CHAPTER TWENTY

In which I am pushed out of the nest to seek my failure

 

While Batanwa Jim took responsibility for keeping on Fred Griffin to get those marijuana stems to us like he’d promised, me and Prunesquallor set about manufacturing a water pipe out of a mayonnaise jar and some clear plastic tubing, which I then hid in the bottom of the cardboard wardrobe box that my Mama and my Daddy had gotten for me to use for a clothes closet in my basement headquarters.  Before too long, Fred Griffin came through with the stems, and we made plans for our next pot party to be held in the basement of Prunesquallor’s Daddy’s church late at night, because that was the only place we could relax and have a good time and not have to worry about anybody walking in on us.  As Master of Locks and Keys, Prunesquallor could be relied on to have an extra copy of any key he had ever had in his possession longer than twenty minutes, so it was no problem getting in.

This time our experienced guide was to be Judas, instead of Fred Griffin.

Judas had first appeared in my life at the Rabid Flock.  His real name was Herman Sherman O’Shay—hence the nickname.  A friend of Batanwa Jim’s, he was a hyperactive, mumbling, geeky little scholarly type who wouldn’t sit down, he just wanted to pick up some religious literature to pass out at school.  The act of harassing non-Jesus Freaks with questions like, “Do you know the Lord?”—which was supposed to end up with the non-believer agreeing to take a piece of religious propaganda off your hands if you would promise to go away—was called “witnessing.”  It was one of the things that we were required to do in order to prove to Jesus that we loved him, and Judas became my best little witnesser. He later admitted that he took all those religious tracts because he considered it his duty to help them find their way to their final resting place, the trash can, as expediently as possible.  He kept up on this chore in addition to having a 4:00 a.m. paper route, being a straight-A student who took four years of Latin and college math, setting all kinds of new high school records in cross-country, cooking nights at the Country Kitchen until he got fired for micro-waving a golf ball, and, mistaken by everybody in school for a nerd because of his sunken chest and his coke-bottle lenses, he was strong as an ox, smart as a whip, and the most motivated pothead in the whole school.  But his only ambition in life was to move to California, grow his hair long, practice yoga ten hours a day, and smoke marijuana.  He did all that other stuff to get out of his house, where he was responsible for eight or nine younger siblings anytime he made the mistake of being home.  By the time he graduated from high school, he’d run off and hitchhiked to California twice and been brought back by the police both times.

The reason Judas wouldn’t sit down that first day I met him at the Rabid Flock was that his Mama and his Daddy, who were Irish Catholics like Batanwa Jim’s Mama and Daddy, would have grounded him if they thought he was hanging around with Jesus Freaks, so he was in a hurry to leave.  I remember one Sunday morning when Batanwa Jim’s Daddy found me and his boy sitting in Batanwa Jim’s closet bedroom stripping seeds off of morning glory vines.  He had come in to announce that the roof had caved in at church.  Batanwa Jim raised his eyebrows and said, Oh, Judas’s family showed up?

Judas’s family and Batanwa Jim’s family were both Irish Catholic, which made them friends, which in Batanwa Jim’s Daddy’s world made them rivals since that’s as close as he came to having friends.

Judas’s Daddy worked for the government.  His real Mama, who he had not met since he was too little to remember, was three-quarters Cherokee, which Judas’s Daddy managed to hide from the family till many years later.  Judas’s Stepmama was a reformed child beater, and since Judas was the oldest sibling, he had missed out on most of the “reformed” part of that deal. Although he had more energy locked up inside him than he knew what to do with, he had a very sober exterior and never spoke above a mumble, but he had a sort of violent grimacing nervous twitch in his jaw that had started when his little brother Bonzo, who is now a retired Marine drill-sergeant who went on to become a convicted marijuana smuggler who never even smoked the stuff, hung him from the garage roof one time when they were playing Cowboys and Indians.

But I didn’t know any of that stuff about Judas when he and Batanwa Jim tapped on the upstairs side door of the church that night.  Prunesquallor ran upstairs to let them in as I ran my fingers lovingly over the water pipe we’d made from a mayonnaise jar.  This was gonna be the real thing.  Finally I was gonna experience getting high the right way.

Judas’s first task as our guide was to show us how to “clean the stash.”  He demonstrated by opening up the cardboard cover of his double Yes album, which he had brought since he said it was the best music to get stoned by, and poured the whole bag full of stems and seeds and little marijuana pieces out onto it.  Then he took his library card out of his wallet and used it to scrape little piles of the green mass up the slope of the slick cardboard, allowing the seeds and stems to roll back down while the little pieces of marijuana stuck to the sloped surface of the cardboard.  These he scraped up and put in the bowl of the water pipe, which Prunesquallor had made out of a steel plumbing part.  By the time he’d sifted through the stuff and extracted all the little pieces of marijuana, the big bowl was full and there was enough left over to fill it a couple more times.  Judas said that would be enough to get all of us stoned, and told Prunesquallor to flush all the seeds and stems down the toilet, because there was enough there to get us all thrown in jail for 50 years, even though you can’t get high on seeds and stems.

With that task done, it was time for our education to finally begin.  Prunesquallor put Judas’s Yes album on and I turned most of the lights off.  Batanwa Jim sat down cross-legged with the water pipe in his lap and started bouncing up and down with glee, singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”  Judas ignored him and Prunesquallor told him to shut up; I wasn’t fooled by any of them.  I knew we were all just geeks trying to find something to fill our empty shells with, except for Prunesquallor, who was already full of it.  He took the water pipe away from Batanwa Jim and handed it to me since I was the oldest.  I handed it to Judas, who launched right into the standard lecture on taking the smoke deep into your lungs and holding it as long as you can, etc.  Then he demonstrated.  He stuck the long piece of plastic tubing in his mouth and lit a match, and holding the match up to the bowl of the water pipe, he started sucking.  He sucked and sucked and sucked, and the mayonnaise jar and the clear plastic tubing filled up with a thick, yellowish-gray smoke.  He kept on sucking until suddenly he blew the tube out of his mouth and grabbed his nose, and his narrow chest started heaving in and out as he tried to contain the choking within.  Finally the smoke sprayed out of every hole in his face and Judas fell backward onto the carpet where he gradually regained control of his breathing and stopped coughing.  Prunesquallor asked him if he was OK, and he sat back up with one smooth move, mumbling, Are you kidding? and handed me the water pipe.  I handed it to Batanwa Jim, who handed it to Prunesquallor.

When it was finally undeniably my turn, I was surprised how much easier it was to get the smoke down by smoking it through water.  My amazement had only begun.  Based on the theory of getting the greatest possible effect out of the smoke before exhaling, Prunesquallor came up with the idea of doing push-ups as we held it in our lungs.  That part I could do, because I could swim two lengths of an Olympic-sized swimming pool underwater without coming up for air. 

I was finally starting to feel something, but wasn’t sure exactly what it was.  It was a little scary, like how you might imagine a claustrophobic would feel about being locked in a closet, but I managed to stave off the panic long enough to take some more hits off the pipe and do some more push-ups.  Me and Prunesquallor started losing it right away; earlier we had been looking at some girlie magazines that Judas had brought along, and now Prunesquallor was looking at naked girls while he held his smoke in and did push-ups.  The next step was naturally to start humping the floor, and by the time me and Prunesquallor had gotten tired of humping the floor, with Batanwa Jim rolling on the floor laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe, I noticed something funny going on inside my empty shell.

There was someone in there, and I couldn’t figure out who it was, or why it should bother me, but I was starting to wish I hadn’t smoked that stuff.  I lay on the floor with my eyes squeezed shut.  Judas was sitting next to me mumbling something, and his voice hurt my head.  It felt like there was a band around my head, and I kept trying to take my hat off, but I wasn’t wearing one.  I felt exactly like a claustrophobic who had woken up in a sealed coffin six feet below the ground, trying to wish away what was undeniably happening.  Either I couldn’t remember who I was, or didn’t want to.  Thoughts and feelings and physical sensations were all intolerable.  I yelled at Batanwa Jim and Prunesquallor, who were playing pool by now, to stop laughing at me and turn down the music.  Batanwa Jim came over and started cackling and making faces at me.  Judas told him to stop it.  So Batanwa Jim went over to the stereo speaker in the corner, lay down on the floor with his head next to it, and reached over to the lamp next to him.  He waved good-bye, and turned out the last light.

For the next interminable and unmeasurable period of non-time, I learned for the first time what it’s like to be an overly-sensitive individual, prone to paranoia at the best of times, who has just smoked too much of something that suddenly removes the trappings of the usual world that normally distract and comfort him through the torment of daily living.  It was like jumping off a cliff and waiting to hit bottom—and waiting, and waiting, and waiting—and thinking of all the reasons why you would have preferred that you hadn’t jumped.  Let me explain something:  amongst the ranks of those who habitually smoke marijuana, you’re not going to find more than a very small handful who realize that this drug is a potent hallucinogenic psychedelic agent that some people react to with extreme panic, the way we’ve all been told overdoses of LSD can cause anybody to react.  However, if you were to interview only those who have tried marijuana once or twice and then refused to try it again, you will find a large percentage of people who would rather stick a fork in their eye than to take six or seven big hits off a water pipe while doing pushups.

So when Prunesquallor heard a noise upstairs and hollered, Someone’s coming! and he jumped up and he and Batanwa Jim started running in circles trying to pick up the evidence of our indiscretion, Judas had to help me to my feet and make me open my eyes and try to act normal.  I leaned against the wall trying not to puke while Prunesquallor and Batanwa Jim nonchalantly pretended to play pool and Judas mumbled something about how I would soon get used to this, and kept me from falling down.  But it was a false alarm; no one ever came down the stairs.  Eventually Prunesquallor went upstairs to investigate, and reported back shortly that the coast was clear.  Batanwa Jim switched the lights back off, turned the music back up, and we all got back on the floor, which was the only thing that could really hold us up in our condition.

But for me it wasn’t that simple.  In the dark, something seemed to be attacking me from the inside out.  I did my best to ignore it, but the pressure in my mind kept getting stronger and stronger until I started thrashing around, moaning, Help me!  Help me!

After another hour or so of being ignored and wondering how anybody could ignore someone who was calling for help, I opened my eyes.  The other three were sitting around in a little circle, looking at me.  Batanwa Jim was blaming Prunesquallor for ruining his headspace with the false alarm, and pretty soon he decided to leave, and Judas walked home with him.  Prunesquallor cleaned up the mess and told me to get up if I wanted a ride home.  That’s the last I remember of that evening.

Of that handful of individuals who find that they are extremely sensitive to the effects of marijuana in a way that activates their inner storehouse of paranoia and panic, there is an even smaller sub-handful of masochistically curious individuals who find themselves driven to go ahead and smoke it anyway, every chance they get.  I, Maxwell Zdaemon, was the mold from which this curious subset of humanity was produced.  Nobody ever had to smoke me under the table; I just got under the table and laid down before taking the first hit.  But my Mama and my Daddy had it in their minds for me to be a pothead, and I was not gonna do anything to disappoint them, so I took my punishment like a man.

It was a few nights later that we met at the church to finish smoking our little stash.  Since there wasn’t much left, we just copped a nice little buzz and then wandered around in the dark construction area where the new gymnasium and all-purpose room was being built.  This was not so bad.  Little Chicken was there that night, along with a young black man named Jed Barney who was dressed like a pimp.  We all went over to Little Chicken’s house, and after awhile me and Prunesquallor went to the convenience store because he said he had the munchies.  We’d heard about this happening to pot smokers, although I’d never known Prunesquallor to not have the munchies most of the time anyway.  I was choking down some really disgusting peanut butter cookies when here came Fred Griffin in his VW van, wanting to know if we wanted to go over to his house because his big brother was having a real  pot party and it was not to be missed.  Prunesquallor declined, saying he had a magazine at home that he hadn’t finished reading, and I got in Fred Griffin’s van and we headed on over to his big two-story house.  His Mama was off at a party somewhere.

We went into the basement where the pot party was being held.  The room was already full of Fred Griffin’s big brother’s friends and customers, so we stumbled around in the dark until we found a place to sit down.  They had started without us, and they were smoking out of a bong.  It was a lightweight metal tube about the size of a paper towel tube, with some water in the bottom and the bowl sticking out of its side on a little stem.  To smoke it, you had to put your whole mouth around the open top and seal it with your lips, sort of like the way Pamela Hearty used to kiss me with her mouth open.  Fred Griffin assured me that if I liked the way  I got high off a homemade water pipe, the bong was gonna be a real treat.

Actually I was starting to feel a little funny from those peanut butter cookies, and remembering the last time I’d overdone it, I was trying to be careful and take small hits.  But that was considered party-pooping, so next time the bong came around to me, Fred Griffin impressed his big brother’s friends by starting up a chant:  TOKE!  TOKE!  TOKE!  TOKE!  Encouraged in this way, I figured, what the hell, if they can take it, so can I.  I took a big hit and passed the pipe on, and pretty soon, here came the bong again, and the custom chant started right back up:  TOKE!  TOKE!  TOKE!  TOKE!  I did my best to appease my audience, who must have been thrilled to see me barely able to lift my head, and they thought it was extra funny when I dropped the bong trying to pass it on to the stranger on my right.  Maybe they didn’t realize that I was slipping into some sort of undescribable, monstrous nightmare; by the time the bong came around again I didn’t have to refuse to take my turn; I couldn’t move anyway, and Fred Griffin poking me in the ribs and calling me a sissy didn’t matter anymore.  A few seconds later I jumped to my feet and ran across the room looking for the toilet.  The sight of porcelain was so welcome that I didn’t make it that far; I puked in the sink because it was closer.  In the other room I could hear all kinds of catcalls and jeers and groans and snickers, and I swear to this day that the things coming out of my mouth had faces, tentacles and antennae.  Taking a hint from Fred Griffin’s brother hollering at him, “He’s your friend, you clean it up!” I managed to wash the ejecta down the sink all by myself.  I hadn’t puked on the floor since the big Pinewood Derby Competition and Spaghetti Feed back in the Cub Scouts, and was not about to do it now.  That was Batanwa Jim’s specialty; he had become known as “The Puker” at the Boone’s Farm Apple Wine parties we used to have back in high school.

When I got out of the bathroom, the first thing I saw was the stairs, and I wasted no time in crawling up them to the best of my ability.  Fred came along behind me, wanting to know if I wanted a ride home.  That’s the last I remember of that evening.

If it hadn’t been for the next big thing that happened, that might have been the last time I smoked marijuana.  Summer was over, all my friends were entering their senior year of high school, and most of them wanted to graduate, and for some reason I wasn’t getting invited to any more pot parties.  Prunesquallor had already quit his job at Doll Irrigation and I was lying in the weeds under an ancient pump trailer scraping grease and paint and rust off it, bored out of my mind and shivering, wondering how I was gonna take the winter with not much to do at work but try to look busy.  Emery had told me that I was the best worker he’d ever had, for a hippie, and he liked the way I took my job seriously, unlike Prunesquallor and our foreman, Mikey, who had quit to go back to college in another town.  Emery told me that Mikey would never work for him again, because he’d been caught using the company’s gasoline credit to fill up his personal gas tank on weekends, and he said he thought Prunesquallor was a loudmouth jackass who just pretended to stay busy.  He told me I could have a job as long as he had work for me to do, and it would get cold in that building before long, but eventually summer would come along and there would be more pivot systems to install and repair, and more pumps to pull out of the ground.

I was mulling over all this, wiping the grease and rust particles off my face, when I had an idea:  I would get a different job!  I could go to work in a fast food restaurant, and maybe Emery would say nice things about me—I’d never heard the term “job reference” at home—and then I wouldn’t have to stand around in that cold little wooden building all winter waiting for summer to come along so I could go back out in the field and suffer under the hot sun.  Eventually I could work my way up in the world like I’d seen it done in the movies, and someday I might have a job that paid me a lot of money, and then I could do whatever I wanted.

I had bought Mikey’s ‘61 Rambler station wagon from him for $175 before he left for college, and after work I jumped into it and headed for home.  I couldn’t wait for my next job.  I had no idea how to go about getting it, but anything would have to be better than the irrigation business.

That evening at dinner I announced my intention to go find a restaurant job, and my Daddy had an idea.  He said, What happened to those inquiries you sent out to piano tuning schools?

Well, that wasn’t what I had in mind, I had thought about it and decided it didn’t seem very interesting.

But you really seemed to enjoy working on pianos at one time.  Do you still have the brochures you sent for?

So I hauled the brochures out of my drawer, and me and my Daddy looked at them.  It turned out that only one of them was close and affordable, and that was Western Iowa Technical Community College in Sioux City, Iowa, 300 miles straight north of Hazing.  The tuition was only $1000, and it was only a year-long course, and my Mama and my Daddy would pay my way, and I wouldn’t have to go looking for a dishwashing job.

But maybe I wanted to wash dishes.  What made anybody think I wanted to be a piano tuner?  I hadn’t worked on a piano since my Mama threatened to have ours hauled away if I didn’t finish putting the new varnish on it, because I’d halfway stripped the old finish off five years earlier and never completed the job, and it was the biggest, ugliest eyesore you ever saw.  So I’d gritted my teeth and finished stripping all the old finish off and made it all pretty for her, and that was the end of it, as far as I was concerned.

The next day when I got home from work, tired and dirty and uninspired about any job, especially the one I had, my Daddy informed me that he had been on the phone with the people at Western Iowa Tech, and they said the piano tuning class was full and the course was starting in a few days, but he promised to keep on it and see if he could get me on some kind of waiting list in case any vacancies opened up.

The next day when I got home from work, my hair full of paint flakes and rust flakes and dried-up old greaseballs I’d scraped off pump trailers, my Daddy told me that he’d called up to Sioux City twice that day and he was pretty sure he could get them to open something up for me, so I should make up my mind whether I wanted to be a piano tuner or a dishwasher or a trailer scraper or what, because he was going to a lot of trouble and so were those nice people in Sioux City and he didn’t want to make anybody go out of their way for nothing.

The next day at work I could barely move.  I hated that job so bad I would have taken any alternative that anybody shoved down my throat.  At lunch time Emery called me into his office and told me my Daddy had called him and warned him that I might be quitting to go to school, and Emery wanted me to know that he wished me the best no matter what I did, and I should do whatever I thought was right, because he could always find someone else to scrape his pump trailers if I decided I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life.

When I got home my Daddy told me that he had called up to Sioux City three times that day, and the nice man who ran the registration department had finally gotten the teacher of the piano tuning course to agree to let me in, even though I would be starting a day or two later than the rest of the class.  So what do you think, Maxwell?  Why don’t we get in the car and go up there and check it out this weekend?

So that’s what we did.  We got in the family car and drove up there, and found the whole school locked up for the weekend.  So we dropped the registration forms in the mailbox and got back in the family car and went back to Hazing to get my ‘61 Rambler station wagon in shape for the move up there.

My Daddy bought some new oil and antifreeze and a couple of tires and spark plugs and spent a couple of days working on my car.  I had other things to do, like saying good-bye to Batanwa Jim and Prunesquallor and Paco and the rest of them, but he got my car all fixed up for me and helped me load it up.

Two nights before I was to drive away to Sioux City, I got a wild hair to try something I’d read about in one of those books they carried in the head shop where you could buy pipes and bongs and books on how to get high.  This book had all kinds of ways in it that you could get high on legal substances, and the most accessible of those things was morning glory seeds, which were supposed to contain a chemical closely related to LSD.  I’d never tried LSD, but I’d tried some morning glory seeds that me and Batanwa Jim had pulled off some vines growing up a telephone pole, and nothing had happened so I figured it was safe to try again.

This time I bought the seeds in a store, and got in the truck and took Batanwa Jim to the park in it since my car was already packed full of all my stuff, and when we got there I sat in the truck and chewed up about 200 of those nasty-tasting, rock-hard little things, and we wandered around the park talking about old times.  He didn’t want to chew anything that tasted nasty, and he figured he might have to drive if I started hallucinating or something.  After a couple hours I couldn’t walk too good, so we got in the truck and headed over to Brother Headfull’s Foursquare Gospel Church, because I felt like I needed to sit down someplace and figured nobody would be at church that late at night.  I parked the truck across the street from the church, and when we got up to the church steps, there was the biggest damn bullfrog we’d ever seen in our lives, jumping around on the front porch.  Its body was about 8 inches long, and with its feet all stretched out, it was over a foot long.  Batanwa Jim grabbed it, and we went in the church and stole a tall plastic trash can out of the kitchen to put the frog in, and got back in the truck to go to Batanwa Jim’s house.  By now it was about 3 a.m.

Funny thing was, I could hardly move, because I felt like I was drugged or something.  Batanwa Jim kept hollering at me to drive faster, or I’d get pulled over for driving too slow at 3 a.m., and he reminded me once again that if he ever got busted for drugs, it would be the end of his life.  I said, What if you get busted for frogs, and took side roads the rest of the way to his house because it is hard to drive fast with your head resting on the window ledge, and I was too lethargic to push down on the clutch pedal and get into third gear anyway.  When we finally got to his house, he took the frog inside and came back outside, and we lay down on the front lawn and looked at the stars.  I kept asking him why the stars were wiggling around in the sky, and he kept telling me it was because I had poisoned my brain with morning glory seeds, and we were having a fine time laying there on the grass talking about the good old days when all of a sudden we heard the front door open up and Batanwa Jim’s Mama’s screechy, whiny voice hollered out in its New York City Irish accent, “Tommy—”  that’s what she called him, “—there’s a frog jumping around in here!”

So he ran in the house and put the frog back in its trash can and found a way to keep it from getting out again, and pretty soon I went home and passed out in my bed.

When the big day came for me to climb into my ‘61 Rambler station wagon and head off into the great unknown, I was surprised to discover that I was neither excited nor enthusiastic.  I was only anxious.  After 18 years of wishing that my Mama and Daddy would get killed in a car wreck so I could live by myself and do whatever I wanted, here I was going off to live by myself and I couldn’t even muster up any adrenaline over it.  When my Daddy got finished telling me for the twentieth time how to go about finding a room to rent and how to buy groceries and all the things I’d ever need to know that he’d forgotten to tell me all my life since all he ever cared about was his job, I got in my car and drove away out of town and onto the highway and felt my whole entire life slipping away from me, and a numbness filled my empty shell, and my mind went blank, and another part of me watched all this with a sort of disappointed curiosity, because to tell you the truth, this is not what I had been looking forward to my whole life as a prisoner in my Mama and Daddy’s house.  And try as I might, I could not decide what it was that I had been looking forward to, if anything.

I know now what I didn’t know then:  that my whole entire future had just been laid out for me without my participation, and shoved down my throat.  It is only now, many years later, that I am getting it gagged back up again.