A Repurposed Coke Bottle and a Few Close Friends

  
I didn't get intoxicated until a year and a half in to my two years of college. It's not that I didn't want to drink or do drugs. It's just that I was more concerned with church and acting and stealing things from stores, convenience and department. I just liked different highs like the kind you get from having the Holy Spirit invade your body and forcing you to speak in tongues. Sure, it seems like an odd way of escape, but it's no different than pull out good ol' Autumn Rose, taking a huge toke from her double-barreled water filtration system, and talking for hours about how the universe is connected. Both, in their essence, are existential. Both are intoxicating. Both are unreal.

It was holy weed from the land of California brought to us by a friend roaming from coast to coast selling joints and telling stories to ear money for his trip that sullied me. I was the only novice out of a handful of comrades sitting in my boyfriend's living room tripping out to Portishead or The Cardigans or some other mid-09's alterna-ish band. The traveller knocked on the door and the contemplative mood ignited momentarily just like a match being struck. He joined us on the couch and began rolling a joint. I was mesmerized by the deftness of his fingers and the gentle wafting green earth smell.

Everyone thought of me as straight-laced. The seminary didn't do much for dispelling that myth. In fact, it outright confirmed that I was dull and a bore, a person comfortable with rules and ritual. On one hand, that is somewhat true. I do have an internal need for order. But chaos and instinct guide my every action. Because of this perception, beers and joints normally passed me by. I didn't really care. My head was crazy enough without added intoxicants.

The joint was passed from lip to lip. My boyfriend looked at me, smiled, and blew a little smoke in my face. I inhaled tasting sage, tobacco, and clove. My foodie palate just beginning, I wanted to taste more. He passed it to me. I inhaled again.

The myths about not getting high the first time or newbies not inhaling deep enough or how weed made you batshit crazy all evaporated in that one long breath. Marijuana reached the bottom of my lungs, and I held it there. Slowly exhaling, a thin stream of smoke made its serpentine escape and danced in the air before finally disappearing. My eyes tickled, my head danced, and I eased back into the couch quiet and relaxed.

"This is what marijuana does? This?" I thought, and then I laughed a small laugh that I thought only I could here, but spilled out of my lips just like the smoke.

My friends started giggling at me, but I didn't care. I just added to their laughter until all of us couldn't remember what started it all. The joint still passed from lip to lip until it and our laughter was extinguished.

Then, our traveller stood up and announced he had one more surprise for us. He swiftly exited the house into the wintry snowy night and returned with a long glass contraption with chambers and flutes and spindly things. A dash of water added to the bottom, and it was set to take us somewhere else entirely. We marveled at its unique form and beauty. Such a thing could easily have had its place in a Chihuly exhibition.

The lighter hit the bowl igniting the tiny green leave as more smoke twirled upward mirroring the abstracted shapes my boyfriend had previously attempted to paint on his walls. I was no longer in his house. I , too, was a traveller riding my high to distant places, imagining California warmth, and a life less ordinary. I was a rebel uniting with comrades and planning some incursion that would never come to fruition. I closed my eyes and felt each fiber of the woven couch between my forefinger and thumb riding its long strands into the cotton of the cushions.

I enjoyed the mixture of enhanced reality and imagination. It was a needed release from the constant clatter of my unaltered hyperactive mind. I was able to ride a thought or an idea until I found another point it connect to. Then, I would explore that point, its edges and boundaries, until the curved circumference broke and unwound into another long line. Another point. Another line.

The glass contraption reached my lips; a lighter already lit; I inhaled again.

Our traveling guest told his tale of the bong. It was a gift or an art project or something of that nature. I don't recall. In a previous life, it was a Coke bottle. The logo stretched beyond recognition, he was the only one who knew for sure whether this tale was true.

The evening ended with a little making out, but not with the boyfriend rather his best friend. He walked in on us and laughed. He was thrilled to see not only my perceptions of drug use open up but also my concepts of relationships. It was that same evening I decided I wouldn't be monogamous. He encouraged a lot of my growth.

I can't recall how the evening ended. Such is the result of pot smoking, time, and distance. It's been fourteen years since that first puff, and rarely have I looked back on it. Now, recording this story, I am glad not only for that evening but also for my willingness to try something new. Risk doesn't come without failure or disappointment or even possibly violence. But risk does stretch one's thinking. That night, thanks to some weed, a repurposed Coke bottle, and a few close friends, I was stretched. And I'm still stretching today.

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