Selling Marijuana to the Christians

I returned from San Francisco by way of Kalamazoo, where I thought to reconnect with my childhood friends.  The first one I called was Anita Grintals.  She was in secretarial school and neither she nor her mother, the imposing Anastasia seemed pleased to see me.  I was full of my hippy tales of Haight Ashbury and the Straight Theater and the whole sex, drugs and rock and roll phenomenon.  Looking back, it was truly a "what was I thinking?" moment.

They put me up on the couch for one night, and one night only. It was clear, childhood friendships were not going to be rekindled. I never even bothered calling Nancy Boers.

Instead I called the Riddles, those friends of my dad's, who lived near the outskirts of town, and who, although she looked down on them for lack of formal education and so forth, my mother always called "the salt of the earth."

This salt of the earth family took me in with no questions asked. It was my goal to see my father and to ask him for a birthday present for my sister.  In my mind, that seemed as good an excuse as any for making contact.  The Riddles could tell me how and where to find him.

I spent about a week with them, seeing my father only once, in a diner, where he handed over $5 for me to get a puppy for my sister. He figured $5 would buy a dog from the pound.

The rest of the time I spent at the local college, Western Michigan University, in search of the "heads." In those days, you could tell who smoked dope and who didn't. Long hair, quiet demeanors, a gentleness, guitar cases.  I discovered Sam and Lee in a corner of the student union.  It was as if we had known each other for years. Sam was a student there and Lee was in between life decisions.  She was also headed to Boston for an abortion.  Now, this was before Roe v. Wade and from my experience with Crazy Jane, I understood abortions were still illegal in Boston.  Did she have an underground connection? Or was she stopping off on her way to New York, one of the few states in the Union, if not the only one in 1967, where abortion was legal.

I don't remember that part, only that in a few days we were off together on a plane for Boston.  I said goodbye to her in the airport and headed for the Beacon Hill digs I still shared with Crazy Jane.  This was before the bathroom ceiling caved in, and sent us screaming down the hill to Mass General, convinced we had contracted lice from whatever lurked beneath the ceiling tiles (asbestos fibers probably). I never saw or heard from Lee again.

Soon, I found myself with a puppy in a 3rd floor walk-up.  To accommodate the pup's needs, I got some kind of pen and covered it in newspaper.  Between my job at Filene's basement and the assortment of junkies and burnouts Jane and I had somehow inherited from Tommy Abbott, I didn't get around to cleaning out the dog's pen very often.

One day I got a call from the boys from Gordon College.  How had they found me? They wanted to know if I could get them some pot.  They were coming to Boston and they heard I had connections.

Wow, gone from the school for three months and I had a reputation as someone with connections!

Before I knew it the Christian boys were knocking on my door.

I was embarrassed by the dog poo in the middle of the kitchen, contained though it was, but they were wayward youth looking for drugs.  I did in fact have the necessary connections and made the transaction.  In some ways I felt oh so self righteous. At least I was no hypocrite. I always wondered what happened to those boys from the church.  I have looked, but I could never find mention even of my old boyfriend, who married the minister's daughter down the hall, and rumor has it, became a minister himself.

Finally, the puppy got to my sister, was named Gretchen, and grew fat and spoiled, but that was not the last I was to see of her.  It was the last, however, of my marijuana dealing days. 

Blue Eyed Poet Number 2

This was in the days of living on the coast, drinking in the afternoons, selling organic veggies and longing for the writer's life.

Bouncing with the Blue Eyed Poet -  a memory

Bouncing with the blue eyed poet, she wears other people’s cast offs. She knows she looks good, tube top, purple cotton jacket, black slinky synthetic skirt.  All turning this caterpillar into a butterfly.  They bounce together to the loud music in the gym.

Her hair is curly and her teeth are white. The blue eyed poet is suave, sexy, smiling. Bouncing together, they enchant the crowd. “What is this dance called” she shouts over the music, one hand grasping, pulling up the tube top. The blue eyed poet mimics. He is a chameleon; his eyes a mirror. His smile a cipher, slight, oh so sexy, buck teeth.

“Who knows,” he bounces her out into the street, the cool night air, September on the coast. He kisses her on the chin. He is always doing things like that. “What is it you want of me,” she asks, hugging thin cotton jacket close. He looks perplexed. Troubled. “Want?” He shrugs.

“To play. To bounce. To kiss your cheeks.  Nothing.”

She knows this then is the end before there was even a beginning. Coffee, and poetry, and gossip, and walks along the mesa bluffs. All less than a beginning. This dance, this bounce, this moonless walk toward his not new, but well-kept car.  

There is meaning in the movement.

His wife is returning and his harmless flirtation is over.

She sticks out her hand. “Well, then, goodbye,” she says, her eyes dark, submerged. He shrugs again.

“I don’t believe in goodbyes.” He smiles his cryptic smile, walking away. She goes back to the gym, but the bounce is over, the band disassembling their equipment.

Her friend Daphne waits for her. She says, “let’s go get a beer,” and the two friends cross the street to the Kingfisher Saloon, now in full post-dance boom.  

“No,” she says. “I want a grown up drink.”  They order martinis at the bar and sip until last call.

WINE WITH THE FUTURE FAMOUS WRITER

Ok, right off I have to say I don’t remember what year it was, never mind what month.  Sometime in the 70's because this was after Cambridge and Beacon Hill and even Berkeley, which is a whole nother story in itself. This was in a small coastal town called Benson, on a peninsula sticking out into the wide Pacific Ocean, where fog and mist and grayness defined the background for much of the action that filled our lives in those long-ago days. This is about one of them.

Daphne and I had been promising to visit the famous writer for months.  This was before she became a famous writer. She was cute and perky and young. She was clever. Even then, at the age of 23, she intimidated us older writers with her clever scribblings in the local rag, the Benson Bugler, which her friend Amy who ran off with the pharmacist edited. After she ran off with the pharmacist, I edited it, along with the Famous Poet and the astrologer. But that’s another story.

Daphne and I were poets. That’s what you did in the seventies in Benson. You scraped by on what you could get as a cleaning lady (and it wasn’t houses we were cleaning either) or selling organic veggies at the Co-op and you wrote poetry.

And you drank. A lot. You drank cheap white wine with friends in the afternoon on warm days at the beach. And you drank with everyone at night in the Kingfisher Saloon. Poets, fishermen, curmudgeonly old timers, hippies of every description met up at Kingfisher’s  for a game of pool and Bud or something stronger. No one drank wine in bars in those days.  It was sweet drinks like pina coladas or tequila sunrises or cheap beer.

Cocaine was appearing as an exotic new drug, and most nights you couldn’t squeeze in the ladies room at Kingfisher’s they were lined up three deep for the lines laid out on the back of the sink.

On this day, Daphne and I decided we would actually stop by the famous writer’s place and have that literary discussion we’d been avoiding. She was only 23 and she was writing a book. We were 29 and 39 respectively and we weren’t. We called her Randi in those days because that was her name and she wasn’t famous. Later she became Miranda and that’s how you know her.

In those days, people lived in all sorts of haphazard structures. Mine was a converted garage I rented by the month, with a loft and an oil drum wood stove.  Daphne lived down by the creek in one of several buildings owned by a family called Josephson and was known as Josephson’s Farm, but it wasn’t really a farm.  Randi lived in a small rented cabin on a corner of one of the main streets in town, behind a dense cypress hedge.  It was like a hobbit house in a different universe from the outside world of chainsaws, laughing children and barking dogs. Many of our little cobbled together homes had that otherworldy quality to them once you entered them leaving the outside world behind.  Or so it seemed during those unstructured times.

When we got to her cabin at the prearranged time, she was on the phone. Phones still had cords in those days, and hers was a long twisted one, getting more and more twisted as she hauled it around the cabin’s central room. We could tell it was a serious conversation because she wasn’t talking, just pacing and grunting and changing the phone from ear to ear, as she waved us inside.

We held out our bottle of wine and bag of Cheetos we’d picked up at the Liquor store, called Liquor’s (you never knew if it was purposeful, that apostrophe, maybe it used to belong to someone name Mr. Liquor) so we wouldn’t appear to be total freeloaders and she motioned us toward the table that served as dining and writing center. We pushed aside some papers as Randi cupped her hand around the phone and said to us “the corkscrew’s in that drawer. I’ll be right there,” then went back to grunting and pacing.

We opened the wine and found glasses in a cupboard. They didn’t match, but we didn’t care.  We tried to motion to her that maybe it wasn’t such a good time and we’d come back, but she kept shaking her head.  So we poured out three glasses of the cheap white and sat down to wait, looking over the spines on her bookshelf behind us.

We heard her hang up the phone, having never really said more than “uh huh” “Yeah” and “ok,” to whoever was on the other end.

“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” she said, taking a seat and a glass of wine. “Thanks so much. Wow, I really need this.”

“Thanks for having us over, but really if it’s not a good time, we can come back,” said Daphne.

“No no, I’m really glad you’re here. I’m sorry. I’m not being very hospitable. Do you want some cheese or something. Oh Cheetos. Maybe some chips.” She kept half jumping out of her chair, then remembering, “Wait, I don’t have any chips. I don’t think I have much here at all; maybe some old wheat thins.”

“No, that’s ok, have a Cheeto.”

“I’m really sorry guys, I’m sort of distracted. That was my brother on the phone. You know my dad’s been sick.”

I had heard about it. Her father was a famous artist who had run with the Beats, only was more mainstream. He sold fairly well and had respect in bourgeois circles. Now in his late sixties he had been battling cancer for some time.  We nodded.

“Well, it looks like this is it. We have to decide what to do, I mean, whether to pull the plug.  I can’t be there, so my brother is really stuck. And my dad is such a cool guy; he’s just so great, I know he’d want us to do it, but it’s so hard to say go ahead and do it, pull the plug, on someone, your father. You know?”

Of course, we didn’t know. We had unintentionally walked in on a very private moment. We were like ghouls at the bedside.   Should we stay, should we go? Would it be ruder to stay intruding on someone’s tragedy or to leave them alone with their crisis?

Just then the phone rang again.

“Sorry,” said Randi for maybe the fourth time, snatching it up.

Daphne and I were giving each other looks. Once she kicked me under the table and motioned with her head toward the door.  Uh, what’s the right thing to do? Would it more inconsiderate to get up and go or to stay. Inertia won out.

We heard more grunting, then a decisive, “Yes, yes, it’s ok. Let’s just do it. Do I have to sign something?”  Silence, then ,”Ok then, I’m really sorry I can’t be there. I’ll be right here by the phone. Call me; anytime, call me in an hour. Call me in ten minutes. Are you ok? I’m ok, really, I’m fine. You’re doing a really great job, Thanks, thanks so much.”

“OK, well, we did it.” She wiped her fist over her eyes looking much younger than 23, then sighed and took a long drink out of her glass.

“I’m really sorry, you guys. I’m glad you’re here, but now you have to listen to all this stuff.  It’s weird. Thanks so much for coming by.”

“We better go. You probably have things to do. I’m really sorry about your dad,” said Daphne getting up.

“Me too, I’m really sorry, can we um…do anything. Do you need a ride or anything?”

“No no, I have to stay here for my brother’s call. He’s only 18, and he has to be there actually doing it. I mean he doesn’t pull the plug; I don’t even know if there is a plug. I guess there is for the respirator, but the doctor pulls it. He just tells them, and I can’t get there, because I’m here and they’re in Connecticut. So can’t you please stay a little while longer? I’m sorry. I must be the worst hostess ever.”

She dumped the last of the Cheetos out of the bag and stuffed them into her mouth.  Daphne and I poured more wine for all.

“Oh, I don’t even like Cheetos,” she said, around a mouthful. “This is so gross. Do you want a napkin?”

She got up and pulled some paper towels off a roll, tearing them in places other than where the perforations were. She folded them as neatly as torn and mangled paper towels can be folded and put them on the table in the general area where we sat.  We smoothed them out just to have something to do. No one said anything at all for a while.

We spent the next few minutes trying to get orange goo off our hands.  Randi had it all over her white blouse; Daphne got some in her hair.  Randi noticed her struggling with some paper toweling and a strand of hair, looking crosseyed at the hair and pulling at it with the paper towel, now shredded.  She rolled her eyes and all three of us broke out into raucous laughter.  It seemed the right thing to do. We laughed and waved our orange fingers in the air until we were laughed out.  Randi said simply, “Thanks.”

Then the wine was gone and then Randi found some more in the back of the fridge. “Look, it hasn’t even been opened. Oh, it’s that really bad stuff from Liquor’s. I think they make it in the back room.”

Daphne was already pouring. We drank and waited for the phone to ring again.

The Kidnapper - A digression into the past

My mother was obsessed with kidnappers. She warned me about them constantly.  She checked every night that my shades were pulled down tight and window locked to keep them out. Was there something in the news around that time about a sensational kidnapping?  We lived in Michigan, a mid-sized City that became the site of the first outdoor pedestrian mall. That was later, when I was a teenager. The mall was an oasis for kids going from store to store with our friends, usually Anita Grintals, or Nancy Boers.  I had other friends as a teenager, but none who were interested in shopping.

You might say I had an eclectic taste, in friends, and in activities.  I was boy crazy with Nancy and still chased the large grasshoppers, big as locusts who populated our working class and yet very quiet and safe (and white) neighborhood with Anita.

My other friends were Sue Schneeberger, whom I giggled with in Latin class as we made up our own translations to the text, taught by the very thin and even more ancient Miss Mead, whose mantra was "I love Latin," said with a look of pure joy through a tight smile punctuated with pink teeth.

"Marcus look at the Queen; she is puking," we chortled behind our books. Miss Mead was not amused.

Later my friends were the the theater and newspaper crowd, and bookish Sharon Rothrock and Diana Henschel.  None of these people were friends with each other. Anita found Nancy frivolous and Sharon and Diana had no interest in either boys or the theater, certainly not grasshoppers or being irreverent in Latin class.  The theater crowd felt anyone not so inclined irrelevant.   

But this story is before all that, before any friends that I can recall.  Today there was just my mother and me.  And of course the kidnapper.

This happened one day when we lived on West Main Street. I must have been 4 or 5.  My mother and were walking to our favorite restaurant, the SuperBurger. We were not well to do. My father sold cars, flipped burgers and tried to carve out a niche for himself as a private detective.  Later my mother and I would accompany him on his stakeouts, hours in a cold car while he waited for a wayward deadbeat to return home so her could serve a subpoena.  No Dashiell Hammett my dad.  The only reason he kept his private detective gig going was because he kept flunking the test to be a cop.  Something to do with his hands.  He had some kind of a finger fungus, or so I remember it.

At this time, I also had a little brother, Glenn, my best and only friend for those early years before he got sick, and even after, when we moved to the new house on South Westnedge Avenue and made all those long car trips to Ann Arbor for transfusions, to prolong his meager life. What other friend could ever measure up to such a soulmate?

For some reason, it was just my mother and me on our way to the SuperBurger on this fateful day.  The brother, the father, somewhere else, but no doubt together, bonding over big Dad and small son activity at home.

Walking slowly along at first, on a warm spring day. Mom in a flowered dress. Me in braids and short skirt, frilly ankle socks, hand held tight in hers.  Then a tightening of her fingers, a tension communicated from mother to daughter. I turned to look behind me, my short legs working hard to keep up.

"Don't look back," my mother said through clenched teeth.  "Just hang onto my hand and walk fast."  I was already walking as fast as I could.  What could be going on. Was a big animal chasing us?

Faster and faster my mother moved toward our destination.  At some point, she let me know a kidnapper was following us. "But don't look back!" she warned. By this time, I was crying and running as fast as my little feet could go to keep up. A kidnapper had found me at last, despite drawn shades and locked doors and windows! The SuperBurger seemed miles in the distance. And the kidnapper was gaining on us! I could hear his footsteps. I could almost feel his breath on my neck. I held on tight to my mother's sturdy fingers, even though my own were cramped and painful in her steely grip.

We all but flew the last few feet to the door of the SuperBurger and dashed inside. Safe!  Surely he wouldn't follow us in here and kidnap me, with people all around!  Or would he.  My mom moved close to the counter, where she smoothed her skirt and dropped my hand. What if the kidnapper came in and grabbed me without her holding on tight? 

I dared a look behind me, but the glassed in door barely rattled where she had thrown it shut when we entered.  No one lurked on the sidewalk out front.  My mom indicated that I hop up on the stool at the counter, as she said to the man in the white paper hat on the other side, "Two SuperBurgers, please."

Not the One - Fourth and Final Part

A Long Night in San Francisco

So, Zachary and I start out from the I and Thou Coffee House, down the stairs. Whoa, right then and there, about halfway down the longest stairway in the world, I have my first (and last) actual hallucination. I see overhead the visage of a young woman, shimmering, long hair, all colors of the rainbow in her face, dress, hair, the very air around her. At her breast, a baby. Radiant happiness. I think, "That's me, my future. I will have a baby one day and be radiantly happy."

As you can see in this picture, the I and Thou was at ground level.  It could be then that the stairs we were walking down were fromt he balconey of the Straight Theatre, where we went after leaving the I and Thou.  I had never been in the Straight on a night hen there wasn't a music performance, but a legitimate theater company used the spaces during those times, and this night they were putting on a performance of Julius Caesar.  Zachary and i sat in the balcony while one of the actors ran down the aisle to the stage were Caesar was waiting to be murdered and say his famous line "et tu Brute?"

Then we are outside. The street which I left to walk up the stairs just an hour before is now the most interesting street in the world. A cacophony of sounds, which I realize can be isolated by my will. I can tune in and out of conversations, street noises, feet lifting off the pavement, the very air moving around me. Zachary moves me along, his grin as big as the sky. He knows I am new at this and I can tell he is delighted to take me on this, my first acid trip.

We walk and walk and walk. We are on a street with palm trees; it is an amazing street. How did it get here in San Francisco, City of Cypress, and pine and Eucalyptus? A City of fog.  Zachary keeps us moving and soon the palm tree street (later I learn this street is called Dolores) gives way to a crowded neighborhood of many buildings and people on the street. It seems late at night by now, it seems as though we have been walking down the various streets of the City for hours and hours.

No we come to one of the buildings and go inside and up a flight of stairs.  At the top is an apartment, where many people site and lie on the floor.  A jukebox, silent, but vibrant, alive with color, sits in the corner. Zachary leads me to where a group of people are lying on floor, sleeping.  I am to lie down and go to sleep to.  But how can I go to sleep in this night full of sound and color and electricity?  I lie down and watch the colors and listening to burbling sounds.  Zachary goes into the kitchen while I entertain myself waving my hands in front of my face and watching the trailing images following along.  

Time passes.

Zachary returns and says now, we will go visit a gentle man.  Then I get up from the floor where the others are still sleeping and go with Zachary out into the morning,  It has become morning while I lay unsleeping in that strange house with those strange people "crashed" on the floor.  I think, I have just been in a crash pad!  This makes me feel very adventurous and ready for more.  I am still tripping, but much more quietly.  

We go down this street and that, up this hill and that, and come to a building that is nothing like the building where the crash pad was, nothing like the I and Thou or the Straight Theatre. It is a doorman building.  It is white, gleaming in the sun, which is turning its windows golden as it peeks over the hill from the east.  There is an elevator.

Inside, we take the elevator and a man meets us at the door to an apartment that is white like the building.  He gives us orange juice. His is golden like the sun, a California man.   I sit on a couch while he and Zachary go into yet another kitchen. A few minutes later Zachary reappears and he and the man shake hands.  Then we go back down the elevator and into full morning.

The walk back to the Haight is long and tiring. Somewhere before the end of the walk, the K Ingleside streetcar stops and I get on.  I know now that Zachary will not the be the one. Sometime later i realize that the "vision" I had was not me in the future, but the cover of that week's Oracle (psychedelic newspaper), which several of us hawked for extra cash on Haight Street.  It is several years after that when I realize what was going on that night was a drug deal.  Zachary procured from the Mission Street crash pad and sold to the "gentle man."

And years after that I wonder to myself if maybe Zachary was a "gentle man" himself.

Not the One - Part Three

Next door to the Straight Theater was the I and Thou Coffee House.  It was very hip, or it tried to be. Since I was also trying to be hip, it was perfect.  There I met Zachary, with his beard, wiry frame and impish grin. He was as hip as they got. he was cool. He drank coffee at the I and Thou and he seemed to always be there.

I didn't get any better than that.  When it was down time at the Straight, which was often between shows. And where was the baby? you are asking yourself. Good question.  Probably with the little gnome who also resided in Ingleside and watched the baby before I came along and after I left. 

Did Zachary (always Zachary, never Zach) and i discuss philosophy? Music? Child raising? I don't remember a thing that was said (Ok, there is something to that whole "If you lived through the sixties, you can't remember it" thing), but I am sure it was fascinating and enlightening.

How many nights we sat there drinking coffee and talking I don't remember either, but somewhere along the way I started to get the distinct feel that Zachary was going to be the one. The one I would do "It" with at long last and finally get some mileage out of the birth control pills I'd been using since April, when Jane had taken me to her quack doctor and had me get a prescription. (The doctor was a quack, I now know, because he also handed our scrpts for all manner of "diet pills" without so much as requiring a physical, but I wouldn't be using those for a few more months). 

The night started out like any other. Zachary and I drinking coffee in the I and Thou, talking about this and that, when Zachary gets a twinkle in his already sparkly eyes and says, "Do you want to try something?"  

Ooo, I think., what is he asking me to try. (I already have a filthy mind for an 18 year olf virgin).

He says, "Windowpane," revealing a small square of what looks like cellophane in his hand.

"Really?" I ask. Acid. The good stuff.  I have heard of this, but never been invited on a "trip" before. It was just two months ago, I was right out of Christian college having my first Budweiser in Wendy Kellum's living room.

"We'll split." He produced a razor blade and cut the piee of cellophane right down the middle. "You put it on your tongue." He reched over and put it on mine, then popped the other half in his mouth.

"No what?"

"No we wait."

Sipping coffee, waiting, with Zachary.

Not the One - Part Two

How I almost met Janis Joplin

This will strike people as implausible, but I worked at the Straight Theater for 6 weeks and can't remember a single show that was put on or band that played except for Janis Joplin and Big Brother and Holding Company.  Maybe there is something to that "if you lived through the sixties, you don't remember them" thing after all.

This is how it happened.  Everyone was excited that Janis Joplin was coming to the Straight.  The house was full and all the crew members were backstage. I don't remember the actual concert. Usually someone passed around a joint or two or several.  There was this high school boy who also hung around the Straight, in from the suburbs several nights a week on the bus. 

All I remember is there I was backstage after the concert with the high school kid and a bottle of Jim Beam, unopened, that someone from the band had left behind, where it was rolling around backstage, after everything was cleaned up and everyone else had gone home. This was special.  We had no choice but to open and, sitting there on the stage, in an empty theater on Haight Street, proceed to drink the whole thing, or as much of it as we could, before becoming violently sick. Soon I realized I was the only one left on stage, my young friend (I was 18, he couldn't have been more than 17) had toddled off to catch the last bus. How he could stand up was beyond me, but that may be because my own high school years were spent going to church and youth group, and the the first time alcohol had touched my lips, some three months earlier, had also been the last, once I discovered the much mellower joys of  marijuana. His tolerance as obviously much higher than mine.

Then I heard noises and realized I wasn't truly alone.  One of the crew members or maybe it was a member of the Family Dog who managed a number of the bands that played at the Straight, found me propped up against the rear wall, my eyes going.

"What are you still doing here?" he asked.  I don't recall what I answered other than vaguely waving in the direction of the now half empty bottle lying at my feet.  "Oh," he said, "I'm taking you right home to bed."

If I had paid closer attention to my mother's regular and ongoing admonitions, little warning bells would have gone off in my head. After all, I didn't really know this guy.  He was good looking and he was a regular backstage, so I never thought twice about letting him scoop me up and half carry me to his car outside.  

But I was too out of it to pay attention to mere bells, when my biggest concern was not throwing up all over myself or his nice leather car seats.  Soon I realized we were going over the Golden Gate Bridge, not out to the Avenues, where my own bed awaited.

But I did not protest. In fact, drunk as I was, I was secretly pleased to have attracted the attention of a handsome backstage guy.  Maybe this would be my big break of the love of my life.  If I could manage not to puke, of course.

Soon we were climbing a mountain road. It could have been minutes or hours from the Bridge. (Later I learned it was Mill Valley, a short ride over some twisting roads on the side of Mt. Tamalpais.) Then we had arrived and the handsome man was helping me out of the car, up the stairs into his house and tucking me into a bed. Alone.  He pulled the covers up to my chin and said, "You'll feel better in the morning."

When morning came, I  felt worse, and I didn't smell that good either.  Embarrassed at my unseemly behavior, I all but hid my face in my hands, after showering in the adjacent bathroom and redressing in last night's mussed clothes. Clothes I had slept.

Well, I thought to myself on the ride back to the Straight, a little wistfully, I'll have to tell my mom that not all men who get you in their cars are up to no good.