college radio station and had memberships at the alternative eating clubs and dining co-ops; who turned me on to all the indie rock and classic rock I had missed in my time spent playing my four Beatles records over and over again; who looked and dressed like Willie Nelson in the 1970s, disheveled and intimidating from afar but utterly harmless up close.
From the fateful night when I was handed a bong for the first time and, not knowing how to approach the apparatus, tried to fit it inside my mouth and asked if they made them any smaller, I became a different person. In those moments when everyone else at a party started shooting stealthy glances at one another and then disappeared to parts unknown, I was no longer the guy left behind to wonder where all his buddies had gone. I was a part of that group, who got to visit the shabby, half-lit rooms where all the action went down, always littered with unwashed clothes and half-eaten sandwiches and smelling vaguely of cats even when no cats were present. I got to watch the rituals, in which an acolyte would retreat to a corner and turn on a stereo softly playing
American Beauty
or
Pretzel Logic
, and a high priest would sit at the edge of a bed or stand over a dresser drawer arranging his relics and manipulating his paraphernalia, packing a bowl of marijuana so compactly and precisely that it looked like a newly mowed field in miniature. Then he would offer up the first hit to whoever looked like he was most in need of relaxation, and eventually, we’d all take a hit, and another and another and another and another, and we were happy and content to share the same air and smoke andsaliva. If you overdid it one night and couldn’t make your way back to your bedroom, you fell asleep right where you were on the floor, woke up the next morning, and wandered home in a delighted daze.
Having concluded my prepared statement, I’m ready to take your questions.
Did I, as a direct result of my new drug-consuming identity, meet any women who, in their blissed-out state, found me more attractive or were willing to sacrifice a small bit of their dignity in exchange for access to, among other things, my stash? No.
Did this identity give me enough of an edge to make me sufficiently beddable to a couple of girls who would have paid me no notice in my button-down days? Probably.
Did I, as the son of an addict, who had seen firsthand the havoc that drug use could inflict on a user and his loved ones, have any hesitation about taking those first steps along a route that could lead me to the same cul-de-sac where my father resided at length? Didn’t I hear in the back of my head an endless echo of that vintage 1980s television public service announcement in which the guy barges in on his kid doing some unidentified substance and demands to know where the kid got it, and the kid answers, “From
you
, all right? I learned it by watching you,” and then a Deeply Serious narrator comes on and says, “Parents who use drugs have children who use drugs”? Are you fucking kidding me?
How do I think my father would have felt if he could have seen me in these moments?
I’m not going to say that he gave me his permission to behave this way or that I needed his consent to do so. My decisions were my own, and I would have made them whether he wanted me to or not. (
Especially
if he didn’t want me to.) But I thought I had anecdotalevidence of how my father would have behaved in the same situation. Why else had he told me, and told me and told me, about his rooftop dalliances back in the Bronx, about smoking pot and getting caught and, above all, getting away with it, if he didn’t want me to know it was possible for me to get away with it, too? What else had he been trying to teach me from his example other than it is permissible and necessary to experiment with things until you find the way that you fit most comfortably into the world? How else would I know that I had measured up to him until I
From the fateful night when I was handed a bong for the first time and, not knowing how to approach the apparatus, tried to fit it inside my mouth and asked if they made them any smaller, I became a different person. In those moments when everyone else at a party started shooting stealthy glances at one another and then disappeared to parts unknown, I was no longer the guy left behind to wonder where all his buddies had gone. I was a part of that group, who got to visit the shabby, half-lit rooms where all the action went down, always littered with unwashed clothes and half-eaten sandwiches and smelling vaguely of cats even when no cats were present. I got to watch the rituals, in which an acolyte would retreat to a corner and turn on a stereo softly playing
American Beauty
or
Pretzel Logic
, and a high priest would sit at the edge of a bed or stand over a dresser drawer arranging his relics and manipulating his paraphernalia, packing a bowl of marijuana so compactly and precisely that it looked like a newly mowed field in miniature. Then he would offer up the first hit to whoever looked like he was most in need of relaxation, and eventually, we’d all take a hit, and another and another and another and another, and we were happy and content to share the same air and smoke andsaliva. If you overdid it one night and couldn’t make your way back to your bedroom, you fell asleep right where you were on the floor, woke up the next morning, and wandered home in a delighted daze.
Having concluded my prepared statement, I’m ready to take your questions.
Did I, as a direct result of my new drug-consuming identity, meet any women who, in their blissed-out state, found me more attractive or were willing to sacrifice a small bit of their dignity in exchange for access to, among other things, my stash? No.
Did this identity give me enough of an edge to make me sufficiently beddable to a couple of girls who would have paid me no notice in my button-down days? Probably.
Did I, as the son of an addict, who had seen firsthand the havoc that drug use could inflict on a user and his loved ones, have any hesitation about taking those first steps along a route that could lead me to the same cul-de-sac where my father resided at length? Didn’t I hear in the back of my head an endless echo of that vintage 1980s television public service announcement in which the guy barges in on his kid doing some unidentified substance and demands to know where the kid got it, and the kid answers, “From
you
, all right? I learned it by watching you,” and then a Deeply Serious narrator comes on and says, “Parents who use drugs have children who use drugs”? Are you fucking kidding me?
How do I think my father would have felt if he could have seen me in these moments?
I’m not going to say that he gave me his permission to behave this way or that I needed his consent to do so. My decisions were my own, and I would have made them whether he wanted me to or not. (
Especially
if he didn’t want me to.) But I thought I had anecdotalevidence of how my father would have behaved in the same situation. Why else had he told me, and told me and told me, about his rooftop dalliances back in the Bronx, about smoking pot and getting caught and, above all, getting away with it, if he didn’t want me to know it was possible for me to get away with it, too? What else had he been trying to teach me from his example other than it is permissible and necessary to experiment with things until you find the way that you fit most comfortably into the world? How else would I know that I had measured up to him until I
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