WHY did I smoke today? As if! Tell me why I smoked? How can I do
this to myself? I have papers to write, so many papers to write, what
am I doing? How did I become a walking self-destruction? We read in
class pull yourself out the abyss by the hair, and I continually relive
failure like my old man.
So I’ll spill all of it. Let it drip as it may. I am too stoked to organize
as my speech and logic classes try to program, I am not yet a cyborg.
Something organic is filling the page. I’ll be back in a few minutes . . .
excellent, a college bathroom and I’m toked as a virgin on a first date.
An eclectic blend of architecture to torture one senseless is Queens
college. The shiek postmodern library clock chimes like the bells of my
Catholic preschool . . . clangorous irony. An empty clock tower with
four six-story pillars and no interior, just these humongous iron bells
to clang people into synchronized machines. Not that I have anything
against time in principle, mathematical time, clock tower time, it’s
just the emptiness of the architect’s vision . . . the emptiness of the
whole damned century which began with Gatsby. I’d explain but I’m
high as a giraffe and the clock tower clogs me with intellectual clamps
that can last an odyssey. Holy hell, I see the tower blow his long legs
out of the reinforced concrete foundation and run around the quad
jangling his bronze bells as he shocks all of the literary prudes sitting
in the physics and polysci departments, all of whom internally yell that
such exhibitions of artistic gesticulation are against quantum mechanics.
Is it my job to uncork these robotic industrialists?
I might do it if I didn’t hate the writer that strangles readers with a
chokehold like a middle school bully while writing about himself. Always
about themselves. Colors herself purple on the page. Shamelessly purple.
They put on purple sunglasses and color the whole world purple. White
shirts turn purple. Frisbees turn purple. Nipples and eyelashes and Spanish
roofs turn purple. Some mesmerized kid pacing in spiraled circles before
the fence that guards the construction of the first dormitory Queens is
building in its history with these white and yellow hand prints going down
the stretch of the dark-brown-wooden-fence in perfect waves turns purple.
Everything, swirling purple. The Bengali girl in a white summer straw-hat
with a blue flower in its brim next to a long haired kid in sky-blue Albos
above his light-denim knee-ripped threadbare jeans, sparking silver beams
from his white rubber soles which shimmer love-vibes like the honey-colored
glass gems embroidered in the girl’s crayon-yellow-bohemian-wild-flower-skirt
turns purple. The fish-shaped fountain with an endless stream of coin-silver
water that regenerates like literary images indelibly burned with blow torches
from the mouths of white-bearded professors who look like mountain-goat
shepherds, men jumping from peak to peak, peaks chiseled for them by
insecure spirits in need of building mountains like Achilles to immortalize
their death-shocked beings turn purple. The violin speaking with the piano
from the music building’s windows seems to pour out of the holes of the sky
which swirl ocean-blue clouds through O’keefian eyes whose arabesque
contours in some fine arts major’s fantasy turns purple. The whole lavender
beehive of aristocratic bees in white space-suits fencing on the quad lawn
as they stumble over their own knees, each in their own mind believing
themselves to be a musketeer, next to them grass splashing in the air as
the contemporary Mexican peasant manicures the lawn on a great modern
Teradactyl, deafening the surrounding buzz with its spouting industrial noise
from its fat diesel muscles as they try to get through their first attempt of
Paradise Lost turns purple. The sun turns purple spilling purple light as it
bounces off the opaque purple windows in the purple buildings into the purple
purse that a stunning undergrad is frenzying to find her purple lipgloss and
plum eyeliner to go along with her purple blouse purple jeans and chilipepper-
red boots. Everything turning one shade, comic or tragic, sublime or hideous
optimistic pessimistic, + or -.
I doubt this is what my dealer meant when he said the stuff he’s got is top
notch, a strand I’ve heard a great many things about, Purple Haze. I learned
in high school that kids who smoked Purple Haze pissed purple piss. Exciting.
Thing is I never cared for the nomenclature of what I smoked so long as it
got the job done. They have all sorts of exotic names these days, Blue Haze,
White Widow, Jack Herrera, Diesel, Buddha’s Sister, Blueberry, Sweet Tooth,
Dutch Dragon, White Light and on and on; a clever poet can put them all to-
gether and probably get a decent sonnet out of them, or at least a haiku.
Pretty rad. Though all that never mattered, as that’s not what smoking is
about.
Eddie and Yuki are all over each other, Artist’s row, Central Park. Spring love
in full bloom beneath Mangolia trees full of bulb-length white flowers with little
pink nipples sitting inside, every flower pressed against the other like a batch
of apples, as a whole, a row of plump wedding breasts. I hear an artist on my
left remark, “Look at the expression on his face. I really want to paint him.”
Recalling my thoughts at the time my look must have been the look of a Chinese
immigrant stepping foot on horseshit California roads in the 1800s expecting
to see streets paved with gold. Back over my shoulder, I see the artist, a mid-
thirty year old man sitting with a long black perfectly trimmed beard and these
raving-mad blue marble eyes. I give him a twitter of my lip which refuses to
smile as an acknowledgment and perhaps an appreciation for seeing what no
one else sees, but I am at a time in my life where my expression speaks what
my lips cannot utter. I notice I am the only one wearing all black on this lush
spring day. The trees do not stir me with their beauty and I see through the
tourist smiles and awe reflected in their scrambled morning pink white
eyes.
There are two categories of smokers, see. There are the people that are really
into pot and all the rituals and names and crap that they see on Comedy Central
and in movies like Cheech and Chong and Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.
These are the people that subscribe to High Times magazine and know most
of the urban myths that are passed along the halls and cafeterias of junior,
middle and high schools. They’ll gather up in groups and be fascinated by the
ritual rolling of the blunt, a cheap cigar usually sold in any local deli smoke
shop or gas station which is stripped of tobacco and filled with marijuana in
a cult like fashion, everyone’s got their “special” way, after which the blunt
is lit and passed around a circle gathered in a backyard, basement, or someone’s
living room, all depending on age bracket and economic standing, kind of like
they show on That Seventies Show where teens say odd things, make corny
jokes while trying to explain some profound insight which usually makes little
sense to anyone but the speaker, and then get collectively wasted. I met a guy
from that milieu and he started sharing his enlightenment about happiness . . .
happiness is when he had to really go to the jon and finally got his release.
That’s what, for him, life came down to. I think some 20th century philosopher
said something similar, so who knows.
“Eddie, common! Just come with us. What are you afraid of?” He had just seen
the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and refused to follow through on our idea to walk
through Alley Pond’s woods at night, because, he said, we were five people and
in the movie it was five people who were killed. He used to get irrational and
paranoid when he was high; and sure as shit we used to be cruel to him. We
told him to stay behind if he was so afraid but he did not want to be left alone;
so Andrew began spinning some tale about cops patrolling the area, how his
brother got arrested a few months back and when I saw the blue beams behind
me even I began to panic like a suburban housewife who just pissed her secrets
after getting off the subway in Harlem. Then sure as shit he yelled “Police!” and
I was really ready to scram. But it was just some kids like us, probably smoking
weed, no doubt, blasting their music and feeling up their girls in the back seat
of a sleek bumble-bee Hummer, who knows, probably coke heads.
Then there are people like me. People all about catching the ultimate high, cloud-
nine as the street tongue goes. I guess kinda like a surfer who’s always talking
about the ultimate ride, the ultimate wave. A Zen moment, maybe. Something
profound, something that just doesn’t happen on its own unless you’re a William
Blake type. Some people just have it. I never did. I mean, I came close . . . I had
my moments see. But whatever these moments were didn’t come often enough.
And if they did come, they never lasted too long. It may be the generation I come
from, which, they say, is always after instant gratification; and then maybe it’s
something else entirely. Something very hard to explain, especially to those that
have never experienced it or are only concerned with the negative health effects.
Over the years I’ve learned that these people are hopeless; not in the sense that
they are hopeless people, who knows maybe they’re the William Blakes of the world,
but they make hopeless converts. You can’t make these people see what it is you’re
after and that’s okay. No bad vibes.
I already had the big ride of my life, and every so often, at least once a year, it
returns like the cycles in the tides. And it’s never the same. When it happens though,
man, oh man, when it happens, the world just speaks. Everything from the coffee
mug on the desk to the floor and the stars and other people becomes terrifyingly
beautiful and instructive. Shamelessly so. The mind seems to speed up on that wave.
Speeds up so fast that the rest of the world seems to stand still.
It gets so still and the mind gets so fast that the combination of the two brings about
insights you would of never had if you weren’t going at the speed you were going. It’s
like looking out of the window of a bullet-train going over a 120 MPH and everything
outside is ocean for as long and wide as the eyes can see.
Then you begin to catch the subtleties in every wave. Things you’ve never seen before
because you’ve never seen wave after wave at such a speed. Go out, read and listen
to a lot of things. Go get yourself a psychology book that’ll tell you about all the different
personality disorders people have, the insecurities people share; go and listen to
professors lecture on similar subjects, even watch it flicker on the TV, but when you’re
out here in the real world that isn’t a show on mtv, in a snug book-shop in the Ville all
toked out of your habitat as you catch glimpses of insecurities right before you: people
avoiding people, nervous glances, inadvertent flirtations and that cosmic goo you’ve
read and felt on deep intuitive levels but never to justify a sound empirical deduction,
all of it flashing before you and the people begin to see it in your eyes and start dodging
your Mickey Mouse gaze, the colors ripping out of the walls and the music jittering your
bones like being sardined in the middle of a sold-out Pink Floyd concert, at that point,
the world changes in such a radical way so deep down the sky blue well frozen in your
gut that it never goes back to being the way it was. You’d have to be institutionalized
for it to go back to being the way it was. A real madman.
I look out of my notebook and everything beams under the ticklish fingers of the sun.
My playlist is set to random but this is the fourth time a Marley song played in the last
twenty minutes. Jam to any song long enough and sure as death it’ll make you sick.
Marley is able to offer the titanium strength needed to navigate a campus toked off
the coral reef. That’s not to say that marijuana only offers paranoid juices or that it
doesn’t calm and render life magnificently artistic. The trouble with ganja is that
when you’re toked in a place with a history, with people you know or knew, some of
whom you engage in half-smiles and rapturous daydreams in the closets of the mind;
this intellectual Mecca where bad grammar and slang are frowned upon and ragged
clothes and beatup old Cougars suddenly stand out against waves of straight hair and
black cotton coats, where three out of four people are in designer sunglasses or thick-
lensed specs to make one feel incredibly, intellectually insecure; where the teenage
dreams of coed cuties have become realities, and professors to whom I still owe term
papers from dead semesters stare down from the opposite ends of the universe with
eagle eyes, well, then, one might think twice about the merits of smoking coral on
campus, mid-semester.
Buffalo Soldier ignites from my headphones and I know myself to be taller than the
ominous skyscraping tyrants on the horizon. I Jump to my feet and flit past the
glowing freshman eyes, the numb accounting eyes, the flowered skirts and Isaac’s
tribe looking strong next to Ishmael’s brethren, Japanese scholars and Phi Beta
Kappas walking beside a stout professor with a roller-backpack and a tuna gut. I
dodge the glance of a musician with bark-brown hair teaching a mellowed-out hipster
on the steps leading to the fountain, the fountain splashing coin-silver water crashing
rain drops echoing an African waterfall, Santana jazz on an acoustic.
I’ve been smoking so much and for so long that the dazzling effects, even of Purple
Haze, are already beginning to lose their spell. It’s really disappointing. If I had to
explain it, I guess, getting high would be kind of like going on a ride on your favorite
roller-coaster. The first time you go it is the most magnificent thing ever, it must be,
because it becomes your favorite coaster, one you will continue to ride all your life.
Everything is jizzin, from the anticipation as you wait on the line, the conversations
and the people you’re with, getting strapped and buckled in the seat, that slow incline
on the way to the apex, the nervousness, apprehension, fear and excitement you feel
rising, the suspension in the air and then that complete surrender of control to the
design of the ride which shall thrill you with unexpected twists and turns loops and
loops and loops and right there, right in that moment where you’ve wished for this
one feeling to become eternity, at least one very long moment in heaven stretching
the span of a few hundred years, right then and there you feel gravity begin to pull,
the noise of the coaster-wheels rattles less and less and you re-enter the dark cave
from which moments ago you were liberated.
If it was a pleasant journey you’ll celebrate, perhaps with a cheer, and wish to ride
again. Maybe immediately or soon after. Each successive time the ride will get more
predictable and less exciting. Nothing has really changed. The peak of the highest
loop is still the same height. The speed of the coaster is still the same speed. But
you’re body begins to adjust, it anticipates every concentric motion, and your mind
is no longer thrilled by a screwdriver or suspension in zero gravity. You’ll return, not
looking for what it was you sought the first time you went, maybe just searching to
recapture memories of those all too mortal moments of your virginity. Sometimes
you’ll just ride to see what is different from one ride to the next; but no matter how
thrilling the very fact that you’ve done it, been that high up, been through the madness
and poetry and beauty of it all swirling around your frenzied purple bowl leaves a lack.
Nothing changed externally, but you as you are no longer the same, no longer able to
feel what it is you felt, see what it is you saw—and even if you do see it, it still is not
the same—and ultimately you begin to wonder why it is you come back year after year,
why repeat the cycle. What is it there that you’re craving? How low must you really be
to catch what you once had, and not only catch it, but joyously bake and quack while
knowing everything there is to know about it.
Much is like that. Reading, writing, driving, kissing and Marryjane. When reading
you enter a paragraph that lays out a setting, a character, and some sort of dramatic
situation; a crisis occurs, the plot develops toward a climax and a resolution. A well
educated or experienced reader anticipates this structure, aware of it on various levels
and to various degrees and because of this rarely becomes impressed by what they
encounter. This is a horrible disease that prolific readers have to which only the best
books written by the best writers have an antidote. These writers will tamper with the
structure, play upon expectations, offer a momentary release.
But to re-read the book is to already become aware of its pattern, the bold edginess
hovering above the abyss just loses its bullet. The addict is left with the surface for
contemplation and enjoyment, the skin and hair of the characters, the scenery along
plot lines… This is more than enough for virgins but not addicts, yet they continue to
read. People go on kissing their wives and husbands without real expectations of discovery,
hit the accelerator down the same road with the identical trite trees, keep puffing on the
magic dragon, keep chasing Moby without really knowing why and maybe it’s just the
habit, and maybe it’s being caught in the perpetual whilwinds of cause and effect, and
maybe it’s the devil’s temptations, who knows, I don’t, but I know I’m lighting up.
It can’t just be the structure of the trip, the awe of ‘high-consciousness,’ it’s not the
ride itself but what is caught within the net along the swirls. It’s screaming in absolute
joy with a ridiculously contorted look on your face beside your best friend as the camera
captures your mug-shot. You step off the ride, look at yourself in amazement on the
computer monitor, and realize something bright still burns within no matter how
intensely encompassing the darkness that swallowed you is. It’s about catching
something within yourself that you weren’t aware of, something that sits beyond the
reach of regular consciousness; writing is like that and so is reading, both unlocking
gateways to desires and repressions: a therapuetic firework of self: finding self, the
you within you which is strangely unfamiliar.
Yuki and Eddie all over each other next to a Filipino musician on Artist’s Row. The
man is dressed in white slacks and this black silk dress-shirt. He’s got this wavy
black hair with a long white highlight stretching from his forehead to his neck, and
he’s sitting on a park bench serenely playing the cello. I could watch him for days on
end and he doesn’t have to play a single note to maintain my interest. To the left a
clown is juggling silver sabers over the head of children sitting cross-legged in a
semi-circle with animal faces painted on: zebras, lions, panthers and monkeys. They
look mesmerized and bored at the same time. The parents watching look far calmer
than they should be, but none of this is new to me. I had seen it all before and continue
walking like nothing special is occurring, no epiphanies to make. New Yorkers and
tourists and the whole iron city, the stinking summer shine in the city park . . . I was
high of course but had no Yuki to make out with.
Something has disoriented, unhinged the last comfortable plateaus I . . . I clung to
before the cosmic vacuum cleaner pulled everything inside its infinite depths. Staring
at the lulling beauty of the trees I hear the voices of my teachers urging “Awake!”
awake from the romantic lullabies that keep dread out. I am unwilling.
There is a fascination with Truth sculpt within me. It’s been there since I was fourteen.
I was surfing the cosmic strings with my cousin who attended Queens College at the
time and I questioned her about illusions and falsehoods. Are falsehoods which bring
about happiness better than truths that bring about misery? She declared, “The truth,
always the Truth!” I cannot recall the rest of our conversation or how exactly she
persuaded me to change my mind, she’s a clever girl and must have had a better
argument than I’m able to recall, but I do remember her zealousness and the topaz
fire in her brown eyes, like something other-worldly was shining through her. It chiseled
within me the same stubborn desire to know and recognize only what is true and to
turn away from all that is false, no matter how sublime. Since then I have encountered
a great deal on truth, untruth, and the whole struggle of past millennias to understand
and develop through art or science this great notion which so many people, from the
highest educated to the not so educated have been unable to arrive at a reasonable
consensus for the longest damned time.
This is the experience in university where one professor teaches about rationality as
ultimately free of contradictions, the only refuge for truth seen as right action, and
another teaches Dostoevsky and Sartre. On Tuesday I study the Romantics and
Trandsendatalists and their beautiful odes to nature; on Wednesday professor so and
so lectures on Frankenstein and says nature is a sedative.
The truth is sometimes a sedative is just what the doctor ordered. Yet to go through
life enraptured by the subtle opalescent shades of green in the Hickory leafs or the
enjoyment of watching two squirrels playing tag is unsatisfying. There is an urge to
uncover being, to encounter it with a kiss. To create in spite of the fact that every-
thing is subject to destruction. This is why fucking and even making love are not
enough. I had my moments see. I made love and animal romped until the ceilings
shook and the stars turned green and wept. There too I encountered more repressions
and desires and discovered that unless they are recorded, the void wins. For every-
thing inevitablly sinks from wherever it arose.
Now I’m rambling. Maybe I’ll fall underground where the battle of the self will mirror
another treacherous mentality that is forever at odds with itself as it seeks to create
and destroy in a perpetual philosophic ouroboros, a cerebral snake that eats its own
tail. I may already be caught in the middle of it and never be able to find my way out
of the underground cave. That’s probably what smoking is for, to destroy the structures
of belief, cover truths, enabling a dude or dudette to enjoy once more the semblance
of things almost as if from an infant’s perspective, freeing one from the cave, only to
be placed in another cave, but at least to uncover a new horizon of awareness. The
cave sits in a labyrinth and each section has a kind-of truth to it. Even to know the
whole as a whole is to be in another section with a type of partial knowledge . . . and
while in awe of it a trace of purple footprints that spiral before the waves is overcome
by the immediate desire to smoke everything into oblivion.
There is this constant back and forth between destruction and creation, truth and
untruth, two twin pillars at war: for every reason beaming forth from some strange
heaven of ideas a passion with equal might erupts in counter, and not always without
its own good reason. Endless creation brings about constant exclusion and evasion
which only urges the wrath of the destructive instinct. Destruction is a liberation from
the purple structures imposed upon the perverted eye! Destroy the purple swirls and
liberate everything else to speak for itself as other without the particular perversity,
while remembering that the perversion itself is sublime and carries with it its own
candescences of light.
The THC had imploded. As I walked down the quad I found myself on two levels of
experience. While my motor skills maneuvered my meat through the crowds where
baseball caps swam the backstroke and eyelashes met for fleeting kisses, my own eyes
remained intently focused on kaleidoscopic pebbles caught in the slabs of slate on top
of which my beatup Cougars beat, simultaneously I visualualized a memory capsule so
intently a part of my own being that the whole memory is like a play dough dream, as
a colinsign wrote. The cast of characters, chronology, and the actual dialogue are
indefinitely cemented and unalterable, but the various detours for a wild imagination
are unquestionably worthy of recognition.
It was a year ago during finals week. I needed to get my hands on some addies to cram
for two exams and conjure a term-paper due 48 hours from now. I had been trying for
days with no luck, asking anybody I could think of. When I was all but ready to give up
I ran into Andy, a guy I had gone to middle school with, one of the few, well, only friends
I had.
As it turned out he had been hanging with a younger crowd by the high school two blocks
down from our college. He made a call and it was arranged. A hot Russian fox, Natasha,
would meet me at one thirty by one of the side-exits of the school. The deal was that if
I drove her home, which was only about a mile away, she would hook me up with four
addies. Turns out the girl actually has attention deficit disorder and is stock full of pills
which she sells for three bucks a pop. I asked Andy how I would recognize her in the
crowd and he told me that it’d be no problem cause she’s the hottest girl in school,
extremely tall with this crazy red hair, like a phoenix. In fact, because she’s so much
taller than everyone else and her hair is so wild the kids call her Amazon.
Andy was right as it turned out because I instantly picked her out of the crowd which
wasn’t too hard as she was literally a head taller than the rest of the kids. Being a
college guy I wasn’t intimidated by hot high school chicks and had no trouble approaching
and introducing myself. I was rather interested in what kinda girl these youngsters
considered “hot,” a girl, who, Andy insisted, most guys were afraid to approach.
Before we met I decided to put on a black fedora that I had stashed in the backseat of
my car to make her feel more comfortable about the situation. After all, I was some
strange college dude who she didn’t know giving her a ride home, but it turned out
that she had that part covered. As soon as she greeted me she introduced me to Chris,
a tall bulky guy with the build of a football linesman in a black trench coat. It was about
eighty degrees outside and he was wearing a black trench coat. Chris, Amazon informed
me, narrowing her mascara-less eyes, was coming with us or there’d be no deal. I’m not
sure what it was but there seemed to be an instant click between the three of us. Perhaps
it was because all of us were weird and goofy and so it seemed natural for the three of
us to spark. Amazon even complimented me on my black fedora and Chris gently shook
my hand. I watched them exchange some gossip and joke around like brother and sister
and then we all headed for my car.
I was very panicky because I was in a huge rush to get home and begin cramming for the
exams which were the only things on my mind. Truth is, I was already speeding on two
addies that I took a few hours back and was determined not to let the juice waste. I had
little time as it was and Amazon was on her last bottle, she wouldn’t get another shipment
‘till the end of the month,’ so every minute was a precious commodity, every second, or
else the whole semester would rot. I was getting too old for the college routine as it was
and I simply could not, GPA-wise, afford another incomplete. Another failure and I’d never
get out of community college.
Nothing good was playing on the radio. Chris silently passed a shiny purple-tinted CD which
I slid inside and “Who’s a Fire Starter” blazed from the speakers. Amazon said she’d heard
this CD so many times she was getting sick of it, but still liked the song. I had nothing to
say about it but loved the powerful political spirit the symbolism in the lyrics inspired. Chris
offered the CD as a gift and I accepted. Amazon opened the window, stretching her torso
outside and yelled, “Frankie Woooooooo Hooooooooooo Football man next Saturday Woooooooo
Hooooooo!” and we all heard a guy yell back “Amazzzoooaaaaaan!” She came back inside
laughing and told me to make a left. Then she asked, “Wanna smoke pot?” I said sure.
What the hell I had no idea what I was going to write about anyway, and the day was still
young, plus I couldn’t wait to see what Amazon was like stoked. The two of them had
some sort of oeuvre about them that had me magnetized.
Amazon got out of the car, went home for her pills, while Chris and I shared a comfort-
able silence as we sat back listening to the music. She came back inside, opened my
right palm, here, six for twelve, I looked up at her, she smiled; I smiled, I put away the
pills inside the center compartment below the Tuner, placed my hand in my back-pocket,
took out a roll of twelve singles, passed them to her, she placed them in her pocket
without counting and said, “How about Alley Pond?” I said, “That’s perfect I always
used to smoke at Alley Pond when I used to cut class and smoke by myself. Great place
to just walk around.” Chris said he wanted some coffee so I pulled into double-d and he
ordered a small black. I parked the car by the park and we sparked.
We walked into a secluded area in the woods, above us light bouncing off the leaves
like pinballs in the arcade, and Amazon apprehensivly asked, “Do you think The Blair
Witch Project was really real wow the woods are creeping me out.” I calmly said no,
because people have been using the woods as horror settings for centuries like in Grimm
fairytales and Little Red Riding Hood. Amazon looked at me with laser lips and a vanilla
smile as she eagerly said, “I’m convinced.” I looked at her impressively and fell in love
instantly. Chris said to Amazon that Jen got high three days ago at Mikey’s party and I
did the whole—he formed an invisible cube around Amazon’s head with his palms—on
her and she said it totally blew her mind and like she went crazy sitting in the corner
not talking to anyone. Amazon’s eyes inflated like two hot-air balloons with green
parachutes. Chris turned to me and made the invisible cube around my head. He and
Amazon stared at me waiting for a reaction. I didn’t react.
“You’re curious.”
I smiled.
She asked me what I needed addies for and I told her that it was finals week and I was
in the middle of writing a paper. She said cool and asked Chris if today he was going to
do his laundry. He said no he’d do it this weekend. I asked them if they were brother
and sister and they both gave me a dirty look. They turned to each other; “Wow we get
that a lot. Just friends.”
Chris walked up the path to smoke a cigarette, probably out of consideration for us,
and me and Amazon began to follow him at a distance. On our left was a recently fallen
tree with this sperm white bark and a few green patches of moss growing near the roots
with this impressionistic pistachio forest in the backround, one of the few remaining
stitchs of wild land caught smack in the middle of a New York burb, and I looked at
Amazon, and I looked at the tree, looked back at Amazon, she stared at the tree, so
I stared at the tree and then looked back at Amazon who sadly looked at the fallen
tree like a solemn saint, and I looked back at the tree, thought I’ve seen it all before,
looked at Amazon and then back at the tree, then looked at Amazon and said, “The
tree, huh.” Yeah, it’s so beautiful, she said reluctantly. Chris expressed nothing and
we walked back to the car. It was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen.
“That’s funny Andy thought you were Russian but you’re not.”
I flicked the ignition and pulled onto the street.
“I know. People assume because my name is Natasha that I am. I get that a lot.”
Two Kawasoki motocycles passed us.
“Yeah, she does. How old do you think she is?”
I gave a long stare, examining every facial feature.
“Eighteen.”
“See! That’s why no one will approach you.” Chris said.
I looked at her. She turned to the backseat.
“Yeah, now I see why.”
I unconsciously made a turn on Springfield.
“She’s fifteen!” I nearly stopped the car.
“Hey, let’s listen to classic rock.”
Amazon began scanning toward 104.5 but I beat her to it as I clicked on one of my
presets that had the station. She looked at me as if she’d just fallen in love. I
remembered myself at her age and knew that if she were anything like me, that
she just fell and fell hard. I asked her what it was like to have a.d.d.
“It’s kind of crazy because I jump from one thought to the next and always want to
do something new. But when I’m in class I have to be on the meds which help me
focus, but I don’t feel like myself . . . and, so, sometimes I don’t take the pills
because I just want to be myself, you know?” She made this sad, pensive expression
and looked out of the car window.
A few songs later she told me I had to drop Chris off at home, and I did. Before he
left we all agreed to hang out more in the future. She asked me if I wanted to get
Wendys, and I certainly did. I ran a red-light by accident, she didn’t care, and we
drove up and placed our orders. We ate in the car, in the parking lot—I found an
opporutinty to mention my girlfriend—dropped her off at home, and never saw either
one of them again. Niether did I finish any of my papers. Just took all six addies at
once, wrote a poem and hoped for something to happen. Death . . . creativity, any-
thing really. Wasn’t sure what.
On the way to the food court too many young eyes followed me with their curious
gazes. I am unequipped to handle the rituals of the food court. I never thought the
light of the campus would be so traumatizing, why did I smoke? I need to avoid all
these butterflies reflected in the eyes staring at my ragged clothes. Fucking judg-
mental eyes. Innocent eyes. Indifferent eyes. Curious eyes. Pink eyes. Pink eyes
grabbed me in an introductory to Acting course last semester . . . never have I
encountered such haunting terror. She even seemed to love me . . . I don’t think
she realized we were in a drama class so I dehumanized her just to be able to look
and speak to her on stage, a phenomenological reduction that shall haunt me for
as long as Cain walked.
The tall grass looks like an ant and mosqito jungle where territorial wars are
continuously being fought. My head is throbbing like a jack-hammer… I know the
state that I’m in very well, if I don’t drink some coffee and do something active
I’ll vegetate for the rest of the day. No way will I be able to read or write anything
worthwhile, maybe ten minutes ago, but not now.
My brain’s burned out and I seriously fear that perhaps my little escapade into the
unconscious has ravished a lot of cells. But someone once told me that watching
televison kills braincells so I’m not really sure how I fair in the grand scheme. I can
also never be certain if the man I imagine, as vividly as any memory, atop the art
building dressed as a mime with a black moustash like Salvador Dali has, shaped in
this long concave black canoe, tight-rope walking on the edge toward a monkey with
a marching band drum wearing jeans and blue suspendors, banging away, is there for
me to see because I smoked, as if conjured by the reefer, or, rather, if the pot unveils
the gray curtains hanging between me and my unconscious. What is this unconscious
anyway?
I know its there, like some cosmic witch’s brew with poetic images, memories,
fears and dreams . . . who knows what else. I don’t know how it works, if it works,
but it seems to be some primordial place to jump into and take away facinating
images . . . which actually make sense, at times, given enough space and perspective.
A childhood fantasy fun-house with me running around, meeting strange faces, fat and
contorted images, skinny and long arabesque skin waves, beasty teeth, hounds . . .
truthfully, I don’t want to see. It’s like I give my mind a place to enter, a few mirrors,
and things begin to appear. Where do they appear from, from what force of nature?
And my cousin denies the unconscious . . . an outdated idea.
I really wish I was high, exteriors are more colorful and less threatening to psychic well-
being. The sun floats ahead in slow motion down the purple sky, slowly, I watch the sun
go through a meat-grinder cut up by the jagged city skyline, annoying black birds chatter
in the trees, a girl walks beneath the branches with the look of an opera singer being
pulled down into the inferno, she cringes in pain at the screaching sounds; I need to
smoke; a few stars appear through the plummy-blue haze, the entire place is a starry
pastel dream. Everyone seems to be hurrying. I really need to smoke. How amazing
everything would appear if only I could smoke. How interesting things would be…
(to be continued)
if one read further. Maybe the psychology could be built in a little later. Will re-think; thanks for the criticism, believe me, it’s appreciated. Problem is the psychology is right for the setting, smoking mid-semester with a lot of work due. But I agree, the first paragraph opens slowly and a little on the whiny side.