I remember all three puffs vividly. I remember who I was with, where I was and what I was doing. But before I recall those puffs for you, let me give you some background.
I grew up, thankfully it seems, with a parent that droned into my head that marijuana usage led to heroin and heroin led to prostitution. In my mother’s mind it was all a train ride to hell. What I was never informed of was how it was obtained. My teenage years never saw the stuff beyond standing at bus stops, or at social gatherings where someone would inevitably, with an arm outstretched and a joint pinched between thumb and forefinger, would say: Do you want a hit?
I’d never been present when someone actually purchased marijuana and no one had ever offered me a ‘hit’ in exchange for money. It just never happened, so I never put two and two together that marijuana actually cost money. It was always presented to me like a garden yielding too many zucchini’s to eat; you shared the bounty. So when I was fifteen, and asked if I could and wanted to ‘get rid’ of some pot I cheerfully said: Sure. A week later I was given a small shopping bag with about 20 ‘lids’ enclosed within. They were called lids back then and they very well may still be called this but I can’t tell you how much a lid weighs or even what the word pertains to. All I can tell you is it’s in a sandwich bag and about the size of half a whole salami. Everywhere I went pot was smoked. Everywhere. And not once did I see money exchanged. So where in the world was I supposed to get the idea that money was supposed to be exchanged?
Everyone I asked declared that they would love to have some pot, and I cheerfully handed over lids of pot to people who appeared to be grateful and kind to me. In my mind I was being generous and thoughtful. Filling the needs of those without. Keeping the chain of sharing alive and well.
Never mind how I got out of having to explain to the guy who gave me the lids that I had collected no money. Suffice to say, fifty years later, I’ve lived to tell the story. Often, when I tell that story, if the listener is high on pot they laugh riotously— if they’re not— I usually get asked: Where are you from?
Marijuana, for me, was never something I found even vaguely interesting and I have a morbid fear of ingesting anything that I can’t reverse out of my body should it cause a sensation I don’t like. The idea of having to ride something out until it dissipates holds no appeal for me. Furthermore, I have found the consumption of pot in others to render one not unlike an overripe banana. Every pot head thinks they can function while high on pot but I’m here to tell you on my end all I can think of is, Flowers For Algernon, as I witness you slip back into idiocy. It’s not a lot of intellectual fun to be around pot heads when you’re not indulging yourself. You’ll find yourself suddenly alone in a room, in possession of the last functioning brain. People on pot, in my experience, never seem to talk about anything that makes sense or has a purpose. Maybe that’s the point. I don’t know.
Back in the seventies I was living in Ashland, Oregon. I had a dear friend who went by the name of Barbara. She and I got it into our collective head to hitchhike to San Francisco which, on a Friday, we did, and to my recollection it was the last good day to hitchhike in America before it became the mode of death for serial killers. We got two rides on our way down. Once in a Karmann Ghia which took us all the way to Yreka and the second ride, which took us all the way to Frisco in a VW Bug.
When we arrived in the city by the bay, it was the dead of night and I called my friend Sir, whom I had woken up from sleep, but who nonetheless came to get us. He scooped us up in his own blue Karmann Ghia and drove us to his home where we immediately fell to sleep. I don’t remember what we did while we were in San Francisco those few hours but I remember vividly he drove us to Vacaville claiming that rides back to Ashland would be better from there. When he dropped us off he handed Barbara and I a joint. Something he defined as being ‘Acapulco gold’. Again it was the dead of night as we stood waiting on a desolate highway wondering if anyone would come to our rescue and carry us home. We were exhausted and had to be at work in a few hours. I lit the joint and took a puff. The calm that came over me was a wonderful colour of blue grey. The silence of a highway with no cars has a pleasing sound. I felt in love with adventure, I felt strong as a woman, I felt determined and capable. I was pleasantly high. We eventually got a ride from a young trucker headed north. He took us all the way home. Barbara immediately fell to sleep in his cubby hole and I felt an immediate responsibility to remain awake protecting her from any danger that might befall us. When we were finally dropped off in Ashland, Barbara was rested and able to go to work whereas I was exhausted and bleary-eyed. There was plenty left to the joint Sir had given us and I dismantled it to see why he might have described it as ‘gold’. Indeed it was a colour, blondish, that I had never seen before and the only thing I tucked away in my future reference was that all pot was not the same somehow as this pot was a completely different colour from the earlier pot I had given away.
Years passed and pot passed me by on its rounds to the next person sitting to my left and right. I learned how to roll my own cigarettes because of pot. I felt left out of those circles of passing joints as I never wanted a puff. So I asked my dear friend Simon if I could at least be responsible for rolling the joint everyone was to puff from. I got the job, and I got so good at it that people praised my talent for being able to roll joints that didn’t ‘look pregnant’ as others often described them; joints they had smoked that were fat in the middle and thin at the ends. I was proud of this fact and in time I got the reputation as the one you needed to go to and ask to roll a joint. When I was queried as to why I didn’t smoke I simply replied: I just like to roll.
Even more years passed and at that time I was living in The Bronx. I am not sure of the circumstances of how I acquired the joint, but I found myself alone in my apartment with one. I lit it up, puffed away and was immediately consumed with paranoia. I couldn’t shake the feeling. I was alone in my own apartment and paranoid. No amount of rational thinking could quell the feeling. It was awful. I shared the apartment with two cats and suddenly the cats seemed out to get me. The experience was so traumatic that I vowed never to smoke again. And I didn’t for many years to come.
I’m not sure where the next story fits in chronologically but I was up in Vancouver, BC with some of my siblings. My mother was dating a Dutch guy. We were playing Scrabble in teams and the Dutch guys suddenly asks if we would like to smoke some pot. I immediately shot a glance to my mother expecting her to be at first horrified and secondly to throw the Dutch guy out of the house. To my surprise, she giggled and put up not a smidgeon of protest. According to the Dutch guy he had found some pot in his guitar case that he’d forgotten about from years earlier. He brought it out and handed it to one of my brother’s to roll. We were all in the kitchen at this time. Once the joint was rolled it was lit and passed around. The roller, of course, got first dibs, and then it was passed to the Dutch guy and then to my mother who was to the left of me standing in front of the refrigerator. My mother took the kind of puff someone who has never smoked anything takes, holding it with two hands, and looking at the end of the joint like it was a puzzle piece perhaps not suited to fit with her mouth. She took her puffs and declared that pot didn’t affect her. She quickly added that we all must be surprised to be smoking with our mother to which my witty brother quickly and jokingly replied: I’ve never seen the stuff before until now, which caused my mother to laugh so hard that she slid down the side of the refrigerator to the floor in convulsive laughter. The joint was handed to me but there was no way I was going to cloud my memory from this historic moment and I passed it back to the roller.
I came away from that encounter with a host of feelings and questions which never got answered. Was my mother a pot head? How come my mother could smoke pot and stay away from heroin? Did she know that I had never seen her laugh so hard as I did that day? How did she have the nerve to smoke pot in front of me after all those horror stories she regaled me with? It all remains a mystery to this day.
More years passed and I attended a party with Simon at his parents’ home in Sneden’s Landing. Why I chose this moment to try pot again I will never know, but try it again I did. We were all crowded around the bathroom door admiring the mural of The Birth Of Venus which Simon had just replicated and completed on his parents bathroom wall. Something about the manner in which Venus appeared to be clutching her pelvic area made me remember I was on my period and that it was a good time as any to openly discuss my menstruation problems in great detail. Simon being Simon, later, simply said: It’s perhaps a good idea that you had the forethought to refrain from smoking.
That was a good thirty years ago and I can’t say I’ve missed much.
Pot has come a long way since then. Now, it seems, one can go to a store complaining of elbow pain and a customer service personnel will leap to your aid holding a sample of pot that only deals with elbow pain. There’s talk of body highs versus head highs. You can say: No paranoia please, and a jar is lifted from a shelf and placed under your nose for you to sniff your approval. I’m still suspect.
But lately I have been listening to the experiences of others who use pot to alleviate issues relating to mental health with some even claiming they’d go mental if they didn’t smoke, so I’m curious again about the world of pot. From Facebook I’ve learned that people slightly older than myself have been the biggest champions of it being legalised. I’ve learned from my mother that heroin and prostitution are not necessarily an inevitable outcome or side effect from partaking in this communal practice, but I’m not so sure my ego can come to terms with my entering my senior years with a pot habit. I mean, after all, will it go along and fit with the persona I’ve created —sixty one years in the making? My biggest fear is taking up the habit and a day later being asked to present a hair follicle for pot testing. Is it the end that is dry and brittle or the end straight from the confines of my head that is tested? If I’m found guilty, do they take into account the other three inches of hair that didn’t smoke or am I discarded and placed into the category of pot smoker? It’s question like these that make me think pot is better suited to those that don’t think so much.
I grew up, thankfully it seems, with a parent that droned into my head that marijuana usage led to heroin and heroin led to prostitution. In my mother’s mind it was all a train ride to hell. What I was never informed of was how it was obtained. My teenage years never saw the stuff beyond standing at bus stops, or at social gatherings where someone would inevitably, with an arm outstretched and a joint pinched between thumb and forefinger, would say: Do you want a hit?
I’d never been present when someone actually purchased marijuana and no one had ever offered me a ‘hit’ in exchange for money. It just never happened, so I never put two and two together that marijuana actually cost money. It was always presented to me like a garden yielding too many zucchini’s to eat; you shared the bounty. So when I was fifteen, and asked if I could and wanted to ‘get rid’ of some pot I cheerfully said: Sure. A week later I was given a small shopping bag with about 20 ‘lids’ enclosed within. They were called lids back then and they very well may still be called this but I can’t tell you how much a lid weighs or even what the word pertains to. All I can tell you is it’s in a sandwich bag and about the size of half a whole salami. Everywhere I went pot was smoked. Everywhere. And not once did I see money exchanged. So where in the world was I supposed to get the idea that money was supposed to be exchanged?
Everyone I asked declared that they would love to have some pot, and I cheerfully handed over lids of pot to people who appeared to be grateful and kind to me. In my mind I was being generous and thoughtful. Filling the needs of those without. Keeping the chain of sharing alive and well.
Never mind how I got out of having to explain to the guy who gave me the lids that I had collected no money. Suffice to say, fifty years later, I’ve lived to tell the story. Often, when I tell that story, if the listener is high on pot they laugh riotously— if they’re not— I usually get asked: Where are you from?
Marijuana, for me, was never something I found even vaguely interesting and I have a morbid fear of ingesting anything that I can’t reverse out of my body should it cause a sensation I don’t like. The idea of having to ride something out until it dissipates holds no appeal for me. Furthermore, I have found the consumption of pot in others to render one not unlike an overripe banana. Every pot head thinks they can function while high on pot but I’m here to tell you on my end all I can think of is, Flowers For Algernon, as I witness you slip back into idiocy. It’s not a lot of intellectual fun to be around pot heads when you’re not indulging yourself. You’ll find yourself suddenly alone in a room, in possession of the last functioning brain. People on pot, in my experience, never seem to talk about anything that makes sense or has a purpose. Maybe that’s the point. I don’t know.
Back in the seventies I was living in Ashland, Oregon. I had a dear friend who went by the name of Barbara. She and I got it into our collective head to hitchhike to San Francisco which, on a Friday, we did, and to my recollection it was the last good day to hitchhike in America before it became the mode of death for serial killers. We got two rides on our way down. Once in a Karmann Ghia which took us all the way to Yreka and the second ride, which took us all the way to Frisco in a VW Bug.
When we arrived in the city by the bay, it was the dead of night and I called my friend Sir, whom I had woken up from sleep, but who nonetheless came to get us. He scooped us up in his own blue Karmann Ghia and drove us to his home where we immediately fell to sleep. I don’t remember what we did while we were in San Francisco those few hours but I remember vividly he drove us to Vacaville claiming that rides back to Ashland would be better from there. When he dropped us off he handed Barbara and I a joint. Something he defined as being ‘Acapulco gold’. Again it was the dead of night as we stood waiting on a desolate highway wondering if anyone would come to our rescue and carry us home. We were exhausted and had to be at work in a few hours. I lit the joint and took a puff. The calm that came over me was a wonderful colour of blue grey. The silence of a highway with no cars has a pleasing sound. I felt in love with adventure, I felt strong as a woman, I felt determined and capable. I was pleasantly high. We eventually got a ride from a young trucker headed north. He took us all the way home. Barbara immediately fell to sleep in his cubby hole and I felt an immediate responsibility to remain awake protecting her from any danger that might befall us. When we were finally dropped off in Ashland, Barbara was rested and able to go to work whereas I was exhausted and bleary-eyed. There was plenty left to the joint Sir had given us and I dismantled it to see why he might have described it as ‘gold’. Indeed it was a colour, blondish, that I had never seen before and the only thing I tucked away in my future reference was that all pot was not the same somehow as this pot was a completely different colour from the earlier pot I had given away.
Years passed and pot passed me by on its rounds to the next person sitting to my left and right. I learned how to roll my own cigarettes because of pot. I felt left out of those circles of passing joints as I never wanted a puff. So I asked my dear friend Simon if I could at least be responsible for rolling the joint everyone was to puff from. I got the job, and I got so good at it that people praised my talent for being able to roll joints that didn’t ‘look pregnant’ as others often described them; joints they had smoked that were fat in the middle and thin at the ends. I was proud of this fact and in time I got the reputation as the one you needed to go to and ask to roll a joint. When I was queried as to why I didn’t smoke I simply replied: I just like to roll.
Even more years passed and at that time I was living in The Bronx. I am not sure of the circumstances of how I acquired the joint, but I found myself alone in my apartment with one. I lit it up, puffed away and was immediately consumed with paranoia. I couldn’t shake the feeling. I was alone in my own apartment and paranoid. No amount of rational thinking could quell the feeling. It was awful. I shared the apartment with two cats and suddenly the cats seemed out to get me. The experience was so traumatic that I vowed never to smoke again. And I didn’t for many years to come.
I’m not sure where the next story fits in chronologically but I was up in Vancouver, BC with some of my siblings. My mother was dating a Dutch guy. We were playing Scrabble in teams and the Dutch guys suddenly asks if we would like to smoke some pot. I immediately shot a glance to my mother expecting her to be at first horrified and secondly to throw the Dutch guy out of the house. To my surprise, she giggled and put up not a smidgeon of protest. According to the Dutch guy he had found some pot in his guitar case that he’d forgotten about from years earlier. He brought it out and handed it to one of my brother’s to roll. We were all in the kitchen at this time. Once the joint was rolled it was lit and passed around. The roller, of course, got first dibs, and then it was passed to the Dutch guy and then to my mother who was to the left of me standing in front of the refrigerator. My mother took the kind of puff someone who has never smoked anything takes, holding it with two hands, and looking at the end of the joint like it was a puzzle piece perhaps not suited to fit with her mouth. She took her puffs and declared that pot didn’t affect her. She quickly added that we all must be surprised to be smoking with our mother to which my witty brother quickly and jokingly replied: I’ve never seen the stuff before until now, which caused my mother to laugh so hard that she slid down the side of the refrigerator to the floor in convulsive laughter. The joint was handed to me but there was no way I was going to cloud my memory from this historic moment and I passed it back to the roller.
I came away from that encounter with a host of feelings and questions which never got answered. Was my mother a pot head? How come my mother could smoke pot and stay away from heroin? Did she know that I had never seen her laugh so hard as I did that day? How did she have the nerve to smoke pot in front of me after all those horror stories she regaled me with? It all remains a mystery to this day.
More years passed and I attended a party with Simon at his parents’ home in Sneden’s Landing. Why I chose this moment to try pot again I will never know, but try it again I did. We were all crowded around the bathroom door admiring the mural of The Birth Of Venus which Simon had just replicated and completed on his parents bathroom wall. Something about the manner in which Venus appeared to be clutching her pelvic area made me remember I was on my period and that it was a good time as any to openly discuss my menstruation problems in great detail. Simon being Simon, later, simply said: It’s perhaps a good idea that you had the forethought to refrain from smoking.
That was a good thirty years ago and I can’t say I’ve missed much.
Pot has come a long way since then. Now, it seems, one can go to a store complaining of elbow pain and a customer service personnel will leap to your aid holding a sample of pot that only deals with elbow pain. There’s talk of body highs versus head highs. You can say: No paranoia please, and a jar is lifted from a shelf and placed under your nose for you to sniff your approval. I’m still suspect.
But lately I have been listening to the experiences of others who use pot to alleviate issues relating to mental health with some even claiming they’d go mental if they didn’t smoke, so I’m curious again about the world of pot. From Facebook I’ve learned that people slightly older than myself have been the biggest champions of it being legalised. I’ve learned from my mother that heroin and prostitution are not necessarily an inevitable outcome or side effect from partaking in this communal practice, but I’m not so sure my ego can come to terms with my entering my senior years with a pot habit. I mean, after all, will it go along and fit with the persona I’ve created —sixty one years in the making? My biggest fear is taking up the habit and a day later being asked to present a hair follicle for pot testing. Is it the end that is dry and brittle or the end straight from the confines of my head that is tested? If I’m found guilty, do they take into account the other three inches of hair that didn’t smoke or am I discarded and placed into the category of pot smoker? It’s question like these that make me think pot is better suited to those that don’t think so much.
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