“Attention Sony Pictures: All your testicles are belong to us!”
December 24, 2014
“Have a Merry Christmas, brother,” Reggie said to the bent old man shuffling away from us in the grim little strip mall parking lot.
“Yeah,” Shake chimed in. “But don’t smoke and drive.”
Little Kief, all of six years old, said nothing. As far as I know, that’s all he ever says.
We were hanging out in the early evening on Christmas Eve outside the Swell Farmacy, a closed-for-Christmas medical marijuana dispensary in Youngtown, Arizona. Youngtown is the Suburb of Lost Toys, a tiny slice of closed-for-the-duration urbanity that may at any moment elect to end it all by leaping into the dry riverbed of the Agua Fria River.
That much is funny. The ironically-named Youngtown was a retirement community before the much-larger Sun City was even a gleam in Del Webb’s eye. But the town couldn’t keep its eye on the ball, so Youngtown lost its school-tax exemption – the secret sauce that makes retirement communities – so now it’s struggling to find a new identity.
My suggestion for the grimy little burg’s new marketing slogan: “Cheaper than Peoria, safer than El Mirage and not as freaking far as Surprise!” The earnestly under-employed town fathers chose something less informative – “Uniquely Youngtown!” – which is even more funny, because Youngtown really is unique. It’s a little piece of exurban Chicago, like Gary or Cicero in the 1950s, half-a-mile wide and two-miles tall, misplaced in the Sonoran Desert.
Along with two seedy motels, a Dennys and a Jack In The Box, the Swell Farmacy is by now a significant part of Youngtown’s commercial tax base. The tank- and grenade-launcher-enriched law enforcement community of Maricopa County has spent many years and many millions fending off a pot dispensary in Sun City, right across the six lanes of Grand Avenue, while Swell has been quietly pulling commuter traffic – over-dressed Yuppies and under-dressed Stoners and stooped-over retirees – from its nothing-burger little store-front on Michigan Avenue. Location, location, location. If you want to run a business almost everybody hates, do it where nobody cares.
But Reggie and Shake were there on a mission of mercy. For the Yuppies and the Stoners they had nothing but regrets: “Sorry, brother, they’re closed ’til Friday.” But for the old people – the gray-haired ex-golfers with hands curled into claws by arthritis and the gray-skinned grannies withering away from the continuous nausea of their cancer meds – Reggie and Shake had little red and green baggies of Christmas Spirit, reggie and shake for pilgrims who came too late to find choom at the inn.
Translation: They were giving away grams of grass – which is putatively legal, patient-to-patient, or at least not yet definitively illegal, under Arizona’s byzantine medical marijuana laws – to genuinely-sick people. I was there because being there-at-the-time is what I do. And Kief, a scruffy little ruffian in a too-large Santa hat, was collecting the too-late ‘Toys-for-Tokes’ donations in a faded pink pillow-case.
“This is just a goof for us,” said Shake. “We save our shake all year so we can give it away for the holidays. How’d you like to sit down for Christmas dinner with the kids and grandkids and not be able to eat a bite? With just two or three pulls on grandpa’s secret bong, you’re not just hungry for a change, you’re chatty and fun and pain-free for a few hours. We get to play Santa for old people who may not see another Christmas, and tomorrow Kief gets to play Santa for all his little friends.”
I said, “I’ve always suspected medical marijuana was a scam.”
“It totally is, brother,” Reggie said. “All you’ve gotta do is listen and lawyers will tell you exactly how they want to be lied to. Chronic pain? Anyone old enough to have wiped out on a bike or slipped on a staircase has chronic pain. But if you’ve got a pot card, chances are you look like us – young, twisted and slack.”
“Totally slack,” Shake agreed. “With a wave of the magic wand, the law turned weed into a flower and two former felons like us into Christmastime freelance pharmacists. How cool is that?”
“What do you two do the rest of the year?”
“Mostly we play Xbox and hack Sony,” Reggie replied.
“Hack Sony?”
“Yeah,” said Shake. “We’ve been in the news for like a month. We’ve been hacking Sony on and off for about eight years, but this is the biggest splash we’ve made so far.”
“You’re the Sony hackers?”
“Just social engineering at first, brother,” Reggie offered. “Just a password-phishing expedition that went unbelievably right. But then people started talking about some dumbass movie the North Koreans wanted to censor for some stupid reason, so we upped our game. We wrote threatening emails like a Fu Manchu villain in a Space Ghost cartoon and the whole world had a cow.”
“Attention Sony Pictures: All your testicles are belong to us!” Shake exulted.
“I heard the movie’s coming out anyway.”
Shake shrugged. “We never cared in the first place.”
“You said it, brother. But they should bring back ‘Freaks and Geeks.’ But this time they should call it ‘Norks and Dorks.’ The Norks are the cool kids – short, fat and obnoxious. And the Dorks have to dance like puppets and weep incessantly every time the Norks come around.”
I said, “Not much of a plot.”
Reggie gave me a deadpan look. “I take it you’ve never watched television.”
Shake guffawed at that. “We need to book,” he said. “It’s getting dark, so we won’t see any more old people.”
“You’re so right, brother,” Reggie agreed. “We’ve gotta get home and hack NORAD.”
“You’re going to penetrate the nuclear defense command?”
“You bet,” said Shake. “Little Kief here is my sister’s kid and our best buddy in the world. And the Santa Tracker at NORAD always makes sure that Santa comes to Kief’s house first.”
Kief smiled shyly, but I could tell he was proud of his slacker hacker guardians.
I smiled back at the three of them. “You’re putting the young back in Youngtown, gents. Merry Christmas!”
