Pot Planet by Brian Preston

Author:Brian Preston
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802198204
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

London continues to irritate the hell out of me. On my last night in town Chris and I are walking near Oxford Circus, trying to discreetly smoke a joint on the street.

Chris is complaining about even having to be an activist: “This is all very boring and should have been sorted out twenty years ago. I resent having to work at this. But the reason it didn't work out is that people ghettoized it back then. It was, ‘Oh, those crazy hippies.’”

I have the joint we're sharing in one hand, and in the other a bunch of grapes I've just bought, when some desperate and angry British dude steps out of an alleyway, grabs the wrist of my joint hand, and sticks his other hand in the grapes.

“Don't take them all!” I tell him.

We're eyeball to eyeball, and he's calling me a cunt and various other things, telling me he could lay me on the ground with one punch. It's surely true; I'm not a fighter. But he has nothing to gain by knocking me down in the bright light of busy Oxford Street, so he's trying to steer me into the alley.

Chris the pacifist moves to block his path, pleading softly with him to let go of me.

“Fuck off! You're Old School!” the guy yells at him.

I'm staying out of the alley. This sad bastard can't make too big a scene, so eventually he settles for a few grapes and lets us go on our way, muttering insults.

Chris and I wonder what the hell he meant by “Old School.” Are we really that old? Being Old School is nothing you can control, I guess. Just to be old is to be labeled. We're forty-something, he was maybe thirty. Calling me a cunt over some grapes. If that weren't depressing enough for a final evening in London, my very last image of the place comes the next day on Victoria Station's vast concourse, in the unyielding din of trains, announcements, and scurrying, stressed commuters. Two custodians, each behind the steering wheel of vacuuming machines the size of forklifts, pull up nose to nose and scream insults at each other. In England, even the janitors suffer Road Rage.

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