My brother had been trying to turn me on to pot for quite some time. Each time he visited me, he would pull out a pipe and light up, much to my horror and consternation. I was convinced that I was going to be busted because he was smoking in my home. I would be innocent, but busted.
Finally, though, I decided I was being a little pigheaded about the whole thing. He had worn down my resistance. I might as well do it, just to get it over with. It so happened that I was visiting with my brother on the Fourth of July. It happened to be a Thursday night. I know this, because Star Trek was on. It was a summer repeat but still in its original first run on NBC.
My brother lit up the pipe with what passed for good pot in that early period. I took a toke, and immediately coughed right back into the pipe, causing the entire bowlful of grass to explode into the air. My brother was horrified. Crap, I had never even smoked a cigarette before.
I apologized for my social faux paux, then tried again. I got the hang of it and soon the four of us, both brothers, both wives, had plowed through several bowls of marijuana.
Before long we were really enjoying that Star Trek episode, one of those ones about a God computer controlling an entire society. I think it was Landrew.
By the end of the episode I was looking at wifey #1 with more interest than usual. I was horny! She was too. We made a trip upstairs, and then I discovered what pot was really good for. It wasn't long afterward that we had our first (of many) pot-fired orgasms.
After that, we left the house and went to view the local Fourth of July fireworks. We sat on someone's lawn, smoking pot and laughing hysterically. View Star Trek, get laid, watch fireworks. I became a head in a single night.
What you learn about marijuana is: everything is better. Even if it isn't better, it's better. Perception is everything. Almost every negative critical impulse you have just flies away in the face of a good grass high.
The food you are eating is the best you ever tasted and you can't get enough of it. (That's the big one. 'The munchies' aren't just a rumor, you know. I can't tell you the number of times during the years that I made a mad dash to the grocery store or 7-Eleven at 10:00 at night just to buy a Tastykake Chocolate Junior.) The sex you are currently engaged in is the wildest. The music you are listening to is the best.
Conversation is the most intellectual, the most stimulating, the most original. You say things that you've never said before and then you say to yourself, "Wow! Did I just say that?" You are convinced that you've solved the problems of the universe.
Time and time again I can remember the 'morning after' a get-together with friends, knowing that we had made some truly profound discoveries the previous night, if only we could remember what the fuck they were.
One day I resolved to force myself to remember. We were having a get-together that evening (shit we had a get-together every evening!) to smoke, talk, drink, laugh, listen to music, and when we split from our friends, fuck.
This time I was going to be prepared. I carried a paper and pen. When we said these profound things, I was going to write them down! Oh, yes, we'd capture those profound utterances for eternity this time.
This next morning, I remembered. I remembered I had written our most important discoveries on a piece of paper. Now, if I could only find out where I put the damn thing. Sure enough, it was sitting right where I left it, on the coffee table in our living room.
Written in shaky but bold letters: "The room smells funny."
My brother demonstrated to me pot's second greatest attraction. Sitting me down by my stereo and putting a set of headphones on me, he queued up the Moody Blues Album In Search of the Lost Chord. This might have been the first album specifically designed for potheads. There were birds chirping. They started in your left ear, made a bee-line directly through the center of your brain, then exited out the right ear. There were sounds like sonar tracking a submarine circling through your brain. What a trip. There was the greatest of all drug-related songs Legend of a Mind (even better than White Rabbit). Hey, it may have been an anti-drug song, but it was still best when listened to high. Wonder how the Moodies felt about that?
It's still one of my favorite albums, over thirty years later.
We were living out in the middle of nowhere in a neat hundred year-old house. Actually, the middle of nowhere was the big city of about 8,000 people about ten miles away from us. We lived in a suburb of the middle of nowhere.
My drunken slut wife worked most evenings, leaving me home alone to take care of the kids. At that time I knew she was a drunk but only suspected she was a slut.
I was still pretty much a weekender kind of smoker. My sources weren't that good, so I didn't have access to that much pot. And I was trying to keep things in perspective, not become a heavy user.
Still, at this time, Thursday evenings had Kung Fu on at nine o'clock, followed by the Hollywood Bowl at ten. I'm here to tell you that the Hollywood Bowl was un-watchable straight, but high it was an all-time classic. Don't know why. There were scantily clad chorus girls. Sammy Davis, Jr. would be singing and dancing. What a rush. And of course, the original Kung Fu was a must-see.
Our bedroom was on the first floor across a hall from the living room. We had this terrific front porch. It was huge, the perfect place to sit out on a summer night, get high, and watch the teenagers cruise up and down Main Street. And there were these big windows on the front of the house that came down almost to the floor.
I was sitting on my bed with a joint, preparing for Thursday night TV. The kids were bathed and in bed. Kung Fu was going to start any minute. Life was going to be good. I had the shades pulled on our windows about three-quarters of the way down.
Sitting there I suddenly heard the distinctive sound of someone walking onto my porch. I looked up in time to see a pair of legs move past my window towards the front door. And those legs were wearing blue pants with a yellow stripe down the side!
My life was passing in front of me. But no, the legs turned around and started to walk off. I thought I was safe. But of course, the legs turned back and walked purposefully toward my door. Then I heard the knocking.
Caught! I couldn't pretend I wasn't there. The lights were on; my TV was going in the living room; my car was parked in the back. But the place smelled like pot. And I was already high.
What to do? I went to the door to answer it like a man going to his own execution. I opened the door wide enough to get through it, stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind me, holding the doorknob behind my back.
It was the town cop. This was a little town, only a few hundred people. He lived behind my house in a trailer along with his wife, one of those women with a magnificent body but who looked like her face had caught fire and someone had stamped it out with a track shoe. Her teeth went in about ten different directions but her eyes only went in two. She went around town bra-less in a tee shirt that said, "Candy is dandy, but sex don't rot your teeth".
Anyway, her husband wasn't too bright, but he was still a cop. We are standing there on my front porch and he says, "I found a dead black cat in the street. I think it's yours. I've got it in the trunk of my car. Want to take a look at it?"
Now, I knew it wasn't my cat. I had seen my cat only a few minutes before, though true, it was outside. And if it was or wasn't my cat, I certainly didn't want to look at it dead.
Before I had a chance to respond, the situation took a bizarre turn. We both looked across the road in time to see a stray dog come trotting down the street.
It was a huge German Shepard. This dog took one look at us and came like a shot, running for all it was worth straight towards us, teeth bared and growling.
The cop panicked. He made a dive for my door and tried to run inside my house. But I had a death grip on the doorknob.
He was pushing the door open; I was pulling it shut, while the Hound of the Baskervilles was going into attack mode, apparently planning to rip someone's lungs out.
I did the only thing I could think of. I attacked the dog. I ran screaming directly at the German Shepard. It was apparently the last thing the dog expected. It turned around and ran like hell. I thought my heart was going to stop.
The cop and I composed ourselves for a minute or two, then the cop said, "Well, let's go look at the cat" and proceeded to try to open my door again, with the intent of going through my house to the back, where his car was parked.
Again I pulled the door shut and said, "Let's go around the house." So I had to go to the back and have a viewing for this car-flattened cat just to appease the cop. Unfortunately it wasn't my cat, which as far as I was concerned made it just about the perfect evening all around. I hated that fucking cat.
I went back in my house to watch my Thursday night lineup. Thank God for Sammy Davis, Jr.
A
We had been smoking dope one evening when we decided we needed to go to the liquor store to pick up a bottle of wine. So my wife and I piled into the car for the long trek to the store that was in a town about ten miles away.
We had been driving for quite a while when I began to feel strange, disoriented. Nothing looked quite right. I knew something was wrong. I couldn't quite identify where we were. Finally I figured it out and it scared me.
I looked at my wife and said, "Somebody has turned around all of the signs! They're all backwards!"
She looked at me with disgust. "We've already been to the liquor store, you idiot. Now we're going home." Whew. That cleared things up for me.
B
We had been without grass for several weeks. Everyone was getting desperate, but our suppliers were dry.
One evening a knock comes on my door. It's my buddy. He says, "I can't stand this anymore. I know you, Wiggin, you're an idiot. We're going to search your house. You stashed something away somewhere and forgot all about it. We're going to tear this fucking house apart until we find it."
Now I guess I should have been insulted. On the other hand, I figured, I know me too, maybe he is right. So we started going through the nooks and crannies, the drawers and special hiding places.
Finally he says, "Let's look in your clothes closet. We have to go through your pockets." So up we went; pulling out my pants; digging in the pockets.
In the inside pocket of a sports jacket of mine I never wore was a piece of tin foil surrounding a hefty chunk of hash!
We ran downstairs. We didn't bother with all those hash rituals one used to go through. Take a razor blade, slice off a piece, etc. We put the whole damn chunk in a pipe and wailed away. We both got shit-faced.
C
Come to think of it, something similar happened to me at another time. I was doing something in my laundry room and saw a paper bag sitting on a shelf. Just for curiosity I opened the bag and found an entire ounce of grass in a baggy. At that time, buying an ounce of grass was a big event for me, so no matter how fucked up I got, I should never have lost a whole ounce. To this day I have no idea where that grass came from.
D
I had gotten a new stereo system and was I proud! I called my buddy over after the kids were asleep. We did a couple of joints and prepared to listen to my new baby. I didn't notice my buddy clandestinely turn the volume up to maximum on both speakers. We sat down on my couch, high as kites, and started listening to Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, specifically "A Day in the Life".
As the song moved towards that crescendo in the end, it was getting weird in my living room. I knew something was wrong. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I knew something was wrong.
The glass in my windows was vibrating. I think blood started coming from my ears. Suddenly, my wife came downstairs (she had been sleeping) and said, "Will you turn that damn thing down! They can hear you in Afghanistan!"
That's when I figured out what was wrong. My buddy was giggling up a storm. I swear my speakers were never the same after that.
E
I was dating the future wifey #2. She was a sweet innocent little southern chick who had probably done about two joints of grass in her life.
I was looking for something to spice up our sex life a little bit, so I suggested we do some honey slides and then go to an X-rated movie theatre. Surprisingly, she agreed to both ideas, even though she had never done either before.
Honey slides involve heating some cleaned pot on a skillet, then pouring it onto a spoonful of honey and sucking it down your throat in one short slurp. The effect isn't instantaneous. It usually takes about a half hour for them to hit you. So we got in the car and drove to this sleazy theatre about twenty minutes from her apartment.
We sat watching the movie. Neither of us was feeling a damn thing, and by the way, the movie was disgusting. Well, maybe it wouldn't have been quite so bad if I had been by myself, but my girlfriend was a bit of a prude (still is) and was not comfortable watching Linda Lovelace deep throat Harry Rheems.
We decided to drive home, a little bummed out by the events of the evening. I had wasted a lot of good grass, not seen the movie, not made it with my girlfriend. Life sucked.
Boy was I lucky we decided to go home, because 15 minutes after we got back, the honey slides kicked in. If we had waited any longer, I would never have found my way home. We were shit-faced.
My prudish girlfriend turned into a wild woman. We fucked. And we fucked. At four o'clock in the morning she woke me up and we fucked again. We made it four times in six hours, which remains our all time record after twenty-five years. I said she is a bit of a prude.
I had a meeting with the president of our company at 8:00 in the morning. It had never occurred to me the previous evening that the honey slides could possibly last that long. Whenever I did them before, the effects were long gone by the following day.
Perhaps I had overestimated the amount of pot I needed. I met with the president and vice-president of our company for an hour, stoned out of my mind. I don't know what they were talking about. I don't know what I responded.
They didn't seem to notice, so maybe I always acted to them like I was fucked up, who knows?
I left and spent the day programming at a customer location, then at the end of the day made my way back to the office. My girlfriend worked for the same company, so I thought I would stop by and see how she was making out.
When I walked into the office a buddy of mine came up and asked "Hey, Andrew, what's the matter with Emily?"
"What do you mean? Is something wrong?" I asked.
He led me to her office, opened the door and we peaked in. There she sat. Her chair was turned facing the wall, which was not more than two feet away from her face. She was leaning slightly forward, staring at the wall, not moving, not blinking, not doing anything.
My buddy said "She's been like that since nine o'clock this morning."
It was the late seventies and I was living in a major metropolitan area, working as a computer consultant. I had this terrific contract doing work for the American division of a French manufacturer, whose name is relatively well known but will remain nameless for obvious reasons.
I was working for the financial VP writing programs for projections and budgets and all kinds of such crap. Hey, it was steady work, the money was excellent, and almost every spear-carrier in the place was a pothead. As I said, it was the late seventies.
One morning the VP came to me and said, "Hey Andrew, let's do lunch."
I said reasonably, "but it's only ten-thirty in the morning."
"No problem", says he. "I just want to talk about some things I want you to work on. I'm buying."
'Nuff said as far as I was concerned. He was paying my check, after all, and he was my boss on the job. About 4:30 that afternoon, my wife called the company to ask me something. She was told that I was out to lunch.
She said "why is he taking such a late lunch?"
They said, "He left at ten-thirty this morning."
I crawled home on my hands and knees. That's when I discovered that the VP was a major league drinker.
After that, whenever he asked me to go to lunch, I already had some other pressing engagement.
But I liked the guy and felt bad for him. He had this great, but high-pressure job. He made a ton of money. He had a nice house with a swimming pool built right into the patio that came off of the back door. And yet he drank like a fish. He was drunk in the afternoons, that was a given.
Then I made a fatal decision. What if I turned him on to grass? I could help him get over this self-destructive drinking problem and give him his life back.
I felt very holy, knowing that I could rescue this guy. So one day I went to lunch with him.
I said, "Instead of drinking, how about we do a few bowls of pot."
He was several years older than me, one of that generation who just never got the chance to do pot. You know the type. The kind who can stand there in their suit coats and black shoes with a glass of beer and in all seriousness tell you that there hasn't been any good music on the radio since 1963.
But this guy was at least adventurous. He agreed to smoke dope immediately.
Next to my first marriage, this was probably the biggest single mistake of my life. My staid but drunken VP instantly became the most reckless and relentless doper I have even known.
I was right about the liquor. He didn't have time for liquor anymore. He only wanted to get high. At nine-thirty in the morning he would come back to the data processing department where I did my programming and say, "Hey guy, let's go out in the parking lot for a while." And he wouldn't take no for an answer.
There were a number of heads in this company, and I volunteered to pick up some pot for everyone, since by this time I had a good source. Talk about the good old days, you could get a pound of pot for about $175.
I made my contact, picked up a pound of grass, and brought it back to the company. Now, there were about twelve or thirteen people involved, most of them getting an ounce apiece. I certainly wasn't pushing or anything. We all were going to share equally in the per ounce cost.
But I mentioned to the VP that I had the stuff, knowing that he was to get an ounce. He said, "Good. Don't tell anyone else about this, I want it all." He gave me the money, took the pot (he didn't even let me have some!) and that was that. From that point on, I never saw him straight again.
I guess that he had an addictive personality and was going to fuck up his life no matter what. But I sure feel guilty about my part in that fucking. Especially since I was directly affected by it.
I had been working diligently for months preparing the projections for the coming year. All of the executives were to go to France to present their financial plans to the corporate muckity-mucks. I gave all the reports to the VP as the honchos were leaving for France the next morning.
Only, this guy got high and missed the Concorde. The other
executives showed up in France with no projections and no Financial VP.
Shit hit fan. He lost job. I lost contract. What a cluster-fuck. I
swore off Good Samaritanism for eternity.