By Andrew Baxter
When I met Zach the energy was immediate and it was immense. He greeted me like we had known each other for years, like we were old friends from childhood and he could not believe I was right there standing in front of him. We sat down at the local coffee shop, busy with the keyboard taps and idle chatter of hipsters, yuppies, and hippies alike. Zach dawned skinny jeans, a beanie, and a micro patterned button up and his gaze carried the comfort of someone set on proving his worth with actions as much as words. Over the next week we meet several times and l learned his story how he became of the most well regarded guys in New Mexico’s medical cannabis industry. In that time I noticed that Zach’s gaze would hardly rest, as though he was always searching for the perfect word for a practiced story, and when his eyes did meet mine (usually at the point his story) they connected with a presence that said “I gotcha homie.”
By the time I sat down to write this article I had seen Zach perform twice, had a couple hours of conversation, and we had exchanged a handful of emails. He told me the story of his upbringing with a father, mother, and grandfather that used cannabis as medicine despite legal prohibition. I heard the story of his journey from husky kid with a strange and colorful family to Renaissance Man of New Mexico performance art and marijuana extraction. Still, even after interviewing him I find myself wanting to know more about the life, trials and tribulations of one of Albuquerque’s most memorable personalities.
Zachary Lee “B-Boy Felto” Abeyta is 28 years old and he has seen his own share of both success and tragedy. We all have an image of the tortured hero that draws from a dramatic upbringing to find greatness, but Zach found greatness in ups and downs that are unexpectedly normal. Zach was raised by his mother, his father, and by his grandfather and grandmother. His parents were not together for Zach’s upbringing, his mother getting his weeks and his father getting his weekends. Luckily when you talk to him about his family it is clear that his parents separation had nothing to do never with the unyielding love they held for their son. Growing up in what a more cynical person might call a “broken home,” to Zach it was just a part of his story that leads to his first medical cannabis job, and his first breakdance battle. Talking to him you get the sense that there are no failures just struggles that lead to inevitable triumph. When I asked him what kind of a child he was he snickered and paused. “You know all these new positive ways to describe big girls and curvy or thick women, well when I was a kid all I had to call myself was husky.” Looking at Zach, it hard to believe the fitness freak and Bboy would have been a chubby child. “Husky was the name on my pants and I never had pride in the way my body looked, I started to lose some pounds in high school but I still wasn’t fit. That didn’t happen until college when I started lifting weights.” He went on to describe the perfect trifecta of fitness, weight lifting, dancing, and snowboarding. I asked him if that diverse and well-tended fitness regimen was the secret to his success and he explained that it was more of a “mind, body, soul relationship” and that medical cannabis played a crucial role in developing. Cannabis for medicinal use was a family tradition. Zach’s mother was never especially open about her cannabis use but it was her main method of pain management. Zach commented that despite a series of injuries and a particularly nasty fall injury she went through he had “never seen her use opioids or prescription drugs. Cannabis was always the remedy.” His father, the owner and operator of New Mexico Hydroponics in Santa Fe, was a lot more open about his experiences and relationship with cannabis. Zach described
his father as an OG outdoor grower that predicted the acceptance of medical cannabis in New Mexico and was ready to help growers make effective safe medicine when the Lynn and Erin Compassionate Use Act was passed. Zach has a lot of stories about his body builder dad but this one stood out. One of my favorite memories is when we judged the 710 Cup together a few years ago. We had to judge 52 samples in less than 48 hours. During the cup my pops was walking around with this crazy ray gun nectar collector, and everyone was asking if they come and take a dab out of it. It was like my dad was Billy the Kid and everyone wanted to hold his gun.” When I met Zach’s father, Leroy Abeyta, true to form he was introduced as “Pops” and gave me a bear of a handshake to match his wide muscular frame. Zach’s grandfather, Phillip J. Gurule, was also a cannabis cultivator for medicinal purposes from back in the day and the subject of one of Zach’s most emotional moments with me. A Vietnam Vet and a principal, Zach’s Grandfather the stepfather of his mother and according to Zach “the smartest man I ever met, always reading, always curious. Really respected in the community”. Zach took great pride in knowing that his grandfather wasn’t his blood relation because “He treated my mother well and all of her children like any loving father. Would, and that extended to me as well. When we’d run into his former students they’d talk about how he gave them stability and opportunity, that had a big impact on me, on my character.” Eventually cancer came and Zach’s pain of seeing his grandfather fade away reinforced the salience of medical cannabis to him. Zach had his father, his mother, and his grandfather to thank for his exposure to the positive medicinal relationship an adult can have with cannabis, but it was Zach’s brother who introduced him to the universe of creative expression that is underground Hip-Hop, one of Zach’s long time loves that keep on giving in his unusual but incredible path. The story is classic; Driving down Central in Albuquerque, passing the luminescent red and yellow Pop’N’Tacos sign that dominated the skyline between I-25 and the train tracks, making a victory lap with each steady mechanical rotation of the tire. It was the early 2000’s, swag rap and candy coated beats were inching into Zach’s line of sight. His brother turned the radio dial when he noticed Zach’s nascent interest and made it clear, “That, is straight garbage. What you need to be listening to is underground hip-hop with real cyphers. People with stories to tell who have been spending their lives perfecting this craft.” Zach was given homework. He would go on to study Aesop Rock, Grouch, and Eligh; the Living Edge, A Tribe Called Quest, Wu-Tang Clan (aka real shit), and upon study was immediately hooked. Kids like me learned about real hip-hop from masters like Nas and Pac and west coast legends like Hieroglyphics and Mac Dre, around the same age as Zach. But I never had the hunger for the challenge of hip-hop that Zach did, and the more I got to know the man the clearer his passion was. Zach Abeyta needs a challenge. His love of ciphering and being a DJ grew more when he got his first turntables at 13. In high school he started to cypher with a friend and that became a huge part of his life, but he described his experience with rapping as ultimately unsatisfying because it came so easy to him. It was not until he met the famous Flava Pheenz group that Zach found a challenge that would really test his skill and his patience at every step. One night while out at Burt’s Tiki Lounge he saw a dance circle and jumped in doing what he would describe to me as “a jokey and sorta whack routine.” But one of the Flava Pheenz was in the crowd that night and approached to say that if Zach ever wanted to learn some moves he and his friends might be able to help. At the time he was 21 and the party life had been a big aspect of Zach’s world. When he started to join the Flava Pheez, practicing the back breaking difficulty of Hip-Hop’s most emulated form of expression started to clash with partying. He realized that going out and drinking, while also regularly working out, going to school, and break dancing was not a winning combo. So when his friends called to say “Hey it’s time to go party man” Zach turned to cannabis for an alternative lifestyle and a treatment for all the aches and sores that come with learning to be a B-Boy. So on nights out Zach became the friend that skipped the beers and chilled with a blunt, allowing him to stay clear and keen during the next day’s work and stresses. Cream’s did the job for sore joints, CBD was great for the anxiety of school and work, and THC gave his brain the time to procrastinate and reset to a place of intense focus he needed, and still needs, to achieve his dreams. And his dreams are big. Breakdancing came harder then rap but that just made Zach work harder. One day at a Flava Pheenz open practice with onlookers and everything (before he was officially part of the crew) one of his friends walked up, grabbed the beanie off his head, threw it to the ground, and demanded they battle right then and there. Zach thought it was going to be the typical sparring they do anytime they practice but was surprised at the intensity and aggression his friend brought to the game. After they battled and Zach was ready to pause and re-energize another Flava Pheenz member came up and started to battle him was well, then another, and another, an on like that until he had gone head to head with every member of Flava Pheenz. And after all of it he was exhausted, they were impressed, and his status in the crew was official. They toured the region (Arizona, Colorado, California, etc.) winning competitions and Zach excelled. After graduating from UNM, Zach was in the early years of his B-Boy life and looking for work in his field, English and Creative Writing. Like a lot of us he could not find it. Add to that the grief and anxiety in the time following his grandfather’s passing and saying things were difficult would have been an understatement. But Zach remembered how he had used medical cannabis to help his grandfather find temporary reprieve from physical pain and regain enough mental clarity to be present with his loved ones near the end. He remembered his father’s experience and his family’s positive relationship with the miracle plant, and Zach saw the medical cannabis industry as a place he wanted to be.
He found a gig as a sales rep with Phresh Picks, a smoke shop supply company that sells rigs, pipes, etc. That job helped him build relationships in the industry but Phresh Picks had the already overworked Zach face-to-face with some of the shadier head shops and left him hungry to be on the medicinal side of New Mexico’s marijuana revolution. Zach was able to use his connections with most of New Mexico’s smoke shops and dispensaries to build a resume as an extraction expert. Now he holds it down at Herbal Edibles where he takes great pride in bringing “top shelf medicine to the masses” with a focus on quality control. Besides being a pro-cannabis extractor Zach is also a medical cannabis patient and experiments with creams, salves, extracts, edibles and flower to find that perfect “mind, body, soul” combination to treat pain from his active lifestyle of breakdancing, weightlifting, snowboarding, and to help alleviate his anxiety. To this day Zach teaches breakdancing at ‘Dance In Motion,’ but there was something he had trouble getting past. When he did battle, he was good, but there were always people for whom it came naturally, who didn’t have to work as hard, and who could always get the best of him. And as the years went by and his skill improved the reality of his body’s fragility became more apparent. We all know that our bodies are destined to hit a peak, and for a style of dancing as demanding as breakdancing that peak will come sooner than later. The freedom and self expression of breaking was freeing but it would only last so long. Eventually he had an epiphany; the body will fade but words can live forever. Leroy Abeyta, or as Zach calls his father “Pops,” kept comedy tapes around the house. There were classic tapes by Dennis Leary and Eddie Murphy that were so vivid and so real it is no surprise Zach fell in love with standup-comedy. As of writing this article he has been doing standupcomedy for 8 months. But for a year before that he wrote bits and jokes. According to Zach “My dad has this passive aggressive way to him sometimes and one day he told me ‘When are you gonna get on stage and do it?’” So he did, and it turned out he wasn’t that bad at stand-up either. But being good wasn’t enough, Zach is the kind of guy who needs to be great. He said, “Let’s see if I can perform 100 times in 6 months” and he did. The first time we spoke he hinted at his plans for the future and how medical cannabis would be a crucial part of that. Zach’s partner Amanda works in special education, a fact that gives Zach great pride, and when she finishes graduate school in education they plan on relocating to Los Angeles for the universe of comedy clubs that are centered there; his experience in extracting top shelf concentrates will land him a job, and cannabis will be the fuel that drives his engine. With this goal in mind Zach stays busy. He works early shifts full time doing extraction, teaches breakdancing, and commits to at least 5 nights of stand-up a week. After watching one of his routine on Youtube about his grandmother smothering dinner in high potency cannabutter that Zach made to help his grandfather’s pain during cancer treatments I knew I had to see Zach live. On the Monday after our first meeting my partner Jessica and I went to see Zach at an open mic at Back Alley Brewery. We walked down the dimly lit alley to the aptly named pub and found small crowd buzzing over beers and conversation. I recognized some of the local comics and when the show started I realized that Jessica and I were maybe the only non-comics in the room. The comics were young and old, and of every race, gender and background you would expect in a city as diverse and eclectic as Albuquerque. Local stalwarts, hit-women and hit-men of comedy, shady and friendly people alike took the stage but Zach was not phased. When his name was called he jogged up and jumped in front of the mic with an energy that lit up the room like an arc-lamp. He promised to bring the fire that night and his first volley was a series of musings on his muscle-man dad, plucking out the funniest imagery of fishnet shirts and stray sex toys while laying down images with scientific precision. Afterwards, Zach compared open mic nights to reps at the gym while we puffed on a BHO pen outside the pub. Mike, an old b-boy friend of Zach’s who is now a comic in New York City, stopped by to say hi. They greeted each other like old friends, with hugs and big grins and proceeded to do something that I cant help but smile at in remembrance; they broke down the fundamentals of succeeding at stand-up comedy, or anything else for that matter. They preached about the focus and dedication it takes to perfect a routine and how, just like a gym, you can go everyday your whole life and never see results if you are not optimizing your workout. Mike preached about the social media hustle that demands invitations to comedy shows like a smartwatch demands 10,000 steps a day. He preached about the wisdom of showing up and being known because doors only open if you knock. Mike was the mentor for sure, rolling in with sharp hipster attire and short manicured beard hair, and summed up his perception of Zach with a few words. “I see you on Facebook and Instagram, and I see that you are doing good stuff.” Spending two hours with Zach is a sure fire way to meet half of Albuquerque and with an uplifting spirit like his it’s no wonder. That following Sunday my partner and I attended the 2017 Essie Awards put on by Kurple Magazine in honor of Essie DeBonet one of the medical cannabis advocates that got us to where New Mexico is today. The show kicked off with a song by local rock group The Riddims, and Mr. Zachary Lee Abeyta kept the mood light and festive as the emcee. The crowd erupted in laughter when Zach did a bit about testing salted caramel edibles till they were just right and being too medicated to tell if that last batch was perfect or just felt that way. But more than the content of his comedy the crowd loved his expressiveness, the energy that made an auditorium which could have been awkward feel like a smoke sesh with all your friends. Zach may have been born into the world of medical cannabis but he never rested on his laurels. Instead he going at life hard.
Follow me for upcoming shows and events. Zach Abeyta – Facebook zach_bboyfelto – instagram
