words: Aron Glatzer
Anybody who has smoked some ganja and then forgotten where they left their car keys knows weed affects the short-term memory, but what has transpired in a small Colorado town near Aspen brings an entirely new meaning to the concept. When Josh Bailey—a 33-year-old independent contractor for FedEx and avid Volkswagon fan—bought a 1958 double-door VW bus from a friend of a friend for $5,000 about eight months back, he thought with some restoration, care and elbow grease he had the makings of a boss blast from the past. The plan was to beat out the dents, bring it back to its original paint of stock blue, install a new two-liter engine and add some mystique by lowering the frame about five inches.
But upon closer inspection of the interior, Bailey realized he purchased a lot more than he bargained for: Pounds upon pounds of old, dried up packaged bricks of chronic. “I noticed the belly pans [in the floorboards] were folded back and bent and figured somebody had done some makeshift repairs to fix a clutch cable or accelerator,” says Bailey, who believes the weed to be from the 1970s or ’80s. “But I pulled it back and one of the bricks was open and weed poured out all over; then I bent it all the way back and saw that it was stocked full.
Bailey, not one to get high or get his hustle on by taking the bammer to the streets, decided the only reasonable thing to do was alert the authorities.“I wasn’t going to risk driving around with it and I didn’t want to put it in the garbage so a garbage man could find it, so I called the police and I said I didn’t want it, that it’s useless and that I wanted to get rid of it,” laments Bailey. The cops probably had a chuckle upon arrival at Bailey’s house, but didn’t suspect any foul play and weighed out the sealed bricks of dormant herb to the tune of 15 pounds and 10 ounces.
Dank doesn’t exactly age like a fine wine, so after all this time, the stuff could be worthless altogether. It still had to have been better than the Wizard Smoke they sell to anxious suburban teens out the back of High Times magazine, so someone like Sampson Simpson with an army of murderous breezies might have fetched a few thousand dollars. It all depends on the age-old hustle of supply and demand and how to work the clientele.
Who exactly loses or abandons that kind of weight remains to be determined, but this much is known: Before Bailey picked up the vehicle it sat in a backyard in Arizona for five years and going further back, spent seven or eight years in a body shop. The educated guess is the van was once owned by some criminals who were busted and had the car repossessed by the cops where it was then sold at a police auction with the weed undetected, but nobody knows for sure. We like to imagine that a naïve hippie was tricked into cruisng the Mystery Machine across country and then when the heat turned up in the dessert, dude caught a whiff of the dank, thought he ran over a skunk and freaked out. After holding a roadside memorial, burning bundles of incense and shedding tears, the guy ran off into the wilderness—vowing to dedicate his life to the preservation God’s wild creatures—abondoning the loaded van.
