Doug Roy, Vaulting, Cut Paper
Dope
It was on my sixteenth attempt (yes, I kept count) that I finally got indisputably, certifiably, stoned. At the time, it seemed to be nothing short of a chemical Pentecost but, like the poet says, “Everything starts in mysticism and ends in politics” or something equally banal.
I’d been just about ready to give up on the whole process, tired of spending precious cash (I was fifteen with limited means) and being paranoid about getting caught (it was 1971 and you could do time for possession). Each time I smoked the cheap ditch weed I was able to get I would strain my senses, trying to detect the slightest physical or mental change, like a tuned antenna scanning deep space for alien signals or a monk in great silence, awaiting the whisper of God. All I’d gotten so far was a headache, and lungs burning from the funnels of smoke I’d forced into them.
This time I was with my friend Marty. We were at the home of a guy who wasn’t really what you’d call a friend, just someone we went to school with and could get dope from. It was a home very different from ours’. Roy’s dad was dead, and his mom didn’t care if we smoked pot in the house. My guess is she didn’t care about much of anything after her husband shot himself in the garage and Roy and his brother were the first to find him. Her oldest son had come home from Viet Nam a heroin addict. He’s the one that got Roy the hash. She was gone every time I dropped by, working long hours I guess, strung out on grief.
We each shelled out a five-dollar bill to buy a couple of grams. Neither of us had smoked hash before. We’d heard it was pretty strong, but in light of our previous experience, the skeptical look we gave each other when we unwrapped the Chiclet-sized, blackish-brown squares from their tin foil cloaks said, “This is it. If this doesn’t work, no more: ‘We don’t get fooled again!’”
Roy took out a pocketknife, quartered a gram, then dropped two of the pieces into the bowl of a pipe, crudely improvised out of some tin foil and the cardboard tube from a toilet paper roll. He lit the hash and took a couple of long hits, enough to get the lumps glowing like pieces of incense, then passed the pipe to me and got up to put on a record and go into the kitchen to find something cold to drink. Marty and I each took a couple of drags, holding the smoke down as long as we could. It was denser and spicier than what we’d experienced with leaf. We kept looking at each other quizzically, our eyes asking, “You feelin’ it yet?” After my fourth or fifth toke I settled back into the couch, passed the pipe to Marty, then crossed my arms and exhaled what seemed an endless stream of smoke that flowed down over my chest like a great beard, then fanned out into a delta across my feet.
I knew something was up when I found myself staring down at my shoes for so long I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing before I first looked at them. My range of vision seemed to have shrunk to within a yard or so beyond my body, but my feet appeared to be a great distance below me. They didn’t feel connected to me, but I knew they were. They seemed like objects viewed down in the street from a balcony fifteen stories high.
Just as puzzling was the fact that, despite their being so far away from me, I could see their suede leather surface in astonishing detail; each fiber stood out as individual and distinct as a stalk of grain. And the more I stared at these stalks the broader the fields they stood in grew until I found myself high up in the cab of a combine looking down on the header below as it chewed its thirty-foot swath through the field, but the stalks got thicker, and the machine choked, shuddered, stalled, and I kept turning the engine over and over again, waiting for it to catch before I realized the noise it was making was really Led Zeppelin grinding their way through Heartbreaker which I hadn’t recognized because it sounded as if someone had put a finger on the spinning record and slowed it down then broadcast the sound through water and, like water, the surface of the trance finally broke and I realized I was stoned, sitting on a hideous floral-patterned couch, helpless to staunch the twilight leaching, like smoke, into this sad, orphaned house.
But that’s not really what I thought then, though I think it now.
Then I thought, “Wow, I’m wasted and we’d better start walking home.” I know I didn’t like the “feel” of Roy’s place, but I’d gotten what I wanted. My home had its problems- why else would a kid be so doggedly trying to get high? But, strange as it seems, one gets used to one’s own problems. They seem familiar.
There were no drugs, no booze, no shouting or cursing, no violence in my home. My father went to work, and my mother stayed home.
Unlike Roy’s house, we had blood on our lintel. We were a Christian family.
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Keith Hansen