My other chemical first

I’ve gotten high a handful of times very occasionally and can’t remember the last time but I remember the first. I visited friends in England. I was closer to the guy in the couple; he was ten years older than me and she was another five or ten older than that. She was in a pretty famous band, and a band I’m a big fan of. I tried not to act star struck but I totally was. And the two of them were so smart and well read. Totally the kinds of people I looked at and thought “I hope I end up something like them someday, I wish I was something like them now, why do they even like me?” We had a great time, lots of drinking and talking and eating and talking and walking and talking. I felt well-liked and quite mature for my age. I was, I don’t know, 23? 25? I don’t remember exactly but it was around ten or twelve years ago. I also felt quite cosmopolitan. No one else in my family had ever been out of the country except for day trips to Canada while visiting an uncle in the north of Michigan, even the Mexican side of the family didn’t leave anymore. And here I was in A Foreign Country eating their food and understanding their accent and cultural references. High roller, me.

We went to a football match - how world-traveler am I, a real football match in real England?! - and I learned some chants, pretended to understand the … uh… action? on the whaddayacallit, the pitch? the field? Whatever. I had a few beers and tried to notice when I was talking books and politics too much instead of shouting about kicking the ball or something.

They took me to a play that she had a hand in. It was proper literature writing, like real emotion with a story and it was well-told, I thought, dealing with real social stuff and real human life and emotion stuff, well expressed, thoughtful but not pretentious. I was, once again, starstruck and intimidated. We talked on the walk back and I warmed up again as they were interested in what I thought. Then we went to a party, someone’s 50th birthday. Fifty! that’s so old! my parents aren’t that old yet! I thought something along those lines. It seemed a little bit weird and a little bit cool - how grown up I am, invited to adult get togethers, where people just sip wine and chat like adults, sitting in chairs. I don’t remember any conversation at the party. I was the youngest by far, and more than a bit drunk. I remember making polite chatter with people near me, and thinking that it was best to just be a wallflower - not my party, not my friends really, and my friends were busy talking to other people they’d known a long time, which is fine.

We ended up sitting in a big circle in their kitchen, in chairs. Someone rolled a joint. Someone rolled a spliff, which at the time I didn’t know was a mix of tobacco and marijuana. They passed these slowly in a circle. Everyone picked one or the other that they were smoking, taking hits from the joint and not the spliff, or vice versa. Everyone but me. I didn’t realize that. Anything handed to me, I took a hit from. I wanted to be a wallflower here, socially unobtrusive, but didn’t want to be notably a kid. I felt adult and sophisticated again, casually using a small amount of drugs in a social setting with Europeans like it was no big deal. (My only previous experiences with illegal drugs were with my aunt’s heroin addiction, my mom and aunts sneaking off to the bathroom to smoke huge quantities of marijuana, and various family members’ stories of drug deals and bad trips and worrying about cocaine heart attacks - it was all very white trash, I felt at the time, nothing sophisticated or interesting about it, and all definitely a big deal, part of how a lot of people I knew had made bad life choices and often continued to do so. And all of it was vicarious, I never tried anything myself because it didn’t feel rebellious, no more than listening to the Beatles did, that was stuff my parents did so it was dull and stupid.)

I got really, really, really high. I remember feeling really good, and feeling like my brain had slowed way down. I could feel my eyes, they were kinda dry and I also just was very aware of them. Did I remember to blink? If I don’t blink deliberately will I not blink and dry my eyes out? I blinked slowly, to be sure, trying to be sure to remember this time too. Yes I blinked. Okay. Good. No problem. Wait, when though? How long since I last blink? I better blink again. And wait how often should you be blinking? What’s the right amount? Oh god I bet I look like a real weirdo. I need some air, and to stretch. I stand up. I walk slowly to the doorway between the kitchen and the next room of the house. I stand in the doorway, this is better, back to wallflower, totally unobtrusive again and I can blink as much as I want to. I notice from very far way, it feels like, that my friends are talking about how we should get going, they have to be up in the morning and anyway they have to drive the teenager home who is babysitting their daughter tonight. I reach to grab my sweatshirt from the pile of sweaters and jackets next to where I’m standing. I’m suddenly pretty dizzy.

I open my eyes, I’m laying on floor. Someone is helping me up. Everything had gone white. “Are you okay?” “Sure.” “Really? How do you feel?” “I feel great!” The woman whose house we’re at brings me some orange juice: “drink this, it will get your blood sugar back up.” Another woman carries a kitchen chair out the front door, the first woman leads me out after her, sits me in the chair. “Lean forward, take slow deep breaths.” Very nice, caring, supportive. Though mine rarely felt this way, this feels very parental. Oh fuck. I’m a kid. A stupid dumb kid, and one who made a scene, at someone’s 50th birthday party. With a minute I’m feeling fine enough to fake fully fine, I tell my friends I’m ready to go. They smile and help me into the car. I catch snippets of conversation from the front seat while I doze in and out.

The next day some mutual friends come over for a reading group, we’ve all been reading the same marxist analysis of the contemporary world. As my friend is cooking dinner I say “please don’t tell the others what happened.” She smiles. “Oh don’t worry. It made you look hard. You were standing there and fell flat on your back and everyone in the room thought, ‘ooh he seems very interesting.’”