Subject: Hello Old Friend

Hello Amanda, Wow What a trip to see how great your career is going. how are you? Just thought It’s been a long time since I saw you last, a lifetime really. Just wanted to say Hi and maybe we can catch up on life

.

I’m very proud and quite impressed with your accomplishments. I hope to hear from you soon

.

p.s. Don’t freak out about this. Always your friend, Ian

One last thing. After a treacherous few months when I was twenty-seven, I was finally diagnosed. Turns out things did happen to me that didn’t usually happen to others. I had panic disorder and there were drugs, that were not cocaine, to treat it. While I seldom have panic attacks anymore, I still feel a tugging anxiety at the sight of preteen girls and the men who pay attention to them. It’s only now, when I look at those full, baby-fat faces that I have perspective and can see with objectivity how morally despicable Ian was to prey on me. I feel sad for Caroline and I even feel sad for Ian, but I feel sadder still for their baby girl, born fourteen years ago, and the age now that I was when I met him.

J

AN

H

ELLER

L

EVI

is the author of

Once I Gazed at You in Wonder

, which won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. “Eve Speaks,” included in her second collection,

Skyspeak

, won the

Writer Magazine

/Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America. Her next book,

Orphan

, will be published in 2014 by Alice James Books. Levi is also the editor of

A Muriel Rukeyser Reader;

served as consulting editor for the new edition of Rukeyser’s

Collected Poems

, and is currently working on a biography of Rukeyser. With Sara Miles, she coedited

Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan

.

ethics class, 1971

by jan heller levi

Don’t be frightened, Mr. Bliss said, we’ve got

to talk about these things. You can be honest—

how many of you have experimented

with drugs? Mr. Bliss was cool. So, okay,

about half of us, shifting in our seats, sneaking

looks at one another, slowly raised our hands.

An hour’s discussion ensued about pros and cons,

and sure, the moral issue. Yes, it’s true, Mr. Bliss

agreed, Thoreau said you

should

break a law

you don’t believe in, but didn’t he also say the body

is a temple, that the gift nature gives us is

to be shown matter, to come in contact

with rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks!

the

solid

earth! the

actual

world! There were

half-decent questions asked, and answers

none of us took too seriously. And when the hand-raisers

got home that afternoon, we’d each been nailed

by a phone call from school. It wasn’t so bad

for me, my parents already knew I was rotten.

But Jamie got the shit beaten out of her,

Stan’s parents shipped him off to military school.

Wesley gave up pot for drinking; in April he drove

himself into a tree. Through the rest of the year,

Mr. Bliss continued to pose interesting questions—

If a baby and a ninety-year-old both fell off a ship and you

could only save one, which would it be? Your mother’s

sick, you have no money for her medicine,

Would it be wrong to break into the pharmacy

and “borrow” it? What about risking

the life of one to save the lives of many?

For our final—stoned on some primo hash,

I wrote a B- essay on honesty.

J

OSH

G

ILBERT

is a documentary filmmaker and writer. He currently resides in New York City with his girlfriend and their son Henry.

the devil smokes ganja

by josh gilbert

It was in the mid-1990s when the famous Godfrey Jackson walked into my office wearing his vintage dreads and Birkenstocks and asked me if I could help his daughter Gladys land a job in the film industry. It wasn’t as if Jackson didn’t have the connections necessary to help her find a job—he surely did—but he didn’t want to call in a favor and risk rejection based on some old industry beef or an unpredictable blindside. As Jackson spoke, he slouched down into his chair across the desk from me, and being the ever-sycophantic aspiring junior executive that I was, I eased into a slouch to mirror his and begged him to please continue.

He told me Gladys had just returned to the US from Russia where she’d been studying existential Russian poetry at the University of Kiev and was lost back in Los Angeles and always had been. Being the daughter of a celebrity was never easy, and Gladys had turned her Freudian angst into sexual promiscuity, while her brother Munsey had developed a nasty mean streak and an unruly belligerence.

I was relatively new to the business at the time, a recent film school graduate, driving around town in an old wreck of a BMW with no money to fix it—your typical big-hat-no-cattle film industry hack with a total of three midlevel connections that I milked for everything they were worth. With a cocky reassuring nod, I told Jackson I’d see what I could do.

“Thanks, mon,” Jackson said, “I’ll have Gladys give you a call.” He ambled out of my office, leaving me slouched in my chair, wheels churning about how to find the girl a job.

Jackson had been directing, starring in, and producing a self-financed film that our production company was line-producing called You Best Shut Up! about an unemployed bicycle mechanic with the IQ of a cabbage, who rides off on a journey in search of Life’s Greater Meaning. Like most of Pepperpot and Jackson’s comedies from back in the day, the flimsy story line did little more than serve as an excuse for audiences to laugh at the mishaps of a pot-addled idiot while smoking themselves into oblivion.

I’d been a huge fan of Pepperpot and Jackson comedies since I was a kid and was starstruck from the moment Jackson had walked into my office. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m no celebrity ass-kisser. Far from it. I grew up in one of LA’s storied canyon communities, lousy with big-name entertainment industry icons, all milling about at the local food mart. But Pepperpot and Jackson had that seminal impact on me as a kid that wields the ultimate influence on any fan—a history of preadolescent enthusiasm bordering on obsession. And while Jackson’s fortunes were way down at this point in his career, during their heyday, the comedy team had amassed a monumental following of ticket-buying enthusiasts and potheads.

Several days later, Jackson’s daughter Gladys called me, and for the next few weeks we wound up spending many late nights together, sometimes wearing clothes but mostly naked, with me giving her pointers on script analysis, and after several Bacchanalian all-nighters, I became unequivocally convinced she had what it took to truly succeed in Hollywood, and with a concerted effort and a little luck I managed to land her a job interview with Cecil B. Glazer’s production company. It was a relatively easy thing to do because Gladys was bright, beautiful, and sexually uninhibited, and Cecil was the cad son of a billionaire with a weakness for nymphomaniacs. When Gladys got the job, Godfrey Jackson was thrilled.

It was at this time that Jackson was becoming totally obsessed with catching up to his former partner and arch nemesis, Aaron Pepperpot, who had leveraged his post–Pepperpot and Jackson comedy career into a solo one by starring in a series of hit films and prime-time television shows. As Pepperpot’s stock rose and Jackson’s fell, people in the industry openly opined to Jackson’s face that Pepperpot had always been “the funny one.”