My Copy, My Drug

Disappearing is easy. It’s easier when you’re the lead singer in rock band. Cigarette and pot smoke lingers of the audience. Music and crowd shouts rattle the walls. You don’t disappear behind the smoke and music. You’re not even on stage. What’s there is a copy of what you could be. It was easy to fade into that guy. It’s a disappearing act performed in front of the audience and band mates and nobody noticed. But I was just something spectral. I was a ghost reaching for alcohol and drugs at every turn. My copy had to do the work. I thought it was better to be a ghost on stage pretending to be a rock star than a lifeless s**t clocking an 8 to 5 job. But I didn’t want it any of it anymore.  I was tired of pretending. This version of me, this copy, had lost interest. Reasons to live had become only excuses not to die. I was trapped by my own drowning logic. The more I developed my arguments the deeper I submerged in the drowning pool. It became more difficult to swim to the surface and the reasons for living became more elusive. I didn’t want to breathe the air I consumed or fill the space I inhabited.  It seemed reasonable to remain in the cold at the bottom of the pool.  It was easier to shut down there. What made me human, the thing that was my essence was tattered and I decided to cut away the final vestige of my existence. Not even faded copies of me could pretend there was a reason to live. Go far enough sideways and you forget where you exited life’s highway. Value was something for the other f***s. This decision brought me great comfort and a warm sense of ease. I was relieved. I could breathe. For the first time in so many excruciating months of struggles with imagining my own end, I was happy. I came to the realization of my finality on a cold and quiet winter day. 

It was a beautiful day when I took the first step. A cold Michigan winter enveloped the house as sun eased across the midday sky. Standing in the basement of parent’s home, a shaft of sunlight from a small window wedged near the ceiling bathed me. The strain of pale light spilled on the blade of the bayonet I was holding against my chest. I gripped the handle with both clenched fists, but this wasn’t enough to keep the bayonet from quivering in my trembling hands. Sunlight skipped and jumped off the blade as my hands shook while I tried to control my fear. I pulled the blade harder into my chest as I closed my eyes trying to summon the courage. The point of the blade pierced my skin.  It was the first hint of pain I hoped would be quick to end. I glanced, quickly, catching a slight trickle of blood through my white t-shirt, closed my eyes and turned my head to one side. The beauty of the day was lost to me as I focused on the end.

What would it feel like to have the rest of the blade inside me, cutting through my ribs and plunging deep into my heart? I’m certain I would live long enough to feel my heart stop. I don’t know if I was too much a coward to plunge the blade or if I wanted desperately to live. I wasn’t sure how I got there, but there had to be other places to go, other days with lives lived in cool beauty of the moon and warmth of life born under the sun. I don’t even know how the hell I came to this place. I’m not sure what steps brought me to hold a bayonet against my chest as a sat alone in my bedroom basement. The tip of the blade was real. The sharp point against my skin and pressed against my rib was authentic. What wasn’t clear was if it was a copy of me clutching the bayonet. I knew, of course, if the copy pulled the blade into my heart all of us would die �" the original invisible me and the copies born on my other birthdays.

Where did it begin? Who started it? Where was God when I was planning on meeting Him years before my time?  Was this some kind of test or was it some kind of joke He perpetrated out of sheer godly boredom?  If it was a joke, then it was a sick one and God should be ashamed because I wasn’t laughing. Since God didn’t intervene that winter morning as I pressed the bayonet into my ribs, I realized His omniscient power was as flaccid as a wilted vegetable.

            God is a head of lettuce. He is a leaf of every salad served in Hudsonville, Michigan. And He wilts Monday through Saturday. On Sunday, God is crisp and green, served with a splash of vinaigrette.  Hudsonville town elders called their town Salad Bowl City. For some excruciatingly banal reason, they were proud of it. I was seventeen when our family moved into the salad bowl. I wasn’t looking forward to living near our relatives, my aunt and uncle, the Huffs. By the time we moved into Hudsonville they had devoted a lifetime to worshipping Lord Lettuce and I had spent three years walking through a Salvidor Dali canvas. The Huff family is a large one, as a result of fundamentalist lettuce theology. There was no birth control there, save for the occasional miscarriage of ranch dressing; don’t dare let a thin strip of poly get between sperm and its desire to plunge into a fallopian tube. Religious communities can foster strange children.

            “Hi, my name’s Marge.  If you want to f**k, just let me know.  I’ll f**k both of you guys.” 

What better introduction to a new high school? She was two-hundred-twenty-five pounds of thick, wiry hair, angry lipstick scored across her mouth and rolls of fat straining against a curtain of floral prints from her breasts to her knees. Marge. She was terrifying. Even for a young guy on the mellowest of highs, I was trembling at the thought of this titanic flotilla of estrogen having her way with me. I could hear prison bars locking shut, the bolt echoing through the cold tier. I shuddered at the thought of her wrapping her legs around me and licking my face with her bovine tongue. Fortunately, she was on the other side of a chain-linked fence. 

            “Uh, no, that’s okay, man. Thanks anyway,” I said, biting my lip and digging my heels into the dirt.

There was a tall guy with long, thin hair standing next to me. We were the two new kids in school. The abrupt and startling introduction by Marge gave us immediate connection.

            “No, me too,” Mark chimed in.

“What’s your guys names?” Marge asked.

“Renee.”

“Mark?”

“That’s tits!”

“Tits? Really?” Okay, I like tits, sure. But I wasn’t clear on what tits had to do with this.

It was a football game during a cool Michigan night. Lights blinded the fans, creating the illusion the football players on the field were running faster than usual. The crowds were cheering and the sounds of helmets colliding filled the air. I’m not a fan, but I was new in town and the high school football game was about as exciting as it would get in Salad Bowl City. Mark and I were on the outside of the fence, lingering. Marge smiled and ran her fingers along the fence and caused them to clink. She batted her thick eyes at us, then turned and wobbled away. The flowers on her floral print dress wilted in the sweat stains. I turned, smiling nervously at my new friend, Mark. He too was new in town. We were both from large cities. I arrived from San Antonio, Texas, and Mark came from Chicago. Admittedly, Mark came from a more cosmopolitan city than I, but we had something in common ... neither of us wanted to f**k Marge.

            “If you want to, though, I go to school here. Let me know if you want to f**k,” Marge said over her shoulder, throwing her mop of brown hair.

            “That’s f****n’ brash, man.”

            Mark turned to me. His prescription glasses glinted in the glare of field lights. “I never had a chick say that to me. Even in Chicago, man.”

            “That was weird, man. I’m kinda scared.”  

            It was the senior year for both of us. Marge was our initiation into this cabal of lettuce worshippers, our first communion with one of the organic lettuce heads. Mark and I hadn’t introduced each other when Marge threatened us with a lesson in flabulous love. Marge must have realized we were outsiders, since we didn’t look anything like the locals. For the most part, Lettucians are blond and their hair is cut perfectly disco. Their eyes are Viking blue, and their clothes cover any potential unseemly part of flesh that yearned to be caressed. This made them wet at the first touch. Saturday  nights in Lettuce City are made for finger f*****g. The intrepid actually f**k. Mark and I were too frightened to whet Marge’s appetite. After she left, we gazed at each other, smiling nervously. What Marge did do was break the ice between Mark and me. We numbered only two, but there is strength in numbers, even if that number only added up to two. We knew we were the cool kids in Hudsonville High. Not a real accomplishment, but this little school was an easy mark for the two of us. Mark and I shook hands. We connected from the start. We knew we would have to stick together. But we also knew we could smoke this little hump of a town.  I don’t remember which team won the game.  I didn’t care.

            “Man, was that weird, or what?” I chuckled.

            “I don’t want to be alone around her,” Mark confessed.  “She scares the s**t out of me.”

            “No s**t, man.  I’m freaked.” I shuddered, goose bumps riding my neck at the thought of sweat and slobber on my pretty mouth. But there was something that made me feel sorry for trying so hard and so willing to debase herself.

            Mark and I were feeling comfortably frightened together.  I reached for a cigarette, cupped it in my hands and fired it.  I took a long hard pull, the goose bumps ebbing away.

            “Got another?” Mark asked.

            “Sure.”  I flipped open the hard pack of Kools and Mark reached for one.  I handed him my lighter.  “Chicago?”

            “Chicago,” Mark replied, puffing on his smoke. He handed me back my lighter.

            “No s**t?  What the hell brought you here?” I really wanted to know.

            “My uncle lives here. He was a lawyer back in Chicago.  My mom and dad divorced, but my mom is still there though.  It got a little ugly, so they decided it would be better for me here. I’m living with mt cousin. My uncle’s across the street. He owns the whole street, so it’s cool, you know? Where you from?”

            “San Antonio.”  I wish I could have said L.A., or someplace more cool.

            “That’s where the Alamo is, isn’t it?” 

            I was glad, just a little bit, that Mark knew something about San Antonio.  That made the city a fraction above nowhere.  It was, after all, a growing city fighting growth, rejecting cosmopolitan thrust.

            “That’s it, man.  The Alamo.”  It’s the only damn thing people seem to know about the f*****g city.  You don’t have to know anything about Chicago to know it’s a cool city. It just sounds cool.

            “That’s cool,” Mark said, unconvincingly.   

            “Hey, you want to get the f**k out of here?”  I asked, hoping.

            “Yeah.  What do you want to do?”

            “Shake the thought of that chick out of my head. Get high. I’ve got a f****n’ headache.”

            Getting high was a way to make this bowl of wilting lettuce look crisp. Even in this place that had a church on every corner, there had to be someone who was almost as cool as us. There were a few kids in school who knew that disco was for f*****s. They were almost rebels, almost fringe, like near beer, but unfortunately for them they would never be genuinely Bohemian cool because they were born in a place that prided itself salad capital of the world. These other kids, the revolutionary wannabees, wore jeans, like me and Mark.  But we didn’t have to go that far after we left the game. All we had to do was go to where Mark was staying. He was living with his cousin, Bernie. They shared a small two-story, three-bedroom house off a dirt road called Bend Drive, owned by Bernie’s father, the lawyer from Chicago. It was a safe place to chill and let things roll the way they wanted without fear of persecution. The road was surrounded by farms anf forest, so there was remarkable freedom to do whatever the hell we wanted. It was perfect.

            Bernie’s mother and father lived in a nice home across the street, surrounded by tall evergreens.  Down the street, Bernie’s sister, Linda, lived alone in a middle-class two-story home with her pet python, Sylvester. Bernie’s house was old with a damp basement, and it could have looked better, given he didn’t work. It had the thirty-something bachelor esprit de neglect. He walked with a limp, so that gave him room to be as negligent as he wanted.

            When Mark and I arrived at his home after the football game, Charlie Manson was sitting at the dining table. Getting high was the last thing I was thinking about, watching Charlie Manson drinking coffee, his beard wrapping around his cup. He was smiling at me when I stepped into the kitchen. I was looking for Helter Skelter smeared on a wall somewhere, and some wicked signs scrawled on the floor and body parts dangling from the ceiling. When he stood up and shuffled across the broken linoleum floor, his shoulder-length black hair hung around his face like a pendulum. I was thinking Helter Skelter, and how the f**k did Charlie get out of prison and what the hell was he doing in Hudsonville? Was he after lettuce this time? Did he want to kill the lettucians? Did he want to f**k Marge? After we introduced ourselves, Bernie hobbled to the cast iron stove and tossed several blocks of wood into the fire. It was warm.  I had a warm feeling from Bernie, too. There was no Charlie Manson edge to him that struck me by his appearance. The heat from the iron stove enveloped me, caressed me, called back my childhood in Germany.  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I get to the past I have to face the present.  Not to worry.  Connecting the dots will be as easy as counting the large spots on a Dalmatian.

“You washed my cup,” Bernie said, returning to his seat at the dining table, his eyebrows furrowed.  “The f*****g frog is clean now.”  Bernie never washed his favorite coffee cup, where a faded green fog resided at the bottom.  Rinse only.

            “Hey, give me a break.  I forgot,” Mark replied, annoyed.

            “The fire feels good.  Damn, you scared the s**t out of me.  You look like Charles Manson, dude.”  I was feeling comfortable enough now to think about getting high again.

            “Who won the game?” Bernie asked.

“I don’t know.  We left before it ended. Some chick scared the s**t outta us.”  Mark sat down across from Bernie. He pulled off his glasses and wiped the lenses on the tail of his shirt.

“Some chick wanted to f**k both of us,” I said.

“What are you guys doing here?” Bernie asked.

“She’s scary, man. I think she would break us,” Mark responded.

            “Cowards.”

“Hey, I’m okay with coward on this one, man,” I shot.

“Sit down,” Bernie beamed, drumming his fingers on the table,  “Chill out.”

            “You like music?”  Bernie’s eyes flashed alive at me. He pushed out his seat and disappeared through a narrow door into another room.  There were sounds of shuffling, like cards, then the sound of a needle skipping on a record. Bernie reappeared, grinning devilishly and holding a baggie of weed. Blind Faith filled the room behind him. “We’re all cool here. Mark brought you here, so you’re welcome here anytime.?”

“That’s cool, man.”

“Want to smoke some weed?” Bernie asked me.

            “F**k yeah, man, it’s cool.”  I sat up, wringing my hands. “I’ve got this f****n’ headache. Maybe the weed will take the edge off. Hey, that’s not headache weed, is it?”

            “Bernie doesn’t buy headache weed,” Mark said.

            “We only smoke good s**t around here. Smooth. This here’s red, good Panama Red,” Bernie said, sitting down at the table and peeling open the baggie.

            He was an adept surgeon with his fingers. Bernie sprinkled a generous portion of pot across the rolling paper, then lifted an edge and rolled it gently and lovingly. He rolled it tight, his eyes focused, brows shifting like crossed swords. It was a beautiful dance with his fingers, a kind of cannabis sign language. After pinching the ends, he held the joint up to the light, admiringly. It was a wonderful work of art. Not a bud spilled.  No seeds.  No stems. It was a tight number and ready to burn. Bernie lighted it with a candle, then handed it to me. As he stood up to turn off the light, I took two long pulls of the joint and handed it to Mark. It was some of the best weed I had ever tasted.

            “That’s some smooth s**t,” I said, exhaling slowly.  “Gotta shake this f****n’ headache.”

            “Come on, man, let’s go sit in the living room.  I like to listen to Faith when I’m gettin’ high.”

            “Who is that, man?  Faith?  I never heard them before. I can’t believe I never heard them before.”

            “Blind Faith,” Mark answered, coughing up a lung full.

            “I turned him onto it,” Bernie smiled, proudly fingering at his beard.

            We walked into the dark living room.  I dropped onto one end of a sofa while Mark eased into the other end. Bernie switched on a black light and took a seat on a recliner and set a small board across his knees.  He began rolling another joint.

            “Where you from?” Bernie asked, keeping his eyes trained on his rolling board.

            “Texas.”

            “That’s cool.”  He could roll a joint without looking at it.

            The red was starting to warm me and Blind Faith was starting to carry me on a peaceful journey.  We landed some place where every other word is man, man.

            “No s**t, man?” Bernie lifted his gaze for just a second.

            “Yeah,” Mark, coughed, handing me the joint. “Remember the Alamo, man?”

            “How you like it here?” Bernie finished rolling the joint and fired it up.

            “It’s cool, man.  I like it, I think. You dudes are cool, man.”

            I did like it, too.  It wasn’t the first time I had lived in Hudsonville. My family moved there when my father was stationed in Thailand. I was in fourth grade. Although we lived in a trailer while the Huffs lived in a large house, we had a good time. My memories of that period were fond ones. Summers were warm, winters were cold and the snow was deep and clean. With cousins around, there was always a game to play and someone to play it with. My brothers and I were never wanting for playmates. Although the Huffs were already practicing members of lettuce-ology and espousing Baptist superstitions, we, the children, were nearly immune to the dogma. I fell as deeply in love as a fourth-grader could, a kind of peppermint stick bubble gum love. Two of my cousins were so beautiful, I thought I would marry both of them. I had no idea family ties were taboo. Too bad they weren’t some sort of revolutionary sect of Baptist Mormons.  I fell into a deep childhood crush with two of my cousins who were several years my senior. In that pastoral setting of farmland surrounded by fields of corn with golden husks reflecting in the sun, red barns punctuating the landscape, horses and cattle meandering along fences and kicking up splinters of grass, and hundreds of chickens pushing eggs, I had my first sexual encounter ... no, it was a quasi-sexual encounter and it was with my darling cousins. No, I’m not being honest. My first sexual experience happened some years before my cute little cousins offered a peek at their Baptist pinkness ... A nomene Patre E’spiritu Sancti.  God bless the faithful in Hudsonville. My first was The Monster.

            Blind Faith was floating through my head as the spirit of Cannabis evacuated the pain that was coursing through my head, cursing me, tearing at my brain like the sharp talons of an angry crow. Still, moving back to Hudsonville rekindled those cherished memories of “show me yours and I’ll show you mine, you touch mine and I’ll touch yours.” It’s a natural and healthy childhood game, no matter what Baptist might condemn it. Sitting in the chair, mellowing, lingering in the moment, becoming part of the torn brown vinyl of the couch, I had to smile. But like most memories, fond and warm like scintillating embers of fire floating freely and igniting past spirits, there is the crushing weight of darkness that stamps out those memories, dousing those flickering kindles. Smoking pot helped to ease the chronic pain tearing at my left temple. It pulled the veil over the shadows I was running from since childhood.  Surrounded by new friends who were good people and relaxed by Blind Faith and smooth weed, I exorcised my demons in the comfort of a vinyl chair, its stuffing working out of tears.  I lingered there, at ease, but not trusting. Trust is unveiled in time. It’s an expensive commodity purchased over time. The same questions snaked through my mind, as they have every time I’ve met knew people.