Hal Ackerman - Stein,stoned

“You’re still acting like I’m the enemy,” Stein groused. Schwimmer looked for a moment like he was going to respond but dismissed the thought.

Six hours after take-off with the plane racing over the Atlantic at five-hundred miles per hour in pursuit of tomorrow, most of the passengers were asleep, their bodies Salvidor Dali’d into surreal fluid shapes dangling over the armrests or contorted against a shaded window. Stein’s shade was up. He couldn’t sleep. He watched an earlobe of moon that hung outside the window nestled between underlit clouds.

Stein hadn’t anticipated the strength of the feelings his returning to Amsterdam would engender. He had found something there that had defined his life. The sixties had happened to him there. In Amsterdam. When migrating hippies were shunned by most European cities as deterrents to tourism Amsterdam welcomed them. The Dutch were cool people. While they shared the Germans’ Teutonic love for order and cleanliness, they possessed a rogue chromosome in the deep end of their gene pool that gave them a goofy sense of humor in place of the need to exterminate people. Living below sea level must have taught them the futility of legislating against nature. Every night in Dam Square, sleeping bags opened out from the center fountain to the edge of the square like a giant mandala. The police were not concerned by the sounds of singing and guitars, the commingling bodies or the wafting aromas of Acapulco Gold, or the soft, sweet, orange hash from Lebanon, or the hard black, bricks from Afghanistan. It was there that he became Stein. All the goofy antics of the time, which for most people was a costume they put on for a while and then, after Stein went back to being their real selves. For Stein it was his life.

In the Autumn of ‘69, after Woodstock, after the moon walk, after Chappaquiddick, after Helter Skelter, either by coincidence or through a preordained Harmonic Convergence, Stein and Winston and five or six of their buddies had found themselves in Amsterdam, each of them happening to have with him a bud of the best weed they had smoked that year. Sitting in lofty judgment like the World Court of Cannabis, they awarded each other prizes for best in show. The following year without any of them mentioning it, leaving it in the hands of the universe to decide if it would become a tradition, they all convened again. Plus a few friends.

The year after that a hundred people showed up. This was no Woodstock II. There was no promotion. No hype. The people who knew just knew. They came with buds of the best weed they had found. People stayed high for record amounts of time. Prodigious quantities of Dutch chocolates were consumed. Contests evolved with gonzo prizes. An emperor was crowned. The crown was smoked. They knew with absolute certainty that the changes they were making in the world would last forever, that this was merely the dawn of the Age of Aquarius and that they were the first generation that would never grow old.

Thirty years later, now at the dawn of the false millennium, the festival had become so corrupted and commercialized, so mainstream and institutional it was like Disney Times Square. According to the brochure in the airline seat pocket, forty coffee houses were entered in this year’s competition. There were more than six hundred judges. Morley Safer, for God’s sake, was doing a segment on it for 60 Minutes.

He pictured Hillary in those days, dressed in her peasant blouse and perpetual smile. They were uncorrupted embryos, cells in the hippie jet stream that wafted down over Spain to Morocco, east across the Greek islands and Turkey through the Hindu Kush to Katmandu. “A long way to go for a shortcut to Enlightenment,” the people who did not go had scoffed. Stein and Hillary had been inseparable, revolving around each other like twin stars. It bewildered Stein now to wonder where all that heat and fire between them had gone.

He had tried several times to explain to Angie why he and her mother had gotten divorced, what had gone wrong. But he could describe it only in metaphors about adjacent raindrops on opposite side of the Continental Divide or comets whose orbits just touched for a brief moment on their ways to opposite sides of the Galaxy. But none of this explained to her why people married, had children, and then broke each other’s hearts.

Stein hadn’t slept in days but his mind was too wired to surrender now. Lila had told him it was good for his circulation to walk while flying. So he took an excursion up the aisle to the back end of the plane. A cute, dark-haired flight attendant had taken her shoes off and was curled up in a window seat. Her lapel button said “Jana.” She patted the seat alongside her and invited him to sit down. “You are coming to Amsterdam for the Cannabis Cup?” she asked, though it was more of a friendly presumption of fact than a question.

“Why would you think that?” he flirted. “I’m a respectable citizen.” He waited for her to laugh at the word ‘respectable,’ as an acknowledgment of how anti-establishment he was sure he looked. “I’m kidding,” he had to say, and attributed her gaffe to the language barrier

“You American lawyers like to pretend to be radicals,” she said

“You think I’m a lawyer? Oh, man! That hurts.” He played up the pouting.

“So you are not a lawyer.”

“The exact opposite of a lawyer.” Whatever in the hell that meant. He took his shoes off and brazenly pulled some of her blanket over his feet.

“Are you high already?” she scolded. “And you don’t offer me any?

“After we land that might be arranged.”

She rubbed the ball of her foot against his leg and Stein began thinking of the mile-high club and converting feet to meters but the movement came in response to an announcment in Dutch over the intercom.

“That means me,” Jana said. She extracted those lithe limbs from the blanket. She nodded that she’d be back soon but Stein doubted it. His thoughts became more focused as preparations began for their descent into Schipol Airport. He knew that a long delayed, long avoided moment of truth was approaching that would define what kind of a man he had grown into. In protesting the Vietnam War he had risked the bite of tear gas and Billy club. Yes, he had led protests. Yes, he had hunger-struck, yes, he had draft-resisted, Yes he had bedeviled authority, exposed hypocrisy; all of which were admirable. But he had not fought. He had not faced the possibility of death. He had been, for all of his bravado, for all of his audacious demonstrations, as safe and immune to the infliction of real harm as any pentagon general.

He had no idea now what awaited him on the ground; whether Goodpasture had tracked Nicholette’s killers to Amsterdam or fled here from them. If her killers were here and meant to do danger to Brian, it meant that Stein would be in their crosshairs as well. But he couldn’t think of it that way. He had to think that they would be in his. That he was the hunter and they were the prey. He wondered how he would perform under life-and-death pressure. He pictured himself as a high diver wondering as he peered down at the distant water from the top of the cliff, whether he was still as good as he once had been, and thinking, perhaps foolishly, that yes, yes he just might be.

Captain Verheoff set the 747 down on runway number three. The passengers were thanked for flying KLM and informed that the local time was some number of hundred hours and that there were very, very few degrees Celsius outside. Stein looked at his watch but it was a meaningless gesture. After an eleven-hour flight across nine time zones and not having slept in God knows how long, his biorhythms were so askew he could have laid eggs. In the arrival terminal he telephoned the number for the taxi that Schwimmer had given him. Rather he had someone do it for him.