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.
____________
Keith Hansen
Review by Dave Mehler
I’ve known Keith for thirty years now, and one of the fun or funniest things about this piece is how like and yet how different it is as a representation of the man I have known. It’s recognizably Keith, but also not at all representative of the man he would become: good husband, father of four great kids, doting grandfather, successful businessman who went out of his way to care for his employees as a contractor, paying them even when work was slow or especially nonexistent, an autodidact and good writer, musicologist, school board member, church elder, a person with so many many good, close friends. The authenticity of this piece shines because Keith is humble enough to try to honestly re-enact the unvarnished thoughts and attitudes of his younger self, and the touches of humor, self-abdegnation and truth-telling make it all the more readable. This piece only works as short prose, would not carry with line breaks, and finds itself in that hybrid zone of not easily categorizable genre writing that has elements of fiction, memoir and prose poem in it. To me the distinction ceases to matter–it could be all three or only one. One of my arguments against line breaks in a poem is when they would damage the piece of writing–it becomes lesser with them. This is one of my tests. I would place this up there with BH Fairchild–an elder for both Keith and me as a poet. Specifically the poem, “In a Cafe near Tuba City, Arizona, Beating My Head against a Cigarette Machine.” This comparison is the highest praise I can think of, and it fits.