While other people got silly and fun, I became brooding and introspective. Sure, I could shovel down Cool Ranch Doritos with all the people laughing at the specks they saw on the kitchen counter but the whole time I’d be wondering if they were secretly laughing at me. This is, I guess, what can happen when you have a brain that is constantly scanning for negative possibilities and when it finds one, blows it up billboard size and blasts it into your synapses. With pot, I found a drug that would not only enhance and exacerbate that process but also, with all the Cool Ranch Dorito consumption, make me fat.
Good times.
The expressions “going to the hardware store for milk” or “going back to the empty well for water” are popular among codependents. To me, those aphorisms are about that thing people do when they know someone—usually a parent—isn’t going to give them what they need but their irrational desire to get those needs met supersedes this knowledge. That was me with pot. Rather than accepting the fact that my brain chemistry caused pot to do the opposite of what it was supposed to, I would go back to the bong well for more, thinking this time would be different.
And sometimes it would be different. Oftentimes it would be worse.
Because of this fact, someone like me should not go to Amsterdam for a weekend in order to enjoy what the city was most famous for among college students. But, when I was studying abroad my junior year in college, that’s exactly what my roommate Abby and I did. And well, on our first day we went to a café and smoked hash and that all seemed to go okay.
But the next day, we wanted to do something different. We wanted to eat space cakes.
We found a café where we got our space cakes, which I remember looking and tasting quite a bit like pound cake, a treat I’ve always loved. We ate them. I think we may have played Connect Four. I felt totally normal.
“These aren’t doing anything,” I complained to Abby.
She agreed. And so we did the next logical thing: we ate more. And more. And more. Like I said, pound cake has always been a favorite treat for me and since they weren’t doing anything, what did it matter?
An hour or so later, Abby and I decided to go see the movie Pacific Heights, a thriller that was playing down the street with English subtitles. Here’s what I remember:
We bought tickets. We started watching the movie. It was sort of bad.
Then. There was an intermission and we all filed out to a bar area that was just off the lobby.
Does this make sense? No. But it happened.
And that’s when everything went well, not quite sideways and not quite upside down but like a Rubik’s Cube that was being violently twisted by a demonic nine-year-old. I held the wall as everything around me began to take on a funhouse mirror look.
“Dude,” Abby said.
“I know.”
There were no other words. I didn’t know how to form the sentence “I’m as high as I’ve ever been.”
So we went back in the theater and watched the rest of the movie.
Afterwards we walked out into the street, clinging to each other the way an elderly couple might. Neither of us said a word. Then, Abby said she had to pee. I remembered just then that I had forgotten about bodily functions and, now that I remembered, I really needed to too. So we went into a Burger King bathroom where a bathroom attendant was handing out towels like it was the Four Seasons.
This seemed like the funniest and craziest thing imaginable, so much so that I started laughing so hard that I began to fall over. And so I did the next logical thing: I allowed myself to fall onto the ground so I could bang my hand on the ground, like I was having a tantrum. It occurred to me that I could be dying. As I remember it, the bathroom attendant—if there was a bathroom attendant, this whole thing could have been in my head—said something about calling security.
Abby pulled me off the floor, I managed to pee and we started walking back to the hotel. Then we heard Madonna’s “Vogue” playing out of a club we passed. Without saying a word to each other, we ran inside. It was winter and we were college students with tons of shit on us so, once we were in the middle of the dance floor, we tossed off our backpacks, our coats, our purses, our scarves, our hats and our mittens and, per Madonna’s instructions, struck a pose. That’s when the song ended. We looked around the club. A sea of Dutch folks were staring at the crazy Americans who’d run in there, tossed off their worldly possessions like they were on fire and tried to dance to a song that was over. As we silently picked up our things, it occurred to me that the reason they were looking at us so warily is that this was not in fact a club but a restaurant that happened to be playing Madonna and we’d just run into the middle of it, thrown everything we had on the floor and posed. To this day, I have no idea if this was a club where no one happened to be on the dance floor or a restaurant; I’m a girl, after all, whose brain blows negative possibilities up billboard size and then blasts them into my synapses.
The only safe thing to do right then, we decided, was to go back to the hotel, where we set the alarm for 7 am the next morning so we could make our 9 am flight.
I fell asleep in an instant and the next thing I knew, it was morning. I opened my eyes, feeling like a fat man was sitting on me. But I was alive! And not only that but when I looked at the clock, I saw that it was 6:30 am. We’d beaten the alarm.
Feeling proud, I got up and stumbled to the door to retrieve the newspaper the hotel left out there every morning. But when I looked at it, I noticed something strange.
“This is so weird,” I said to Abby, who had just opened her eyes. “Today’s paper has tomorrow’s date.”
“What?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
We looked at each other. We looked at the paper. And we both knew: The paper did not decide to randomly print the next day’s date. In other words, we had not only slept through the alarm but through the night, through the next day and then through the following night. Space cakes had not only possibly caused permanent brain damage but had also made me lose a day of my life.
I wish I could say I left pot alone after that. But I didn’t. That empty well was going to deliver me water someday, God damn it. That hardware store would have a milk special, I just knew it. So let’s just say that the fact that my sobriety doesn’t allow me to smoke pot isn’t much of a sacrifice.
I still enjoy pound cake and Connect Four and Vogue-ing. Some things, thank God, I didn’t have to give up.