When I think back on why we smoked pot for the first time, and why we were the first ones to do it in our grade, the only explanation I could come up with is that we all shared a feeling that life wasn’t made for us and that The Universe provided something, however crude it was, to separate ourselves, from this reality. Like a prisoner who endeavors to complete some great work, or to plan his escape, we were trapped on a breeding grid where the only way out was straight through the heart, through the dismantling of our own minds. The town we lived in was one of those places you’d live in once you’ve made the resignation that you can’t escape who you are, no matter how many cities you run to or places you go so the best thing to do is hide. It was one of those random towns you’d see on a highway exit sign, and immediately upon reading it you’d ask yourself why anyone would live there. It provided just enough so you never had to leave, so you never had to see anything new ever again. Chalky strip malls like badly kilned clay and the asphalt, and the poisoned earth that stank like rainbow-ed streaks of gasoline and fertilizer.

The guy we got it from was Jim, he was a friend of mine who was about two years older. He was tall and walked like his limbs were being controlled by an extremely unskilled marionette, had aquiline features and was always making snide remarks towards the resident idiots/racists of the school which usually resulted in him being on the receiving end of a public beat-down. When recounting these altercations he’d always act like I was supposed to be surprised , as if some moron who wore stained undershirts and work boots to school and who compulsively screamed “white power” was up for a reasonable debate. I didn’t usually feel like pointing out these incongruities in his thinking and risk another pointless argument so i’d usually reply with something vague like “that’s fucked up” or “that’s a shame”. It was probably after one of these discussions that I asked for and eventually received a dubsack which he handed to me gleefully ou  of his hand under the dusky, funereal glow of the overhead lighting in his beat up black sedan.

I had tried to get high before before but it didn’t work. My friend in math class had given me what was to this day maybe one of the worst, most rickshaw joints i’ve ever seen in my life and it was impossible to get it going. Whatever buzz I might have gotten off of it was spent hiding in the bathroom from my mom as I was convinced that she was able to perceive my highness at some supernatural level.

This time I had a better plan. Henry was going to provide a metal pipe which would probably harder to mess up. We gathered on my porch I remember it was a moonlit night and the stars was clear of any clouds so that that night seemed like some perfect inversion of a sunny day, everything painted in black yet perfectly visible. That porch on that night became where everything happened, it became the unlit porch at the end of the world and for the first time i’d see it that way, i’d feel the unrelenting cold, the wind that whipped through lifeless bloodstream of winter trees, I’d feel alone and yet connected in ways I hadn’t felt before.

I held in the earthy, pungent, smoke that coiled from the azure colored pipe. I only took one hit. When I got back inside the house I was already laughing with my friends about something or other, everything was amusing to me now and I couldn’t stop . The moment I remember most distinctly though was lying on my back in the living room with my friend who was also thoroughly enjoying himself and asking him if he had any music. I’d heard of course that pot was supposed to make it sound awesome. Evidently all he had was a single mp3 file on battered flip phone, that file being Eric Clapton’s You Look Wonderful Tonight. I normally would shit talk Eric Clapton ad-nauseum and really hated his music but I figured it was better than nothing.

The sound that emanated from that upraised flip phone was probably one of the most beautiful things i’ve ever heard in my life. The weeping, over saturated string bends that repeated throughout the song, the sweet simplicity of it gave me a sense of euphoria I hadn’t experienced before, like the arms of the world were wrapped around me. At the same time the comedic value of two ostensibly straight guys listening to this song while lying on the floor together wasn’t lost on me. To ad to this our love fest was rudely interrupted by my golden retriever, Buddy, who had gotten his head stuck in a bag of chips and began franticly waving it around to free himself from this prism which it seemed to him was trying to absorb his entire body. What commenced was probably the biggest laughing fit i’d ever had, as I tried to help Buddy escape from the bag he’d gotten trapped in.

To this day none of my marijuana experiences really have come close to that first time. Eventually the excitement wore off and as I had gotten to use it more habitually the returns began to diminish.However, what I came away with was an experience of happiness and escapement that I probably needed at that point. I found a way, however unhealthy it might have been, to pass the time in a town I really didn’t want to be in, full of people I mostly didn’t like. That experience of listening to that music followed me the rest of my life and furthered my obsessions with its power to transform, to altercate experience by way of creative intention.