Play Faster Dammit! More Reefer!

Up until then, I could cook, in that I could apply heat to foodstuff and create hot something or other from a can or more than likely, leftovers Mom had stuck in the fridge.

Patrick taught me the basics of how to truly cook, that is how to combine raw ingredients into something you could call lunch or dinner. The first time we put a meal together-it was pasta and red sauce-I remember the incredulity of having something in my mouth that did not resemble at all Mom's or my cooking to date. That is to say it did not have the texture, consistency and flavor of cardboard boiled in milk for eight hours.

We were both around 14, Patrick and I and were in with the girls like a bad organ transplant. With nothing else to do Saturday nights, we'd hang out, play cards, watch TV, muse about Virginia and Judy actually doing their hair and generally spend the time. One night the folks were out, we were hungry and instead of re-heating the posterboard latte, Patrick thought there was enough to put something more substantial together. So we did and I began to learn to cook.

In this, life is kind of like a whipsaw. Because for the all the hours my buddy and I put in in the kitchen in the lonely hearts club, it developed in us skills that in later years would ensure that any girl coming over for a light dinner would sit down at the counter with a glass of wine and be wowed at me in the kitchen. A path to other adventures paved with a little olive oil and fresh oregano.

Patrick's happily married and is raising a fine bumper crop of girls. He can speak to his own experiences.

All of which brings me back to marijuana.

If Patrick had come by that night with the express purpose of watching TV, playing cards and maybe putting something together food-wise, we'd all have been a lot better off. Instead he and I had plans to pass a joint around. Notice that we didn't have the common sense to get some grub set up for the inevitable munchies.

Instead of going outside into the tundra, I had discovered the updraft in the furnace exhaust pipe. The joint was lit, Patrick demurred at the last minute, so I greedily smoked the whole damn thing hugging the chimney like an ersatz-mutter.

Done.

Now to get stoned.

Funny.

Nothing's happening.

Heart's going a little fast.

Must be the excitement.

WTF?!?!?!!

WHY AM I STANDING ANKLE DEEP IN SNOW IN THE FRONT YARD WITH A MOUTH FULL OF MOUTHWASH???

GOT TO TAKE A SHOWER! CLEAN UP!

WHO ARE YOU?

CALL SOMEONE! I DON'T KNOW! CALL, NO WAIT, COPS USUALLY COME WITH AMBULANCES!

GOT TO TAKE A SHOWER!

About an hour later I stopped hyperventilating under streaming water. Got out, dried off, cleaned up the bathroom. Patrick noted that my eyes were about as red as whatever the simile for quite red was in 1977. He'd been calmly watching TV for about an hour while praying to Jesus that he'd never fall under the spell of this wicked weed.

So, Saturday night, you got anything going with Judy?

Nope.

You got something with Virginia?

Doubt it.

Guess we'll hang out.

Maybe cook something.

Yep.

Oh, this never happened, right?

Bunny on.

My First Joint

Some first tokes expand consciousness. Some first hits mellow you out so you can become the person others turn to for understanding and compassion. Some initial forays into mind-altering substances cast the world in an entirely different light and one sees things that one never saw before. As you age, responsibility and common sense suggest that you put away the drugs of youth because as appropriate as they may have been for that time of your life, they are after all intoxicants, plain and simple.

However you retain in the archives of your experience the sights and sounds of your time with them.

I'll never forget how cold standing in knee deep snow in your gym shorts can be and how hard it is to explain Scope colored ice to your old man the next day.

I wish I could have passed a joint to the sweet blonde I adored all through high school over a roaring camp fire but that wasn't going to happen. A good runner up would have been a hit in the basement of a buddies' house with the wavy haired Irish girl obstaining ashamedly but that didn't quite pan out either.

Instead I bought a full joint of local grown Tibbet's Hill Thunderfuck in the boy's room, craftily hid in in my sneaker (no there's a place NO ONE would ever think of looking) and on a February Saturday night when Mom went over to the neighbor's for coffee and castigation of the new family next door, I invited my 2 year younger friend down for a pot party.

It was a perfect opportunity and it had been thrust upon me like the perfect storm of behaving badly. The joint had been stashed away in my room for the better part of two weeks and every night I connived how I might steal away to smoke it.

Mom was always home in the evenings because, let's face it, when its February in the frozen tundra, why the fuck go out for any reason other than to die in a snow drift?

Which I considered. Announcing I was "taking a walk" I planned to trudge out into Roberts' field (a couple of open acres of feed grass left in the middle of our small city as a reminder of either our rural past or the inability to feed a populace with a 2 month growing season) where nobody could see (or smell) my partaking of whoopie weed. I thought it was a good idea, the natural conclusion of a small search party coming across my frozen corpse and roach a few days later never having fully formed in my eager to be imbibed brain.

I was planning to "take a walk" Saturday night when Mom told me she was heading across the street you remember the phone number call if you forget where the pasta salad is.

Could I invite my friend down for company?

Sure.

Oh boy. Asian Opium dens, here I come!

Bunny on.

But Finals Were Just Last Month!

Hitting the message playback button only to have a female voice identify you, her name and begin speaking in complete sentences, my stomach instantly contracted to the size of a walnut and ran to hide behind my liver.

There are awful, terrible, horrible phone calls you sometimes get in life and this was one of them. I had expected a truncated robo-voice urging me to sell my mortgage out like a herd of sheep in October or call right now to earn double the points of this amazing offer or participate this very instant in a town hall discussion taking place in Iowa.

Instead she asked for C. Autistic Bonet, introduced herself and said she had gone to high school with C. Autistic and was I he?

The fact that I was and she had found me (generic area code and all) on the first try made me re-think recent musings of giving up my day job to go back to being a spy.

Then I panicked. I don't know about you, but my high school generation was pre-prophylactic wrapped hand-holding. We took chances, sometimes foolish ones that nevertheless were really smokin' at the time, with our selves and other selves that you'd cut lawns for a month for to afford dinner money, con your way into a Saturday night with the car and after a warm glass or two of Charred O'Nay snuggle up to in the back of the car in a parking lot you'd scoped out with some buddies.

In other words, you did something that wasn't just youthful exuberance and coming of age, you got lucky in the back seat.

So for some woman to announce that she had gone to high school with me made me wonder if a one time back seat party was now out there somewhere debating a vasectomy, giving up on Rogaine and mortgaging his house for a second time. See, it was that long ago that I was in high school.

Now they're having a reunion, and I'm invited!

The woman (whom I don't remember, then or now) went on to announce that the-number so large it borders on obscene-year reunion of the old place is coming up in October.

Hoo-boy. I can't wait to see people I barely knew then and know even less now. Talk about all the good old times we never had and compare expanding waistlines and receding hairlines.

You can probably guess I'm not going. But to be honest, there's a reason I'm not going. I really don't know these people, we really didn't have a lot of good times together and I'm not going to make any shit up that we did. I went to 3 1/2 years of high school in a different town, state, hell, country than my graduating class. I showed up in January, looked forward to graduating in June then got held back a year because some administrator couldn't fathom how my old school considered eleventh grade the end of high school. Hint: We actually had a curricula that didn't involve study hall or self-esteem as legitimate periods. So after almost eleven years with kids I knew, grew up with, did actually have weird shit, life changing, remember forever experiences with I transferred and graduated with a class of strangers.

I won't be going back to reminsce eighteen months that happened -number so large it borders on obscene- years ago.

There was another reunion. It happened a few years ago and it was my actual high school class getting together after -a number that was just dirty- years.

I didn't make it. I was distracted. Life was kind of falling apart at the time and I wasn't going to recount that over white wine and cocktails.

Pity I didn't. Out of that maelstrom a few years ago came a few pretty good friendships and bonds that still hold today even though we don't see each other a whole lot and emails have dropped off. I still think of you all.

A lot.

In a year or two, our class will have graduated -a number so large it affronts God- years ago and I'm hoping there's a reunion. Count me in. Maybe I'll get my back seat boogie consequence to drive me up in the Porsche he can't afford.

Bunny on.