Everything We Don't Know Page 6

  I opened my eyes while lying on the road and felt sick.

  After untold dizzying minutes, Dean and I decided it was best to try to get some rest. We had a full day of driving the next day, and staying in the hills wasn’t easing our discomfort. With wobbly legs and dilated pupils, we stood up and drove down the mountain.

  None of the town’s few gas station and grocery store parking lots felt safe, so we parked on the dirt shoulder of a rural road. Neither of us knew if angel dust precluded sleep, but we lowered the front seats anyway, spread blankets over our partially dressed bodies, drank a beer, and closed our eyes.

  Right as I started to doze, Dean nudged my shoulder. “Did you feel that?” he said.

  I looked out from under the pillow, said, “What?”

  “The car move.” He sat up. Blankets fell around him. “It felt like something rammed the car, like another car.”

  We cupped our hands on the cool glass and stared through the windows without unrolling them. Darkness spilled around us. Cows. Fences. “The whole van moved,” he said. “You didn’t feel that?”

  I hadn’t felt a thing.

  THE STONED AGE

  It started just as I’d feared. I had to say, “Hi, my name is Aaron and I’m in here for weed.” The idea sounded so ridiculous I wanted to dive out the window. The most harmful side effects some stoners suffered were short-term memory lapses and Cheeto-stained fingers. Other people smoked pot and just fell asleep. Yet here I was, in a mixed drug recovery group for smoking dope every day, all day, for three straight years.

  I sat with my back against a white painted wall, facing five other people in a tiny room lined with drab industrial carpeting and ringed with foldout chairs. Ted the group leader said, “Welcome Aaron.” The other members muttered the same. I was twenty-one years old.

  Why I ended up in this mixed group rather than Marijuana Anonymous I cannot recall; my mind was still hazy in those early days. Group met at night once a week, on the second-story of an ugly-as-hell white office building lined with palm trees and mirrored glass in Tucson, Arizona. Unlike AA, NA, or CA, our group represented a potpourri of chemical agents; all vices were welcome. My mom found the group after I asked her and my dad for help.

  I’d moved from Phoenix to Tucson in January 1996, partly to study ecology, partly to sober up. What I told everyone, including my closest friends JT, Chris, and Jason, was that I was moving because Arizona State University, where I’d spent the last five semesters, didn’t offer the ecology degree I wanted, only the University of Arizona did. The primary truth was that I had to remove myself from my social circle in order to change my behavior. My theory was that the hundred miles between the cities would put my drug contacts at too far a distance to be useful, and without easy access to weed, I’d be forced to spend my free time doing things other than slumping on couches getting baked in front of televisions. I would start reading all the books I owned but was too lazy to get through. I would further my studies of natural history, improve my photography skills and pursue my dream of writing about nature and culture. And then, as the final component of my personal reconstruction, I would make new, less intoxicated friends, friends without breathy, space-case snickers, friends with huge, imposing, identity-defining interests. People like me.

  After five or six months nothing had changed. Rather than strangling my supply, I frequently got lonely and drove the two hundred mile roundtrip on weekends to get stoned with my friends and buy a bag for the month. Eventually I found new sources in Tucson: a brother of a childhood friend; my elementary school buddy Brett who I’d spotted on campus. He was funny, chatty and smart, and we’d been close as kids. Now we had little in common but his pot supply. We’d get stoned and sit around with his roommates and I’d listen to them talk about U of A sports. I’d often go outside and skate while he and his roommates played video games, then we’d smoke a little more and I’d pay for my bag and split. He usually had fragrant, fluffy buds—not overpriced California hydro, but not the ammonia-scented Mexican dirt weed so common in Arizona either. A nap of fine fuzz often coated Brett’s weed. Sometimes its tacky, crystallized edges stuck to your fingers, and like fresh truffles to a cook, I savored my purchases. I stored the buds in small plastic film canisters to keep them plump and moist. The few times that my stash ran out before I could re-up, I scraped and re-scraped resin from my filthy pipe stem at home and waited for Brett to answer his phone, and then all the resin did was fog my head. This wasn’t why I’d moved.

  One morning when I should have been in class, I found my canisters empty. I called Brett to restock but he didn’t pick up. He was probably in class. Without even the crumbs of a desiccated bud to tide me over, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Though I preferred a red-eyed, glazed-over, completely crippled high, just the idea that there was shake in my canister could have comforted me until I got more. I put on a surf CD and waited a few minutes before redialing Brett. Again, no answer. I called my other connection but he didn’t pick up either. Oh shit, I thought, double shit. What the hell am I going to do? I’d waited too long, hadn’t planned ahead, and now—well, I didn’t know what now. In three years I’d never endured an entire day with a break in my supply. I scraped my bong stem clean of resin, scraped and re-scraped my pipe until I had to pluck tiny metal shavings from the dark, gooey tar, and I studied the debris in the bottom of my bong. What had once been green was now blackened sediment, as bloated and dank as swamp muck. I poured the brackish bong water through a paper towel to filter any smokeable bits and then microwaved them dry, and with the tip of my pocket knife, I smeared the tiny resin mass across my pipe’s screen. Watching the clock, I put the flame to the goo and inhaled until the wad glowed orange then faded white, releasing the last of its bitter toxic ghost. I exhaled a pale wisp, not enough to call a hit. The microwaved bits disintegrated when I handled them and slipped through the screen. I cursed out loud and wanted to kick something and wondered: should I drive to Phoenix? Maybe cruise side streets in sketchy South Tucson and try to buy weed from loitering strangers? Dealers down there were mostly crack addicts and junkies, not at all safe. I slumped in my living room chair and waited a while before redialing my connections. My chest tightened while the phone rang. When they didn’t answer, I threw my head back and lit a cigarette to calm down. What felt like a pool of acid gurgled in my stomach. With my eyes closed I could feel my angry heart pound and I faced a whirlpool of swirling thoughts—the facts, the ugly truth, options. Sober or not, my mind was not clear, but the next step was obvious. When I opened my eyes, I called my parents.

  They’d always said that I could tell them anything no matter how bad it was. So I told them: “I’m a pothead and I can’t quit.” Dad was shocked. Mom said she “kind of suspected” but didn’t know how to broach the subject without running me off. I was hardly around as it was. Since turning sixteen I’d mainly come home to shower and sleep. I spent the bulk of my time at my friend Chris’s house, at school or hiking the desert, and even then I arrived home at hours where my parents and I rarely crossed paths, because I was either stoned or hungover, and I didn’t want to hear their suggestions about doing “extracurricular school activities” or attending family functions that infringed on my social time. “I feel so guilty,” Mom said, as if confronting me earlier would have convinced me to act responsibly.

  Now, humbled before them, we forged a plan: quit using drugs and go to support groups or a counselor. I suggested I take the semester off to dry out in what I called a “stress-free environment,” maybe read some things about addiction, or maybe just my Edward Abbey and desert ecology books.

  “We think this requires a professional,” my parents said. They suggested someone to help me learn to deal with stress, reacquaint myself with my emotions and explore the sources of my compulsion. From the tension in their hushed voices I could tell they were nervous. They spoke in short sentences, listened more than spoke. Mom was a loud New Yorker, a born talker, yet as I unloaded, she mostly
said, “Mmhmm. Yes, mmhmm.” There was a restraint there, timidity, as if by not acting heavy-handedly, she might successfully direct me to help without making me defensive enough to squeeze them out of the equation.

  After I’d detailed the situation, they agreed to let me reduce my course load to one class—just to keep my toe in the pond, Dad said—but I had to promise to abstain and use my free time constructively. If I didn’t get it together that semester, I would still have to take the full five-class load the next semester. They didn’t chastise me. They didn’t say “We told you so” or ask how I could be so stupid as to get myself into this mess the way I asked myself how I could be that stupid over and over again. They offered only encouragement: you’re strong; you can do it; thanks for being honest; we love you. I felt relieved as we talked, relieved to have the burden of secrecy lifted from my conscious, relieved that my parents hadn’t scolded, judged, or rejected me. We had once been so close, but I had long feared that if they learned of my problem, it would be such a crushing disappointment to them that I would take on the stigma of “the ruined son,” and that they might love me less. To prove to myself and to them that their faith in me was justified, I got off the phone, laid my foot-long, blue plastic bong on the kitchen floor, and crushed it beneath my shoe. The scratched, dirty cylinder shattered underfoot, sending shards skidding across the linoleum. It was hard to see my old companion go, worse to have to be its executioner, but the violence of its end, and the hollow pop its expiration made, only reminded me of the shallowness of our relationship. I kneeled to collect the pieces, dumping them into a plastic grocery bag, then shuffled out of my apartment into the alley behind the building. I clutched my small metal pipe in my other hand. Its compact weight in my palm felt as comforting as it had hundreds of times before. These, my constant companions, two empty fetid tubes. I slid back the side-latch on the dumpster and out rushed the stink of festering garbage. Holding my breath, I took one final look at the pipe and bag of shards and tossed them in. They disappeared into the squalid mound forever, and I went back inside. To make sure I followed through with our agreement, Mom found me the group.

  When I walked into group the first night, I eyeballed the room, partly to see what I expected would be a pitiful assemblage of shriveled barflies and burnouts in stained sweatpants, partly to measure my condition against theirs. I arrived scowling. I didn’t want to be there and I didn’t care who knew it. But as soon as I entered the room and the other members looked at me, my gaze dropped to the drab carpet, and I flopped into an empty seat by the door.

  Our group consisted of five people. There was Carolina, a beautiful, cocaine ravaged Latina in her early twenties, newly impoverished without her drug dealer ex-boyfriend’s income. There was Ben, a plump late-forties pain-pill-popper with feathered hair and a cigarette-rasp. The other two were quiet, early-forties, male alcoholics. One was a middle class executive in dark slacks and crisp collared shirts who I loathed on site, the other an effeminate prep cook who primarily drank but also smoked pot and gobbled pills once intoxicated. He generally sat with his thin legs and arms crossed, head down, blonde hair parted so a sheet of it hung over one side of his dour face. He drank first thing upon waking, and in group, he always sat beside me.

  I was the group’s only “marijuana dependent,” a more ludicrous title to me than “chronic masturbator” or “shopaholic.” Saying it aloud felt as cool as getting high and telling people you were “on weed.” I might as well have been saying I was addicted to Taquería Guadalajara’s bean burritos, because I ate those three or four times a week and thought constantly of the small mom and pop restaurant’s homemade horchata. Did that habit require professional assistance? Maybe I should put on a gaudy Hawaiian shirt and grow a mustache and start asking kids on high school campuses if they had “a dime bag of grass” to sell, then my new persona as the out-of-touch NARC would be complete. Thinking all this, I’d sat in my car in the parking lot that first night during break, and considered ditching the whole thing. I could lie to my parents and tell them I’d attended, make up stories about the people in there who were worse off than me. Tell them how much it was helping to purge myself of the dark, antisocial longings I carried inside me. Then I could sit comfortably at home and read.

  The ravages of hard drugs and alcohol have been thoroughly depicted in books and film. Trainspotting, Requiem for a Dream, and The Basketball Diaries deal with heroin. Bright Lights, Big City and Boogie Nights involve coke. Barfly and Leaving Las Vegas portray the horrors of consumptive boozing. The list goes on. Yet most modern American marijuana flicks depict the lives of daily dope-smokers as comic, light-hearted affairs.

  Take The Dude in The Big Lebowski. The Dude, aptly named of course, is a peaceful, beloved bungler who, when he isn’t bowling and tucking back his long hair, stumbles from dramatic event to dramatic event, alternately clueless or baffled by the complexity of his situation. Cheech and Chong, whether parked on a median or trailing plumes of smoke, experience more adventures than problems. The 1990s saw a string of stoner movies—Dazed and Confused, The Stöned Age, and Half Baked—where snickering characters decked in tie-dye and vintage clothing get high, search for parties in their old V-dubs, and live blissed lives to the tune of “Slow Ride.” Despite the contraband on their persons and the THC clogging their synapses, no real harm befalls any of these stoners. Even Shaggy from Scooby-Doo speaks with the telltale pothead’s affect—that, like, uh, total spacey drawl—and he solves crimes!

  Although some Americans worry that pot-smoking can lead to the use of harder drugs—or at least signal a young person’s increased interest in chemical experimentation—many others don’t take weed all that seriously. The general consensus on marijuana’s dangers might best be summarized by one telling and hilarious line from Half Baked. When the character Mary Jane says, “Marijuana is terrible. It’s a gateway drug. I mean, everybody knows that it leads to other stuff,” Dave Chappelle’s character says, “Yeah, mostly junk food.”

  Another example of the hapless, loveable toker is Jeff Spicoli, from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. A perma-baked high school surfer, Spicoli is the archetype American pothead: bumbling yet witty, laid back yet subversive, and largely harmless despite his antics. He orders pizza during class, butts heads with the uptight history teacher Mr. Hand, and even crashes a football player’s car. He’s always out of work and short on cash. But when Brad Hamilton, the movie’s popular male lead, asks him why he doesn’t have a job, Spicoli says, “All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, an’ I’m fine.” In real life, such a statement would widely be seen as tragically adolescent, but on screen, the magic of humor makes the inherent tragedy of his limited ambition lovable. Spicoli functions as the film’s comic relief. He’s the foil to the stiff Mr. Hand, who represents boredom, old age and oppression in all its forms. Who doesn’t watch a movie like Fast Times and find himself rooting for the underdog? Don’t most people enjoy seeing authority figures get punked? Spicoli’s not just a comic stoner, he’s the drowsy antihero who represents all of our suppressed rebellion and hedonistic lust. While we slave away at boring jobs, he coasts through life and hits the beach. While we tell our overbearing bosses, “Yes ma’am, no sir,” Spicoli laughs in authority’s face. As we try to monitor our diets to stay fit, Spicoli inhales slice after greasy pizza slice and innumerable bong hits.

  And because Hollywood has immortalized him during his prime years, Spicoli is destined to remain eternally young and free in our eyes, forever the high school joker, perched on the edge of self-destruction, yet never having to face the ramifications of his intoxication, or the way teenage lifestyles constrict adult career options. If there was a Spicoli biopic which followed his life after high school, it would probably be called Still High in Ridgemont, and it would show him living in his parents’ basement, working the night shift at a suburban convenience store where he chain-smokes Pall Malls and keeps his thinning hair in one of those embarrassing adult ponytails. “Mom bums me out whe
n she gets on my case,” I imagine him telling the camera. “That’s why I stash my buds in the shed out back. Every time she changes my sheets she finds and takes my stuff!”

  I might sound like a buzzkill overanalyzing one of Hollywood’s most memorable creations, but, as much as I still love it, Fast Times reminds me of my own recklessness. In high school and early college, I wore vintage Hang Ten shirts that I’d found at thrift stores, and a few buddies started calling me Spicoli. “Hey Spicoli,” they’d say at parties. “Where’s the pizza?” Or they’d just call out “No way!” in a gassy drawl. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or offended. The characterization worried me partly because, in addition to my long blonde hair, I knew I’d become as spacey as Fast Times’ stoner prince. Also, paranoia had set in. I was having trouble separating irrational thoughts from reality, and I kept worrying what people were thinking when they looked at me. And even in Tucson, after I quit smoking pot and had long since cut my hair, the anxiety wouldn’t go away.

  After three years awash in THC, the chemical residue of abuse had reduced me from a confident, conversational extrovert to a fretful wad of trembling Chihuahua energy. I’d assumed sobriety would return me to the previous era of clarity and calm; instead, it felt like someone had yanked back the shower curtain while I stood there naked and sudsy. My natural inclination had always been to get out of the house as much as possible—eat out, go to bookstores, meet friends, ride bikes, see bands play; the world was too interesting to stay at home. Yet I winced now under other people’s gazes, or even the idea of gazes, and for the first time in my life, the looming specter of an observing public made me want to hide indoors.

  Part of the problem might have been that my detoxifying body started behaving as strangely as my brain. Everything that required piloting presented a monumental challenge: crossing streets; stepping off curbs; maneuvering between chairs at a café or in class. Walking unaccompanied across open spaces made my shoulders hunch and neck arc as I scurried toward the next bit of cover. I was hyperaware of my movements—how my arms swayed and legs swung—because some internal force seemed to be hampering their control. My pace felt either too fast or too slow, which made my muscles tense and increased my uncomfortable perception of how I looked to other people. So I wore a low-set baseball cap to reduce my awareness of others. To steady my awkward appendages, I kept my hands in my coat pockets on cold days, and clutched my backpack straps on warm ones. I quickly learned all the spots around town and on campus that offered the greatest amount of shelter and required the least amount of maneuvering: sidewalks lined with trees; street crossings with low curbs; back routes between U of A buildings traversed more by groundskeepers than students. And I avoided the streets, creeping to class through the alleys instead, favoring the station of the city’s detritus, the fetid garbage bins and tossed sofa cushions, feasting pigeons and feral cats, the unseen and unwanted, my fellow outcasts.