Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. Hello listeners. In today's bonus episode, I'm
talking with one of my parents friends from the counterculture,
a psychedelic pioneer I call far Out. So what are
your last thoughts you're on far Out? Any last things?
Want to tell us about far Out? Since we're gonna
tell his story on this podcast, It's interesting from me,
(00:31):
I would say far Out was the epitome of the
left wing politico hippie who started out as a left
wing intellectual and ended up as a hippie, super duper
pot smoking guy who in fact, I mean he was
the epitome. He sold like ounces and nickel bags and
(00:55):
that kind of stuff, so he really supplied it to
the people. A ground floor member of San Francisco's counterculture,
far Out was the manager of a world famous San
Francisco rock and roll band, and like many of the
psychedelic Pioneers, he's a nice Jewish boy. He's from Chicago
and landed in San Francisco's North Beach in the early sixties,
(01:15):
where he became friends with my mom. San Francisco's North
Beach neighborhood was ground zero for the city's iconic beat
nicks and the alternative art, literary, music, and comedy scene
before it morphed into the famed counter culture and moved
to the hate Ashbury neighborhood in the late sixties. Now,
for his entire adult life, far Out has been in
(01:38):
love with my mom's best friend from her North Beach
belly dancing days, and far Out spent lots of time
around my mom's best friend's communal table, a famous gathering
spot for future famed musicians like the Anonymous Artists of
America and the Quicksilver Poster artists like Stanley Mouse, Nelton Kelly,
plus actors, writers and smugglers who gathered to smoke doobies,
(02:01):
schmooz and eat Chinese food and hippie stew and people
always like just went to the table, rolled joints and
drank coffee, rolled and smoke joints and drank coffee and
just bullshitting like all the and all these like all
the time. It was like it was it was like
(02:22):
a coffee house. So it was somebody's house right now.
My mom's best friend's table is the same place where
my dad met my mom in nineteen seventy and where
Dad met far Out, So that was a famous table
by the time I got there. Oh yeah, yeah, you
got there late. Yeah, you got the table late, dad later. Yeah. Now,
(02:48):
although far Out primarily worked in rock and roll, he
had one good story about pot smuggling through Mexico over
the Rio Grande. I'm Rainbow Valentine. This is disorganized crime
smuggler's daughter going to do young, free and groovy, making
(03:13):
it up. We rolled along a country gang New York State,
making it up as we roll. Oh my god, Oh
(03:43):
can I have just taken a trip through the city
San Francisco to get to the Castro, which is an
awesome neighborhood. I'm gonna ring the doorbell. Oh, here we go. Okay,
I went to far Out's apartment in San Francisco. Now
in his eighties. Far Out has been a small time
pot dealer for over sixty years, and he might be
(04:04):
one of the last meaning psychedelic pioneers still living in
San Francisco. Proper in the Castro. Go all right, I'm
going in, All right, how are you? I call him
far Out because he says it all the time with
complete earnestness and far Out awe, he really means it.
(04:25):
And since I say far Out all the time. I mean,
I'd probably Shay far Out one hundred and two times
a day. Now, far Out was never a true smuggler.
He was a band manager with a pot dealing side hustle.
But being a true psychedelic pioneer, he did one smuggling
trip and he told me about it while sitting in
(04:45):
his tiny apartment full of pot paraphernalia and iconic memorabilia
from his life amongst San Francisco's music superstars. His one
smuggling trip happened to be some of the best pot
he'd ever smoked. It was the best, most spectacular Mexican
pot I have ever run across in my life. It
(05:06):
was literally technicolor. It was yellow, gold, green, red blue.
And I've been smoking pot since fifty seven, So what
do we have? We have forty three sixty two years,
so I consider my judgment pretty good. It was the
best Mexican pot that I ever smoked in my life. Now,
(05:35):
being in his eighties, far Out is vague on details
like who asked him to supervise the trip, But remember
business was all done amongst close friends, so it was
probably another psychedelic pioneer. Also in rock and roll, they
rented a house south of Mexico City, and they were
(05:55):
going ahead with a purchase, and they needed somebody to
supervise the whole operation. I flew down to monter Ray,
which is in northern Mexico. At the airport in Monterey,
I rented a car. I rented a new Dodge, a
seventy Dodge, and I started driving south. Now the rented
(06:16):
Dodge became a critical part of far Out's illicit adventure
about to unfold, and I drove all the way south
south of Mexico City. I drove hundred some miles south,
followed my nose. I arrived at the house. I entered
(06:36):
the house. They took me to the back living room,
in the back room, and there in the back room,
piled in a corner was two hundred and fifty pounds
of the most beautiful Mexican pot. And they had already
bought really thick clear plastic vinyl. They'd bought sheets and
sheets and sheets. So I decided, what we're going to
(06:57):
do is we're going to wrap these two hundred and
fifty pounds one pound at a time, and then I
had us operated into five piles of fifty pounds each
fifty bundles each, and we made five bundles each. There
was two hundred and fifty bundles. Now I made five bundles.
(07:18):
Each bundle was fifty pounds. So it was wrapped over
and over again with this vinyl because we were going
to cross it on the river under Rio Grande. Now
the Rio Grande has been a popular smuggling route since
(07:40):
eighteen forty eight, when the Mexican American War ended seeding
Texas to the US and causing trade issues between the countries,
leading to tariffs. Rio Grande borderland residents seeking to avoid
paying tax on goods began smuggling over the Rio Grande,
adopting smuggling routes previously used as escapeways by Texas slave
(08:05):
was seeking freedom in Mexico, which abolished slavery in eighteen
twenty eight, so the smuggling trip far Out stepped into
had a plan. Far Out would drive a wrapped cube
of two hundred and fifty pounds of pot one thousand
miles north through Mexico to the Rio Grande border. There,
(08:28):
he would send it across the river, passing it off
to the Texas smuggling crew waiting on the other side
of the rio Grande. Now the Texas crew member was
a physicist whose day job was to watch cloud chamber
photographs of nuclear explosions. So far Out and his crew
set off north with the cube of two hundred and
(08:50):
fifty pounds of pot in Farout's dodge, which left first,
with the rest of the crew following forty five minutes behind.
So we started out. I start out. I had a
few joints with me so I could smoke on the way.
(09:12):
I figure, if I see a check station up ahead,
I'll just toss the joint out the window and open
the windows and air out the car. And I come
to the first town and there's a restaurant. Basically, it's
a roof on poles. There's no walls to the restaurant.
It's a roof on pole with a bunch of tables,
and there's a few people sitting there round And I
(09:35):
pull up my car and park it. And in the meantime,
while I've been sitting in this restaurant, some local drives
his car. He's driving his car around the area and
he slides into a creek. So a few of the
people who are hanging out at the restaurant get up.
They go over to the other side of the road,
and one of him has him chaded with him and
(09:58):
he chops down a spindlay, a thin tree, but he
gets by chopping down the tree. He gets a long
pole with ridge and they all go together and they
used this long chop down tree and thing, and they
pull They jack this car and this truck out of
the river, and everybody goes on with their life. Far
(10:18):
Out far Out finished his tacos and moved on smoking
doobies another two hundred and fifty miles up the road
to a hotel where he meets up with the rest
of the crew. Now the hotel was just some random
nowhere spot, nothing special, But it turns out the hotel
is significant for a progressive socialist idealist like far Out.
(10:48):
I'm walking downstairs to meet my friends and have breakfast.
I'm on the second floor, and from the second floor
down to the first floor into a big circle. In
the center, there's a sort of a bench stairway. There's
a half a flight and then a little landing, then
another flight going down. As I'm walking down the first
(11:10):
flight towards the second flight going down at that landing
in the middle, as I'm walking down, I see a
picture of yellow as Abotta, an old hero of mine.
He led the Mexican Revolution in the early ye twentieth century,
but he's a hero of mine. And I'm walking down
(11:32):
the stairs, I'm approaching that picture hanging on the wall
of a Potta. It's a famous picture as a Potta.
He's got his bullets bundeeerrows across his chest, he's got
his sombrero on his head, and he's holding his rifle.
And as I'm walking down the stairs and I'm approaching
that picture, a really strange, weird feeling comes over me.
(11:53):
I can't figure out what's going on in my body,
in my head. And as I come to the bottom
step and I'm standing in front of the picture, I
realized the wall that the picture is hanging on as
the wall against which Zapota is standing to have the
picture taken. It turns out at the hotel that we
(12:14):
were staying in used to be Zapota's headquarters. He used
to ride his horse around that inner circle inside the
brick wall. For me, this was even more of an
adventure than the smuggle itself. You know, I stood where
Zapota stood. This blew my mind. Even now, I get
(12:35):
the chills thinking about it. I'm Rainbow Valentine. This is
disorganized crime. We'll be right back. After spending the night
at Zapota's former headquarters, there was another five hundred miles
(12:59):
to go so far out started out in the dodge
and the crew followed forty five minutes behind a secret
caravan of sin Semea smugglers. I took off another restaurant
two hundred and fifty miles. They showed up. I finished up,
paid my check on one another two hundred and fifty miles.
That evening, we wound up together at a motel in Metamoros.
(13:24):
We're gonna wait till midnight to do the smuggle on
the Rio Grande. We drive in my rented car to
Rio Grande. We drive through the beach. Now we get
to the beach and it's blackest pitch. We're probably within
fifty feet of the edge of the river. We've parked
(13:45):
the car and we've dragged this big bundle to the
edge of the river. And the edge of this big
bundle is sitting now on the It's half into water
and half on the land. I positioned it so the
land part is holding it in place. We've got a
rope on bundle. The other end of the rope is
(14:09):
in the hands of our Texas physicists friend who's at
the bottom of the river. He's better walkie talkie with him,
and we've got a waukie talkie with us, and we're
in touch with him. He's under the water. We're on
the Mexico side. He's entered the water from the Texas side.
We're in touch by wakie talkie. But also what we
(14:31):
hear on our waukie talkie is the Matamoros police radio.
They're all talking in Spanish, and almost every other word
is marijuana. With every other word marijuana, we were sort
of uptight. We couldn't were so black on the beach
that we couldn't see anything either in front of us
(14:53):
or in all four directions. We couldn't see if anybody
was approaching us. The cops could have been approaching us
without their lights on. And you know what marijuana are
they talking about? Are they talking about suspicion of us
with marijuana and some other man who knows we're listening
to them, and we're talking to our friend under the water,
and so on and so forth. And it took until
(15:17):
about three am. This was almost three hours before everything
was clear before we got to go ahead from him.
When he gave us to go ahead, I stood at
that bundle and I pushed it slowly into the water.
And at the speed that I pushed it into the
water was the same speed that it staggered crossing the water.
(15:41):
And we watched it crossing the water until we could
no longer see it, and then we got an okay
from him. They said see you later. The crew piled
in far Out's rental car, relieved to pass off the
weed when the danger they'd been evading for one thousand
miles zeroed in on them. The Mexican police, Yeah, we
(16:07):
come to an intersection. It's hard to tell how the
intersection was defined, but we could tell it was an intersection.
We were not yet at the town and there was
a big I can't tell what it was hanging from,
but there was a traffic light in the middle of
this intersection where nobody was there, and you know, and
they were also It's three in the morning. So we
(16:29):
come up to this intersection and the traffic lighters read
so we stopped, and as we stopped, I noticed about
thirty feet in front of us, there's a cop. It's
like a municipal cop standing there, which is I can't understand.
This is three in the morning. He's a municipal cop.
(16:50):
There's no civilization in this area at all. What's he
doing here? And why is he here? And what's a
cop doing here? But the fact that you know, I mean,
we were foreigners and we were guilty, and so it
was hard to think eight And as I see this cop,
I made the mistake of looking directly at him, and
(17:13):
so our eyes met. This all happened real fast, and
as our eyes met, he did this. Yeah, So we
had no choice but to approach him, and he took
us into town and he confiscated the car. I can't
remember the details of this. They confiscated. This was all underhanded.
(17:37):
This wasn't legitimate. But Darre in charge, he confiscated the
car and he said we could come back tomorrow morning
to the police station and pay our fine and recieve
our car. Now far out doesn't know why the car
was confiscated regardless, Now they had to pay a fine,
but unfortunately all their money was in the impounded car. Well,
(18:02):
the problem was that while we were conducting our business us.
I put my wallet under the front seat of the car.
What we had to do tomorrow morning was pay one
hundred paco fine, but the hundred pacos were below the
seat in the front seat of my car. We went
early that morning. We climbed over the cyclone fence of
where the car was confined, and I went into my
(18:25):
car and I got the wallet from under the front
feet and then we climbed out. And then we went
to the police station and paid them a hundred pacos
and they went and released there, released my car. Oh,
disorganized crime for sure. Meanwhile, the Texas crew drove the
cube of pot from the Rio Grande to the San
(18:47):
Francisco Bay area. Far Out drives back to Monterey, Mexico,
and flies back to San Francisco to help them with
a distribution. And we opened a pod and one of
the fifty pound bundles leaked and got wet. That's it.
That was it. A local pot dealer and music manager
(19:07):
rather than a smuggler. Far Out had never done something
this daring and dangerous, and he never would again. Far
Out preferred dealing small amounts of pot to his regular
customers in town. Over the intense adrenaline rush of smuggling
large quantities over boarders, supporting my theory that my parents
(19:28):
are adrenaline junkies. My meeting with far Out ended with
him reminiscing about his great love for my mom's best friend,
who recently passed away. Far Out expressed surprise that my dad,
of all the people around mom's best friend's psychedelic table,
(19:48):
had been the one to call him to share the
sad news of mom's best friend passing. An icon of
San Francisco's psychedelic history, far Out has been a pot
dealer for almost sixty years, along with his career managing
global rock band I can't tell you who, but it's giant,
like the biggest. Now, this reminds me it's always good
(20:13):
to have a side hustle in order to generate multiple
income streams, and in this unprecedented pandemic full of immense
devastating job loss, cultivating side revenue hustles is a valuable idea.
I'm not saying we should all become pot dealers, but
(20:33):
maybe toilet paper dealers. I do hear there's a black
market for it now, and I'm totally serious about this.
There's a black market for toilet paper. We should all
become toilet paper dealers. Stay safe out there, Wash your hands,
don't touch your eyeballs. I'm Rainbow Valentine and this is
Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter. Disorganized Crime Smuggler's Daughter is written
(21:04):
and recorded by Me Bow Valentine. Our producers are Gabby
Watts and Taylor Church. Executive producers are Brandon Barr, Brian Liven,
Elsie Crowley and Me at School of Humans and Connel
Burn and Charles Bryant at iHeartRadio. Our music is by
Gabby Lala and Claire Campbell, with original theme by Mark
Karen and Me. You can follow us online at Disorganized
(21:26):
Crime Podcast dot com. Vel story Doing It As with
Me Tamble by Stephen Princess of the Red says, keep
(21:48):
it real, handshake seals the deal, Rap stat seal Meal,
Going up these old golding to Doobe, Young, rich and groovy.
Maybe it up As we roll along, Rolling along fer Country,
(22:14):
Roll Rolling along Far Country, Roll, Rolling along Far Country.
Low