The City of Dank

March 7, 2020

Cathedral City, California

     It seems that Cathedral City, our home away from home this winter, has been freely zoned for marijuana dispensaries, and contains more of them than the other towns here in the Coachella Valley.  The Coachella Valley, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, is the Southern California desert lowland in which Palm Springs is located at the northwestern end, followed, heading southeastward, by Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, La Quinta, and Indio, then more southward through Coachella, Thermal, and Mecca, to the Salton Sea.  The area is about 45 miles long altogether and an average of fifteen miles from north to south, bounded more or less by Interstate 10 on the north and California 111 on the south.  It ranges from just under 500 feet above sea level at Palm Springs to 272 feet below sea level on the surface of the Salton Sea.  But altitude is not really important to the issue of marijuana sales, except perhaps in terms of how high one must get in order to be as high as the folks in, say, Denver.

     The legal recreational marijuana industry, here in California as in the other states where it exists, has given rise to a unique set of commercial nuances.  Business names and logos are important, just as they are in fast food or tax preparation, for instance.  Places must be easily recognized for what they are, and labeled in such a way that they will attract the intended clientele.  That clientele can vary.  Of course there are the everyday stoners who just want to get high, who I'm sure make up the bulk of the customer base of any marijuana dispensary, just as everyday or regular drinkers, as differentiated from those who take a drink only on special occasions, keep the alcoholic beverage sales industry going.  But there are also the folks who consider marijuana something more (or perhaps less) than a THC delivery system--those who believe in the curative, sedative, and restorative qualities of the noble weed.  Of course, now that recreational marijuana use is legal across the board in a number of jurisdictions and trending more that way, much of the bullshit, quasi-bullshit, and sincere beliefs that fostered the prescription-only medical marijuana industry, such as its anti-nausea qualities, its ability to relieve pain, its calming effects, and the various real or imagined magical qualities of hemp in all its forms, may be dispensed with as pretexts for its legality.  No longer do ardent users have to try to persuade legislatures of the inherent goodness of weed, like children trying to convince their parents that joining the circus would be a good thing because it will enable them to broaden their horizons.  Here again the analogy to alcohol is strong.  Even during Prohibition, pharmacies were permitted to dispense alcohol for medicinal purposes, many of which were believed to be similar to those of marijuana--it can calm you down, it can relieve pain, it makes other medicine go down better, etc.  In the 19th century and before, alcohol was just about the only reliable medicine, along with opiates, available to the general public, and furthermore was one of the only safe things to drink, besides boiling-hot tea and coffee, from the standpoint of being free of waterborne pathogens, such as cholera.  For that reason, the consumption of beer and wine were considered downright healthful, and laudanum, which was opium dissolved in alcohol, was a sure-fire winner, and generally thought to be good for what ailed you, from tuberculosis to migraines to menstrual pain.  Addictive as hell as it turned out, but as long as it was cheap and legally available, not so terrible in the minds of the public.

     All of which brings us back to Cathedral City and its many marijuana dispensaries, often including on-premises consumption lounges.  Although I have not partaken of this earthly delight for many years, since back when it was illegal everywhere in this country and far less potent that it is today, I remain fascinated by the existence of the thriving legal dope-selling industry as it begins its life--something I never thought I'd see.  Within a few blocks, or at most a mile, of where we're situated, there are several dozen such emporiums, and their names are often fanciful, and probably more varied than the products they sell.  One place advertises on a billboard, "Smoke it, Eat it, Drink it, Enjoy it."  Green crosses frequently signal dope shops, just as in Europe the green cross is the universal sign of a pharmacy.  Here are some of the names of the places I pass nearly every day:  Mother Earth's Farmacy, Cathedral Green, Atomic Budz, House of Lucidity, and The Vault.  A little further out, but still in Cathedral City, one can find Dank DePot, Green Cross Pharma, West Coast Cannabis Club, Iguana Collective Dispensary, The OG Collective, and more.  But by far my favorite, by name, is The City of Dank, a place situated nearby in a tiny strip mall, together with a Philly cheese steak restaurant and the Show Girls Gentleman's Club.

     During the many years I have been out of the marijuana consuming game, so to speak, the terminology has changed.  We used to call it grass, or weed, or dope, or reefer, or (not very often) pot.  And if it was strong, we'd simply say it was "good" or "righteous" or maybe "killer."  A marijuana cigarette was a joint, and a pipe was a bong.  Types might include Acapulco Gold, something with the word "red" in it, I think, and most often just weed of unknown origin.  Much of it was filled with seeds and stems, and flower buds were a rare treat.  My memory is, understandably, foggy about any more details than that.  But suffice it to day, things were a bit simpler.  And as with anything else, one falls out of the loop, jargonwise, quite quickly if one does not keep up.

     Today, as with the marketing of alcoholic beverages, there is, if anything, an excess of choices, nuances, and sales pitches for marijuana.  Does it give you a body high, a head high, a creative high, or a combination thereof?  Is it relaxing or is it downright shit kicking and hallucinogenic?  In the world of alcohol, the simple drinking of a beer, a beverage with very little alcohol, something that should take about a minute and a half followed in a few more minutes by the need to urinate and another beer, has become a Big Fucking Deal, far beyond the rather lowly status of such a pedestrian potable.  There are craft beers and specialty beers and fruity beers of all kinds, and the bulletin boards of bars and restaurants will list them all, including their relatively puny alcohol contents, for the serious and "discerning" consumer.  To be sure, there have always been different types of beer--lager, Pilsener, porter, and stout, to name a few--but the act of selecting one or the other, and the absurd snobbery associated therewith, has never before been elevated to such complicated heights.  Even the act of putting a slice of citrus fruit in the neck of a beer bottle would once have been considered an irksome hindrance to ready access to the contents of the container.  Wine and wine loving was always a more complicated thing, since it was inherently something to complement food, or to come before or after a meal, so taste and flavor and quality meant more.  The only kinds of food beer pairs well with, really, are, besides salty snacks, pizza and maybe burgers and dogs and fried chicken.  Beyond that, the purpose of beer is or should be to give you something to drink a lot of over a fairly long time, at a comparatively low price.  There are exceptions, but most folks don't usually buy 24 bottles of wine or a dozen liters of whiskey to consume during the course of an evening with a few friends watching the Super Bowl.  And you don't order a glass of whiskey to wash down a beer.  It's the other way around.

     Anyway, the name City of Dank intrigued me, and thanks to the miracle of the internet I was able to ascertain that the word "dank," as an adjective and sometimes a noun, denotes particularly strong and high quality marijuana.  When I looked up City of Dank on Google, I of course saw the name of the place I'm referring to here in Cathedral City, along with (you gotta love it) Yelp reviews.  But I also discovered that there's a song called "The City of Dank," by a Houston-based hiphop group called SPM, or South Park Mexican.  The chorus of this ditty goes, in part,

          Well I come from the City of Dank,
          Where n*****s shoot hop, snort, and smoke crank.
          Where anything's possible and nothin' fa sho'
          High off Khadafi mixed with blow.

The exact meaning of "Khadafi" in this context was more difficult to discover than was the meaning of "dank," which seems to be pretty well known.  As with the etymology of any term that has no obvious linguistic origins, whether it's reported in the Oxford English Dictionary or an online urban or slang dictionary, the meaning is usually teased out by citations to its first known use, or to a few different such occurrences.  As far as I can tell, after some research, "Khadafi" denotes a drug (probably heroin) whose effect may also be to make you as crazy as the late Libyan Colonel Muamar Khadafi, who was indeed known for his craziness.  Mix it with cocaine (blow), and well, I suppose anything's possible, as the song says.

     I'm a hopeless old fogey by South Park Mexican standards, I admit, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the words from "The City of Dank" cited above point with a certain measure of pride to the profligate consumption of a variety of very strong drugs within its eponymous earthly paradise, and not of the kind sold over the counter at your average Cathedral City legal dope house.  As such, it's difficult for me to understand why that name would be a good ambassadorial invitation into the place, especially considering that one of the glowing online reviews of the City of Dank had its proprietor gushing about how wonderful it was to see an old woman come in and obtain what she needed in order to be able to play, pain free, with her grandchildren.  Again analogizing to alcohol, imagine calling a bar The Stagger On Inn, or a liquor store A Drunkard's Dream.  Now, there are bars and there are bars, as we all know, from elegant cocktail lounges to buckets of blood, but as a marijuana dispensary, the City of Dank doesn't strike me as your mother's, or grandmother's, kind of place.  More likely, its patrons go in to get as fucked up as possible, then wander out to consume a Philly cheese steak sandwich or two, and then maybe repair to Show Girls to gaze at naked pole dancers and sip on overpriced craft beers.

     Early in the evenings, at the corner of Perez Road and Cathedral Canyon Drive, just a block or two from where we stay, we began to notice a rank smell rising up from the dry desert floor.  At first it reminded me of skunk cabbage, or perhaps of a skunk itself.  But I realized that skunk cabbage favors wet areas, not the arid arroyos here in the northwestern Sonoran Desert, and also that skunks aren't very common hereabouts, and certainly not at the same time every evening.  So it dawned on me that the smell was the powerful Stank of the Dank, emanating from the collective exhaust systems of the consumption lounges of Mother Earth's Farmacy, Cathedral Green, the House of Lucidity, Atomic Budz, and yes, the City of Dank.