While in high school at the Punahou School in Honolulu, Barack Obama began associating with a group of boys who loved basketball and good times, called themselves the Choom Gang. Choom is a verb, meaning “to smoke marijuana.”
Unlike Bill Clinton, Barack Obama never tried to say he didn’t inhale. In his 1995 memoir “Dreams of My Father,” Obama writes about smoking pot almost like Dr. Seuss wrote about eating green eggs and ham. As a high school kid, Obama wrote, he would smoke “in a white classmate’s sparkling new van,” he would smoke “in the dorm room of some brother” and he would smoke “on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids.” He would smoke it here and there. He would smoke it anywhere.
As a member of the Choom Gang, Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends. The first was called “TA,” short for “total absorption.” To place this in the physical and political context of another young man who would grow up to be president, TA was the antithesis of Bill Clinton’s claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled.
Along with TA, Barry popularized the concept of “roof hits”: when they were chooming in the car all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste; when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling.
When you were with Barry and his pals, if you exhaled precious pakalolo (Hawaiian slang for marijuana, meaning “numbing tobacco”) instead of absorbing it fully into your lungs, you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around. “Wasting good bud smoke was not tolerated,” explained one member of the Choom Gang, Tom Topolinski, the Chinese-looking kid with a Polish name who answered to Topo.
Barry also had a knack for interceptions. When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted “Intercepted!,” and took an extra hit. No one seemed to mind.
Although Obama himself wrote that he and his pot smoking buddies were a “club of disaffection,” that’s not really true. In fact, most members of the Choom Gang were decent students and athletes who went on to successful and productive lawyers, writers and businessmen. One notable exception was Ray, the group’s pot dealer who, known for his ability “to score quality bud,” would years later be killed by a scorned gay lover armed with a ball-peen hammer.
Obama himself managed to be a pretty good student despite all the pot smoking and unconventional study habits. He told his Choom Gang mates that the trick was if you put the textbook under your pillow the night before you would perform better on an exam.
Hawaii of the early 1970s was something of a pot-smoking Mecca. It was sold and smoked right there in front of your nose; Maui Wowie, Kauai Electric, Puna Bud, Kona Gold, and other local variations of pakalolo were readily available.
Obama’s pal Mark Bendix had a Volkswagen microbus known as the “Choomwagon.” They would often drive up Honolulu’s Mount Tantalus where they parked turned up their stereos playing Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult and Stevie Wonder, lit up some “sweet-sticky Hawaiian buds” and washed it down with “green bottled beer” (the Choom Gang preferred Heineken, Becks, and St. Pauli Girl). No shouting, no violence, no fights; they even cleaned up their beer bottles.
Of course, smoking, drinking and driving on mountain roads could also be a little dangerous. Especially the night they tried drag racing. According to one anecdote, the Choomwagon and a Toyota in which Obama was riding raced to the top of Mount Tantalus, and the Toyota rolled off the road. The Choomwagon’s passengers found the future president staggering on the road and “laughing so hard he could barely stand up.”
In his senior yearbook, Obama expressed his gratitude: “Thanks Tut [his grandmother], Gramps, Choom Gang, and Ray for all the good times.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment