He may be a pot dealer now, but “subway vigilante” Bernhard Goetz insists he was definitely not stoned when he opened fire on four teens three decades ago.
He couldn’t have “performed” as well as he did if he’d been buzzed on ganja, Goetz insisted.
“What an odd question! Of course not!” Goetz told The Post in an exclusive interview when asked if he was high during the infamous 1984 subway bloodbath.
“I shouldn’t have said, ‘Of course not,’ ” he added.
“But to perform as good as that, with shooting, I don’t think you could do it stoned,” he said, speaking moments after being released from custody on charges of selling $30 worth of pot to an undercover cop he met in Union Square Park.
Goetz, 65, gave The Post a rambling, good-natured peek inside his mind as he headed home from Manhattan Criminal Court on Saturday night.
He had just spent the previous night in custody before being arraigned on misdemeanor pot possession and sale charges. A judge freed him on his own recognizance.
“This is stupid. I shouldn’t have done it,” he told cops while in custody, according to the prosecution’s account of his arrest.
“That was all the marijuana I have,” Assistant District Attorney Bernard Eyth said Goetz told cops. “I don’t have any more.”
Goetz wouldn’t admit to The Post that he was selling pot and denied a pretty young undercover narcotics cop’s account that the “creepy old man” had hit on her when they met in the park on Friday night.
“She was average,” he said of the cop, who accuses Goetz of inviting her to his West 14th Street apartment to “get high.”
“It sounds like he was definitely trying to pick her up,” a source connected to the case told The Post.
“But what a pickup line — give me $30,” the source said.
Goetz had given the undercover a small amount of pot folded into a napkin and had a bit more on him in a baggie in his pocket when he was arrested, his criminal complaint says.
“She was young and pretty and found him to be fairly creepy,” a source said of the attractive undercover. “He was just this creepy old man to her.”
After his release, Goetz — an avowed vegetarian and animal-rights activist — compared being in a holding cell to being a city carriage horse.
“You know how some people complain about the way carriage horses are treated? That they are in a small stall? That is mistreatment,” he said. “In a holding cell, you get very bored. You have no newspapers, you have no anything.”
Goetz also rambled on about his vegetarian politics.
“India is mostly vegetarian, and I think that will be crucial to changing the world,” he mused. “I think the United States is lost.”
Mostly, though, he wanted to talk about squirrels.
“I go to Union Square Park, mostly to take care of squirrels. There is a black squirrel that I rescued many months ago who wound up leaving me and wound up in Union Square, and I was taking care of him. And then a few days ago somebody released a little, much smaller, black squirrel — which was unprepared — and I’ve been spending a lot of time looking for that one.”
Goetz is due to appear back in court on Dec. 18.