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In a lot of ways, pot is like Mary Kay Cosmetics. Try it once and you see yourself in a whole new way. Before you know it, you’re dealing to all your friends so they can support your $10-a-day lipstick and blush habit. The only difference is you’ll never see a pothead in a pink Cadillac. But at the grass roots, marijuana is all about network marketing. Today’s buyer is tomorrow’s seller. And everyone shares the high. In 1969, Mike Halliday was casting weed upon his friends in the handy take-home size. That’s what brought him to the little hippie commune on Doniphan Drive in El Paso’s Upper Valley. It was a small connection, but it was his first. He scored less than a pound, but before the day was over, Mike would experience the bliss of homemade granola, listen to a little Bob Dylan, and witness a spectacular high-desert sunset. In the time it took to break in a new pair of Levi’s, Mike Halliday became a tie-dyed hippie. He grew a ponytail and converted his VW bus into a slick camper with a cleverly concealed “hide” to preserve his stash. A few performance-enhancing modifications of his own design were added, of course. But the crowning glory was the large peace symbol that replaced the VW logo on the front of the bus. Make Love, Not War may have been the statement he was trying to make, but he couldn’t have screamed ARREST MY ASS! any louder with a billboard and a bullhorn. MIKE HALLIDAY My wife Karen turned into Earth Mother and I was a hippie with a job—which made me kind of a part-time hippie. But I was lucky enough to get on at Phelps Dodge—the copper refinery down on Trowbridge Street. It was hard work, but the pay was really good. It turned out I was the very first gringo in eight years that lasted more than sixty days. The only gringos there at the time were the machinists and the foremen and office guys. I worked down the line from the shears, where the copper was cut into pieces weighing about seventy-five pounds each. Part of my job was to stack ’em up for shipping. The thing is, this copper would have growths on it kind of like warts. By the time you stacked ’em about three feet high, they would be leaning every which way, looking like they were going to fall over. So every time I saw a big wart, I’d flip the sheet and turn it so it would come down on the other side—the smooth side. My stacks would always come out nice and straight. The shipping department thought I was a genius. They wanted me to show the other guys how to do it that way, but I think they had me confused with somebody who wanted to experience an industrial accident. These guys had been working there for fifteen years—they weren’t gonna like some gringo kid showing them a better way. I kept my mouth shut. Turned out to be a good decision too, because a lot of the Mexicans ended up liking me. I had a Volkswagen van I converted to a camper. I always smoked a joint on the way to work. I wore tinted safety glasses inside Phelps Dodge, so you couldn’t see my eyes. I could get high, go stack my copper or whatever job they gave me, and no one would ever know. At noon, I’d go out by the smokestack and smoke another joint by myself. I thought I was pretty cool about it, but it turns out the Mexicans all knew I was getting high. They started asking me if I wanted to smoke some of their pot. “Okay—whatever. Pot’s pot.” But the first joint—hell, the first hit was a different story. That was some primo shit—the best pot I had ever smoked and probably my first taste of really good Mexican. It made the stuff I’d been getting from the hippies look like alfalfa. I went drinking all the time with these guys from Phelps Dodge—they hung out in a little bar on Alameda Street. In those days you could go in there and buy a Prince Albert can of pretty good pot for $10. Some of the guys just let you reach in the bag—as much as your hand would hold, that was $5. They hooked me up pretty good—a kilo or two at a time. So I got to where I started selling more and more—to the hippies, friends and neighbors, and a few other guys. And they had some friends who had some friends…you know how it was. If you had pot, you had friends. I was getting a lot of friends. That was about the time I met Jack Stricklin. It was at a party thrown by an old girlfriend of his—she introduced us and we hit it off right away. Jack was a college guy, but he wasn’t a douche bag. We started doing a little business, nothing much—nickel and dime shit. Jack got to be one of my regular customers. He was always trying to hook me up with a friend of his named Dave Blott. Dave was another guy he bought from. Every time I got with Jack, he was always trying to get us together. Dave Blott was a friend of Jack Stricklin—one of the neighborhood guys who would stop by our house from time to time. I didn’t really know Dave. The five or six year difference in our ages seemed eternal, and neither of us had much interest in closing the gap. Dave graduated from the neighborhood high school, served a hitch in the Navy, and came home to find whatever work he could as an electrician. The Navy had introduced Dave Blott to the bliss of cannabis. He found no shortage of ways to maintain a steady supply once he got out. He was, after all, living in El Paso. As a friend of Jack Stricklin, it was only natural that they would do business, sharing small loads of a kilo or two and breaking them down at $10 an ounce. Like Jack, Dave began to see the possibilities of scaling up. But Jack was going away to serve his own hitch in the Navy. He tried in vain to put Dave Blott together with Mike Halliday. But as good as he was at making connections, Jack Stricklin had thus far failed to link his two most reliable sources of supply. MIKE HALLIDAY At the time, I was living in the alley on Hastings Street. It was actually a house that was in the alley. And right across the alley was another little house. Anyway, this place had a glass-enclosed porch that was full of mismatched stuff. It was too cold to sleep there in the winter and too hot in the summer. We lived there probably two and a half years. The only time I slept in that little room was on that night. My son Mikey had an earache so I put him in bed with Karen. That’s why I was on the porch. It’s about ten or eleven o’clock. I hear a car drive up and park in the alley, and I think, “Oh shit, is somebody here to see us?” I look outside. It’s the guy who lives across the alley and another guy. They get out and open the trunk and start pulling out duffel bags and hauling them inside. I’m like, “Holy shit!” It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out, right? It was probably more pot in one place than I’d ever seen. So the next afternoon, I’m waiting for my neighbor when he pulls up around 4:30. He gets out of the car, and I say, “Hey, I live across the alley, I’m Mike.” “Yeah, I know who you are,” he says. “Well,” I say, “I just want to talk to you about something.” “What’s that?” “I happened to be on the porch last night when you guys pulled up.” He gets this look on his face like he doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind. So I say, “Hey, I just want to buy something, man.” That turned out to be Dave Blott. It kind of shows you what a small town El Paso was back then. Here’s this guy Jack was always trying to put me together with, and there he was living right across the alley about twenty feet away. The issues Jack Stricklin would have with authority were a minor annoyance compared to the issues authority would have with Jack Stricklin. With pot consuming more and more of his time and Jack consuming more and more pot, school ranked somewhere below wash the car on his list of priorities. Academic
