My Best Pot Stories

The Places That Scare Me

“Well, see, there, you forgot to enter your vehicle information.”

By default, I tend to find myself doing silly or strange things to try to impress good looking men- “Sure we can listen to the Dave Mathews Band.” This of course is highly ridiculous behavior, as it only causes me to look completely clueless and uncomfortably weird in an otherwise calm situation. “Show them your BOOBS!” I heard a group of girls giggle-out, trying to single out one of their sororitron brethren to a group of tattooed-military-nipple-shirts smelling like a bottle's worth of Old Spice XXXTreme.

So when “forgot to enter your vehicle info” park ranger handed back my registration card with pen, complete with bulging shoulders and sparkling green eyes- as much as I wish I could have nervously shown him how incomprehensibly stupid I was for forgetting to mark down the license place number plus make and model of my vehicle at the drive-up registration kiosk of his camp ground near Monterey, California... I recognized that I was, instead, going to have to take him down a couple of pegs.

You see, mister tall-dark-and luscious, notice how my brow is all a'sweat, and this huge back pack is strapped to my back like an elephant? And that I'm standing in front of your drive-up kiosk, and not in some kind of futuristic invisible transportation machine? Well, the truth of the matter is, I walked here.

I wrote “n/a” over the appropriate fields, and returned the card.

He looked the card over again, puffing his chest out. Undershirt, fruit-of-the-loom v-neck.

He flipped out with an exasperated exhale, “You walked here from BERKELEY?”

Smart to have checked the address I wrote down, sure, but again, it seemed perhaps the ranger had been kicked in the head by a horse once or twice in his time.

“No, from the bus station, about a mile from here.”

“Oh I see, well, we don't get many walkers around here. Just put your receipt out on the number marker of your camp site so we know you registered.”

When I got to my camp site, I understood why he said they don't get many walkers; RVs and redwoods dotted the cliff line, no tents.

It would be imagination to say I didn't know I was sticking my finger in the socket by diving off into these journeys. Since about November of last year, I have been on tour of sorts- a musician, wandering about California, getting from here to there, playing music, writing music, meeting people, smoking a lot of weed, getting drunk sometimes, getting crazy a lot of the times, and visiting all the places that scare me.

Cumming a lot, basically. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the video-biopic Pumping Iron, “I am cumming all the time.” (If the internet proves of any value in our human history, it is that you can literally type in a search for “Arnold coming” and see the very clip right now. The search engine will probably even finish spelling it for you.)

So when I said my next destination was Oceanside, people's faces began to drop. It didn't take anybody long to figure out what attracted me to Oceanside: the Marines. It is where they go to get drunk and stupid while in San Diego, and I was there for a week.

It's like jumping into the pool of balls at Chuckee Cheese- gay kid in a rainbow candy store.

It fooled no-one that I might be there just to explore different parts of San Diego. I needed a place to get a legitimate flattop, and what better place to do that in, than a beach town where I can stick my finger in 20,000 volts every second.

It jump-starts the heart. It gets the body moving. It tells you you're alive.

It brings you up to the borderline, and asks you if you are ready to jump.

I don't believe that any of us are born without the innermost desire to do just that- do what takes us to the brink, and try to go a little more.

The “how” in that, the window dressing that makes up our stories, is little more than an arbitrary place-holder. The pursuit of window dressing, however, it has fractured off our human existence into believing that there are borders between people and matters of difference worthy of violence or intolerance. If growth is being able to incorporate previously unknown aspects of nature into one's self, then a constant turning away from fear, or the unknown, is akin to stunting one's own growth. Believing that there are borders, either physical or mental, is just another way of saying, “I'm afraid I don't know how to incorporate that yet, so it must be labeled as different.” Fear then is a motivating factor.

Like a cherub with my arrow, puncturing the “how” and getting to the meat of the matter, the secret heart of what drives all of this, I perused Oceanside with my head exploding, nearly unable to keep my eyes from popping out of my head.

“Well, that's idotic.”- My father.

“If I had a more sensible approach, obviously that's what I'd be doing.”
Amanda Palmer- The Dresden Dolls, “Gravity”

People began to question whether I had any sense when hearing my Oceanside plans – to their credit, out of concern, for which I am of course extremely grateful.

But I like the excuse: if I had a more sensible approach, I'd be using it. Life, like art and beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So the way we always contort ourselves to fit what we believe are the expectations of others, is rather humorous, even when, and perhaps especially when I find myself gel-haired and cologned like some a-hole in a magazine. In some ways, artists are nothing but contortionists. And going to Oceanside was a contortion of biblical proportions- epic floods.

Trapped. Stepping off the train, no real place to go, but too much to carry too far, I realized I had made it, but hadn't at all thought through the ramifications of the train pulling away from the station, and having only my two feet to guide me the right way, and my eyes to push me into a zone of racing heart and pinching stomach.

A recollection, a photograph. The setting, outside, San Diego most likely. Still a baby. Naked. Without any explanation, muscle-chested military-shorts-clad studs surround my body. No faces in the shot, there is no reference to who they are. Or why I am there, naked.

In my dreams, or perhaps my fantasies, they were my secret keepers, keeping their influence even secret to me. Vulnerable, they held me, protected me, circumcised me, fed me and raised me, all from under the cloak of their spell. Attached to them like an infant, still unable to let them go, they beacon and I am compelled to follow. The smells and the tastes entrance me, though they leave me bound and gagged. Identities unknown, just a force, encompassing chemical reactions to desire, and growth. And still, they send me out into the world, naked, exposed, unable to help myself, carried along at their command.

I know I can't reach out for them. I have to recognize them when they come to me.

“You smoke pot?”

Back in the wild beach woods of Northern California, I stumbled upon a raggedy looking fellow pushing a bike up hill. Leathery brown skin, dressed in combat-black, nearly head to toe.

“I'm going down the coast on bike. Got some killer bud with me.”

Quantum Cracks

As a stoner, I have probably smoked more unnecessary dust, leaves, pubic hairs and tiny pieces of carpet fabric as a result of crawling around on the floor trying to pick up one's stash after opening the bag the wrong end up, or tipping over the open jar from rolling around on the bed too much.

As a San Franciscan (urbanite, not monk), I have seen more crack heads crouched down on the ground literally fingering the cracks of the sidewalks... for crack. I'd imagine they've smoked a lot worse things than excessive pubic hairs with such habits.

My dear friend Christopia and I once spent a stoned hour looking around my room for a suitable photo of me so he could take a picture of it on his cell phone so he could use it as my caller-ID pic. It never dawned on us that I was right there and he could just snap a picture of the real life RD.

While busking in downtown San Francisco, a cracked out sunbeam became my biggest fan, and started doing the “I just smoked all my crack” dance, for which I turned on the “space effect” on my amp. He then took his shoes off, left them in front of me, and walked into a pay-for-potty stall on the sidewalk, and never walked out.

In March of 1997 in San Diego, the bodies of all members of the Heaven's Gate UFO-religion were found after everyone had taken an ample supply of phenobarbital and vodka. Their goal was to meet up with the spaceship following the Hale-Bopp comet. In all the media reports, the focus was solely on the concept of “cult suicides.” No one bothered to ask, what if they made it? What if upon further inspection, we find a spaceship in the tail-lands of Hale-Bopp with a bunch of Marshal Applewhites having a grand old time?

The laws of physics which govern our minds and text books says that when a fellow by the name of Isaac Newton observed an apple falling from a tree, he realized all matter attracts matter, and by nature, it tries to get together. Yet that couldn't account for how the atoms that make up everything in our universe stay in orbit around each other, and don't come violently crashing into one another. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been working hard to figure out what laws are governing the atoms, and what they are discovering is that matter may not even be here at all.

My mom, an avid meditator, once told me about a meditation she had recently gone through, where she felt her entire body levitate, her limbs expanded like rubber bands, and every sensation in every part of her body became extremely amplified. She blissed out on the gorgeous colors and sounds for hours. I quickly went to my journals and found the account I wrote of my first stoner experience, in which I had described the exact same trip.

Syd Barrett was the flamboyant founding member of Pink Floyd, who was forced out of the band before they became “Pink Floyd,” the mega-stars, mostly due to his mental incapacitation. During the recording the band's epic masterpiece, Wish You Were Here, which in fact was in reference to the long departed Barrett, Barrett actually showed up at the studio completely unannounced. No one had seen him for years, and at first, people didn't recognize the balding chubby character that had wondered in. According to legend, he just kept getting up to go brush his teeth.

In the Syd Barrett-movie in my head, when he “burnt out,” somewhere on their first American tour, supporting Jimi Hendrix, he actually joined a different Pink Floyd, one that existed on the plains of his acid trips, and not a record label. In that plain, he continued to write, record and perform with the band. After their break-through hit, Bright Side of the Sun, they went to Abbey Road to work on Glad That We're Here. During the sessions, Barrett became extremely disoriented, having walked into the studios to find a slightly different band recording songs that sounded similar but completely different to what he thought they had been working on. Unable to resolve the mis-placed characters, he gets up to go brush his teeth, thinking the practical-joke will be over upon his return.

I was helping a disabled friend cross the street in downtown San Francisco. Now, if neither of your legs work very well, it's going to take longer than the fifteen allotted seconds to cross the road. But taxi drivers have somewhere to go. “Stop j-walking, asshole!” yells one cab driver the second his light turns green, and we're still in the middle of getting across, my friend Jon hunched over, wabbly legged, clearly giving it his all to even have climbed down the three flights of stairs from his apartment. To complete the scene, the cabby wailed on the horn, and screeched around us.

“Oh, you learn to not take it personally after fifty nine years,” he shrugs.

I saw the Smashing Pumpkins do a two-week residency at the Fillmore last year. They performed all kinds of new songs that were written special for the gigs. One was called, “I'm Doing The Best I Can.” In it, Billy Corgan sings “I'm doing the best I can, so FUCK OFF.”

My favorite moment in stoner-ville, is the moment when you inevitably have to ask, “Where the hell did I park the car?” This is especially cumbersome in any environment where it snows a lot, leading to many stories of “false stolen car reports” by my friends. Once the thaw comes, which could be anywhere from a day to a month later, they eventually see the car and realize, “oh, THAT'S where I parked!”

One day, we'll all leave our Nike's at the altar, and get in the pay-for-potty, and rocket out of here to sights unknown, at speeds faster than 299,792,458 metres per second.

Bat Juice

A hallmark of any family get together in my Peruvian family is when my tiny uncle Guillermo, who stands maybe 5'1”, with heels on, waddles by, unable to speak much English, but able to offer “Coors...eeeeh... Miller... eeeeeh... Germany?” Then his son, my cousin, a refrigerator of a man stomps by, making his only cameo appearance of the night to say “It's Heineken, Dad. We're doin shots on the deck, so if you want some... I'm just coming through to get limes.” He's the kind of guy that can eat a burrito bigger than your head in less than five minutes. That's the portrait of family get togethers for me.

Through a series of miraculous events which finds me wedded to a corn-bread mid-western mister, I spend most holiday seasons in Dayton, Ohio opening presents with the original Puritan Pilgrims. Now, I could take pot-shots at Ohio, but I usually have a fantastic time, the scenery is great, I completely adore the family, and it would be too easy to mention the fifty-foot Jesus doing a permanent touch-down by the side of the freeway.

When it comes to booze, Ohio is like everywhere else, in that there are bars, people drink, and there are inevitable problems with punky youngsters not knowing their limits and crotchety oldsters tipping over in their lawn mowers. But the “mid-west” is also home to more conservative values, which can include strict views on alcohol. In the sweetheart's family, when the adults are around, the prevailing idea is “Alcohol? Well sometimes we like to have champaign on New Years! But, no.”

So imagine my delight, as a member of the euphoric-inebriated class, to discover that any trips to see the family would probably include no members of the spacial-disorientation family.

See, as far as alcohol goes for me, I'm not too much a fan. My dad's drinking when I was a kid just kind of turned me off to it, and when given the option of smoking pot instead, well, what it comes down to is that marijuana is of the gods, and alcohol is of fermentation. But to allow for social norms and airplane security, in a pinch, alcohol can provide the right “volume control” as to relieve the knots in the stomach and be able to eat properly, laugh and tell stories, and not want to just run and hide.

Ben's not blind to this fact, nor does he dis-allow me from actually drinking when the time arises, or even finding a person to buy pot from while we're there if I were that determined. But there's a subtle shyness about it that comes over Ben whenever the subject comes up. It's a squeamishness that might be associated with the idea of having sex in your own parents' bed. There's a certain puritanical sense about the mid-west, which Ben's family reflects to some degree, and when we're there, Ben reflects it too, like he's seven again; which is, you know, sickeningly cute and gorgeous. There's just something that doesn't quite want you to break that innocence. I fear any pot smoking would be met with paranoid delusions of being chased by Mennonites.

So, when the chances to drink arise while on holiday, I take them. If I'm not going to be entering the realms of the unreal, I might as well enter the realms of the stumbling, which is merely a translational codex for the realms of the Christmas-letter-updates.

This has gotten me into trouble. In what has already been dubbed (in all caps), “THE THANKSGIVING OUTBURST OF '07,” I actually spoke up for once and was clearly on the verge of having a highly emotional moment in front of Ben and all his old high school friends. And I'm sure the half-drank TGIFriday's Ultimate Mudslide looked fabulous in front of me as I fought back the tears, with those swirls of chocolate syrup streaked down the glass in a spiral.

It wasn't quite an Anderson Cooper with ear piece falling out and ribbons of text soaring by and update boxes popping up so fast you can't understand a single thing that's happening but you know it must be fantastic so you keep watching, type event exactly. It was just that I needed some clarification and reassurance on the value judgments people make, and to make my point, I found it necessary to bring up some semi-private and clearly closely felt feelings that caused a quiver or two in the voice. Oh geeze, I basically said I was afraid people thought I was a lame duck and they put up with me because Ben liked me enough. Talk about a skinny white boy whine fest.

It wasn't bloody, no one got hurt, and no one did anything they later regretted.

The brainfreeze from the mudslide hadn't even fully thawed by the time we ended up at one Aunt and Uncle's house for Thanksgiving dinner down past the highway with the five-hundred foot rock-and-roll Jesus. The Uncle of the Aunt-and-Uncle duo is either like this to all new-comers, or honed in on the baby-deer-in-the-way-of-a-mac-truck look in my eyes, and came up behind me and whispered, “There's egg-nog in the fridge behind the milk....”

“...and bat juice above the stove.”

Bingo.

I knew exactly what he was talking about. I finally exhaled after having been there for twenty minutes. The bat is the little logo on the Bacardi bottles. He was telling me if I wanted to spike my eggnog, which is the only reason he offered it, where I could find it. So I finished up whatever conversation I was in, “Uh-huh-uh-huh, college, great, yeah, okay,” and made a bee-line to the kitchen.

Sometimes Life Just Hands Itself To You

The first warm and sunny day in Boston after an unimaginatively long winter was also one of my last before jetting off to Alaska for the summer, prompting my best gay friend Christopia to call me up saying he was going to come over and take me out for a smoke drive.

First, you have to understand Christopia. Think football jock on ecstasy starring in the Wizard of Oz. His imposing presence might intimidate you if it wasn't for the fact he wears pink polo shirts with the collar up and never misses an opportunity to tell you how sassy he is. I mean, his name is Christopia, 'nuff said.

Oh, except for the fact he was off again/on again dating Prince Charming at the time. No, literally Prince Charming. From Disney on Ice.

He clicked his size fourteens together three times, and showed up at my front steps driving his nineteen-eighty-and-something maroon Ford Escort, which he had decked out in rainbow boas, a dashboard hula girl, all things sparkly, and a lot of pot. This would turn out to be an excellent day.

As we snaked our way through surface streets to the Massachusetts coast line, we took turns with Bombardier, Christopia’s glass pipe named after a beetle that shoots fire out of its ass. Somewhere between flipping through radio stations, sharing and laughing at recent stories involving our latest craigslist hook-ups, and eyeballing every Dunkin’ Donuts we passed, we came upon the greatest site we’d ever seen, the moment in the movie where it changes from black and white into color… a whole troop of shirtless army men cleaning the street.

To crown the moment, like munchkins coming out to sing and dance, The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” came on the radio, and we coasted through the intersection in super slow motion using every part of our being to take it all in. I think Christopia and I both mentally embraced each other and cried a little for the beauty that lay before us. “Oh yeah, you really got me now.”

There were 7 or 8 of them, all in their army issue shorts, with trash bags, mops, brooms, brushes in hand, working hard for their community. I swear my eyes divided up so I could take each one in individually and simultaneously. The one on his knees planting new greenery along the sidewalk, the sun glistening off his sweaty back, the one with the broom in the middle of the intersection stopping to pose for a second and rub his tired biceps. Of course when you’re high, they’re not just doing a civil service on a sunny day… oh no, they’re performing for us, and us alone. They’ve reached into our psyche, taken hold of our innermost desires, and recreated them for us… right in the middle of this intersection. Add in the pounding screams of The Kinks and every pleasure sensor in the body reaches that state that you can only hope to feel if there is heaven and you end up at its front gates.

Bac-RD

Wait.

How do I get home again?

I keep digging into my pockets, trying to pull out the map of Barcelona, but all I can find are condoms...or condomi as the little silver and red packets say...condoms passed to me by the beautiful Argentine man decked out in a fantasy red-white-and blue tennis outfit.

Mr. Argentina was the concierge at the bathhouse, appropriately named “Buenos Aires”...where Mr. Argentina emptied his bottle of Bacardi on me, which is precisely why I can't find my way home now...not home...but my Peruvian aunt's home here in Barcelona...and all I have are these condoms.

And a slide.

There's a children's park across the street, and I haven't been on a slide since going to school no longer meant having recess. It's three in the morning so I don't think any little kids will mind if I cram my long drunken body onto their slide.

My legs are more than half the length of the slide. There won't be any death-defying adrenaline rush from this ride. But when you were just treated to the sights of the best of Spain-and-Finland's masculinity sharing a tender moment together in the darkest recesses of a bathhouse, somehow, a ride on a kiddie slide seems next on the menu. As does more Bacardi.

For my next nostalgia trip...the swing set. This reminds me of my honeymoon. Somewhere en route between Arcadia, Oregon, and San Francisco, Ben and I stopped along the Oregon coast to take in the sights of surf, sand, and sandy surfers. There was also a swing set which provided many smiles and laughs for my sweetheart and myself.

Jet Fighter Helmet

“Do you think he's ready to try a bong?”

“Oh shit. RD with a bong? It's all over now. Let's do it.”

Those were my two neighbors conspiring against me, Jamie and Dustin. All three of us were the same age, and had basically grown up together along side an avocado orchard in the east county of San Diego.

Jamie and I were closest. She was a dreamer like me, and we indulged eachother's fantasies about being rock stars gallivanting throughout the universe, saving the rain forest and the hungry with our pop music. Then we'd switch gears and go into the tree house to play “Fighting Couple,” a game where we used our middle names and pretended to be an adult couple going through relational troubles, complete with flying dishes and scribbles of “I HATE RENE” on the tree-house walls.

Though real fighting couples separated us for a good chunk of our adolescence, she had returned from living with her mom in Delaware to be with me in the summer of 1995. We were sixteen, and Jamie and I knew we'd spend the entire summer together getting stoned out of our minds.

My relationship with Dustin, on the other hand, had been a rocky one from the beginning. His parents were over zealously Christian, which put a strain on our friendship, being my mom was an up-and-coming Buddhist still smarting from the pains of growing up Catholic in South America. Neighborly dinners when we were kids would run amok when Dustin's mom would start speaking in tongues and his older sister would start telling me I was going to hell unless I accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as my savior. All I knew about Jesus at the time was that Madonna wore a ton of crosses and I just wanted to be Madonna.

The fun thing about boys the same age growing up together is when they simultaneously discover that penises are an amazing play tool; the game of “Doctor” suddenly opens a whole new world of possibilities to curious budding children. But with a mom as suspicious as mine, and a mom as Christian as Dustin's, our “secret” was inevitably discovered, and wrath was what we had to pay.

The two moms convened to discuss what to do about their little bundles of joy, and I was too embarrassed to even want to overhear anything they might have said. I had a jet-fighter helmet that was a gift from a Navy Seal I had a pre-pubescent crush on, so I put that over my head which blocked out all sound completely. The helmet also had a microphone piece attached which I pretended was my stage headset-mic. I sang “Live To Tell” into it and fell asleep.

After that, we'd see each other occasionally, but were mostly in different schools and just drifted apart. By the time we were 15, crystal-meth was starting its chokehold among East County's youth, and Dustin was the first on our block to get addicted.

So it was quite a surprise for the three of us to find ourselves together in the summer of 1995, mid-teens, totally freaked out by the world, and about to watch it all blow up, or melt down, or spin out. I was in the process of coming out, Dustin was in the throws of Crystal and doing any drug passed in his direction, and Jamie was lost in a world of promiscuous sex and low self esteem.

“Do you want to try the bong, RD?”

Jamie was a seasoned stoner, having the kind of parents and step-parents that wouldn't mind passing her the joint on Friday nights at home. I, on the other hand, had only been smoking since February, and was still in the stage of giggles beyond giggles. We were ripe for the picking, and the pot gods were not going to let us rot.

Under the secrecy of night, the three of us sat in my parent's driveway, propped up on the ice plant that lined the embankment. In the dark of the shadows we all giggled at each other wondering how we'd all gotten so far from each other, and wondering how we'd ended up back together; still the same but completely different. And now we're all going to get stoned together.

The great thing about trying new ways to smoke pot with your friends is that they take special pride and happiness in being the one who gets to hold the lighter while you start sucking in air, take the bowl piece out when you've sucked in enough, and remind you to “Hold it in.”

Waiting to exhale, I leaned back into the prickly softness of the ice plant. Its mushy water-rich spines provided a soft cushion for my body to surrender into. I felt the little ice plant tentacles tickling my body, and turning into fingers and hands, massaging me. I was drifting.

“Hey, do you think he's okay?”

“RD, you alright there?”

“Oh shit...” and I think that's about the last thing I was physically able to say before turning into an out of control giggle volcano.

Me and the ice plant floated across several worlds together while Jamie and Dustin passed the bong back and forth reminiscing about playing in “Jamie's Jungle,” an avocado tree with perfectly draping branches perfect for being hidden and hanging out in. We'd bring our boom boxes and blast the “Welcome To The Jungle” cassingle.

“What are you laughing at?” Jamie and I had retired to the tent we set up in my folk's back yard.

I really wanted to tell Jamie what it was I was laughing at, but every time I tried to tell her, I just started laughing even harder. And the more I would laugh, the more she would ask. And the more she would ask, the more I would laugh. We had a tape recorder on, and the only thing on it is “What are you laughing at?” followed by fits of laughter from the both of us.

My young mind was blown away by the way her face kept morphing right in front of my eyes. For a part of the time, she was Tori Spelling, and then Claire Danes. She may have turned into an inanimate object a few times, like a large ice cream sundae. But either way, the entire night was a series of psychedelic trips which included lighting up our cheeks with flash lights and eating croissants; the only “snack” I could find in the house.

I had seen things that night I had only wished about in my dreams and fantasies. I felt connected to myself in a way I hadn't since childhood. There was something I was discovering, but the confusion of teenage-hood was such a staticy mess, I really couldn't make out what it was. It was like being with that huge jet helmet on, and singing into the mic, only this time, hearing something back. I just knew I had to be there and maybe, maybe one day I could be connected enough again to hear the message that was coming through. Luckily Jamie and I had all summer to keep dialing in, phoning home.

Completely Confused, Totally Wasted and In The Middle of Nowhere

I have no idea how I want to tell this story. Vacationing in Amsterdam for a week is like staring into the flash of a camera, and wondering how on earth you’re ever going to get your sight back. It’s moments like these that you realize nothing in life is predictable, and yet never surprising. Of course I would end up watching the sunrise sitting by a canal, coming down from some crazed pot induced night of debauchery. Of course I would find myself in a mushroom shaped coffee shop having conversations with a kitten and learning to enjoy Euro-techno. But where do I even begin to sort out this exploded water balloon of a week? What piece of this can I extract and turn into some kind of coherent tale? Well, perhaps that’s just it. There is no coherency to any of this, and when you let go of control, you end up falling asleep in a porno theater, and if you’re lucky, your pants are still on.

“Is your friend okay?” The waitress at Barney’s Breakfast Bar (server of Amsterdam’s award winning bud, Willie Nelson) gave me a look of “I see this all the time,” as she got an energy drink and some water for Rob, who was passed out face down on the counter. I met Rob an hour earlier at the Bulldog Hostel, which can only be described as Hotel Starbucks. Posterized images of random celebrities (Bono, Madonna, Richard Pryor) line the hallways, everything is clean and funky but a little homogenized, and their logo (who would guess, a cartoon bulldog) pops up all over the city.

On our walk over to Barney’s Breakfast Bar from the Bulldog, I began to realize Rob wasn’t a real person, he was a physical manifestation of my subconscious. My height, my age, but with glasses and ADD, he spoke as if he were reading the private, most idiosyncratic diaries of yours truly. I had only smoked a little bit of hash by this point in my journey, but already I was in a real life Mulholland Drive. His outer personality was a blueprint of my inner workings: excited and naïve, but still critical and jaded; all over the map, but still intensely focused; connecting experiences to draw exact pictures of a disappointing world that is ultimately one hilarious trip after another. My shy and quiet nature keeps all those inner workings hidden from the world until I figure out the best way to express them. Rob’s ADD erases that layer, and he comes forth as a raw and uninhibited version of me.

Once the Willie Nelson started to take hold of our bodies and minds, those layers that separated us began to merge, and dissolve into each other. By my second hit, I was in a place that I haven’t been to probably since I first started smoking ten years ago; a place where the physical world becomes just a platform to experience the universe and every color, every frequency and every thought that’s happening all at once. It’s that moment when the personality just turns off, and as if on queue, Rob passed out face down on the counter top. But that part of me that is afraid to expose what’s going on inside to the world outside kept me somewhat afloat, well, at least able to keep my head up and eyes open, and able to (sort of) talk to another American who came up to us to enjoy some Mr. Nelson.

His name was Ben, and it must have been the Willie, or the fact he had the same name as my fiancée, but I was finding myself completely entranced by his sexuality. Nothing about him particularly screamed “sexy;” short, furry, glasses, but his tight-ish t-shirt and frat-boy shorts begged further investigation. In my mind I already had him posing for polaroids for me, shirtless, hands behind head, lonesomely gazing down at his own six pack. But my feet were melting, and we were having completely separate conversations:

“How long have you been here?”

“Yeah, it’s my first time, it’s pretty great isn’t it?”

“Oh really? I thought about seeing the Rijks Museum too.”

“I don’t know how much bike rentals are. I’m sure they’re… those eggs look really good.”

The Second First Time

Until now, my mom had always thought that the time she and I smoked pot together was the first time I ever smoked pot. Sorry mom, but it was actually the second time. Being that moms know everything, especially my mom, she probably already knew, or at least strongly suspected. It was my mom’s omnipotence that brought us to smoking pot together in the first place.

As an extremely shy teenager, “I’m going to a party” was never a part of my vocabulary. My buddy Zach was having another one of his many football parties, which always included copious amounts of football jocks, booze and pot. Booze didn’t interest me at all, and while I wished the prospect of a room full of drunken jocks was titillating, at the time it meant instant panic attack. But if pot was involved, perhaps I could lock myself into his parent’s bedroom with a joint, and have my first pot experience watching the night’s belligerent activities through the safety of a key hole.

Picking up our week’s worth of groceries at the Food Basket, my mom wrestled differences between ketchup, catsup, and something called “Spread with Red,” while I began to butter her up about Zach in hopes she wouldn’t catch on to the fact I was trying to sneak my way into his party. “Yeah, Zach made varsity this year. He’s really good. Just might be the best player in school. I really should go see a game of his. I mean, I know I’m not into football, but it’d be great to show my support you know.”

“Uh-huh. The ketchup is seven cents an ounce, but the catsup is a dollar for a quart. I’m so confused.”

“And people go to his house afterwards to celebrate, so that’d be fun to check out too.”

“Uh-huh. I think you want to go to Zach’s party so you can smoke pot.”

Oh shit. Busted. Without any probing questions, she just knew, and pounced on it. She may as well have said “And don’t lie about it, because remember, I know everything!” because I was under her grips and forced to say nothing other than the truth. “Well, I’ve heard that it’s there. I really don’t want to drink though! Really! Not even curious about the taste of beer. At all!”

“Well, listen,” she started. In that split second of anticipation of whatever she might say next, I thought of every last possibility, which ranged from “No son of mine is going to become some drugged out loser like those friends of yours,” to “Well, I think you should wait until you’re 16 at least.”

But then the unthinkable happened.

“If you’re going to be smoking pot, your first experience should at least be in a safe place, with someone who cares about you, and in a controlled environment.”

Oh Allan

Sometimes, all you need to do is make someone smile.

I am a firm believer in the beauty of flirtation. Now, by flirtation, I don’t mean the boobs-in-your-face-crotch-grabbing type. I mean the you’ve-been-staring-at-me-and-I’m-flattered-here’s-a-smile variety, that is simple, subtle, and appreciative. Of course, it makes a person feel good about themselves to be admired from afar, but it makes the admirer feel even better about themselves when their stares are requited with a gesture of thanks. For those of you who are constantly the source of shy-boy gazes, you don’t even need to approach the guy, fain interest, or even gayness. Just a nod can make that person’s day. It’s as easy as that, just one nod, and voilà, a day has been made. Sew on your good-deed-badge, Scout, ‘cause you’re going to heaven! I mean really, what could be better than making someone feel good about themselves? I’ll tell you: being stoned and walking through the campus of UC Berkeley.

I think straight guys secretly love being admired by people like me. It must be some crazy ego stroke or something, because every time I show up on campus, it’s like the guys start in on this incredibly well choreographed dance. “RD’s coming! T-shirts off and hoses ready. I’ve got the soap and buckets!” Seriously, I’ll walk up the hills of campus and see an entire frat house out on the street washing trucks, getting soap suds all over each other, spraying each other’s board shorts, and deciding the only way to wash the hood is by laying on it with arms behind the head, pecks a-flexin’. I’ll turn the corner to find a group of jocks practicing their boxing moves and wrestling in the grass together. They sit on each other and hug each other and sweat and grunt and look up at me and smile. And I’m left unable to move, thinking only “There are beautiful shirtless men wrestling in front of me and they’re looking and smiling in my direction. The sun is shining, I’m in California, and I’m really high. Am I alive right now?”

So, when I first arrived in Berkeley, I sought out other buddies to chill and smoke pot with. This is how I met Lewis. Lewis was a cook at one of the frat houses on campus, and lived at the frat house… with all the frat boys. His room was the den of pot, so naturally, that’s where all the boys wanted to hang. Lucky for me, Lewis and I hung out a lot one summer, and boy did I always leave feeling very, very good about myself.

One night, during a particularly awesome Conan O’Brien show, a boy called Allan showed up for a session with Lewis and I. Oh, Allan. Nineteen years of all-American cornbread good looks in khaki shorts and a polo shirt. His puppy-dog eyes screamed “I’m on my own for the first time, and I’m in California!” He was all too eager to enjoy the pot hookah with Lewis and I, and Conan crowned the evening by uniting us all in laugh.

The First Time

I somehow knew it was meant to be. As if by instinct or some kind of genetic pre-disposition, I could feel my most basic animal logic kicking in; I was 15 and ready to get stoned. Somewhere in my gut I knew, even as a kid, that this green leafy substance and I would have a long and giggly relationship.

When we were exposed to those “anti-drug” films in 5^th-8^th grade, the guys with the big afros and glassy eyes always caught my attention. Usually wearing a colorful muumuu, and speaking of love and peace slowly and melodically, it was hard to believe that whatever these guys were on could actually be harmful.

On the other hand, the interviews with nose-bleeding trust fund kids and tweaked out street hustlers showed us that things like coke and speed weren’t really that fun. But they could never say anything bad about pot. How could you when your stock footage included not much more than dancing girls and guys saying “Groovy, man.” One film tried to scare us from pot by saying our acne would get worse from eating too much junk food, and that we might get laid a lot. Yeah, it really sucks when you’re a closeted 15 year old homosexual, to have the problem of getting laid too much.

The stage was set; I was already a Pink Floyd fan, my hair was down to my shoulders, and my maroon ten-eye Dr. Marten’s screamed “teenage-counter-culture.” I was also perfectly playing the part of the spacey intellectual; a smart honors student, but completely in my own giggly world. My appearance and personality type were there, I just needed the actual weed to fill in the gap and complete the picture. My friends patiently waited to see when I would finally take the plunge. I think my football-jock-buddy, Zach, gave himself a pat on the back when he realized he would be my first supplier.

I’ll never forget conjuring up the nerve to approach him about it. I practiced all night the night before to make sure I could get the words out of my mouth, and that I wouldn’t chicken out and say I meant to ask for “a pot” instead. “Yeah, my mom’s pots broke. All of them. And I need one. And  you’re the only person I could think of to ask. I swear this is not a thinly veiled attempt at something else.”

Despite his football jock status, and my nature to be immediately intimidated by such people, Zach was a very approachable, caring and gentle soul, who I knew I could trust. When the time came to ask him about it, he smiled a big smile just as I started in on “I was wondering if you might be able to get me…” Knowing what was coming next, he saved me the embarrassment of having to say the words, gave me a big hug and said, “No worries kid, I’ve got you covered.”

But my naiveté tripped me up at the first question, “how much do you want?” Uh, do I measure by putting my hand up and showing you a space between my thumb and index finger? Do I measure in joints? Is a pound enough? Clearly perplexed, he said “We’ll start you off with a nickel bag.” Cool, my first foray into pot lingo, “a nickel bag.”

I Miss Andrew Jacob

Claiming yourself as an "artist" and being in a rock band at the age of 24 gives you carte blanche to just dither around, make pancakes, smoke pot, and make some noise every now and then, all the while, blaming white corporate oppression for the fact that you can't hold a job, and fascist journalism pigs for keeping your EP sales low.

"My vision is too intense for the world to handle, but I'll never compromise," you say with bong smoke billowing out your mouth.

Such was the case with the Lakeside Project, my pet band during my Boston tenure. Destined for stardom, we decided to get serious about practice, and make it an all day affair as often as possible.

Starting early in the morning, we'd all gather up on Hooker St; home of drummer Andrew, the unassuming Jedi with a smile that made the room glow, and he'd promptly start making us chocolate chip pancakes like a good den mother.

With pancakes, milk and o.j. sitting in our stomachs like bricks, we'd be too deliriously full to actually play any music, so we'd spend endless hours tuning, untuning, and watching Stephen shake the reverb pedal saying "I think this is broken." Eventually Kent would start in on The Moldy Peaches covers to ease the painful food coma.

After all our bowels had moved, we'd finally have the wherewithal to rip through molten lava versions of one or two of our stadium rockers then call for a clearly earned break,  which, more often than not included raiding Andrew’s pot stash, watching MTV and making fun of The Strokes; a clear sign of confident musicians ready to cut it in the professional market.

“What the fuck is this shit? The Strokes?” Stephen’s pessimism for all things non-Lakeside Project was truly inspiring, though it only validated my and Kent’s raging jealously for all other bands. “Is it the White Stripes? They’re all the fucking same. The White Strokes?”

My Craig's List Missed Connections Ad

A story from the Placebo/She Wants Revenge show at the Warfield in San Francisco, October 24, 2006.

Every day is like a missed connection. Every moment presents an infinite possibility of choices, and we give up everything to choose the one. It's pretty amazing that we confine ourselves to these odd existences when all we truly long for is to be stoned and naked rolling around in the grass while the sun sets. In other words, to be enjoying life for all its worth.

We choose to pretend like we're not noticing the person crossing our paths on the street. Instead of saying, “Fancy a shag,” or “How do you do,” we look the opposite way and think to ourselves, “What does martinizing mean, anyway?”

Craigslist, like all wonderful things on the Internet, completely changes how we react to this. Now we can just log onto missed connections on Craigslist, and say “Hey, yo, to that broad that flashed me her tits from a limo on the Oakland Bay Bridge, I think we had a connection, so you know, email me.” This of course introduces a whole new layer of choices that can forever alter a person's fate; Do you post to Craigslist? How do you word it to catch the right person? How do you know they'll even think to check Missed Connections before your post gets buried under the thousands and THOUSANDS of Missed Connections that appear daily??? Nevertheless, the Internet provides a forum to peak out from behind our fear and wave to somebody out there.

So when I found out that Placebo was playing at the Warfield in San Francisco, I was presented with a whole myriad of choices; should I spend money on tickets (found on Craigslist, coincidentally!), pollute the air with gas and my head with traffic, or chance taking the long BART ride across the bay and hope I can leave the show before the trains stop running, all to see a band whose music I was only marginally interested in, have only ever had one album by, and haven't actively listened to for the last five years? Challenging prospect, I know.

In fact, in terms of my music snobbery, Placebo was a band with many marks against them. They've sold their songs to commercials; they haven't changed their sound or approach to music writing for their entire ten year career; most of their songs are a formula of very simple arena-rock ready riffs plus cheap lyrics about sex and drugs with predictably obnoxious rhyming schemes (“Day's dawning, skin's crawling,” from “Pure Morning”.).

That being the case, surprisingly, what stuck with me was the fact that they have indeed been doing this for ten years, and still approach it with the excitement and freshness of ten years ago, but with the patience and professionalism that comes with a decade honing your craft.

I was interested in Placebo initially because of their quasi-gay status, a seductive gender bending image and tunes that I actually enjoyed and could relate to. I was waiting to hear something to really transport me into their music, something that said, “We want to take this as far as possible.” It's what I heard in Radiohead the first time I heard “Planet Telex,” off The Bends. It proved to me they were not interested in being known as “that band who did 'Creep'.” By the time I heard the Placebo song “Black Eyed,” which boasts of being schizophrenic and “biting on your nuts,” I decided that I had heard enough of their witty, sexy, provocative numbers to realize, “Well, I do actually like all these songs,” and I picked up their 2000 effort, Black Market Music. I found a pleasantly moody semi-industrial rock record that had some pretty cool things going on in it. From the maybe Pink Floyd sample in “Taste In Men” (see “Let There Be More Light” from A Saucerful of Secrets), to lyrics about the sometimes horse tranquilizer/sometimes rave drug, Special K, Black Market Music consistently skirts the edge of greatness, but it never quiet goes beyond the clever lyric and tongue-in-cheek riff.

Most bands occupying this sphere of my mental space wouldn't get much of a second look if I found out they were touring in my area. But something compelled me to think twice when I saw the name PLACEBO printed in the paper.

When the lovechild of David Bowie and Trent Reznor took the stage, singer Brian Molko and his band showed that everything that I had thought about them didn't matter. This was their show, and they love what they're doing. They've been following their bliss for ten years, making the kind of music they want to make, and too bad if you have a problem with that, because we're having an awesome time with no intention of stopping. They're also really talented live performers, and didn't have to rely on their early radio hits to keep the crowd interested. Friend to many chubby 15 year old goth girls, and geeky guys with lisps getting over their D&D phase, Molko hugged each one of them with his fained guitar-hero prowess, and for that moment, no connections were missed.

That aside, there were several elements which made the whole event seem like something out of a Hollywood movie version of a rock club; the perfectly lit stage with bright strobing white lights, the band members all cutely dressed in thrift shop boutique black, striking all the right rock poses, and with the obligatory feedback arena rock jam to close out their biggest hit. Drummer Steve Hewitt had perfect 1987-era Bono/Michael Hutchence hair (long, dark and slightly curly) and ended the night with a drum stick toss. Even their back up band members looked like they could have easily been the back up band for Duran Duran, and probably have their own synth pop duo on the side called Invertigo that once played at a Paris Hilton CD release party.

The guitar tech looked like a rock version of Maxine from Being John Malkovich, and took her job very seriously. Constantly jittering about the stage, shuffling papers, straightening cables, tuning and re-tuning each guitar, standing directly behind Molko at the conclusion of each song with a new guitar ready to strap on him, she boldly held her own on stage with a look that said “see how my hair is in a ponytail, but it still keeps draping in front of my face? Yeah, this job is ha-ard, but I'm in control. CONTROL! That's my mantra. And yeah, I know this camisole is kind of girly, but it's all black, and check out these guns man, I'm gonna get a tattoo right here...after the tour...” and, swoosh, she'd swipe her hand in front of her face trying in vein to tuck her bangs behind her ears before triple checking the batteries in the e-bow.

Bassist Stefan Olsdal's stage poses were very L.A. in a way that suggested “I am a sex god, and I know you worship me. See how I hold my bass guitar a foot in front of me while a play an open E for three minutes? Yeah baby, I'm on fire.” Even though his exposed chest and searing gaze were somewhat titillating, watching him perform an interpretive dance for the first minute and a half of the song “Taste In Men,” I couldn't help but feel that if he performed any of his rock-god poses on me in bed, I'd instantly turn bright red and become unable to stop giggling. What was great about it though, was that Olsdal was completely in charge of his on-stage persona. He struck his poses unapologetically, and even if he couldn't win over the most jaded minds in the audience, he acted as if didn't need them to keep rocking. The fact that his pelvis extended closer to the audience than his bass guitar at times, and that his chest bore merely a vest and a glittering diamond necklace only served to elevate room's sexual tension.

It should come as no surprise that a room full of hot sweaty bodies all crunched together listening to really loud music is my idea of a good time. So here I am watching a 6”5', half-naked bassist do pelvic gyrations in front of me while the singer pants the word “MEN” over and over.

Oh yeah.

This is heaven on a dance floor.

The scene around me has my hormones hormoaning, as well as those of all the beautiful bodies that surround me, panting Molko's declaration of “MEN” right back at him. Front and center in the audience is Molko's biggest fan, jumping up and down waving his arms high in the air, a corn bred mid-western looking frat boy who had either been on the bad end of a “do a whole bunch of speed and go to the Placebo concert” dare or was a “now that I'm in California I can finally come out of the closet” case having his first indoctrination into something called Pride. The idea that it might have been a speed-dare makes sense, as earlier when he had been pushing his way to the front through the already sardined crowd, he didn't seem to care how many small girls he trampled on, or how many elbows ended up in his side, or how many hands were grabbing his ass. That last part wasn't my fault. Where did he expect my hands to be? There was no room for them to be anywhere else! And if you're gonna trample small girls to get close to a hunky man singing about men, you're asking for it really.

Brownies? Yeah. (A short anecdote)

Rachel and I are A+ stoners. We smoke until we can't think of anything else but brownies.

"You know what sounds completely amazing right now?"

"Brownies."

"You read my fucking mind."

"Well, today is our lucky day, because I made brownies yesterday."

"You are brilliant. Let's go."

So into the kitchen we went, mouths salivating in eager anticipation of that moist chocolate cake, slightly crispy on top, perfectly gooey in the middle… and oh, a tall glass of rockin' cold milk to wash it down with.

Smiling ear to ear like a couple of village idiots, Rachel opened the refrigerator door to reveal the most horrifying sight ever:

The milk carton was empty.

Our worlds shattered into layers of confusion and disbelief as our eyes passed from brownie plate to empty milk carton and back again. Our giddy smiles turned into disenfranchised frowns, and Rachel stood there shaking the empty milk carton saying, "Oh shit, RD. We're in a commercial."

A Thousand Words

This is me in 1995. I think it sums everything up quite perfectly.