Chapter 15 - The Tutor

I returned from Berkeley determined to secure some cannabis and to continue with my own quiet revolution, in solidarity with my brother. Fired up by our discussions, I became the Tussman program’s extension school of one, reading Jung, McLuhan, and Eliade, and biding my time. I also got to know one of the new teachers, who was all of twenty-four, cute in a plain way, and fresh out of college. Fay, as I’ll call her, had a head on her shoulders and was starved for conversation and company—especially male company. A divorced, single mother with a child of four or five, she wasn’t exactly welcomed by the Lady’s Auxiliary. The town was narrow-minded in the way only small towns can be, and Fay was an outsider and not allowed to forget it. That made her easy prey for an extra-environmental like me, a young man who felt like an outsider even though he’d been living there all his life.

Actually, it soon became unclear who was preying on whom. Fay and I started hanging out; I’d stop by her house and we’d have long conversations. Nothing untoward happened on those visits, but I think we both wanted it to. We did discuss cannabis, which Fay, though hardly a hippie chick, had smoked a couple times, and liked, in college. So we hatched a small conspiracy, which involved convincing Terence to mail Fay a lid of weed. Brilliant! The plan worked. Our newly arrived supply of precious weed was probably quite inferior by contemporary standards, but we had it.

We didn’t just smoke up; this called for a special occasion. As luck would have it, my father was set to attend his company’s annual sales meeting in Denver, a three-or four-day affair that my mother, joining him, turned into a short holiday in the big city. They ended up leaving me on my own for nearly one whole glorious week. I was sixteen, after all; and besides, by then Terence and I had terrorized every babysitter in the valley, making it unlikely anyone would have signed up to mind me.

So a window of opportunity quickly opened for Fay and me to have our special evening. Most readers must know by now where this is headed. I was, of course, a virgin, a status I was determined to change. Fay seemed quite willing to cooperate, though we didn’t speak of the matter until that night. I had picked her up in my parent’s Chevy and brought her back to the house, not wanting anyone to see her car parked outside. I had already prepped the house, closing all the curtains and turning off most of the lights. We toked up and drank a little; we got very stoned and hilarious. The next thing we knew we were groping each other, and a minute later we were on the little bed in my room. I was nervous and didn’t know what I was doing. Fay could see this and was kind, and eventually we completed a fairly inept coupling. It’s said that is something you never forget, and I guess that’s true. We hung out for a while and finished up the pipe, she gathered up her things, and I took her home. I made a quick detour to the bridge to smash the wine bottle on the rocks below and crept back home in the quiet night. No security breach, no drama.

We never repeated that experience. I think we were both a little appalled at our recklessness. I continued to visit her once in a while, but we began to worry that people would talk, and our conversations became less frequent. At the end of the semester she moved on. Recently, others have informed me that I was not her only conquest. If those other accounts are true, Fay may have arrived with an agenda to sample the pleasures of the local randy but virginal males; there was nothing particularly special about me. So much for my self-flattering belief that Fay liked me for my intellect! I wish her well, wherever she is. She may have had bad judgment, but she was a good spirit, and I shall always be grateful to her for introducing me to the pleasures of sex, awkward and halting though the occasion was. It’s gotten both harder and easier, somehow, as life has progressed.

One good thing was, I now had a new supply of cannabis, lovely cannabis! I started smoking it on a regular basis, getting completely baked on ridiculously small amounts. Looking back, I think much of my reaction could be traced to the placebo effect, but placebo or not, it was wonderful. Being stoned was the only time I felt normal. I loved nothing more than to sit in my room, have a toke or two, and “ruminate.” The experiences were similar to those first times on the blanket in the park—strange, fragmentary thought processes leading into interesting, often hilarious byways. The cannabis high is like a state of enhanced bemusement. Every thought is interesting; and everything before the open eyes or behind the closed eyelids is endlessly fascinating. There are audial hallucinations, evocations of deep aural spaces, often accompanied by complex hypnagogic tapestries. Music becomes a transformative experience. I noticed in those early days there was a distinct figure/ground phenomenon, where things in the background became the object of attention, while the foreground was not perceived or was relegated to background. I noticed this particularly when reading while stoned. The words would not only resonate in my head, but the spaces between and around the letters became somehow more important than the letters. This happened to the point where it began to interfere with reading. Then, gradually, the problem would fix itself and I could again read smoothly. I’m not sure what was going on, but I think that when one first starts smoking, there’s a period of entrainment or adaptation to the state. Once one is entrained, being stoned becomes a lot like being “normal.” It feels like a normal state of mind; one is comfortable there, but something is lost on the intensity scale. The early experiences were practically psychedelic in their intensity, whereas later I didn’t get close to that when I smoked.

But it took a while to reach that point. For now, I had cannabis, and I was extremely sensitive to it. I loved how I could be completely toasted and yet have a perfectly normal conversation with my parents. They hadn’t a clue. At first, I guarded my tiny stash jealously. I didn’t want to run out, and Terence had sternly admonished me—“You must speak of this to no one!”—in the same tone he used to say, “Never oppose my will!” I got that. After all our talks about black magic and alchemy (Terence had confided that he’d actually taped shut certain grimoires of black magic he had, not trusting himself to open those books) I was down with the idea of secrecy. Cannabis and certain other drugs were really black arts, or at least forbidden knowledge. But the secrecy didn’t last. I wanted to share the discovery with my close friends, and as spring faded into summer I started turning them on, starting with Richard, then proceeding through the rest of our stoner band. By the end of June all six of us were regularly crowding into my bedroom and getting loaded.

I smoked whenever I could. I enjoyed smoking with my friends, but some of my best experiences were when I smoked alone, rambling around the sagebrush-covered hills outside of town. And now, I had access to a car! I could go out to the ’dobes or the gravel pit or sometimes Bethlehem Cemetery and toke up. I’d get totally, utterly wasted on these solitary wanderings. I’d spend that time ruminating, looking at things, like bugs, plants, trees, rocks, whatever—ruminating, and creating a narrative.

Bethlehem Cemetery was especially inviting, a small, pretty spot nestled in a little bowl on the drive up to Pitkin Mesa. There was never anyone there, and it was peaceful and shady on a summer’s afternoon. I’d get totally loaded and wander around looking at the headstones, speculating about the lives of the names there. Once I found a gravestone bearing the names of a husband and wife, the husband having died a year to the day after her. It was clear to me that he had died of a broken heart. This little vignette, like the others I imagined, seemed enormously romantic and poignant to me. I suppose it was a passionate time of life. I felt things strongly, and the cannabis only made them more intense. On a recent visit to Paonia, I drove up to the cemetery around dusk on a beautiful fall evening. It was just as peaceful and lovely as I remembered it, as though the world had passed it by for the last four-and-a-half decades. It was a timeless little glade, a sanctuary in the midst of an impermanent world, and most reassuring. I did not smoke this time; I had no cannabis with me. It was not necessary. As I wandered along the paths gazing at the old headstones, the memories and the contact high were more than enough.

Once loaded in one of my various countryside haunts, there was the small matter of driving back into town. The main challenge for me was the time-dilation effect. Everything. Was. Really. Slowed. Down. But at least I wasn’t tempted to break any speed limits on the way home. In fact I would creep into town at about ten miles an hour. Nobody ever stopped me or even seemed to notice, probably because in town nobody drove much faster than that anyway.

I wrote less over those months. I had kept a journal the previous summer and written quite a lot. I had discovered Taoism at the time and was fascinated by it, by the idea of living in harmony with nature, so gracefully that one’s imprint on the earth was as light as a feather. Taoism seemed to me at the time to be one of the few religions that made sense. It is actually more a philosophy than a religion, and that was appealing. No faith or dogma, just learning to live in harmony—what’s not to like about that? Much of my journal-writing over the previous summer had been devoted to exploring the character and actions of the ideal man, in Taoist terms, which I aspired to become. I tried to start that up again, but my efforts were half-hearted. Ironically, not writing about the man in Tao was probably a more Taoist thing to do than to write about it. You don’t write about the Tao; you live it, or try to live it. But when I was stoned, thoughts came too quickly; they were too interesting, they could not be pinned to the page! Yeah, yeah, I know: Pot makes you lazy. There is something to that. So my literary productivity over the summer suffered. But that was OK. I was too immersed in the richness of rumination to worry about writing it down.