Fighting Reek with Reek

[ ]Ever since I've been blogging I've talked about my Main Musical Mentor, among other thing, the legendary Leon, aka Reeon. and here he is. This is a recent photo, and compared to what he looked like back in the day, seriously-overweight mainly, he looks like a million bucks. In fact it looks like he's aged way less than the rest of our bunch, because the extra weight he used to carry made him look much older than he was, plus a healthier diet and lifestyle haven't hurt. It was one of those things that could've gone either way. He wasn't into the "stupid" durgs like meth, coke or heroin but everything else was fair game. The fact that we never heard a peep from him after he moved to NC after high school made us wonder if maybe he'd gone off the deep end, and who knows what. We tried to trace him first through the post office and even a private service, and later the Web, with no luck. Then one day a friend request from him popped up on fb and I was overjoyed [ ]He contacted me first and I spread the word and he friended us all. The return of Reon was cause for celebration. Turns out he got happily married (still is) with kids and a house and all. He still plays in bands and his job is related to music. He's settled down a bit but back in the day he was a freebird, and great fun to have for a friend. He drove a Corvair, Ralph Nader's favorite, and every ride in it was an adventure. His weigh had tested the suspension, and the car bounced and leaned and generally went out of camber going around curves, but he drove it pretty wide-open. It was a head shop on wheels. You'd pray you didn't get pulled over, which by the grace of God we never did, because there were about thirty pipes of various types onboard. [ ]His philosophy was you'd get just as busted for one pipe as thirty, which is true, so why not go all out? He couldn't lower the visor because there was a dozen or so pipes being held in place by it. Those were his main pipes and the rest were in a toolbox. There were tiny pipes and pinch-hitters for driving aoround the 'hood for a quick toke, road-trip pipes with big bowls, "concert" pipes, some Meerschaum and some corncob, reserved for smoking elite weed for special occasions, but his crowning achievement was his "cruising around town" bowl. He created it so we could ride around town in traffic in broad daylight and smoke like there was no tomorrow, with total discretion. It was genius. [ ]He'd taken a huge wooden bowl off of a Hookah or something, and rigged it so that four lengths of thin aquarium tubing came out, one for each passenger, and four people was the most you'd dare try to get into a Corvair. The tubing was long enough to hang by your side, and the two rear-passenger tubes were long enough to fit between the front seats. You'd casually lean your head in your hand or whatever and no one could see the tubes. We'd light a couple if ciggies to account for the smoke, although the car smelled like a Rock concert 24/7, and if we'd gotten pulled over we couldn't have blamed it on cigarettes. We figured that busted is busted so why not go for it. We'd smoke ourselves silly riding around in that wobbly-ass car. If Ralph Nader had seen the Leonmobile cruising down the road, creakin' and crankin' and wobblin' toward him, with four guys stoned right out of their gourds, I don't know if he'd have laughed or cried or had a heart attack or called Richard Nixon. [ ]Things were a bit different back then. In high school we had a smoking area, and some people smoked more than cigarettes. I carried a bag with moist towellettes, to get the smell off your fingers and face, Hall's Mentholyptus for breath and Visine for redeye. It worked great and I was known for it. Leon named it the "De-Reeko Kit" which I thought was hilarious. He may have named it but he shunned it completely. Leon had a very interesting philosophy when it came to smoking pot, specifically the telltale signs- red eyes, the smell of burning rope, etc. It was sort of a variation on the basic theme of "If you can't beat 'am, join 'em." He liked to smoke, and he figured that instead of going to all that trouble trying to cover up everything, if you always have red eyes and smell like pot all day long, nobody would know the difference. [ ]To that end he'd save roaches (the kind from the end of a joint) and make his own "Eau de Reefois" sachets. He'd cut a piece of cloth, fill it with fragrant roaches and tie it with string. He had all his shirts and jackets on hangers, and he'd put the roach sachets in the pockets and hang them around his t-shirts. I was at his house one night and after we toked-up and got ready to go out, he grabbed a jacket from the closet and removed the sachet from the pocket. When I realized what was going on I lost it laughing. He explained his philosophy to me, and while it was the exact opposite of every other pot-smoker on the planet I had to hand it to him...it was certainly original. I've never met anyone else in my life who WANTED to smell like pot 24 hours a day, but that's Leon. I mean Reeon. That certainly was thinking outside of the box. I love it.