The first, the last and the latest

Jerry, I blame it all on you.

And Jeri, I blame it all on you, too.

And to both of you, thanks.

I really should say, I owe it all to you. It was an unexpectedly good turn that sent me off into the world of mota, a good turn that changed and saved my life. Yeah, I owe a lot to those two fore mentioned people who gave me the impetus to take that first toke.

Jerry, thanks for being such a boozer, for being such a man’s man, such a guy about town. All your after-hours action with the boys from the barber shop helped keep your party boy image intact and robust, so much so that anything that might have gone into the family kitty instead filled the coffers of the local gin mills instead. I know, I know, you had to keep in good form in order to be ready to take your boy out when he turned 21. In the mean time it was training, all good, all fun, except for the alienation that your actions brought into the house.

But all your carousing did bring one thing into my life that was positive and upbeat: cigarillos. You were kind enough to leave those lying about on your dresser. I snagged them because they seemed, well, cool. Back in those days what I knew about cool could be put into a shot glass with plenty of room to spare but you helped give me a proper teenage definer. I was happy with the image that those mini cigars conjured up in my head: with one of them dangling from my lips I was tough, roguish, the Boy With No Name. I happily puffed and coughed on those things because, well, a man left those behind for me to find. I tried my hand at smoking cigarettes, with my mom’s approval (she’d been smoking since 14 so what did she care?) but I didn’t like the taste of them (filterless cigarettes were yet to come…) and gave them up right at the start. But those cigarillos were cool, came in a metal tin and were very, very bad for me. How grand. What a great precursor.

And then there was you, Jeri. Yep, you were a wonderful first girl friend. End of junior year I was told by your mom that it was time for me to open up my world, look elsewhere, find a new girlfriend to hang with. I think your folks could see that there was too much hormonal pressure going on in your head or in our bodies or who knows what but whatever it was I was given the heave ho right there on the edge of summer. So, a good thing. Life with you was tightly controlled in all regards and letting you go was probably the best thing to happen to me on the edge of my senior year. Being free after being attached for almost three years left a nice taste in my mouth. The Junior Class Ring Party was to take place at the Point in Newport on the last day of the school year and those in the know were going to attend. In the end not too many must have known about it because attendance was small but it was the crew that attended that day that mattered.

I just remember the Volkswagen van but can’t remember who owned it. I didn’t have a car yet and someone had to get us there and by some stroke of luck I caught a ride. Somehow after all the years of bumping around with kids I thought I would like to get to know I finally managed to fall in with a group of “cool” kids. We were all outliers, kids on the fringe and we didn’t know yet how important that was to be in shaping the last year of our high school existence. We all thought of ourselves as smart and weird and if geeky had been a word then we would have used it to describe ourselves. 

After a day of body surfing, noshing and sun bathing a handful of us migrated up to the bluffs, overlooking the sea. My oldest pal DB was there as well as a handful of others that will forever remain nameless. It was a wild haired blonde girl who pulled out the number and fired it up. Mexican, dry and smoky. The joint ran and was passed around and I must have had a hit or two before I really realized what I had done. What I did, besides get nicely stoned, was cross a bridge that had no return.

Thank god for that.

First times are great, but those last times are the things that define you. I thought hard today about the last time I got high. It was in Washington, in the basement of my old house on Kitsap Street. I had been working my way slowly through an ounce that I picked up from my brother in law after my second son was born. I didn’t know it at the time but it was to be the last time I would purchase pot for more than 18 years. I nursed that ounce and to the amazement of my in-law kept quite a bit of it around for quite a number of years.  After a while, to stretch it out I would mix it with loose leaf rolling tobacco (thanks, Drum!) and thought myself very European, but the effect of the nicotine was not quite to my liking and that stopped, too.

My pace getting through that ounce was due to a number of things: household prohibition, the Just Say No years, anticipation of piss tests, the end of friends who smoked, the fact that I was doors down from a police station but even more the thought of losing my house, car or financial freedom to the DEA drug seizure laws of the time. I knew that all my habits were unhappy ones in my house so I kept that one decent appetite on a leash lest it be lost forever.

But forever finally came when I found myself in-between work. The Great Recession of 2008 took its toll on all of us, especially those of us who were unlucky enough to be without a job. I was on my own so the household repression of cannabis was not to blame. Washington was still far away from legalization and since I didn’t live in California I couldn’t go the medical marijuana route. Sure, I could have been an outlaw but too many years of being in a paranoid state left me drinking hard and not worrying too much about a plant that I couldn’t get ahold of anymore. So I quit. Took that last toke in the basement and then sealed up the jar tight. Locked it away, threw out all the paraphernalia I could find and then went to find work out of state in one of the most repressive states in the Union.

But like a good piece of rococo music, the spiral doesn’t end but go up. After a few years in Idaho I found myself interviewing for a management job on the coast. At the time I had no idea where I was but as luck should have it I found myself in the heart of the Emerald Triangle, the land of world class mota, the place where the current marijuana movement and some of the world’s best strains originated. I was so far off the reservation after years of personal and societal prohibition that I knew none of this. Landing in Mendocino County I was to experience innocence reborn. It was like going back to the beginning, sitting with my pals up on the bluff, overlooking the sea. And it was grand.

I knew that my life would change the moment I saw that old Rasta man firing up a number in front of the coffee shop in Mendocino. Somehow I knew that I had turned a corner and that sanity would once again prevail. I was back on the bridge that had no end and I was happy.

I now live in a large city on the Front Range in Colorado and cannabis, while legal, is not all around me like it was in Mendo. It has been normalized, tamed and is now big, big business, regardless of it's Federal status. I am happy to state that my most recent time with the good herb was today with a drop of tincture. A little bit goes a long way, especially tempered with CBD. Flower, oil, concentrates, all well and good. I buy them locally as a good citizen should and then set them aside, waiting for that time when time is mine and I can really enjoy my reentry into the world of cannabis.

Salud!