11/29/23
Newsletter #520
The Crack of Dawn
The first time I smoked pot was up at summer camp in Canada in 1970. I was 12 years old, but being so ridiculously mature, I mainly hung out with the 13-year-olds in the next cabin over. In the middle of the night my elder buddy, Irv, came to my cabin, woke me up, and said, “Come on,” and of course I just went with him without even asking where we going or what we were doing.
Irv led me to one of the “biffies,” otherwise known as bathrooms, which was a wooden structure that was dark because it had no electricity and was not in use that summer. Irv pulled a baggy out of his pocket and a couple of wrinkled rolling papers. Irv said, “I got some pot.” He showed me the baggy and in it was a bunch of sticks and seeds. “So that’s what pot looks like,” I thought. Incredibly, Irv somehow managed to roll a joint from whatever little pot was there, including some of the sticks and seeds. The joint was so malformed, and full of bullshit, that it would barely burn. When we did get it going, seeds popped in our faces. Neither of us got the slightest bit high, and it all seemed like a gigantic hassle. Fuck that.
After camp I started junior high, and as I recently wrote about, first there was “the wall,” then “the ravine,” where the potheads hung out and got high before class. I recall trying pot a few more times, not getting high, and not seeing what all the fuss was about. My parents went out of town and my older sister Ricki threw a big party. It was a blow-out, and the house was loaded with hippy high schoolers who all had good weed. My buddy Jim and I joined in everywhere there was a joint was burning. Soon, Jim got too high and had to go to my bedroom and crash. But I wasn’t that high, so I stuck it out. When it got late and most of the kids had left, there was just me and this one long-haired hippy dude sitting at the kitchen table, and he just kept rolling and lighting joints. I stayed up with this guy until he left. I was finally good and stoned. I went up to bed and there was Jim dead out asleep on the roll-out trundle bed. I laid down on my bad and everything was buzzing and spinning, but in a pleasant, rosy kind of way. I thought, “Pot is OK.”
But then Ricki decided that she didn’t like pot (and never cared for it again in her life). Because she was the main influence in my life, if she didn’t smoke pot, then I didn’t smoke pot. Of course, I still smoked cigarettes (and still do). But I’d still go down to the ravine every day and watch the other kids smoke pot as I puffed away on my charcoal filtered Larks.
However, I became friends with a kid at the bus stop named Ivan who was two years older than me. He and I began hanging out after school. We would go to the wooded lot beside my house and Ivan would smoke a joint and I’d smoke a cigarette. Then we’d go down the basement of my family’s house and shoot pool on our cheap, uneven, particle board pool table (if you set a ball at the center of the pool table it would, of its own accord, roll into one of the pockets).
Kids being kids, and Ivan being Ivan, he kept trying to tempt me into smoking weed. “Oh, this is really good weed.” I held out for a while, but eventually I gave in. Once I did, I’ve continued smoking weed for the next 50 years.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. When I moved back to L.A. for the third or fourth time, in 1990, I decided to change my life and quit smoking weed. I went an entire year without it. Then one day I thought, “OK, I finally get it. Life is exactly the same without pot as with, but I just don’t laugh as much.” Well, I’d rather be laughing than not laughing, so I started again. And I’ve been smoking weed and laughing like an idiot ever since.
I’m presently in San Diego visiting my sister. When I left Detroit this morning it was 18 degrees outside.
As I was waiting for my flight in the terminal, I spotted an attractive young gal with long wavy hair and what I thought was a rather Jewish look, with a Barbra Streisand-like nose. I took my seat in the rear of the plane, then watched as the seats filled up. Gosh darn if the attractive gal didn’t sit down next to me. She had tattoos on the backs of her hands, and one of them was a cross. Well, I don’t care how nutty or young you are, if you’re a Jew you don’t get a tat of a cross. Anyway, I still felt quite fortunate to have her beside me, and perhaps somewhere along the way we might even speak to each other. But no, a young fellow stepped up to the girl and said, “I think you’re in my seat.” She looked at her ticket and she was in the wrong row. She moved up a row and as the guy sat down, I whispered, “Great, and I had a cute girl sitting next to me.” She said from the row ahead, “I heard that,” which I was hoping she would. But the guy said, “What’s the matter? You don’t think I’m cute?” I said, “No, I think you’re very cute.”
And that’s all there is.