You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

WINDOW GARDEN

It was the late 1960s, “flower child” time in New York City. I lived in a tenement in the heart of the Lower East Side. I was not a habitual consumer of marijuana, and yet, as a token of friendship, someone would occasionally give me a small stash. One gift was a “dirty” baggie. It contained seeds along with buds and leaves. The seeds had to be removed before rolling a joint. Having removed the seeds, I was confronted with the question, what to do with these valuable seeds? The desire to have a living plant in my window was great. The possibility of having a pot plant seemed even better. The plant would need sunlight. I would have to put it in the window. However, the only windows in my flat faced 5th Street. The East police precinct was in the same block. If I had a marijuana plant growing in my window, there was the possibility that the police would see it. I decided to risk it.

There were other problems with planting the seeds. Where in the Lower East Side could I get a flower pot and dirt to fill it? Both were available for purchase but at outrageous prices. For a boy from a small town in Oregon, the prospect of having to pay for dirt was abhorrent. However, there were other options. I felt certain that I would be able to find a flower pot in “The Big Store”. “The Big Store” occurred every Wednesday evening when the people in the Lower East Side put their garbage out for collection Thursday morning. On Wednesday evenings piles of garbage lined the sidewalks and street. People would often set useful items out on the sidewalk where they could be found by anyone who may need them. One could find almost anything by perusing the many blocks of “The Big Store”. Every Wednesday, while walking home from work, I passed through the Big Store. My only chair and my frying pan had come from the big store. I looked for a flower pot as I passed through the Big Store on my walk home. There were none to be found. So I punched a drain hole in a coffee can. The second problem was also unique to the Lower East Side. It was soil. In that paved and plantless world there seemed to be nowhere that one could dig up enough soil to fill a coffee can. However, I found dirt. Within each block, ringed by tenement buildings there is a space. It is euphemistically referred to as “The Courtyard”. Instead of gardens, our courtyard had a couple of scraggly Elm trees and ground covered in weeds and litter. Passing through the building and out the back door, I was in the courtyard. I scraped aside the litter to fill my coffee can with dirt laced with bits of plaster, brick, and broken glass. I planted the pot seeds in it and placed it on the window stool. I watered it and waited. Eventually, one seed germinated and grew. I nurtured that delicate sprout with great care. It grew into a proud 18-inch tall pot plant. It was beautiful. I felt a quiet joy when seeing the long fingers of its palmate leaves, a bright green sign of life in my window framed by the rusting fire escape.

One Saturday morning, I was sitting on the toilet, when there came a thunderous knocking on my apartment door. After a brief pause, the heavy knocking repeated, this time accompanied by a man’s voice announcing “This is the police.” Thinking they had spotted my pot plant, I flushed the toilet and quickly grabbed my plant. I shoved it out of sight, behind my raincoat, in the back of the closet.

I opened the door to find the two police officers were laughing. They must have been thinking that I had just flushed my stash. I was smiling as well, I knew it was not drugs that were flushed. One of the cops held out a photograph of a teenage girl and asked “Have you seen this girl? She’s a runaway from Scranton.” I told them I had not seen her. As they left, one looked back, chuckling, and said, “I hope we haven't disturbed your day.”

I closed the door and went to the closet to retrieve my lovely pot plan only to discover that in my haste to hide it, I had broken the stem. There was no saving it. So I harvested and dried the leaves. I put my precious stash into a screw-top jar. Through a hole in the cap, I fixed a coat hanger wire. This I took to the roof. I slid the jar down one of the many abandoned pipes which penetrated the roof. The bent wire was hooked over the end of the pipe.

A year later, several friends had come for a spaghetti dinner washed down with cheap Chianti. After dinner one asked, “Anybody got dope?” No one did. Then I remembered the dried leaves of marijuana in the jar on the roof. I announced that I had a stash on the roof and went to get it. After several attempts to find the right pipe in the dark, I saw the wire still securely hooked over the open pipe. I pulled the jar out and returned to my friends who were anticipating finishing the evening in a mellow marijuana mood. Upon bringing my prize into the light of the room, we saw that the jar did not contain nicely dried leaves but rather a thick black liquid. I said, “This dope is no good.” Upon hearing my comment, one of the guys proclaimed “Year old marijuana tea? That’s gotta be good shit!” He took the jar from me and twisted off the lid. Lifting the jar to take a swig it passed under his nose, on the way to his open mouth, he recoiled thrusting the jar away. Gagging he said “What the hell is in this jar? It smells like shit.” I realized that the pipe in which I hung my treasured stash, was not an abandoned pipe but an active sewer vent. Over the year that it had been hanging in that pipe, moisture from the vent had condensed on the cold wire and run down through the hole in the lid and into the jar. My beautiful marijuana plant had become a jar of putrid sludge. I flushed it down the toilet.