I grew up in the Nancy Reagan "Say no to drugs" era, a message hammered home by a clever "This is your brain on drugs" TV ad showing an egg (your hapless, drug-addled brain) frying in a hot-buttered skillet. Conspiracy Theory grew up in a different era and had an unapologetic love of marijuana.
It was an ever-present fixture in our apartment. I'd watch Conspiracy methodically prepare his joints, often while lecturing me on the healing properties of marijuana. It helped with his glaucoma. It fostered creativity. It eased nausea for cancer patients.
At first, I withheld judgment.
At the time, I didn't even drink. I had too many memories of my dad's bow-wow babes, and I equated getting drunk or high with getting raped or having a train run on you. It was your own damned fault if you were stupid enough to let yourself become incapacitated or inebriated around men.
But Conspiracy was my boyfriend, and pot was allegedly good for me. Under his tutelage, I gave it a try.
Make that four or five tries.
Conspiracy made smoking weed look easy, but I soon discovered it was hard, hard work. It entailed puffing, choking, coughing and sputtering in a vain attempt to hold the magic smoke in my lungs long enough to actually get high.
The first few unsuccessful attempts were in the privacy of our apartment, and one attempt was in public, at a Yale off-campus party Conspiracy and I somehow ended up at.
But finally, the day dawned when I must have chocked things down the right way, because suddenly I felt like I was floating. And hallucinating. I could literally see pink elephants marching across my eyelids. Then, I was in front of the refrigerator, scarfing down food with even more abandon than usual. And having sex with Conspiracy in the living room because it made me horny, too.
That was the first, last and only time I got high.
There were three things I didn't need help with: food, sex or hallucinations. Anything that made me even hungrier or hornier than I already was had to go, and I found the mild hallucinations more terrifying than entertaining. My mother was manic-depressive. If my brain cracked, I wanted it to be of its own genetically cursed accord, not because I smoked the funny green stuff.
Conspiracy, of course, continued to smoke regularly, as he probably had since before I was born.
It lit a flame under his already glowing smokestack of paranoia and grandiosity. His eyes darting from left to right, Conspiracy would recount some of his misadventures as a 1970s counterrevolutionary, sometimes backing up his recollections with cold, hard evidence – a box full of blacked-out FBI surveillance reports documenting his every move, obtained under the Freedom of Information act.
Other times, the pot convinced him that he had other-worldly powers. One evening, we strolled through the Yale campus after he'd smoked up. We approached a flickering streetlamp, and Conspiracy stopped, transfixed.
Periodically waving his arms and gaping in awe, he exclaimed, "Look! I'm commanding this streetlamp. See? When I move my arms up, the light goes out."
No, I definitely did not like pot.
I sighed and suffered in silence. I did a lot of silent suffering in that relationship.
2 comments:
I hallucinated Abraham Lincoln on my wall once. I knew this shit is potent and I loved that moment. Also I realized, if I enjoyed it too much, I might just want to do it again and again. I stopped.
Also, another reason, I smoked up with friends whom I couldnt sleep with. Damn! What could I do feeling horny! ;)
Kisses.
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