Story #1: In Which I Get Turned On

My brother had been trying to turn me on to pot for quite some time. Each time he visited me, he would pull out a pipe and light up, much to my horror and consternation. I was convinced that I was going to be busted because he was smoking in my home. I would be innocent, but busted.

Finally, though, I decided I was being a little pigheaded about the whole thing. He had worn down my resistance. I might as well do it, just to get it over with. It so happened that I was visiting with my brother on the Fourth of July. It happened to be a Thursday night. I know this, because Star Trek was on. It was a summer repeat but still in its original first run on NBC.

My brother lit up the pipe with what passed for good pot in that early period. I took a toke, and immediately coughed right back into the pipe, causing the entire bowlful of grass to explode into the air. My brother was horrified. Crap, I had never even smoked a cigarette before.

I apologized for my social faux paux, then tried again. I got the hang of it and soon the four of us, both brothers, both wives, had plowed through several bowls of marijuana.

Before long we were really enjoying that Star Trek episode, one of those ones about a God computer controlling an entire society. I think it was Landrew.

By the end of the episode I was looking at wifey #1 with more interest than usual. I was horny! She was too. We made a trip upstairs, and then I discovered what pot was really good for. It wasn't long afterward that we had our first (of many) pot-fired orgasms.

After that, we left the house and went to view the local Fourth of July fireworks. We sat on someone's lawn, smoking pot and laughing hysterically. View Star Trek, get laid, watch fireworks. I became a head in a single night.

What you learn about marijuana is: everything is better. Even if it isn't better, it's better. Perception is everything. Almost every negative critical impulse you have just flies away in the face of a good grass high.

The food you are eating is the best you ever tasted and you can't get enough of it. (That's the big one. 'The munchies' aren't just a rumor, you know. I can't tell you the number of times during the years that I made a mad dash to the grocery store or 7-Eleven at 10:00 at night just to buy a Tastykake Chocolate Junior.) The sex you are currently engaged in is the wildest. The music you are listening to is the best.

Conversation is the most intellectual, the most stimulating, the most original. You say things that you've never said before and then you say to yourself, "Wow! Did I just say that?" You are convinced that you've solved the problems of the universe.

Time and time again I can remember the 'morning after' a get-together with friends, knowing that we had made some truly profound discoveries the previous night, if only we could remember what the fuck they were.

One day I resolved to force myself to remember. We were having a get-together that evening (shit we had a get-together every evening!) to smoke, talk, drink, laugh, listen to music, and when we split from our friends, fuck.

This time I was going to be prepared. I carried a paper and pen. When we said these profound things, I was going to write them down! Oh, yes, we'd capture those profound utterances for eternity this time.

This next morning, I remembered. I remembered I had written our most important discoveries on a piece of paper. Now, if I could only find out where I put the damn thing. Sure enough, it was sitting right where I left it, on the coffee table in our living room.

Written in shaky but bold letters: "The room smells funny."

My brother demonstrated to me pot's second greatest attraction. Sitting me down by my stereo and putting a set of headphones on me, he queued up the Moody Blues Album In Search of the Lost Chord. This might have been the first album specifically designed for potheads. There were birds chirping. They started in your left ear, made a bee-line directly through the center of your brain, then exited out the right ear. There were sounds like sonar tracking a submarine circling through your brain. What a trip. There was the greatest of all drug-related songs Legend of a Mind (even better than White Rabbit). Hey, it may have been an anti-drug song, but it was still best when listened to high. Wonder how the Moodies felt about that?

It's still one of my favorite albums, over thirty years later.

Story #2: I have a thrilling experience with the local constable

We were living out in the middle of nowhere in a neat hundred year-old house. Actually, the middle of nowhere was the big city of about 8,000 people about ten miles away from us. We lived in a suburb of the middle of nowhere.

My drunken slut wife worked most evenings, leaving me home alone to take care of the kids. At that time I knew she was a drunk but only suspected she was a slut.

I was still pretty much a weekender kind of smoker. My sources weren't that good, so I didn't have access to that much pot. And I was trying to keep things in perspective, not become a heavy user.

Still, at this time, Thursday evenings had Kung Fu on at nine o'clock, followed by the Hollywood Bowl at ten. I'm here to tell you that the Hollywood Bowl was un-watchable straight, but high it was an all-time classic. Don't know why. There were scantily clad chorus girls. Sammy Davis, Jr. would be singing and dancing. What a rush. And of course, the original Kung Fu was a must-see.

Our bedroom was on the first floor across a hall from the living room. We had this terrific front porch. It was huge, the perfect place to sit out on a summer night, get high, and watch the teenagers cruise up and down Main Street. And there were these big windows on the front of the house that came down almost to the floor.

I was sitting on my bed with a joint, preparing for Thursday night TV. The kids were bathed and in bed. Kung Fu was going to start any minute. Life was going to be good. I had the shades pulled on our windows about three-quarters of the way down.

Sitting there I suddenly heard the distinctive sound of someone walking onto my porch. I looked up in time to see a pair of legs move past my window towards the front door. And those legs were wearing blue pants with a yellow stripe down the side!

My life was passing in front of me. But no, the legs turned around and started to walk off. I thought I was safe. But of course, the legs turned back and walked purposefully toward my door. Then I heard the knocking.

Caught! I couldn't pretend I wasn't there. The lights were on; my TV was going in the living room; my car was parked in the back. But the place smelled like pot. And I was already high.

What to do? I went to the door to answer it like a man going to his own execution. I opened the door wide enough to get through it, stepped outside and pulled the door closed behind me, holding the doorknob behind my back.

It was the town cop. This was a little town, only a few hundred people. He lived behind my house in a trailer along with his wife, one of those women with a magnificent body but who looked like her face had caught fire and someone had stamped it out with a track shoe. Her teeth went in about ten different directions but her eyes only went in two. She went around town bra-less in a tee shirt that said, "Candy is dandy, but sex don't rot your teeth".

Anyway, her husband wasn't too bright, but he was still a cop. We are standing there on my front porch and he says, "I found a dead black cat in the street. I think it's yours. I've got it in the trunk of my car. Want to take a look at it?"

Now, I knew it wasn't my cat. I had seen my cat only a few minutes before, though true, it was outside. And if it was or wasn't my cat, I certainly didn't want to look at it dead.

Before I had a chance to respond, the situation took a bizarre turn. We both looked across the road in time to see a stray dog come trotting down the street.

It was a huge German Shepard. This dog took one look at us and came like a shot, running for all it was worth straight towards us, teeth bared and growling.

The cop panicked. He made a dive for my door and tried to run inside my house. But I had a death grip on the doorknob.

He was pushing the door open; I was pulling it shut, while the Hound of the Baskervilles was going into attack mode, apparently planning to rip someone's lungs out.

I did the only thing I could think of. I attacked the dog. I ran screaming directly at the German Shepard. It was apparently the last thing the dog expected. It turned around and ran like hell. I thought my heart was going to stop.

The cop and I composed ourselves for a minute or two, then the cop said, "Well, let's go look at the cat" and proceeded to try to open my door again, with the intent of going through my house to the back, where his car was parked.

Again I pulled the door shut and said, "Let's go around the house." So I had to go to the back and have a viewing for this car-flattened cat just to appease the cop. Unfortunately it wasn't my cat, which as far as I was concerned made it just about the perfect evening all around. I hated that fucking cat.

I went back in my house to watch my Thursday night lineup. Thank God for Sammy Davis, Jr.

Story #3: A mind is a terrible thing when you're wasted.

A

We had been smoking dope one evening when we decided we needed to go to the liquor store to pick up a bottle of wine. So my wife and I piled into the car for the long trek to the store that was in a town about ten miles away.

We had been driving for quite a while when I began to feel strange, disoriented. Nothing looked quite right. I knew something was wrong. I couldn't quite identify where we were. Finally I figured it out and it scared me.

I looked at my wife and said, "Somebody has turned around all of the signs! They're all backwards!"