I guess you could say my first sales job was selling weed.

I was living on the Lower East Side in 1984 and my day job was working as the social secretary to the Japanese Ambassador to the United Nations. Life was dull and I was ready for an adventure.

My downstairs neighbor was a musician – among other things – but that’s another story – and introduced me to his childhood friend who was now living in Hawaii but visiting New York. Both of them were nice Jewish boys from Queens. Neither were raised particularly strict as far as religion – more like kosher style – which is like when you’re kosher for Passover but otherwise having shrimp at the Chinese restaurant. This nonchalant religious upbringing may have been the reason why my neighbor seemed to be searching for something spiritual. Around this time he was transitioning from Hare Krishna – I guess that wasn’t the right religion – to born again Orthodox Judaism. All the while trying to be a jazz musician.

His friend was into martial arts and tai chi and was on his way to Hong Kong to study when he somehow ended up in Hawaii on an extended stopover along the way. He never made it to Hong Kong, settling instead on the Big Island where he became…*ahem*…a farmer. He was tan and thin and wiry with very long curly hair. Good looking in a sleazy hippie kind of way. And he seemed to be a soft spoken authority on healthy living. He was a vegan and only ate raw food.

When we were introduced the first thing the friend did was reach for my hair. He felt it in his hands for a few minutes like he was studying it and then looked up and said, “Meat eater.” I don’t know why I didn’t go running upstairs and lock the door after that but instead he managed to convince me to visit him on his farm.

He had over 30 acres in a town called Mountain View on the Big Island. This was a tiny town situated on the rainy side of the mountains, the most notorious of which is active volcano, Kilauea. Elevation was maybe around 1500 feet above sea level. His house was a two-story shack that he built himself and you got to it by dirt road. There was no running water or electricity but he had a generator. Water was collected in rain barrels around the property and you went to the toilet in the woods. Apart from a small clearing of meadow around the house, the surrounding land was rain forest – filled with flowering ohia trees, ferns and orchids. And planted well spaced – in plastic garbage bags – amongst the trees were giant marijuana shrubs loaded with sticky buds.

The reason they were planted in bags was so they could be yanked out quickly if the helicopters that were frequently flying overhead spotted them. Spacing them far apart from each other was another way to better camouflage them.

I knew my downstairs neighbor was selling this for him but I wanted to sell some too – to my friends. So we measured out what would get sent to New York – by mail – to my neighbor and what I would bring back for my little business which I insisted on taking with me.

One ounce and half ounce quantities were weighed and then packed in Seal-A-Meal bags. We then went over to his friend’s farm – a real farm of vegetables and flowering anthuriums, those waxy, red tropical flowers with a single spadix coming out of the center. Since the flowers were grown for the florist business and regularly shipped to the mainland, the packing boxes already had the agricultural stamp of approval. Because Hawaii is in the middle of the ocean, there are strict rules for transporting produce and livestock. His friend gave us empty boxes meant for the anthuriums. We packed the sealed up weed packets in the boxes, carefully putting the staples back into the original holes and added extra cushion and protection with damp shredded newspaper.

In those days there were no sniffing dogs or X-rays at Hawaiian airports. A demure young lady would have no trouble bringing flowers back to the mainland. Tucked under my arm as I checked into Hilo airport were 3 boxes of “anthuriums”.

On the next trip out I found out that his ex girlfriend was really not that ex. She confronted me in a parking lot in Hilo one day and we ended up sharing stories about what an asshole this guy was. It was a immediate bond and we stayed in touch by writing letters. There was no email in 1984. She was very funny, originally from New Hampshire and ten years older than me. She danced hula, made leis and chanted to Hawaiian gods. A real free spirit.

Later that year my mother moved to Honolulu – totally unrelated to my Hawaiian interest. For the next ten years when I would visit my mother, I would always visit the girlfriend too – long after the farmer was out of the picture for both of us. Eventually she would succumb to breast cancer in 1995.

I lost track of the farmer but out of the blue he called me a few years later. He didn’t know that his old girlfriend had died. When I told him it was breast cancer his response was, “perhaps it was because I didn’t love her breasts enough”. If I ever see her again in the next life we are going to have a real good laugh over this one.