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A drunk in druggie clothing >> The job blues of a High Times journalist by JULIET WATERS
I believe in decriminalizing marijuana, but few things get under my skin more than that moronic look stoners get on their faces right before they say, "Heyyyy." Plus it drives me crazy that they do this stuff to relax, but are more often than not the most paranoid people I know. I also believe that society should give out free coke and heroin in exchange for a commitment from addicts to never drone on about the boring drug problems that they think are so glamorous. I'm a moderate alcoholic and fairly proud of it. But unlike all the other "lifestyle" people, there doesn't seem to be a magazine for people who just like to drink. Which means, tragically, that alcoholics who write for magazines are forced to go out every day and pretend that they care about other things, just to pay the bar bill. This is what happened, I suspect, with Chris Simunek, author of Paradise Burning. I stopped believing pretty early on that he had any serious passion for drugs, and it became increasingly clear as the book progressed that he was mostly just a drunk in druggie clothing. The first big tip-off came when he was sent on assignment to Trenchtown to do a piece on Bob Marley in honour of what would have been his 50th birthday, and had to confess that he knew nothing about reggae or Marley. But what really drove it in was this paragraph from a piece he wrote on the biker festival in Sturgis, South Dakota. After refusing a hit of windowpane acid he writes: "I didn't want to see what these people looked like straight down to their bone marrow, so I passed on the doses and instead helped them kill two cases of beer and get started on a third. Even without the acid the evening was strange. Some guy had stabbed his girlfriend in the bathroom and word was getting around that Jerry Garcia had just died. It seemed like a good excuse for a party. I went out and bought about six more cases." C'mon. Would a serious pothead make a glancing reference to Jerry Garcia's death and then never go back to the subject? So, contrary to the expectations created by the burning joint on the front cover and the mandala of marijuana leaves decorating the inside cover, I actually enjoyed Paradise Burning. Very few of the chapters actually have anything to do with drugs, and there are virtually no inane drug-trip descriptions. Simunek has a misanthropic but dead-on sense of humour and great story instincts. But I'd also go as far as to say that he's a writer in journalist's clothing. This is someone whose secret ambition in life is probably to never have to talk on the phone. Thus most of his stories generally take place at large gatherings like Sturgis, the Rainbow Festival, the Sex Pistols reunion, a heavy metal band convention, spring break in Cancun. Places where he can drunkenly bump into a story, instead of chasing one. He also has a incredible knack for blowing interviews. Half the fun is imagining the frustration of the Park Avenue potheads who run High Times, as they pour thousands of dollars into sending him to places where he inevitably fails to nail an interview with anyone important. For instance, he goes all the way to Germany to fail to get an interview with anyone from the Sex Pistols, and then when they come to New York soon after, he makes it backstage, but is too drunk to talk to any of them, even when introduced. Given all this, it was no surprise to me when Simunek confesses near the end of Paradise Burning that he hates his job: "I liked the cheap/horny/Mrs. Robinson/divorcée/chic of airport bars and Holiday Inns, but outside of that I was running around trying to get people to talk to me about dope. Who wanted to talk to strangers about anything, much less what drugs they did?" Paradise Burning: Adventures of a High Times Journalist by Chris Simunek, St. Martin's Press, pb. 176 pp. $17.99.
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I have to admit a bias before I review Paradise Burning: Adventures of a High Times Journalist. I've never been big on drugs. Or more accurately, I've never been big on the people who are big on drugs.