Number Two (10 page)

Flashback to Jay-Z asking “Would you like to have a shot of Patron with us?” and once again I was completely dumbfounded. There was probably drool hanging down my lip, and he probably thought I was some sort of sad invalid. Thankfully, once again my wife jumped in to save the day:

“Sure! We'd love a shot of Patron!” she exclaimed.

Done. Just like that, Faux Bill Hader was dispatched to the bar to grab Patron shots for us, Jay-Z, the chatty buddy, the weed-rolling buddy, and the four models. As you can imagine, Faux Hader was a little frazzled, having thought he was rid of us, only to have his boss prolong this somewhat awkward encounter.

A minute or so later FBH returned with a tray of shots, handed them out to everyone, and scurried off.

“Cheers. Thanks for your understanding, guys,” said Jay-Z.

“Thanks for having us!” I said.
What? That didn't make sense.
Oh well
.

I poured the icy, almost frozen alcohol down my throat. I love tequila but don't know much about the subtleties of it so I can't tell you which Patron we were drinking that evening, but I can tell you that if Patron makes a brand of tequila that is distilled from the tears of royal children then this must have been it. It was the smoothest, most delicious shot of tequila ever, and then it was gone.

Just as we were expected to be.

“Thanks, man,” I said and shook his hand as we got up to leave.

The next day my wife was reading People.com and she saw a
paparazzi pic of Jay-Z strolling through a heavily touristed part of Soho hand-in-hand with Beyoncé. The picture had been taken just hours before our encounter. I guess after an afternoon of shopping with the missus he decided to call up his buddies and told them to bring along some models. Shopping in Soho with all those tourists must have been too much for him to take. Then the poor guy shows up at
his
restaurant to find that Faux Bill Hader had given away his favourite table to the two most obvious tourists in New York City.

I will always appreciate how kindly he kicked our asses out of there.

C
hobi and I moved to California in the summer of 2013. The good people at Fox were kind enough to put us up in a condo right by the water in Santa Monica while we looked for a permanent place to live. It was paradise. Just steps from our front door was the beach, the ocean, the sun! But as much as I loved walking along the beach strip, I realized pretty quickly that if I was going to survive in Los Angeles, I was going to have to drive. Everywhere. And that meant getting a California state driver's licence from the dreaded DMV.

Long before I arrived in Santa Monica, I had heard the horror stories of the California Department of Motor Vehicles—the massive, slow-moving lineups and general inefficiency are the stuff of legend. Luckily for me, because Fox was trying so hard to show their appreciation for Dan and me coming all the way to the USA, we had been assigned relocation experts to assist with the move. Fox Sports' ultra kingpin David Hill even sent us each an email when we agreed to the job. Hill himself had immigrated to Los
Angeles from his native Australia, and he assured us that our assigned relocation experts would make the entire move smooth and easy. He was absolutely correct. My wife and I were assigned a wonderful lady from Redondo Beach named Susan Graven, who booked every DMV appointment for me and then showed up to meet me on my appointment days and waited until my appointments were over, just like my mom. It was a luxury for someone so disorganized, and an absolute necessity. How did other people move to the United States without a dedicated relocation expert to take care of booking their appointments to get a Social Security Card? If talented Canadians over the years had known how difficult a move this was without a mother figure holding one's hand, we might not have seen the likes of Alan Thicke, Martin Short, and Robert Goulet making their way down to SoCal to find success with audiences south of the border.

Having been a driver for almost thirty years (we get our learner's permit at age fourteen in Alberta, unless you grow up on a farm, in which case you're likely already driving around age six or seven), I was somewhat taken aback when I learned that I would have to take an actual driver's test to obtain my California licence. Suddenly, I began experiencing feelings of terror. What if I failed the driver's test? I was almost forty years old! I hadn't taken a test in years, but clearly past exam experiences had stayed with me because anytime I had a nightmare it was the same scenario: I had reached the end of my four years at Ryerson University, but just before I was about to graduate I was called into the guidance counsellor's office. Turns out I hadn't completed sufficient credits to earn my degree and I was going to have to take classes during the summer. Then I wake up in a holy, sweaty terror with a feeling of relief that can only be described as borderline orgasmic. I hated taking tests when I was young, and I hated the idea of taking one now even more.

Susan herself was a terrible driver, perhaps one of the worst I've ever seen. She had the basics down but fell into the classic talking-too-much-and-not-paying-enough-attention-to-the-road trap that so many of us, including me, fall into. But she managed to meet me at the DMV on the morning of my driver's exam—an exam that inexplicably included both written
and
practical portions. I somehow aced the written exam, despite feeling absolutely terrified about having to sit down and put pencil to paper on an actual test, and I was feeling pretty good about myself until I wheeled my newly-arrived-from-Toronto-via-cross-country-train car into the testing area and a large, silent heavyset man approached. We got into the car and immediately the guy started giving me instructions:

“Turn on your left signal, then your right, now the hazards. Why are you nervous? Don't be nervous.”

I wasn't nervous, but this guy was making me nervous. He was like a bully, or a bouncer; this was his chance to lord his power over me in the only setting he could control. I instantly hated this man and I was certain he was going to fail me. We eventually pulled out of the DMV parking lot, and what followed for the next half hour was a series of right turns.

“Turn right here,” followed by twenty seconds of silence.

“Turn right here,” then another silent twenty seconds of driving in a straight line. “Another right.” I hoped I'd never have to do anything behind the wheel in California but circle the block because that was all I was being tested on that day.

Finally, the big burly bully gave me what I thought was going to be a challenge. “Pull up to that curb on the right,” he said.

The dreaded parallel parking test. I actually considered myself a brilliant parallel parker and looked forward to proving it to this socially awkward, lumbering oaf. I pulled a car-width from the curb and looked over my shoulder in preparation of backing in to
the curb when the bully spoke, enraged: “I didn't ask you to parallel park! I asked you to pull up to the curb!” There were no other cars parked on the side of the road. Even my wife who had never driven a car in her life could have managed this. Was this some kind of a joke?

Ten minutes of more right turns later we were back at the DMV. The bully told me to park and then got out of my car without a word. Did I pass? Fail? There was absolutely no indication. I followed fifteen steps behind him and walked in the front door toward the woman who had handed me my written test an hour before. She told me to stand three steps to the left on a mark on the floor so she could take my picture.

“So you're saying I passed?”

“Yes, didn't he tell you?”

“He did not.”

“He can be like that.”

Should he still be working here, then?
I wondered. No matter, I would never have to see him again, and I was now officially a licensed driver in the great state of California.

A few weeks after my ordeal at the DMV, I was lounging around my beachfront pad, watching a terrific series called
The Layover
on the Travel Channel. This was the second series to be hosted by chef and author Anthony Bourdain after his breakthrough TV hit
No Reservations
.
The Layover
featured a very simple premise: Bourdain would travel to a major metropolis somewhere around the globe and spend approximately thirty-six hours eating, drinking, and lodging at the best places the city had to offer, all the while showing you how you could do the very same. As someone who loved to take such trips, I waited for each episode eagerly. The Los Angeles epi
sode was no exception. Bourdain spent one evening having dinner at super-popular restaurant Animal
on Fairfax Avenue with the establishment's co-owners, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo. During the course of their conversation the subject of marijuana came up, and Bourdain casually inquired what he would need in order to get his medical marijuana card in the Golden State.

“You need a California driver's licence,” replied Shook and Dotolo in unison.

I sat up immediately, the words slowly sinking into my brain.
Hold on
, I thought,
I've got one of those. I've got a California driver's licence!
I figured I had to try to get my card, not because I was going to become a regular user, but just to see if I could. I wanted to know if Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo were right. And just think of the story this would make! Besides, what's the worst that could possibly happen?

Chobi, of course, wanted no part of this ridiculous adventure. So, like all men who need to do things their wives don't approve of, I waited until she was out of town. She went to visit her mother in Ontario for four days not long after, which gave me plenty of time to research and track down the best and most reputable doctor I could find. Instead, I spent three days in my underwear watching television. Then, on the last day before she was scheduled to return, I panicked after realizing that if I was really going to make this happen, I needed to get it taken care of fast. There was only one destination I had in mind, and that was the shady Venice Beach strip that I'd visited a few years before.

For those of you who've read my first book,
Anchorboy
, you may recall my writing about a press junket I attended for the movie
Blades of Glory
that was so stressful that I sought out recreational
drugs on Venice Beach for relief. While walking along the crazy and eclectic Venice Beach strip with its cheap T-shirt stores, art stands, and head shops that day, I stumbled upon something I had never seen before: men and women in their early twenties, dressed in electric green hospital scrubs, amiably corralling tourists into their oceanfront offices to get medical marijuana cards.

Now, I know what you're thinking:
Weren't those “offices” just dressed-up tourist traps? And with a little effort and research, couldn't you have found yourself a much safer and cheaper option?
The answer was a resounding “yes” on both counts. But, as had been a pattern for much of my life, I tend to take the easy way out, which is often the more expensive way. I could wander down to the beach, grab some lunch from one of the food trucks, and then casually enter one of the many “doctor's” offices with all the other tourists, who wouldn't even notice I was there anyway. Besides, it said $40 on the big marijuana leaf outside the office—how much cheaper could a card be than that?

So I made my way down to Venice Beach that warm fall day in November and walked into the first doctor's office I could find. I was a little disappointed that the neon green hospital scrubs crew weren't on duty; instead, only one person was working at a small desk in the corner of what looked like an actual doctor's waiting room. The only difference was that this doctor's office was open to a beachfront walk that featured a lot of fascinating smells: sweat, barbeque, patchouli, weed, ass—you name it, the smell was there in the stifling heat that fall afternoon. The doctor's office did not smell like weed; it just smelled like an old building that hadn't been cleaned in decades.

I approached the young girl at the desk, probably mid-twenties,who was dressed in hospital scrubs that were actually neon blue. She gave me a series of forms to fill out and asked for a photocopy
of my driver's licence. There was no turning back now; they were going to have a copy of actual government identification that I had been issued just a week prior. I tried not to think of what they could do with that newly issued government ID as I sat down in the waiting area next to a very young skateboarding couple—the girl at least ten times hotter than the guy—and another older woman my mom's age who said she was from Denver and asked me if she would be able to qualify for a card with a Colorado driver's licence. I apologized for not having the answer and wondered why she would even bother since Colorado had just voted to become the first state to fully legalize the sale and purchase of marijuana for recreational use. Following a nice exchange with the lady, I looked down at my sheets of paper on a clipboard and began filling them out.

Normally, Chobi fills out all forms in our household, and before you chastise me for being lazy I will point out that she does it because she loves it. During my speech at our wedding, I specifically praised the “inexplicable joy she gets out of filling out forms” to knowing laughter from her family and friends. But she was not here to help me now. I was going to have to do this on my own.

Turns out I wasn't there on my own.

Shockingly, this particular operation wanted to make it very easy for you to obtain your “green” card. So easy in fact that they refused to even leave it up to chance. Under the question “For what medical reason do you feel the need to obtain a medical marijuana card?”
instead of a few blank lines where one could possibly bullshit their way into a corner like they were writing a high school English exam, the sheet listed ten possible ailments with a box to check beside each of them. In other words, there was literally no wrong answer. “All you have to do is check one, you idiot,” the sheet of paper seemed to be saying. So I checked one:
insomnia. As a kid I suffered from crippling insomnia and as an adult it had never really subsided, but nowadays I just chalked it up to the massive can of Yerba Mate I drank at work every evening (“made from the naturally caffeinated leaves of the celebrated South American rainforest holly tree”), as opposed to any minor or major existing medical condition. Nonetheless, “insomnia” seemed like a perfectly legitimate answer, whether it was presented to the doctor I was about to see or to the authorities who could potentially have me deported.

After filling out the rest of the forms with as little information as I possibly could, I was told to wait a little longer because the doctor had not yet arrived. I pictured a nice hippie type—maybe he'd had a private practice for a few years in Brentwood and then decided to cash out and become a beach bum while doling out weed cards in between catching surf breaks. Or perhaps it was a younger, just-out-of-med-school guy who had walked the straight and narrow all his life and now, explicitly defying his traditional Jewish parents, he had become a convert to all the good pot can do for the body and soul and had begun dispensing cards for the one drug his parents couldn't tell their friends about. It was the perfect act of rebellion. I was genuinely curious who might be on the other side of that rather shabby looking wooden door to the doctor's office.

“Jay, the doctor will see you now,” said the girl at the front desk. Rather dour and serious for someone working reception at a medical marijuana establishment, I thought.

I took a few steps toward that wood door, the paint peeling and chipping away after years of contact with salty ocean air. I opened it up, expecting to see lava lamps and psychedelic posters on the walls, and instead I saw nothing. Absolutely nothing. There was a large desk and chair, and that was it. They both looked secondhand. There was wood panelling on the walls from the 1970s like
the kind in the den of the Brady Bunch house. There were no medical charts or posters, not even a diploma on the wall. Was I being set up? Was I on a reality show?
To Catch a Pothead
?