Chapter 9
	Sharon and I were getting along really well.  We were enjoying each other, providing a healing balm to our damaged physiques, taking the pressure off Sharon's husband, and having a lot of fun.  We decided to live together in my studio in Mexico.  Sharon had never been to Mexico, her young son was still preschool age, and the prospect of the trip was both exciting and romantic.  I bid goodbye to my friend and his houseboat in Marin, packed up, loaded Sharon and Lee in the station wagon, and we were off to Mexico.
	When we arrived in Marfil, John, his wife Ann, and their son Ian were waiting for us.  We slid right into the expatriate American colony in this tiny village.  We hired a maid to do our washing and clean the studio once a day, except on Sunday.  This service was one of the village's major economic resources for the women in the village and sometimes the only income for a single-woman family with children.  The men were either carpenters working for the Italian sculptor, Señor Balloli, or gardeners working for the "gringos."
	On the way down to my studio, we stopped overnight at an enclave of Americans, mostly retired military officers.  There was a very nice motel there with, as it turned out, a very good restaurant.  It was getting late, we were tired, and it would be a short trip to the studio the next day.  At dinner we met a amiable young man from the States.  We got friendly really quick, as is often the case in foreign countries.  The conversation eventually got around to pot.  He mentioned that he could get a good price in a tiny farming village where their major crop was pot.  I asked if I could go with him.  He said okay.  I told him I'd be back as soon as I got my family settled in.
	We arrived in Marfil the next day in the afternoon and settled in to the studio.  Lee had his own bedroom on the upper level of the split-level building.  His room had been the front entryway.  It was now a mid-sized bedroom.  The side entrance on the lower level became the front door, opening into the studio.  The bedroom and studio were on the lower level.  Both had fireplaces.  That was something I really loved about the place.  It was very romantic to fall asleep (in bed) on a cold winter's evening, watching the flickering shadows on the ceiling cast by the flames.
	After a week I had everything in order; food in the fridge, gas in the tank for the water heater and the stove, electricity turned on, and a maid hired to come every day to clean and help out.  I had introduced Sharon and Lee around the village and was ready to take an overnight excursion back to meet my new friend.
	I left early in the morning, arriving mid-day, and hoping to return that evening.  Phones were scarce in Mexico in those days so my friend was unaware of my intentions until I got there.  It took him awhile to get ready, so we left in the late afternoon.  We traveled for a short time on the paved highway and then left it for a gravel side road.  Soon it was dark.  We traveled on the dirt and gravel roads of the back country, occasionally sharing it with horse- or mule-drawn wagons and a few men on horseback, but no other autos or trucks.
	It was about eight in the evening when we pulled into a tiny village of two streets in the middle of nowhere.  We parked in front of a typical Mexican house, adobe walls with a red tile roof, built around a patio, quite plain on the outside but really charming, clean, quaint, and rustic on the inside.  Our host was very gracious; we were invited to sit down at the dinner table which was just being served by his wife.  The three children were already seated.  Two more chairs and settings were made around the long table, covered by a simple, clean tablecloth.
	The food smelled delicious and tasted the same.  The meal consisted of beans, rice, roast pork, and some tasty vegetables which I couldn't identify with lemonade to drink.  Of coarse I was worried about "Montezuma's revenge" (dysentery) which every tourist was warned about and which I had personally experienced a few times before, but it would have been beyond impolite to refuse the food so I ate with gusto.
	As I was eating and trying to communicate with my broken Spanish, my friend, with a much better command of the language, was doing quite well and was obviously an old friend of this dignified gentleman.  I noticed an antique wooden telephone on the wall, the kind of phone with a crank on its side, a round dial under a small, black horn-like mouthpiece.  On the other side was the slender black earpiece, cradled in a horseshoe-shaped on/off lever.  This was very unusual in any Mexican home and especially in a village as small as this one.  Then I noticed a hat held hanging on the top of the wooden box and a bandoleer belt loaded with bullets and complete with a holster containing a large black revolver.  All this caught my eye simultaneously and then on second glance I noticed a large brass badge on the front of the felt cowboy hat--a really nice brown western model.  Then all at once it dawned on me that this nice, friendly, generous man was the village cop!  I couldn't help thinking "Oh shit!  What have I done here?!"
	I grew silent, tried not to show my fear, and even though I immediately lost my appetite I decided to continue to eat and enjoy the food.  After all, I thought, it might be my last good meal in a long time.  After the dinner was over my friend and I were assigned the children's bedroom, they slept in the patio.  The bedding was changed and clean, the beds comfortable.  Before bedding down, I whispered to my friend, "This guy's a cop."  He said "Yeah, but don't worry.  He's cool."  Well that helped a little and soon I fell asleep.
	We were awakened by the roosters crowing in the yard.  We dressed and washed up on the back porch with the water from an old fashioned hand pump and bucket and soap and clean towels waiting for us.  Then we were served a farm-style breakfast of papaya, orange juice, eggs, sausage, beans, rice, tortillas, and coffee.  The family's hospitality was truly overwhelming.  My fears were tempered.  After our trips to the outhouse, a parade of white cotton-clad Mexican farmers came by and showed us samples of their product, pot.  Each would come in, one at a time, with a brown paper bag, roll a joint, let us peer into the bag, smell and touch the stuff, and then light up the joint and smoke it with us.  Some came with leaf, some with tops, and some with flowers (buds).  Then there was one older man of Indian heritage with an ornate serape and an authentic porkpie straw hat of the kind worn by the local Indians of that region, not the western style most of the farmers wore.  He was small and thin, with a short white goatee and a bright twinkle in his eye.  He brought out of his bag some light green tight sticky buds you could smell from across the room.  We smoked it and got really, really high.  Even though our friend, the village cop, was standing behind this guy, waving his index finger and frowning, trying to tell us no, we sent the old Indian back for a kilo of this stuff, which he promised to return with.  We settled on the price, which was pretty much standard, and he left.  Our host shook his head and sighed deeply.
	It took the old man about two hours to get back and when he did we looked at what he had brought.  It looked about the same so we sampled it again, but we were still so stoned we really couldn't tell anything about it.  Feeling we had made the score of a lifetime, we paid the old man, tipped our host generously, and headed back to my friend's home.  We got there about noon.  I gave him a pile of weed, thanked him profusely, and headed back to my studio.  I arrived in time for dinner and it wasn't until the next day when I realized why our host, the village cop, had been waving his finger and frowning.  The post just barely did anything.  It was "lemonade,"  no good, it just wasn't the same thing we had sampled but then we were so stoned we couldn't tell.  I'll never forget that experience.  It was so filled with ups and downs it was like a fantastic roller-coaster ride.