The First Time I Got High

The First Time I Got High
Woody Tauke
1445 words

Growing up I had a number of best friends.   As I got older and developed through the many complicated phases of childhood and adolescence they entered and left my life with some regularity.  As I changed they changed, AJ, Michael, Joey, Nick, and Steve, but despite the many differences they had, I see now one similarity.  They all found sanctuary in partying far earlier than I, and I add as a digression, far earlier than they were ready for.  Now, I use the term partying as a sort of watered down jargon for drug use.  All of the best friends I had growing up started smoking marijuana long before I did, and that is at least partially, in not wholly, responsible for their individual downfalls.    Whether it was through police intervention, college drop out, or excessive pharmaceutical self-medication we all fell victim to the old gateway cliché.  That is everyone except me.  

My freshman year of college a group of friends and I decided to lock ourselves in a door room and eat some weed cookies (edibles [as they are now known to me]).  The function of locking ourselves in was more aesthetic than anything else, and we did eventually leave, but it certainly added to the ambiance of the experience.  In typical 90’s teen movie fashion (insert title here), we had Christmas lights, blankets, and plenty of weird pictures to stare at.  The group of friends I was with were, and are, considerably better versed when it comes to drugs than I, and I’m not sure they necessarily expected to trip out as bad as I did but again, ambiance was important to us.   After dinner the group and I left the cafeteria and headed our separate ways with the understanding that we would all meet later that evening and have that experience.  I don’t remember who went out and actually got the weed cookies but I paid my five dollars and upon my arrival to my friend Xanders room one was handed to me and the door was locked.  We laughed, listened to music, and with deep breaths finally ate the cookies, which turned out to have m&ms in them (also they were less of cookies and more of just cookie dough).  I suppose that could an unspoken rule of drug dealing: you do your own baking.  Point being, and hour later we were high as hell. 

I still have video of us on my phone, I don’t remember taking the video but it’s a lot of giggling and us trying to walk in slow motion.  I make a brief cameo at one point, just long enough to laugh myself to tears before turning the camera away from my face again.  I’m not sure if I mentioned this or not but this was my first experience getting recreationally high (I broke my arm my sophomore year of high school and they gave me a twilight sedation) and I didn’t have much insight into the experience prior to eating the edible.  Most vividly I remember sitting on my friend Xander’s bed, the lower half of a bunk bed, and sleepily staring out at the room.  We had the lights low enough that it could pass as dark and things were quiet in my tiny cave.  The bed above me, and its posts framed my view perfectly as I watched, what I’m sure I thought at the time was, some serious melodrama unfold.   It felt like I was in a movie theater, a private screening, seeing a film of my best friends being generally goofy.   I still hold that idea to be pretty surreal, but where things really got wild was where my legs bent at the knees over the edge of the bed, and through what I thought was the movie screen.  I was partially in the movie and partially in my private theater.  I remember being okay with this concept, somehow able to justify the notion that I could simultaneously be in and out of a movie to myself at the time.  The night took a significant turn for the worse when my friends noticed me and started to actively break the fourth wall.  Even then I was still having a good time and eventually I snapped out of my movie mindset.

 I mentioned above not having much knowledge of what being high was like and while I knew that you got the munchies from weed it would have been nice for someone to warn me of their intensity.  I don’t remember too much of that night, I was incredibly high and a little drunk, but at some point I remember hitting this wall and not being able to think about anything except eating.  It didn’t matter what or how much it cost; I just had to eat.  As I’m sure you guessed I ordered a shit ton of pizza.  Fifty dollars worth of pizza to be specific.  How much pizza can an incredibly high freshman in college order for fifty dollars on a Friday night, you might ask?  Three 36-inch thin crust pizzas which took entirely too long to get to me (albeit time was passing much slower that night).  Their arrival wasn’t nearly as glorious as pop culture had led me to believe it would be and all I can remember doing is chomping.  Now, I use the word chomping with much consideration because I wasn’t exactly eating the pizza.  I was hardly chewing it and I certainly wasn’t tasting it.  It was just entering my body with some mild consideration for me not choking to death.  I wasn’t even really hungry in the sense that I had thought moments before, my mouth hurt from the friction, and I was relatively unaware of the pizza I was merely a vortex that could only be satisfied with Gumby’s (formerly Gumby’s, now decidedly less fun Gumba’s).   The pizza vortex never really closed that night, it merely consumed all that it could and got temporarily distracted.  That temporary distraction was an out of body experience for me, and I seemed a guest in my own life.  I watched myself, with complete disregard for my surrounds, unlock and leave that room, walk back down the hill and enter my own dorm, and eventually dorm room. 

I realize now that this was probably all motivated by my unending quest for food, but at the time I was not thinking nearly that rationally or linearly.  What I found in my freshman mini fridge was an unopened, but semi frozen, 36-oz. jar of frozen applesauce.  The night before I had started the 1998 Terrence Malick classic, The Thin Red Line, and so with my applesauce I slumped onto my futon and picked up where I left off.  It was distinctly more difficult to follow the second day in, and I to this day can’t remember much of that movie.  What I do remember is a scene when the screen goes completely black.  A full blackout only lit by the backlight on my MacBook.  That night in my dorm room (Hoben room 1), I caught my self-reflected in the Gorilla Glass of my laptop’s screen.  I had this now all but empty jar of applesauce resting against my chill, mindlessly shoveling its contents into my mouth, my eyes swollen, red, and half closed, trying to focus on the Vietnam War.   And I remember thinking “This is too much, I’ve really hit bottom.” The guilt was too much and I went to bed. 

The next morning I was left muddled, to reflect on the night before. I know now, that that was a period of experimentation for me, and I have gotten high since, but I have never been able to shake that image of my face, backlit by my computer, and seemingly haunted by all the faces of my childhood friends.  I guess I have them to thank, their individual sacrifices rather, for my sanity and grounded attitude towards “partying.”  I have a rather staunch opinion against drug use, including but not limited to weed, yet every now and again I find myself, at a party, getting high.  And I always feel the same guilt I did that night freshman year.  Is there some united factor from our childhoods that lead us down this path?  Do I do it to remember them and give myself that humility, or grounding, for lack of better words?  I’m not sure.  I just know that I can’t seem to stop myself.  Not in a scary way, I guess I just need to think about it, my childhood, and myself a little more.  Maybe I’ll give one of the gang a call, maybe not.