coeds. He talked seriously about creative civil disobedience, with absolutely no violence. He said anything we did should be aimed at making the evening news, and making the anchorman at least smile, if not laugh. The sign he carried when we hit the streets said, “Mom, send money.” I spent a lot of time with him. It turns out that he was the guy who unhooked Senator Muskie’s caboose from the rest of the train one day when he was running for President. When his whistle stop was over, the train pulled out of the station leaving poor Ed, his campaign staff and press pool behind. I had laughed myself silly when I saw that on the news. His reputation for acts like this with the other Pranksters got him the nickname Hammer. Hammer was my new hero.

The only creative act of civil disobedience we did almost did not make the news. TV had to ignore it, but we did make the Chronicle and the Berkeley Barb. There was a troop train that ran through Berkeley, from the infamous Oakland Induction Center. This was where draftees had to report in their first step towards being used as cannon fodder in Viet-Nam. The train passed just a few miles from Campus. Some groups tried to stop it. This was not always pretty. Indeed one protester who thought that the train would stop if he laid down in front of it found out differently, and painfully, at least until he died. Our group however took being non violent to heart. We never wanted to hurt anyone, and certainly did not want to get hurt. Plus, we were influenced by Hammer’s sense of humor. So we decided to moon the train. We got a hundred students to drop their drawers and show their asses to the troops. The inductees yelled mostly encouraging stuff at us and flipped us the peace sign, or the bird. As fun and memorable as that was, it was not the high-light of my anti-war activity. I actually went to Chicago for the Democratic Convention. I’ll save that for another book. However I should mention that 16 years later, in my chameleon life, I found myself inside the convention as a fully accredited delegate. Like I said, maybe in another book.

After I graduated, and Hammer had burnt out on trying to use humor to save the humorless world, he called me and said he moving to the South Coast.

I had no idea what he meant. He explained to me that he meant the South Coast of Big Sur, and that seems how it was only a two hour drive from my new abode in Marin County, I should visit him.

“Do it in October” he said. I just figured it was some quirky thing, and wished him well.

The next October I drove to Big Sur and figured out what constituted the South Coast. I started asking around for him by his real name and was met with stares and shrugs. This was a closed society I figured. Maybe they were all Amish? Nah, only the men had beards.

Then I saw James Taylor. At least he looked like James Taylor. He was as tall and lanky as the James Taylor I knew from album covers. He had the same chiseled features, and same hair. He was hanging around like a local and no one was cow-towing to him, so maybe he wasn’t really James Taylor. So I approached him and asked if he knew my friend or where he lived. He asked “How do you know him?” “How do I know Hammer, let me tell ya.” He stopped me and said, “Enough, calling him Hammer was all I needed.” He told me how to get to Hammer's house. I thanked him and asked if I could tell Hammer hello for him. “Just tell him Red Truck Robert will be by on Friday.” I told him I enjoyed his last album, just in case it really was James Taylor, and walked away with him staring at me.

My vehicle at the time was not built for the road to Hammer's house. I should have realized that when Red Truck Robert mentioned the 1000 foot drop off where I had to make a tight hairpin curve. “Be careful on that one, I am tired of pulling wrecks out of the redwoods.” It turned out there were more than a few of these hairpin curves, the entire road was cut into the side of a cliff and if poorly navigated, you would tumble for and to eternity. All there was at the bottom was either a grove of old growth redwood, or spectacular granite cliffs at the ocean’s edge. This was the Big Sur of postcards, and I started loving it immediately.

My vehicle however was talking back to me, “find some pavement, and quit climbing.” Neither was an option. It was six miles off of Highway 1 and 4000 feet in elevation. Even my ears were popping. But with patience and a few moments of despair, I found it. He came running out of a ramshackle half built home to see who had the cojones to come visit him. When he recognized me he dragged me inside. There in his almost bare living room was the largest mountain of marijuana I had ever seen.

“Whoa man, that's a lot of dope” was all I could say.

“This ain't dope like you know dope. This is sinsemilla. A strain called Dolores.” He went into a long story about a woman named Dolores who smuggled pot from Mexico. A grower there taught her how to grow sinsemilla, which means seedless. They were big beautiful flowers, covered with a white crystalline dust which, as I found out was pure THC. He tossed me into a chair, rolled a joint that would make Bob Marley smile and said “smoke this.”

Two hits later I was seeing cartoons.

Although I was gainfully employed in the fledgling world of software, I started dealing sinsemilla. I was moving Hammer's stuff and Red Truck Robert's. I had no problem selling it. Software developers tend to be stoners. That goes a long way to explaining why your system crashes after six hours of hard work. My illicit income started matching my taxable income. I was driving too nice a car. I wondered when the capitalist bosses would start to wonder how a mere employee could drive a better car than they had bought their spoiled sons and daughters. This was the best dope any of the developers had ever smoked and I found myself having to go up Plaskett Ridge Road more often than my car wanted to.

After a couple years of my “dope runs” I noticed all the growers had begun packing their product in Tupperware. I asked where it came from and Hammer said “The Tupperware lady of course.” When I growled “bullshit” he told me to come around next weekend. I did. We went to another grower’s house. This house was on the only ridge road that was paved so I was not surprised when a sweet old lady drove up in a Cadillac. She did not bring cups, plates or anything else, just containers. She brought them out and called them the ounce size, the quarter pound, the half pound and the pound boxes. Then she pulled out her order sheets and started a land office business taking orders. When everyone had finished she bid a farewell with “I'll be back before harvest. I hope it’s a good one. See ya boys.” Because the growers knew I was a wholesaler of the South Coast agricultural products, I was invited to be a “judge.” “Of what” I asked. Hammer just stepped in and said “he'll be there.”

A week into the October harvest season I was back on the South coast and in a beautiful home. Everything in this home was hand crafted. The owner made extremely expensive dulcimers for orchestras all over the world. He also made all his own furniture, and his wife painted. Her paintings were not limited to frames, she had done a couple murals on the wall and her refrigerator was painted to look like grandma’s fridge, with paintings of photos of the grandkids instead of photos. I looked around and realized that everyone there was a grower and that they had all bought a sample of their crop. Most of the buds were at least a foot long. The nick name for them was ‘Donkey Dicks’. Suddenly there appeared out of nowhere three stunningly beautiful young women. All dressed in skin tight leotards, leaving little to the imagination. One wore green, one white and one orange. Hammer and Red Truck told me to go sit on a hand-made, nicely crafted dais with four other guys. The hand-made chairs were really comfortable. I wanted one for my office.

The girl in green started rolling perfect joints. There are joints, and then there are perfect joints. Perfect joints do not come apart while being handled, nor do they burn too fast. She coded each one so we would not know who had grown the contents. All I knew was after smoking this stuff for a few years now, there was no way I would be able to smoke thirty or more joints, at least not in a critical thinking kinda way.

I took a hit off the first joint, and then answered the questions on the judging form. I sat back totally bombed and wondered how they expected me to taste twenty nine more. To answer my question, the girl in the white leotards came by with a mason jar full of pure finely ground cocaine. She dipped a spoon, not a coke spoon mind you, but a table spoon into the coke, stuffed it under my nose and said, “Snort it baby.” The girl in orange followed her with freshly squeezed ice cold orange juice and told me to drink it. A minute later I was ready for round two.

After an hour of this I was half way done, floating like the Hindenburg with the cocaine and orange juice hopefully keeping me from the same fatal finale. A couple guys with guitar cases confidently strolled into the crowd. I knew I was seriously loaded and that I should not trust my judgment, or even my bloodshot eyes, but I recognized these guys. They were rock icons. Everyone else was cool about it, polite nods and bops, so I ignored it when one of them came up, took one of my roaches, had a hit, and said in a British accent and a voice I would recognize anywhere, “bloody great shit.” The contest progressed. The musicians played songs I knew by heart, people sang along. Someone won the contest, I'll be damned if I know who.

Anyway, I have digressed long enough. Now you know enough about Hammer for me to move on.