Bernie’s blast: Bernie Goetz called us out of the blue on Monday. He said Dana Beal had told him to talk to us. Goetz supports the medical marijuana activist, who last week staged a protest outside District Attorney Cy Vance Jr.’s Hogan Place office. Of course, New York has already legalized medical marijuana — to a certain extent. Patients can’t smoke it, and there aren’t many dispensaries to be found. But Beal has a beef about medical pot that extends back to former D.A. Robert Morgenthau. As Beal explained it to us, it sounds kind of complicated, to say the least. But Goetz has a simple solution — legalization. “I believe if the situation with marijuana was more relaxed, you wouldn’t have to push for medical marijuana, because it would be readily available,” he said. “I’m for legalizing it.” It turns out the “Subway Gunman” of the 1980s is a daily pot smoker, too. Goetz, who still lives on W. 14th St., said he backs Mayor Bill de Blasio’s having decreed last year that people found packing up to 25 grams of pot will now, at worst, only get tickets instead of being arrested. “That’s wonderful. I support it,” Goetz said. But he’s concerned that pot arrests under de Blasio have only dropped 15 to 20 percent, noting, “That’s not enough.” Goetz is still smarting from his own pot bust last year. He told us the whole story. … It was in Union Square Park. He had been on the east side of the park, just minding his own business (and not shooting anyone), feeding corn and peanuts to a squirrel he had “rescued.” He then walked across on the 15th St. pathway and exited the park, when a pudgy 25-year-old woman loudly asked, “Anybody know where I can get some pot?” Not too surprisingly, she turned out to be an undercover cop. Goetz, who was carrying a small stash, told her, “I have some,” and said he offered three times to give it to her for free, and even to smoke it with her at his nearby office. As he tells it, though, she said she would really rather pay for it. Finally, he agreed to accept some cash and she gave him $40, but he said it was too much and returned $10 to her. “It was good pot, by the way,” Goetz recalled. A male undercover suddenly swooped up and arrested him. Goetz said the D.A. kept offering him a plea bargain on the misdemeanor charge, but he refused it, since if he got arrested again, he’d become a “repeat offender.” The D.A. kept putting off the case and, eventually, a judge just threw it out. Apparently, the arresting officer never signed a complaint. Goetz said he now plans to sue the city “for a small amount” over the whole thing. While Steve Miller sang of being “a midnight toker,” Goetz takes his marijuana in the a.m. “My normal lifestyle is I take a good toke every morning,” he said. “It’s like my morning coffee. I use a pipe. Lately, I’ve been busy, so I only have one toke every three days. … I’ve been smoking pot since I’m 16, and I’m 67. When people say that it leads to other drugs, it doesn’t apply to me.” Actually, he said he was not high at all when he opened fire on a crowded Downtown No. 2 train on Dec. 22, 1984. He boarded the subway car at Union Square, then was approached by four black teens, who tried to mug him for $5. He quickly squeezed off five bullets, hitting all four. One of them, Darrel Cabey, was left permanently paralyzed. The reason Goetz wasn’t baked back then is because, well, he didn’t want to be fried: He was working a big job servicing high-voltage equipment and so was trying to avoid getting electrocuted. “Back then, I was earning 100 grand a year working three and a half months a year,” he said. “I would not smoke pot three days prior to working. At that time, I actually hadn’t smoked any pot for 40 days, which was an unusual dry spell for me.” However, he boasted, “That wouldn’t have mattered. I can shoot stoned or not stoned.” He explained that the youths were very close to him, plus he had honed his shooting skills from a young age growing up in Upstate New York, so, buzzed or not, he wasn’t going to miss when he started blasting away. O.K., we asked, so he wasn’t blissed out on bud back then, but maybe if he had just learned some karate or kung fu, couldn’t that have given him some more swagger and ’tude ? “I’m not a fighter,” he retorted. “I don’t have a good punch. Why should I have to learn martial arts and lift weights out of fear, to be secure?” He added that he supports the former Department of Corrections officer who recently opened fire in the Borough Hall station in Brooklyn, killing a thug who had just assaulted him on the train. In fact, Goetz said, he really didn’t want to pull out his .38 special back in ’84 since he was carrying it illegally. He claims he hasn’t packed heat in the past 17 years. But for a decade after the subway shooting incident, he said he needed to, for his own defense. “People wanted to kill me,” he said. “There was a smear campaign against me, like George Zimmerman.” Once in a deli near his home he thought he would have to draw again. The “Pakistani guy” behind the counter was giving Goetz a finger signal — a man standing near him was armed. “I just took a shooting stance. I angled my body to give less of a target,” Goetz told us. “He had the gun in his right overcoat pocket, a 9-millimeter, but not in his hand. I could have shot him right in the forehead.” Apparently, the other guy knew it, too. “He went in a great huff. He turned and he left.” Goetz carried his handgun in a “fast-draw holster” in his waistband back then, he explained, and from the sound of it, he fancied himself the fastest draw east or west of Fifth Ave. Asked if he enjoys Clint Eastwood westerns with their squinty-eyed gun duels, Goetz offered, “I like ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,’ ” though added, “I’m not into violent movies.” He’s bulked up a bit from his vigilante days, from 150 pounds to 180 today. And he’s packed on those pounds as a vegetarian. He also may still have some problems with black people. He noted that the undercover who arrested him for selling pot last year got up in his face very fast, which Goetz thinks was to provoke him into punching him. “If a black guy does that, you get scared,” he told us. Hmm, what if it had been a white guy? we asked. Oh, that’s scary too, Goetz said. As for Beal, he said that Goetz, back before personal computers, “was part of an extended scene — ‘phone freaking’ — blue box, black box, red box.” Again, we’re not sure we fully understand, but at least it doesn’t sound like any gunplay was involved, perhaps just very aggressive dialing. As for the ’84 subway shooting, Beal said, “Basically, he’s a picked-on nerd. There’s been a lot of movies on this — ‘Revenge of the Nerds.’ ”
