CHAPTER NINETEEN

In which I blindly thrash around seeking escape from my empty shell

 

During that great big conflagration with my Mama and my Daddy on graduation night, I had let it slip that I had lost interest in working on pianos.  I said this partly because it was true, and I didn’t want to delude anyone into thinking that it wasn’t, and partly for the shock value.  In that respect, it worked.  My Daddy was so traumatized that he talked me into going for counseling with the minister at his church, the Reverend Jim Racey, Prunesquallor’s Daddy.

During my high school years, I had from time to time become so obsessed with wanting to rebuild player pianos that I would lay in bed at night and fantasize about doing it in a nice bright shop full of all the tools and parts I could ever want, entertaining other player piano fanatics who would come from miles around to hang out with me while I did what I loved.  A friend and I visited every antique store in town, hoping that we could get our hands on an old clunker to restore.  I went to auctions and drooled over the player pianos there, which I had no way to pay for, talking to the people who seemed interested in them, letting them know that they could hire me to fix up the piano if they bought it.  Then one day a friend of my Daddy’s gave him a good deal on one, and we rented a truck and brought it home.  My Daddy loaned me the money for the parts, and my friend and I proceeded to spend all our spare time rebuilding and refinishing it.  By the time the job was finally done, I sold it for half of what it was worth and was glad to be done with it.  I don’t know where my Daddy got the idea that I was still interested in working on pianos after that.  Maybe it was wishful thinking on his part, since working on pianos was the closest I had come to encroaching on a marketable skill, and I showed no interest in college.

So when I admitted that I wasn’t interested in having anything more to do with piano work, my depression took on clinical proportions in his eyes and he was certain that I needed counseling.

Reverend Jim had been my boss when his son and I were janitors at the church, and he had guided several of us Rabid Flockers through our fire-and-brimstone adolescences, so I knew he was a fair and intelligent person to talk to, and unlike some people I knew, he had a sense of humor, so I agreed to see him, to get my Daddy off my back.  I didn’t want my Daddy to think I was gonna commit suicide for having lost interest in a hobby.

My meeting with Reverend Jim was refreshingly brief.  He told me what my Daddy had said:  that I seemed terribly depressed and had lost interest in everything, including pianos.  He asked me what I thought of my Daddy’s assessment of my emotional state and I admitted that I had been a little despondent for a couple of weeks, but I was used to it, having been at least semi-despondent most of my life, and I expressed frustration that my Daddy had never been able to leave me alone long enough to let me get through anything on my own; he had always wanted to make a basket case out of me when I was quite willing to go through life as an interesting weirdo, and I didn’t think I had much to gain by seeking counseling to change who I was.  I felt safe in my state of confusion, since it was all I had ever known, and was happy to continue muddling through without a lot of interference being foisted on me.

Reverend Jim looked right through me with those piercing eyes of his, and said, “So what you’re telling me is that your parents are over-reacting to a passing mood you were having.”

His insight hit me like a ton of bricks.  I couldn’t have said it better myself.  I grinned and nodded my head.  He changed the subject to small talk, and showed me to the door.

I must say that my Daddy had sent me to the right person for counseling.

That summer, apart from me and Paco’s recording sessions that Prunesquallor hosted using the equipment at his Daddy’s church, my main hobby was smoking pipes.  I had all the right stuff—the fancy wooden pipe, the smelliest pipe tobacco I could find, the matches and ashtrays and nasty gooey stinking used pipe cleaners to collect and admire, and best of all, I had taken over the basement and made it my headquarters.  Being an adult now, I needed more space than the little bedroom upstairs.  My brother Dirk didn’t complain; ever since he hit puberty, he’d spent all his time either at school rehearsing for plays or in his bedroom with the door shut.  My Mama was off at her job working for the district office of the Presbyterian church, and my Daddy was gone as usual, frequently out of town on business trips.  I didn’t need anyone’s permission to smoke a pipe; big men don’t ask their Mamas what they can and can’t do.

I had turned the space under the basement stairs into the coolest hang-out room you ever saw, complete with an old couch, my stereo, a little desk, and paintings on the wall that I’d done in high school art class.  That’s where me and Prunesquallor did our smoking.  Since we’d quit our jobs cleaning the church, and laid Fat Porgy to rest, and Dutch and Toni had gotten boyfriends, it was all we had to do anyway.

It came as quite a shock to me when, several days after the smoking hobby began, my Mama and my Daddy came to me looking very serious, and I’ll be damned if they didn’t think I was down there smoking marijuana.  They were mighty relieved when I hauled out my pipe and tobacco and nasty old pipe cleaners and showed them where that sweet smell was coming from.  I can’t blame them for not knowing one sweet, smoky smell from another; my Daddy hadn’t smoked since he’d snuck behind the barn and tried it as a little boy, and if my Mama has ever taken a puff off anything that was burning, I will eat my hat.  But somewhere along the way, someone had told them to be wary of sweet smoky smells, strange behavior such as avoiding family members, and lack of interest in the physical world.  Since I fit the latter categories anyway without having to take drugs to get that way, all I had to do in order to convince my Mama and my Daddy that I had fallen into the wrong company and become addicted to pot was to burn some incense, or come home with some girl’s perfume rubbed off on my neck, or use a certain type of solvent on one of my projects, and I was presumed guilty.

Despite the fact that my friends Batanwa Jim and Fred Griffin were hounding me to try marijuana—Fred because his brother sold it and paid him a commission, and Batanwa Jim because he was too chickenshit to try it by himself—I never even considered it.  I assumed that I had no self-control, and was afraid of what would happen to me if I tried it once and liked it, and besides that, I wasn’t interested.  Funny thing was, every time my Mama and Daddy asked me if I was smoking pot, even though I always denied it, it was as if it was a point for their side: once they got so many points—just for asking, mind you, because apparently that was their only way of expressing concern for a son who they seldom saw—the accumulation of Concerned Parents Points added up to giving them the right to outright tell me I was smoking pot, and to accuse me of lying when I denied that I was doing any such thing.

I don’t mind telling you, it was a wee bit frustrating to have these two strangers doing this to me.

Meanwhile, Prunesquallor had gotten a full-time summer job working for Doll Irrigation Company, and insisted that I go to work with him one morning so he could talk his boss—a 74-year-old, 6½-foot-tall gorilla who only pretended to growl like a grizzly bear every time he opened his mouth—to give me a job too.  To get Prunesquallor off my back, and because my Daddy said I couldn’t drive the truck anymore until I at least tried to find some way of paying for gas besides calling him up collect from pay phones all over town, one morning I put on my best overalls, which I had worn to refinish a piano in, and which my Daddy said looked like I’d thrown up all over them, and went to work with Prunesquallor, hoping his boss would immediately recognize me as the idle misfit I aspired to be, and send me home to my nice warm bed.

On the way there, Prunesquallor couldn’t stop talking about those 4-foot-long pipe wrenches that I would get to use with 6-foot-long cheater bars, and about how much fun it was to get four guys pushing on one of those cheater bars to get a rusty old pipe unscrewed that had been sitting in a well for 30 years, and let me tell you right now, not only did I not know the difference between a pipe wrench and a percolator, or between a cheater bar and a dildo, the whole idea of working a man’s job around a bunch of other men scared the poop out of me, which could be another reason I decided to do it, because as I stated earlier, my motto as an upslider was, “If you’re afraid of it, do it!”

When we got to the little wooden building in the yard full of rusty old pipes, pump trailers, engines and pumps, right behind the sign that said “Doll Irrigation,” to my dismay it was now time to meet the boss.  So Prunesquallor walked right into Emery Doll’s little office like he belonged there or something, that goofy grin of his sticking out about a foot in front of him, me hanging back about as far as I could without getting hit by a car, and before Prunesquallor could open up his big mouth, the huge old man leaning back in the broken down old chair behind his desk took one look at me and hollered at Prunesquallor, Where the hell did you find that?  Under a rock or out in the woods?

I was mighty relieved that I wasn’t gonna get the job, and was just fixing to turn around and walk home, when Emery Doll told me to stop hiding around the corner and get in there where I could get looked at, so I shuffled on in there and he looked me up and down without any expression on his face for about the longest half minute of my life.

He spoke again:  “So you’re the one who wants a job!”

Not wanting to disappoint anyone that big and mean, I kind of nodded my head and smiled nervously and pushed my hands deeper into my pockets and shivered, because no matter what time of year it is, it’s always cold at 7:30 in the morning, and I hadn’t brought a jacket or anything because I didn’t want to look like a sissy.

He said, OK you bums get to work before I go broke and have to burn this shack down for the insurance money.  So we skedaddled right on out of there, Emery hollering Horseshit! as he scooted up to his desk to start his own work for the day.  Prunesquallor showed me where to write down my hours, for each of which I would be paid $1.85, which was minimum wage in 1974, and he showed me where I could stand when there was nothing to do so nobody would see me not working , and then he stood around and talked to Neal about engines for five or ten minutes while I fidgeted and waited for the ax to fall.  Pretty soon here came our foreman, and off to work we went, this being a very small company, and the three of us were the Installation Crew.

Our first job was to drive about 80 miles away to a corn field where we were assembling a brand new pivot system for some farmer that had bought it from Emery.  A pivot system is a big huge long pipe with a bunch of sprinklers on it, and it’s held up in the air on these steel trailers with water motors on them, and the whole thing pivots around the well where a big diesel engine pumps water out of the ground and pushes it through the pipe, and the moving water turns the water motors which make the tires turn and the whole things goes around in a big circle and the water comes out of the sprinklers and waters a whole big field.  Those water motors were the coolest part.  They reminded me of the air motors in player pianos that made the paper roll go around.  And they were so powerful, without any smoke or fumes or exhaust pipes, I couldn’t believe those teeny little metal boxes could make that whole big contraption go around that big huge field.  But I found out they could, because some time after we got the whole thing set up and running, we got called back to go out and fix it, because one of the trailer wheels had got stuck in a rut and when the safety switch kept trying to shut the engine off, the farmer sat there with his thumb on the “Go” button till those little water motors tore the big 10-inch aluminum pipe, which was the backbone of the pivot system, right in half.

The hardest job I ever did was patching together that pivot system in 98° heat and 90% humidity in July, in the middle of a muddy corn field.  I never forgot the power of water motors.

And I remember the time I rode out to that cornfield with Neal, because he was the engine man and something was wrong with the engine.  While we were out on the edge of the field and Neal was walking about 20 feet in front of me, I ran into some big tall wild marijuana plants, and without hesitating, because I didn’t want to be seen, I grabbed a bunch of leaves and flowers off one of the plants and stuffed them in my overalls as I walked past.  It was a matter of curiosity, because if I was gonna be accused of something, then I thought I ought to know something about what I was being accused of, but when I got home I just sniffed their pungent odor a little and stuck the leaves in a plastic bag and hid them in my dresser, and forgot they were there.

Then one day Batanwa Jim came around wanting to know if I’d been doing any thinking about whether or not I was ready to try smoking marijuana, because he knew somebody who would sell us a whole bag of it for $5.00.  As a matter of fact I had been thinking about it, and this is how that came about.

One evening a couple of weeks before that, I had been sitting around in my room minding my own business when the doorbell rang and my Mama hollered down the stairs that Fred Griffin was up there and wanted me to go somewhere with him, but I had to be home by 9:00 because I had a job now and tomorrow was a work day.  So I got in Fred’s VW bus with him and he was all excited because he knew someone right around the corner from where I lived who would give us a little bit of marijuana for free if I wanted to try it.  I said I didn’t want to, so he drove me around awhile to give me time to think about it, and tried to allay my fears by explaining to me that all it really did to you, if you got addicted to it, was to make you a little bit bitchy the next morning.

I got to thinking about what it might be that made me so afraid of doing this thing, and I came to the conclusion as we drove around that my biggest fear was of getting involved with the kind of people that would sit around in a dark room and put things in their body to make themselves feel, do, and think strange things that the rest of the world would not understand or approve of.  I automatically knew that if I ever started smoking pot it would become an addiction that would require the greatest effort to break out of, and I would end up making friends with the sort of people my Mama and Daddy didn’t approve of, and I would think and feel and do things that were presently beyond my ability to comprehend or imagine, for better or worse.  But like I said before, my motto that summer was “If it scares you, do it!” which is why I got to give Connie Angle an unforgettable piggy-back ride that one night, and why I got to get a real job at the irrigation company, and all those other things that I never thought I would do because of being a coward.  Looked at in that light, it became obvious to me that marijuana addiction was to be my next big adventure in life, so I said, OK, maybe I’ll try a little.

Fred Griffin, who had also gotten me my first job sweeping out the offices at the moving and storage company where his Mama was secretary, hollered, Hot diggity-dawg! and turned his van around to head back to his friend’s house, where he disappeared momentarily and came back with a girl who gave him a little tin with some brownish-green crumbly stuff in it, and then she went back in her house and me and Fred drove out to the country to smoke it.

After we got way out onto a dirt road, Fred pulled over, nervous as hell, and we went in the back of the van and he did his best to roll up a joint.  After awhile he had to settle for the best he could do, because he only had two rolling papers and the first one got ripped in half because he was shaking and looking over his shoulder, he was so scared we were gonna get caught.  Of course I was not scared, I was just practically shitting in my pants for the fun of it.  He stuck that thing in my mouth, and told me to suck on it.  I did, and it tasted like dirt, and he said, Wait, I got to light it first, which he did, and when I sucked on it, my throat got scalded so bad I coughed and the joint flew out of my mouth and it took Fred five minutes to find it in his dark van.  I didn’t help him look for it, because in my opinion I had already tried it, didn’t like it, and didn’t even feel anything, except for pain in my throat, so it would have been all right with me if he had just taken me home at that point, but now that he had gotten me this far along, he was going to take me all the way.

So he stuck that thing in my mouth again and lit another match, and told me to suck real hard this time, and this time take the smoke all the way down into my lungs and hold it there or nothing will happen, and don’t cough.  I tried real hard to do what I was told, but the smoke was incredibly real, much hotter than pipe tobacco smoke, and the seeds kept popping and scaring me, and I coughed and gagged and choked till there was nothing left of the joint and we had to go home without me getting any smoke into my lungs at all.  Fred was mighty disappointed that I hadn’t gotten high, but he said that’s the way it usually went the first time anyhow, and I’d probably get lucky the next time.

So here came Batanwa Jim itching to try marijuana with me, and it just so happened that I had $5.00 to blow, so off we went to his friend’s house to make the purchase.  His friend’s Mama was home, so we went into the garage to do the deal.  His friend pulled out three baggies full of green leaves, and I thought he was being mighty generous as I proceeded to stuff the baggies into my overalls.  The dealer got this consternated frown on his face and Batanwa Jim started laughing and jumping up and down and clutching at his stomach, and when he got his wind back he explained that I was supposed to choose one of the three bags for my $5.00 and give the others back.  So I pulled two bags out and kept one, and me and Batanwa Jim skedaddled out of there before we could get caught buying illegal drugs from a minor.  Batanwa Jim believed that if he ever got busted for drugs, his life would be over.

That night my Mama and my Daddy were out of town on some sort of church-sponsored event, probably a Transactional Analysis “I’m OK, You’re OK” workshop since that was Reverend Jim’s favorite teaching in those days, so I had the house to myself all night, and my brother Dirk would either be out with his friends from the drama department or he’d be in his room with the door shut, so we were gonna have ourselves one hell of a pot party in my basement headquarters.

When everyone was there, we turned off most of the lights and cranked up the Cat Stevens records and spent the next 30 minutes or so trying to roll up a joint out of newspaper or something because we were all too chickenshit to go to the store and buy actual rolling papers.  We finally gave up on that, and just as we were getting ready to load up my dirty old tobacco pipe with marijuana, Fred Griffin showed up, because he’d heard through the grapevine that we were gonna be having a big smoke-out, and he thought we might need someone more experienced to guide us through it.  He vetoed the newspaper idea and the tobacco pipe idea, and showed us how to make a pipe out of an empty soda pop can by putting a little dent in the side for a bowl and poking little holes in the bottom of the dent for the smoke to go through, and sucking through the drinking hole in the top of the can.

I let everyone else go first, so that in case anybody freaked out and tried to kill himself, I could say I hadn’t smoked any when the police showed up.  When the pipe had gone around a couple of times and I saw that no one was freaking out, I could see that it was my turn and there was no getting out of it.  I grasped the soda pop can in my clammy hands and put my lips on the drinking hole while Fred Griffin applied the match and ordered me to suck real hard and hold the smoke in my lungs as long as I could.

About the time he got that said, the first big wad of hot smoke reached my lungs, and my throat spasmed and my eyes squirted water and I flew backwards about ten feet, landing on my back on the basement stairs.  After that, it took a great deal of harassment from my cohorts to get me to take my turns at the pipe, and every time I tried to swallow that smoke, my throat spasmed and water squirted out of my eyes and I flew backwards about ten feet and landed on my back on the basement stairs.  I was beginning to think that I was completely incompetent, and I was certainly not getting stoned.

Eventually, everyone else started complaining that they weren’t getting stoned either, and Fred Griffin said it was because someone had sold us some really useless pot, and the only way you can get high off that kind of pot is to eat it, and he said next time he got to clean the seeds and stems out of his brother’s inventory, he’d save the stems for us to smoke so we could know what it was like to really get stoned.  He drew us up a set of plans for a water pipe, explaining that lightweights like me had to smoke through water to keep their throat from closing up when they tried to get used to taking hot smoke into their lungs.  Then everyone went home.

Boy was I disappointed.  Just when I’d made up my mind to depart this reality and join the ranks of the drugged, here I sat with nothing to show for my bravery but a burning throat, a headache, and half a baggie full of some really useless marijuana that I’d wasted my last $5.00 on.  As a last-ditch attempt to make good on my investment, I mixed the rest of the baggie up with honey and managed to choke it all down.  I sat there and waited for a minute, and just like I thought, nothing happened, so I set my alarm clock and went to bed, because I had to go to work the next morning.

When the alarm went off, my whole body was shaking like a sapling in a tornado.  I had no awareness of what was going on, and wasn’t even sure who I was; all I knew was that I had to barf real bad.  I ran upstairs stark naked, through the kitchen and the dining room and down the hall and into the bathroom, where I stuck my head in the toilet and had the dry heaves for five minutes.  Finally I gave up, and shaking so hard I could barely stand up, I staggered back to bed.  This was the first time I’d run through my Mama and Daddy’s house naked since I was four years old.

When Prunesquallor came banging on the front door half an hour later, my brother Dirk had to get out of bed and let him in, and Prunesquallor berated me mercilessly while he hauled me out of bed and helped me put on my overalls and my boots.  He dragged me up the stairs and out to his car, and we went to work.  That’s the last I remember of that day.

That was how I got high for the first time.