Let's Pretend This Never Happened (11 page)

No one ever helped.

My inability to get stoned was probably related to the fact that I was never able to hold the smoke in my lungs. A lot of people say that coughing when you’re smoking pot gets you higher, because it makes you suck in more smoke, but those people are liars. I’d take a drag and the acrid smoke would hit the back of my throat like a red-hot poker, and I’d start hacking like an emphysemic coal miner. Who also had tuberculosis. And . . . I dunno . . . bird flu. What’s worse than tuberculosis? Whatever that is, I sounded like I had that. Also I was constantly inhaling stray seeds into my windpipe, and none of my friends were sober enough to even
pronounce
“Heimlich,” so every hit was like playing Russian roulette. Each inhalation brought on several minutes of spastic coughing where I’d spray everyone with what I’m sure were lacerated chunks of my lungs. I was pretty much the most unsexy drug user ever.

“All right there, Doc Holliday?” someone would ask.

“Coughing like that makes you higher,” I lied, my voice sounding like I’d swallowed a gravel slushee. “You’re supposed to cough as hard as you can until you feel like you’re going to throw up. I think I read that in
Rolling Stone
.” And by then everyone else was so high that it sounded plausible, and so
they’d
intentionally cough, and the whole car would be filled with
flying spittle, and then eventually someone would almost make himself throw up. And then we’d laugh. Because almost throwing up is kind of funny when you’re vaguely high and covered with other people’s spit.

Even though I seemed mostly immune to pot, I still never turned down a joint, since it gave my hands something to do in social situations. I was still painfully shy, and would have rather costarred in a Tijuana donkey show than to have to make small talk with semi-strangers. The beauty of marijuana is that it instantly brings people together. Two minutes earlier you’re standing with strangers in awkward silence because you brought up dildos, and then someone whispers that the hostess’s brother died in a dildo accident, and you feel terrible about bringing up such a sensitive issue, but also really curious, because
how does someone die from a dildo accident?
Unless maybe a box of them fell on his head? But you’re afraid to ask, because you already feel bad enough for bringing up the subject of dildos, which may have somehow killed a man, and you inwardly tell yourself that you shouldn’t even be bringing up dildos at parties at all, but you know you won’t listen, because next time there’s a lull in the conversation you already know you’re going to blurt out something about the girl you know whose brother died from a dildo accident. And then you’ll remember that
that
girl is the girl you’re actually talking to at the time. And then, just when it gets so terribly uncomfortable that you consider stabbing someone in the knee just to distract everyone so you can run away, someone pulls out a baggie of pot—and suddenly it’s all cool. You’re standing shoulder to shoulder, watching the ceremonial rolling of the joint while people give rolling tips and reminisce about flavored rolling papers and proffer treasured Zippos. (Note:
proffer.
It’s not “offer” or “prefer.” It’s a combination of them, and it’s a real word that you can use in Scrabble. And now you can tell people that you’re reading a totally redeeming educational book and not just one about dildos killing innocent men.
You’re welcome.
) Individuals who only minutes before might have disdainfully placed a protective layer of toilet paper over the hostess’s toilet seat were now cheerily
sucking on a joint moist with the saliva of a dozen strangers, and detailing their botched circumcision as if we are all old war buddies.

In the interest of truthiness I should point out that there was
one
time when I’d actually felt
truly
high. I’d smoked some Mexican weed with my friend Hannah, whom I’d been drawn to because we both had a penchant for wearing baby doll dresses, purposely torn stockings, and combat boots. We both had complete contempt for everyone else in the town who followed the herd mentality and was afraid to be unique and individualistic like us, the two Goth chicks
who were dressed exactly alike
.

When Hannah was a kid she’d had this Betsy Wetsy doll that she carried around everywhere. You were supposed to feed her with a bottle and then she’d pee, but Hannah would always just pry off Betsy’s head and fill her up to her neck with the garden hose. She also decided to skip the whole diaper thing and would simply squeeze Betsy’s distended midsection, and a half-gallon of faux pee would squirt out of Betsy’s rudimentary plastic urinary tract onto the neighbor’s bushes. “She takes after her father,” Hannah would explain. “Runs right through her.” Eventually Betsy’s neck hole became stretched out from her head being pulled off so much, and the body was lost, but Hannah held on to Betsy’s head, possibly as a reminder that she probably shouldn’t have children. Then Hannah got older, and we went through this stage where we made everything possible into a bong: Coke cans, lightbulbs, melons. Then one night we used the baby’s head as a bong. (I’m pretty sure that’s the only time that sentence has ever been used in a memoir. One would hope. I’d check it out on the Internet, but to be honest, that whole horse-enema-fetish stuff scared the shit out of me, so I’m not even going to look.) We poked some holes into the top of Betsy’s head, covered it with a wire screen, lit the pot, and sucked the smoke through Betsy’s pink rosebud lips. After a few hits I realized I was giggly and dizzy and nauseous . . . and
totally
high. Hannah cockily claimed it was her exceptional Mexican marijuana, but I suspect it was the toxic fumes from the burned plastic of Betsy’s soft spot. Regardless, it seemed worth
the accompanying cancer risk, because it was the first time that I actually felt high, and I didn’t want to take anything away from Hannah, because honestly this was kind of the pinnacle of bong crafts, and I thought it would be like the first guy Leonardo da Vinci showed the Mona Lisa to asking,
“Why’s it so small?”
And this was pretty much exactly what was going through my mind the night I took acid from the pizza boy.

Wow.
This is a really convoluted story. I blame the drugs.

Anyway, I waited two hours for the acid to kick in and felt only mildly dizzy, and I began to resign myself to the fact that the only thing that might ever get me high was Betsy’s burning scalp. Then suddenly things felt different. My body started to ache and get tight, and I figured I was either about to start tripping or I had the flu. I asked Travis and he assured me that this was normal and was caused by the strychnine. And I was all, “Uh . . . strychnine? Like . . .
the stuff in rat poison
?” and Travis nonchalantly said, “Yeah. They add a little strychnine to get the acid to bond with the paper, and it gives you mini-convulsions, but it’s not enough to kill you, so chill out.” Then I was like, “I’M PRETTY SURE YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO TELL SOMEONE ON LSD THAT THEY’RE HAVING CONVULSIONS FROM RAT POISON,
TRAVIS
,” but I didn’t say it out loud, because I was suddenly afraid my shouting would go
into
my tongue instead of
over
it and then it would swell up and I’d choke to death, and that’s when I realized I was probably high.

Then I got distracted because I could hear this ringing sound, and I kept telling the other people to shut up so I could figure out what it was, but they were too busy licking the walls because they said the texture was exactly like licking a jawbreaker. I considered pointing out that it was exactly like licking a jawbreaker made of lead-based paint, but then I remembered that we had all just ingested rat poison, so I figured the damage was done at this point, and that if we survived it would only make us stronger.

Then I heard the ringing again and I started creeping around the house on my knees, because I thought maybe I could get
under
the sound waves of my drugged-out friends, who were now freaked out at the revelation that
no one could ever see their faces in real life because “mirrors couldn’t be trusted.” I wondered whether Travis thought to hide the kitchen knives before we began, and I was going to find him and ask when the ringing started again. Travis was struggling to pry a can opener out of a girl’s hands, and he yelled,
“Could somebody answer the goddamn phone?!”
And that’s when I realized what the ringing was.

That’s also when I realized the amazing beauty of the ringing phone, a sound I now knew the sober world would never truly appreciate. Even the
idea
of the phone seemed somehow more significant.
“It could be anybody on the other end of the line,”
I thought to myself.
“It could be Mr. T. Or one of the Thundercats.”
The possibilities were overwhelming. I picked up the receiver and listened to the sound of the staticky emptiness across long-distance lines.

“Uh . . .
Hello?
Travis?” asked the man on the other end.

Me: “No, this is not Travis. Is this a Thundercat?”

“Who?”
asked the man, who seemed really very annoyed.

“I think we both have the wrong number,” I said, and I started to hang up, but then the not-Thundercat started getting all shouty, but I couldn’t really understand him, and I thought that he was probably just angry at the sudden disappointing realization that he would never be a Thundercat. Then I suddenly realized that it was entirely possible that I wasn’t even talking to anyone at all, and that perhaps this was all a hallucination. Maybe I wasn’t even on the phone. Maybe I was standing here talking to an apple. Or a gerbil. Then I realized that if it
was
a gerbil it would probably soon burrow into my ear and eat my cochlea, so I dropped it on the ground and walked away, and Travis was all, “Who was on the phone,” and I was like, “It was
not
a Thundercat. It
might
have been a gerbil. Does my ear look okay?”

This is when Travis probably should have just turned on the answering machine, but I think he’d actually taken a hit of acid himself, because he seemed to be melting, and it’s been my experience that most sober people don’t do that. And then I started throwing up. I said, “Wow. I think I’m going
to throw up,” and Travis said, “No, you just
think
you’re going to throw up,” and then I was like, “God,
that’s
a relief.” And then I threw up. On Travis’s feet. Then Travis gave me a mostly empty bag of SunChips to throw up into, and I sat in a dark room and threw up—a lot. Like, so much that I suspected I was throwing up things I’d never even eaten. Travis put on a single of the Doors singing “L.A. Woman,” because he said it would help, and it actually
did
help, in spite of the fact that the whole house seemed to be dissolving, haunted, and filled with hairy goblins. Also, I was pretty sure all the closets had small fires growing in them, and every time the Doors tape would reach the end, I would start throwing up again and Travis would hear me and have to rewind it and start it again.

This basically happened every five minutes for the next four hours.

But somewhere in between the time when I was stomping out imaginary closet fires and the time when I finally fell asleep, I did apparently have a few moments of clarity and inspiration. I know this because when I woke up later, next to a bag of sullied SunChips, I saw that someone had written a bizarre diatribe about Smurfs on the wall, and it was in my handwriting. And also I’d written my name several times on the wall pointing to it, because apparently I didn’t want anyone else to take credit for my discovery that the Smurfs were actually peaceful bisexual communists. And that’s when I realized that drugs were bad and I never took them again.
¹
Then I left and decided to get all new friends, but first I scratched out my name on the wall and replaced it with “Travis.” I suspected that he might try to pin it back on me, so I dotted his name with a heart, since everyone knew that I was not the kind of person to dot
i’
s with hearts. Then again, technically neither was Travis. I was probably still a little high at the time.

Anyway, my point is that drugs are a bad idea, unless you use them only to distract people from embarrassing dildo stories. And also that aside
from all the vomiting and paranoia and embarrassing myself, it was actually kind of cool in retrospect, although really
not at all at the time
. Much like life. Also, you wish Lion-O the Thundercat would call you, but instead you spend a lot of time unnecessarily worrying about gerbils getting stuck inside of you. Which is also kind of a metaphor for life. A really, really bad one.

1.
Except for pot a few more times. And one time I accidentally did cocaine. And also I did acid a couple more times, but I never did it again at night, so I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count. You know what? Never mind.