Mary Jane

CW assignment: personal essay about an experience.

I was always a ‘good’ kid in high school. I never skipped class, only got drunk a handful of times at my own house with a couple friends, and certainly never thought about smoking weed. It wasn’t really as much about being ‘good’ or drug-free, it was more that I had little interest in doing so. Everyone I knew in high school who smoked weed was a burn-out weirdo. When I got to college though; specifically, college in a hippie city in Maine, it seemed like every demographic got high at least on occasion. It piqued my interest, and suddenly I desperately wanted to join the ranks of the pseudo potheads.

            When I met Danielle, she seemed like most of the girls I’d been friendly with in high school. She and her roommate Destini walked by my dorm room one evening on their way to dinner, and invited me to dinner when they noticed I was sitting alone. It was still the first week of school, late August, and I hadn’t really met anyone I liked yet. Danielle and I hit it off (Destini was a weirdo, for reasons I’ll probably never know) and we started eating together pretty frequently. Outside of class and the cafeteria, we’d hang out in the lounge and chat. She was cool, motivated, and basically the opposite of every other pothead I’d ever known.

            She and Destini, and sometimes another girl named Mary, would often go on burn runs down the back roads of South Portland. I always found this a bit ironic, because the slang term they used for weed was Mary Jane. F****n' old school, man.   They’d get back to the dorms as I was getting out of class, high as kites, and I’d always laugh with them, jealous that I didn’t see what they did. But I wasn’t about to ask myself along, because that would be totally un-cool. I still didn’t know these girls too well. That was almost the only thing holding me back.

            The boy I was dating at the time was boot-camp bound that October. He’d signed on to join the Marine Corps before I’d even met him, and having done so, he’d had to kick his pothead habits. Similarly, he’d started severing ‘friendships’ he’d had with people simply because of drugs. He told me he’d seen people change because of weed; he’d seen people burn themselves out. He cared too much about me, he said, to let that happen. So he asked me to promise to never smoke weed, ever. Though at that point, I still never had, I felt he was being extremely hypocritical. Still, I also felt that it wasn’t worth an argument, especially with him leaving so soon. So I promised, knowing in my own mind I was simply promising myself that this would be the one and only thing I lied to him about.

            Around the second week of September, Danielle’s friend Alli came to visit and the opportunity I’d been waiting for arose.

            “Hey, Emily, we’re gonna go for a drive,” Danielle started. “Wanna come?” I didn’t miss a beat.

            “Yes,” I grinned. “I totally wanna come. Just uh…when my boyfriend comes to visit, don’t tell him, k?” She looked at me kind of funny and shook her head when I explained the promise I’d made.

            “Alright, whatever you say, Em,” she said with a sigh. “Let’s hit the road!”

            Danielle drove, Alli sat passenger, and I rode in the middle seat in the back. Once we were safely ‘in the woods’ Alli took out her bowl and showed me how to smoke it. She took a long hit, tipped her head back, and blew the smoke out slowly. She reminded me of the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.

            “Yeah, so, that’s it,” she shrugged. I still didn’t really have any idea what I was doing, but I took the bowl and the lighter from her and lit up. It was easier than I expected, and the smoke flowed roughly into my lungs. It tasted completely awful. I coughed and sputtered and Danielle chuckled.

            “You ok back there?”

            “Yeah (cough cough) I think so,” I said, blinking rapidly in the haze of smoke I had just created in the backseat. I passed the bowl over to Danielle and Alli grabbed the wheel while Danielle took her hit. Every time it came back around to me, I coughed, but according to the two of them, that was a good thing.

            We passed it around three more time before we’d smoked it all, and as Alli and Danielle drifted off into the clouds, I remained fully grounded in the backseat of that civic. I was totally eager and ready for…something. Anything. Instead, I was left feeling as naïve and inexperienced as ever, but even more determined to do it again. And again and again until I got high. I can’t exactly say why I had this sudden desperation, but I certainly wasn’t going to suppress it.  I didn’t want to be that one kid who never tried weed, I didn’t want to be the girl who avoided something simply because her paranoid, hypocritical boyfriend had told her not to. I was my own woman, damn it, and I was out to prove that, one way or the other.

            Was smoking weed the best way to go about showing my independence? Of course not. But for once in my life, I was not okay with being the One on the outside of the circle. I was in college now, after all, and wasn’t this where you were supposed to try new things? I wasn’t about to let the coke-heads living with me talk me into snorting their powder, but I figured a little high might actually help me relax about the casual drug scene. It had always sort of freaked me out, and even when Danielle and I went on drives together, I was always a little nervous of what might happen. Mostly though, I was excited. I finally got what I wanted in mid October.

            Danielle and I both lived in Massachusetts before we’d moved to the dorms, and some weekends she would give me a ride back to school from my parents’ house when she went home as well, because I didn’t have a car. One of these weekends, I got a ride to her house and the two of us plus Alli went for a drive before heading back to Maine.

Instead of a bowl, this time Alli rolled a sizeable joint inside of cherry-flavored blunt paper. Again, she took the first hit, passed it to me, and I passed it to Danielle. We must have circled the joint around the car three or four times, and I remember very suddenly being taken over with the feeling that I was no longer in control. There was no buildup to this feeling; I was sober, and then suddenly there it was. Everything your mother and middle school health teacher ever told you about smoking the reefer. My head was literally buzzing. I felt like everything I was doing was in slow motion, yet my heart was racing. I could feel it trying to beat out of my chest. My fingertips were tingly and my mouth was as dry as New Mexico in July. Every time I blinked, whatever I was looking at would flicker in and out of focus.  It was legitimately scaring me.

            We drove to Alli’s house to drop her off, and Danielle asked me to sit up front with her. Never has a more difficult task been asked of me in my entire life. First, I had to find the seatbelt buckle and figure out how to pop it open. Once that was done with, I had to open the door, which meant finding the handle. Danielle was fiddling with a pack of cigarettes, and my mouth was too dry to ask for help. I’m not sure I’d have known what to say anyway. I was so fucked up that the only thing I could focus on was finding that handle and pushing the door open. I tried several times to push the door without pulling the handle, and when I finally did both things together, I almost tumbled out onto the driveway. Seriously. If that had been a reality show, and there were cameras watching me, America would have erupted in laughter at my inability to change seats in a car.

            I finally stumbled around to the passenger side of the car, searched for the door handle there, and eventually was able to plop down in the seat next to Danielle. I’d somehow managed to find a bottle of vitamin water in my backpack, and had also managed to hold on to it during the entire door-handle ordeal. Shows what’s truly important to someone who can’t think straight. I guess I couldn’t handle my cottonmouth anymore, and I found words once I was sitting down again.

            “Dani…I really need a drink. I’m wicked thirsty right now,” I started. “I. Am. So. High.”

            “Oh s**t!” her eyes lit up, and then she laughed. “Gobi, I swear I was about to start thinking you had some immunity to this stuff.”

            “I just need some water,” I was totally incapable of having an actual conversation, so I just repeated myself a couple more times. Danielle seemed to get it, and we took off towards the nearest fast-food restaurant. According to Danielle, once I got comfortable and relaxed, then I could enjoy the high and stop being so freaked-out. We went to the drive-through at a McDonald’s or a Wendy’s, I can’t remember which (insert witty pothead joke here). Danielle got me fries and bottle of cold water, and we set off again towards the highway. I still had yet to start feeling better, so Danielle asked me if I wanted to drive. I had my mind together enough to know that that was a terrible idea; I couldn’t even tell exactly where the road was from the passenger seat. Put me behind the wheel? No thanks.

            I ate the fries, I drank the water, and I slept, kind of. I was laying completely immobile in my seat with my eyes closed, yet I heard every flick of the lighter as Danielle lit up a cigarette, I felt every ‘whoosh’ of cold air when she open the window for the toll booths and I could smell the menthol burning off the end of her Newports. It was strange; I did feel like I was sleeping, but without the unconscious bit. It’s hard to explain, but I’m sure anyone who has ever been high enough to feel their cells vibrating knows what I’m talking about.

            When we finally arrived back at school, I was still high as hell, but slightly more able to function semi-normally. I carried my own bags up to my room, dropped them on the floor, and then grabbed a box of Cheeze-Its (insert witty pothead joke number two here) and walked around the dorm. I couldn’t sit still; every time I tried the entire room would start spinning around me. I spent a half an hour, maybe an hour, hanging out in the lounge and just people-watching. Every time anyone said anything to me, I simply held up the box of crackers and silently offered some. Some kids took a handful and some kids just looked at me kind of strange. At these kids I would just shrug, and go back to staring intently at nothing.

            Eventually I got bored, and wandered upstairs to Danielle’s room. I walked in with my tell-tale crackers and Danielle’s eyes got wide. At this point, it had been at least four or five hours since we’d smoked that joint.

            “Gobi! Are you still high, kid?” She chuckled a little. All I could do was sort of shrug and nod at the same time. She told me she was just about to watch a movie, so I jumped on her bed (crackers still in hand, of course) and she settled in next to me. I can’t remember what movie we watched (witty pothead joke number 3) but I can tell you that I was almost completely sober by the end of it. I decided at that point that the best thing to do was go to sleep. My box of crackers was empty, my buzz was gone, and I was worn out by all the stress that high ordeal had brought about. I suppose that’s what I get for being so determined.

            I only smoked weed a couple more times after that, and then I just lost interest. I got the same high both times, and it freaked me out enough to make me wonder why I kept doing it. So when i finally did stop, I did so with no regrets. It’s been two years since then and I still have no desire to smoke again. I think the only reason I still tell this story is because my determination for getting high was totally uncharacteristic for me. It’s sort of fun to look back at something I’ll likely never do again and pretend that my immaturity was to blame.  

             When my boyfriend returned from boot camp, one night we were together and he asked me, out of the blue, "Hey, babe, did you ever smoke weed?" I'd never given him reason to think so, and it was evident that he didn't trust me anymore. I told him, yeah, I had, so what? He flipped. He started a rant about how I had lied to him, and this was a huge betrayal of his trust. Two months later, I broke up with him, because no one needs a constant control over their life.

           In the end, i suppose my experience was about more than trying something new. It was about finding my independence, and my courage to go out in the world on my own. I found myself that year, all thanks to Mary Jane.

 

Reviews

[Richard Longbow]

This is a really good story. It sounds like you got a little paranoid when you smoked. By the way you described the high, I could tell that it was probably your first or second time. I remember what it was like when I couldn't just get high and soak it in and enjoy it, instead I'd get paranoid and feel like I couldn't make a voluntary movement with my body if I tried. You basically described what smoking pot is like if you haven't done it a lot. In fact, you pretty much described it perfectly. The "I. Am. So. High." line is a line that anyone that has smoked pot utters every now and then. This is a really interesting story. It kept my attention from beginning to end. Well done!