I used drugs twice when I was 19, oh, I suppose once willingly and twice unwittingly.

Ronbone, head of the stoner cult I lived with, finally shamed me into trying smoking hash under a glass. He bought a chunk of this resinous material, set it on fire under a glass and then tilted it and sucked out the smoke. This overcame my objections about sharing media and inhaling burning paper. I hated it. It was like some jinn shit in my lungs. I did pushups until I could breathe clear again and felt no effect on my mind or mood.

The next day I came home from work and he was cooking burgers and had baked a batch of brownies and gave them to me. I ate the entire plate and then he told me that he had put a half ounce of hash in the brownies. Well, I found out what high was. Our friends came over, Wolfy and his wife Celeste, who was a gorgeous blue-eyed Italian girl with quite a celestial figure. She laughed all night as I could not keep from looking at her. It was embarrassing. I was being rude and did not care. I am still embarrassed to this day and what was worse, there was no hangover.

Then there was the time that I went with Ronbone and Lisa to hear her and her girl band play in her parent’s basement. I could not even drink a beer I had such a bad headache. Ronbone kept on telling me that his drugs would cure the headache and I did not believe him. But John seemed to feel bad for me and gave me a pill with an E stamped on it that he swore was Excedrin. That was the last time I socialized with them. That pill took me into a dark pit of despair, in which I attempted for hours to tie or untie my boot strings and only wished to die and kept falling into a black pit and emerging unable to remember whether I was tying or untying my boot strings. I came out of that suicidal funk knowing I had been their science experiment and broke ties, found another apartment and moved on.

I did, early this year, at age 57, eat some pot brownies that a friend offered me to relieve the eye seizures and it worked, so used it until it ran out and did not re-up my supply. The brownies made me too talkative, not the me I wanted to be.

…

Mister and Mrs. Biel were Lisa’s parents. Mrs. Biel was enormous at 450 pounds and very mean to 130 pound Mister Biel. Finally he found a solution. His wife demanded a bathroom in the basement so he complied, building it. He then placed a hallway between the front and the back half of the basement so narrow that his rotund wife could not pass through. There he would hide, drinking his beer as she bitched for him to come bring her some food, unafraid that she would attack him, safe behind his barrier.