Last Tuesday morning I ran into my former roommate, Jimbob, while boarding the cross town bus. I was headed home from East Baltimore County and him to work from East Baltimore. Still lean of frame, he has worked in restaurants for most of his sixty odd years, but has also been a carney and a water tank jockey, tasked with insulting men into throwing baseballs at the target that would dump him into the water tank from his opinionated perch.
How big of a pothead was Jimbob?
When Jimbob and I both lived at the old plantation house he would get off work at 4, have a few drinks at the bar, bring home some beer, and by 5 be settled into his basement man cave hitting the bong. He would smoke pot from 5 p.m. Friday until 10 p.m. Sunday! By Sunday afternoon I would leave the house from my room two stories up so that I would not absorb any THC and test positive on a random drug test at work. Jimbob used to stand on the sidewalk two feet from the street on weekday evenings [the landlord did not tolerate pot smoking on weekday evenings] and smoke a joint while reading a book—and he is a well read man.
Once I saw him waving to a cop that was driving by. After I complimented him on his stoner elan he said, in his deep, cavernous voice with that raspy smoker’s edge, “It works fine until you pass a joint to one of the fuckers. Then they either take it—if you’re lucky—or lock you up.”
As we sat down next to each other on the bus I asked him how he was doing.
“Doing good, man, working as a chef at the *&%@# Tavern. I take the bus in, the wife picks me up from work. Got married—finally abandoned the He-man Woman Haters Club, for a woman who pays my rent and buys my reefer. Can’t beat that. I’m a kept man brother, not bad after a life alone.
“What about you, you still writing?”
“Yes, in fact one of my most-liked books is Planet Buzzkill, in which an unlikely pot-smoking hero, based on you, discovers that the alien invaders are allergic to THC.”
Jimbob was off and running:
“Your choice of drug includes the consideration of a number of factors—one of them, of course, being the possibility of alien invasion—which, in the end, comes down to what kind of people you want to live with. Sol, for instance, is a crack head, just got locked up for fighting again. Crack is a violence drug. Do I want to live with violence? No.
“Do I want to live in a crack house paying rent to a guy like Sol who will eventually threaten or attack me, and then when I go after him with a machete I’m all of a sudden the bad guy? No.
“Of course, when I was coming up in the seventies there was no such thing as crack. It didn’t exist.
“Cocaine was expensive—and still is—and the people that do it tend to be rich or snobbish despite of being poor and not good people to be around.
“Beer and wine is something that most people handle without getting violent. But you have to pick your friends carefully if you are a drinker because you have the psychotic cross-over crack heads, and the fact that one-in-five drunks are angry drunks. So if you’re drinking keep it close and keep it small: small bar, drinking at home with close friends, etcetera.
“Heroin—yeah right. Have you ever seen anyone on heroin? That does not look like anyone’s idea of a good time and is the only thing I haven’t tried. It’s a suicide drug. Fuck that. A three-fifty-seven to the temple is cheaper and quicker.
“LSD—acid—can be a good time if you like watching the world melt and you get a kick out of being paranoid. But if you’re OCD or have a persecution complex—Jesus Christ, don’t drop any acid! Acid is a good eight hour high if you are into thinking you’re being attacked by speeding demons while you’re driving down the interstate at ten miles per hour afraid that the state cops are coming for you. But the after effect is a two day headache. No thanks. That got old, and quickly.
“Pills—the idea of pills, of giving into the Medical Industrial Complex—never appealed to me, don’t know a thing about them.
“Whiskey is bad news, guaranteed violence. Whiskey drinkers either brood—not a lot of fun there, what did your dog die of again?—or violent; too much of the wrong kind of fun. I mean it’s what the blacks drink and they can’t stay out of prison, so stay away from it.
“Now pot, if you like to relax with a good book, and you’re not driven to write one, is a great high. The only two things that you do better on pot is eat and sleep. Everything else will be subpar, and you can forget the short term memory—which is no big loss if you don’t experience anything in your day to day life that is worth remembering, and can be a big plus if you live with some asshole that tells the same joke every day.”
Jimbob’ stop was coming up, and as he stood, the handful of delinquent high school kids that surrounded us on the bus, all looked up to him like members of a cargo cult mournfully watching the aviator whose mode of flight they worshipped rise far above and out of reach.
