by Wizner, Jake
“It’s kind of a mess,” Danny says. “But my parents never come up here, so it’s cool.”
“I’ve never seen anyone with so much music,” I say. “You could open a store.”
“I know,” Lisa says, “that’s what I said.”
“Have you been here before?” I ask her.
“A few times.”
“How about a little reggae?” Danny asks, taking a Bob Marley CD from one of the many stacks on the floor.
“Cool,” says Lisa.
He puts in the music, then goes over to his desk drawer and pulls out a small plastic bag and some rolling papers. I watch him roll a joint with a mixture of fascination and anxiety. This is it, I think. I’m going to smoke pot.
When he finishes, he lights it, takes a hit, and offers it to Lisa. Lisa Kravitz smokes pot? She takes a drag and offers me the joint. I try to act natural, but my heart is racing. I put the joint to my lips, inhale, and immediately start to cough.
“You okay?” Danny asks.
I nod and pass him the joint.
We continue to smoke, and I start to get the hang of it. I can’t tell if I’m feeling any different, but I’m certainly not hallucinating or freaking out. This is okay, I think. By the time we’ve finished the joint, I’ve decided that getting high with Danny and Lisa is probably the coolest thing I’ve ever done.
“Hey, you guys wanna do some bong hits?” Danny asks. He goes to his closet and pulls out a long tube-like thing, open on the top, with a little attachment that juts out from the cylinder. From the mini-refrigerator, he takes a bottle of water and pours some into the tube, then takes a bud of marijuana from a different bag and packs it into the tiny bowl that is attached. “This pot is special,” he says, offering Lisa the bong.
She takes the lighter, holds the flame over the marijuana, and begins to suck on the top of the tube. Immediately the water begins to bubble, and smoke fills the cylinder. After a few seconds, she pulls the bowl attachment off the tube, and the smoke shoots up into her lungs.
“Jesus,” I say as she exhales and begins to cough.
Danny smiles. “Nice,” he says. “Shakespeare?”
“You’re gonna have to show me how,” I say.
Danny looks like he has just won the lottery. He holds the bong lovingly and launches into a detailed explanation of how it works. Then he passes it to me, like a proud father handing down a precious heirloom to his oldest son. I press the tube to my lips and nod to Danny, who lights the lighter and holds it over the bowl. As I inhale, I hear the water begin to bubble and see smoke rise in the cylinder. It reminds me of the way I used to blow bubbles through my straw in my milk when I was younger, except now I am sucking instead of blowing, and now I am breaking the law and probably doing irrevocable damage to my lungs. I pull the bowl-like attachment from the tube, and the smoke floods upward into my mouth.
Have you ever had one of those coughing fits where you’re coughing so hard and uncontrollably that you feel like you might spit out a lung? You know, those body-rattling, stomach-heaving, vessel-popping coughs that leave you doubled over begging for mercy? I’ve had those fits before, and they’re nothing compared to what hits me when all that marijuana smoke comes crashing into my throat.
“I’m dying,” I gasp, then lunge into another fit of coughs.
“That was huge,” Danny says admiringly.
“Oh my God,” I say, catching my breath. “That almost killed me.”
“Have some water,” Lisa says, passing me the bottle.
I sip slowly. What am I doing here, hanging out at Danny Anderson’s house with Lisa Kravitz, smoking marijuana? Smoking marijuana? Have I just smoked marijuana? Marijuana. What a strange word. Marijuana. Ma-ri-jua-na. Marijuana, marijuana, marijuana, marry wanna, marry wanna.
“Dude, are you okay?” Danny asks.
I realize I am taking tiny sips from the bottle in rhythm with my staccato thoughts.
“That was really weird,” I say.
Danny takes a bong hit, then asks if either of us wants another.
“I’m good,” Lisa says.
I shake my head. “No way.”
Danny moves behind Lisa and begins to massage her back.
“Mmm,” she says. “That feels good.”
What am I doing here? Are they going to start making out in front of me? I try to look everywhere but at them. Could I possibly feel any more awkward or uncomfortable?
“Where’s the bathroom?” I ask.
Danny tells me and I head downstairs. This whole situation is surreal. It’s a Friday afternoon, and I’m standing in Danny Anderson’s bathroom stoned out of my mind while he and Lisa are probably making out upstairs. My head is spinning, and suddenly I begin to feel boxed in. I need to get out of the house, get some fresh air. Maybe I should splash some cold water on myself. I turn on the faucet, lean over, and try to shovel water onto my face. Most of it gets on my shirt. I look in the mirror and try to suck my shirt dry. What am I doing? I’m sucking on my shirt. I’m freaking out. The colored tiles on the wall, yellow and black, four yellow squares surrounding a black square, four yellow squares surrounding a black square, four yellow squares surrounding a black square. Jesus, the water in the sink is still running. How long have I been in this bathroom, anyway? It seems like forever. What’s the plan? The plan, plan, Stan, can, Dan, fan, gan, han. Holy shit, I am so stoned. I look in the mirror. My face still looks normal. I have to get out of here.
I make my way upstairs, clomping loudly so they will hear me coming.
“I’m gonna take off,” I say, barely managing to make my way over to my book bag.
“You sure?” Danny is sitting on his couch with Lisa’s head in his lap.
“I need some fresh air,” I say.
“Are you gonna make it home all right?” he asks.
I stagger to the stairs. “I hope so.”
“Hold on.” Danny walks me downstairs and lets me out, and I set off on the five-block walk home, taking it one block at a time, trying to look normal, but convinced that everyone I pass can tell I am stoned. All I want to do is make it home, go up to my room, close the door, get into bed, and go to sleep. All I want to do is not have to deal with anyone or anything until I feel normal again.
I keep telling myself that if everything turns out okay, I will never smoke pot again. I am almost home. I can see my house. I can picture the way I will come in the front door and head straight for my room. What about food? I’m starving all of a sudden. I’ll have to get some food. Nacho Cheese Doritos. Ice cream. Pringles.
I walk in the door, and my mother is on me before I can escape.
“Where have you been?”
“At a friend’s house.” Forget the food. Get upstairs.
“Do you know what time it is?” She taps her watch. “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.”
I spin around. “What are you talking about?”
“Dinner with Aunt Sylvia. Remember?”
“Oh shit,” I blurt before I can catch myself.
She allows herself a smile. “Come on, it’s not so bad.”
Not so bad? This situation is completely catastrophic, even by my standards. There is absolutely no way I am going to be able to sit through a family dinner with my parents and my incredibly annoying aunt without completely freaking out.
I run up to my brother’s room and close the door. He is sitting at his desk IM’ing with his friends.
“I’m screwed,” I say.
“What’s the matter?” he asks without turning around.
“I’m stoned out of my mind.”
He stops typing and turns to me with an incredulous look. “Are you serious?”
“I totally forgot Aunt Sylvia was in town.”
He starts to laugh. “What are you gonna do?”
I am pacing his room, running my hands through my hair. “You gotta help me.”
My brother doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then he smiles. “You shouldn’t have told me,”
he says. “Now I’m gonna fuck with you all through dinner.”
“What? You better not.”
He rubs his hands together. “Oh, this is gonna be sweet.”
“You’re an asshole,” I say.
Aunt Sylvia is my father’s older sister. She does not have her own family, having never married, so she spends a good deal of time annoying my family instead. Dinner with her will be a torturous affair of listening to her boring stories and answering her boring questions and watching her talk with food in her mouth. Between Sylvia and my brother, I realize I am doomed.
We end up eating at a neighborhood Italian restaurant. We are sitting at a round table, with my mother on one side of me and my brother on the other. From the moment we sit down I begin to feel boxed in, and when my aunt Sylvia begins chattering on about her taxi ride from the airport, I have to restrain myself from jumping up and running outside. As Sylvia goes on and on, my mind begins to drift, and suddenly I remember that earlier in the day I was sucking on my shirt in Danny Anderson’s bathroom. The memory comes so suddenly and so vividly that I actually let out a burst of laughter.
“What’s so funny?” my mother asks.
By the way everyone is staring at me, I realize I have probably yelped at an extremely inappropriate moment.
“Nothing. Sorry.”
They stare at me a little longer, and then Sylvia says, “It was the most awful thing I have ever seen.”
She is referring to a car accident she has been describing, but at the moment I am feeling so paranoid that I automatically assume she is referring to my rude interruption.
“I’m really sorry,” I say. “Sometimes I just laugh without knowing.”
Everybody is staring at me strangely, which I interpret to mean that I am not making any sense and need to explain myself more clearly. Unfortunately, I discover that trying to explain something clearly when you’re stoned is about as easy as driving a school bus full of screaming children through an obstacle course blindfolded.
Still, I plunge ahead. “Like one time I was with my friends, I mean, they’re not exactly my friends…well, one of them is, and then it was his older brother and one of his older brother’s friends. But they go to the same school—well, now they’ve graduated, but then we all went to the same school. And we were at the park and the same thing happened.”
Blank stares. I am not making sense. I need to do a better job explaining.
“What are you talking about?” my father asks.
I realize my mind has gone blank. “Wait, what was I talking about?”
“You were telling some story about your friends at the park,” Sylvia says helpfully.
“Friends at the park?” I try desperately to remember.
“Yeah,” my brother says in a superfast voice. “Youandyourfriendsatthepark.”
“Shut up,” I say, punching him in the arm.
“What’s the matter with the two of you?” my father says sternly.
“Nothing,” my brother says.
The waitress brings the menus, and I immediately take refuge behind mine.
Next to me, behind his own menu, my brother is whispering so only I can hear.
“Munchies. Munchy munchies.”
“Shut up,” I hiss.
“Would you like some gnocchi?” he whispers. “Munchy gnocchi?”
I try to ignore him.
“Isn’t that a funny word? Gnocchi. Gnocchi, gnocchi.”
“You’re an asshole,” I mutter, and angle myself away from him.
I am having a lot of trouble concentrating on the menu and finally decide it will be easiest just to order what I usually get, which is lasagna and a Caesar salad. The problem is I’m stoned, and this is making me feel like I can eat everything on the menu. Would it be strange to order onion rings, too? The thought of biting into an onion ring dipped in ketchup is making me very excited.
“Are you ready, Shakespeare?” I look up and see that the waiter is at the table and that it’s my turn to order. Everyone is staring at me.
“Sorry,” I say. “I’ll have the lasagna and a Caesar salad.”
The waiter nods and writes my order.
“And can I have a side order of onion rings?” I say, feeling extremely self-conscious.
Gandhi bursts out laughing.
“Onion rings?” my mother gasps. “With lasagna?”
The waiter stops writing and looks up, waiting to see if I intend to change my order. This whole dinner is going from bad to worse, and we have barely been here ten minutes, though it feels like ten hours.
“Shakespeare, you’re not really ordering lasagna and onion rings, are you?” my mother asks.
“Let him order what he wants,” my father says.
“It is rather strange,” Sylvia says.
“I’ll have the gnocchi,” my brother says.
We finish ordering, and I beat a hasty retreat to the bathroom to avoid getting embroiled in a table-wide conversation about my eating habits. I stand in the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror and take a few deep breaths. “This sucks,” I say out loud, then laugh, then become wholly absorbed in studying different facial expressions I can make. “Stop,” I command myself. “Get it together. Just go out, eat dinner, and act normal.”
There are moments in life when we are confronted with nightmarish situations, and somehow, from somewhere, we find the strength and courage and resolve to meet these situations head-on and emerge unscathed. As I walk back to the table, I do so with a determination that I can make it through this dinner, that life will return to normal, and that years from now I will be able to look back on this evening with a sense of pride and accomplishment.
I sit down. Everybody at the table is looking at me. “What?” I say, suddenly nervous and on guard.
“Shakespeare, are you stoned?” my mother asks.
The question hits me like a sledgehammer. I sit stunned for a moment by the force of the blow. Then I feel a smile creep across my face. I feel myself begin to nod, and a voice that sounds curiously like my own says, “I’m stoned out of my mind right now.”
My brother’s jaw drops. Sylvia gasps. My mother seems frozen, completely at a loss for words. My father lets out a little chuckle before he catches himself and tries to look stern.
What can they do? We are out at a restaurant, we have already ordered, and my mother would rather eat shoe polish than cause a scene in public.
“We’ll discuss this when we get home,” she finally says.
We eat most of the meal in silence, though my brother keeps looking at me with newfound respect. My onion rings and lasagna are delicious, but by the time we leave my high has worn off and I am feeling sluggish and bloated.
Over the weekend, my mother tries to talk to me about what happened at dinner, and my reluctance to go into it convinces her more than ever that I have larger issues I’m not dealing with.
“Are you depressed?” she asks me several times.
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“I really think you should see a therapist,” she says.
I shake my head. “Would you drop that already?”
“Just go once,” she says. “If you hate it, you don’t have to go back.”
“Why don’t you send Gandhi to therapy? He smokes more pot than I do.”
“I’d like him to go, too,” she says. “But right now we’re talking about you.”
I’m tired of arguing with my mother. Would it be so bad to go once? I wonder. I mean, there is something appealing about getting to unload all my issues on someone anonymous and seeing how he reacts.
“Who’s the therapist?” I ask. “Not yours.”
“No,” my mother says quickly. “She recommended one of her colleagues.”
“You’ve talked about this with your therapist?” I am not really upset, but I don’t want to make this too easy on her.
She gives me a guilty look. “I just think it’s important.”
My mother knows I will eventuall
y give in, because it is not in my nature to fight. She knows that deep down I am probably not as resistant to therapy as I pretend to be, and that I am fascinated by the fact that I had a therapist when I was four. What she does not know is that I have actually seen a therapist since that time, and though it was only one visit, the experience was one of the few shining moments in my life.
THE TIME I VISITED A SEX DOCTOR
I was getting near the end of tenth grade, and my hormones were in a state of frenzy.
“Feed us!” they screamed.
I masturbated constantly—seven, eight, nine times a day, even more on weekends. The way chain-smokers smoke, the way alcoholics drink, that’s the way I masturbated.
“My hormones are out of control,” I told my friend Neil. “I’m masturbating nonstop.”
He was sitting on my bed, looking through a box of CDs. “So what, it’s normal for asexually frustrated fifteen-year-old boy to whack off. I did it myself last night.” He looked up and smiled in fond recollection.
“Neil, I’m not talking about once or twice a day, here. I’m out of control.”
He pulled a CD from the box and studied it. “Well, how often are you doing it?”
I didn’t want to tell him the truth, because the truth seemed so out of the bounds of normal behavior that I was afraid even Neil, who was probably the biggest freak on the planet, might not be able to handle it.
“Three times a day?” he asked, looking up.
I shrugged.
“More? How much?”
I did not respond, and his eyes opened wide.
“Four? Five?” His voice was rising in volume.
“Would you keep it down,” I hissed.
“SIX?”
I didn’t like how excited he was becoming. “A lot, okay?”
He slid off the bed and stood facing me. “What’s the most times you’ve ever masturbated in one day?”
“Neil, you’re supposed to be helping me,” I said in an exasperated voice.
He picked up a calculator from my desk. “More than ten times?”
“Neil!”
“What do you think the world record is?” His voice brimmed with excitement. “You could be famous.”
