The Wikiness

At school, 12-year-old me had seen the anti-drug Dragnet films, where Jack Webb as Sergeant Friday fought drug dealers addicting kids and leading them to early deaths and insanity. But I was intrigued by the drunk teenagers my sister Sharon hung out with at the park, impressed that they’d used the empty storage space under our back porch to drink their quarts of Budweiser here. It lent this space a certain status somehow.

You could say I was illegal drug-curious.

When I agreed to bike with Tommy Beckert to the house of some dude he knew on Flournoy Street, 12-year-old me had no idea that I’d be trying my first-ever marijuana. According to Tommy, this guy just had a really cool stereo he thought I’d find interesting.

Tommy was from a family in my neighborhood that was even more dysfunctional than mine. This meant I never got past his front door. But I knew from my older sisters that his family lived in squalor, and his oldest sister had gotten into drugs and was never seen again. They had more reason to be ashamed than even me and my sisters.

To Tommy, my house, with absent parents, abundant junk food, and a decent stereo, must have seemed nice, so he and I would hang out occasionally, ride bikes or watch TV and snack in my basement.

We put our bikes in this dude’s backyard, and then Tommy just walked in the back door, which I thought was weird, but Tommy was experienced compared to me, and I just wanted to be cool, so I silently went in after him. We wound up on the second floor in this guy’s bedroom. He looked at least 17, which put me on guard, but he seemed friendly enough. He offered us a can of pop and then pulled out what he said was an extraordinary new album, The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd.

He put it on his Marantz system, lowered the tone arm, and nothing happened. I looked at Tommy like, “Where’s the music?” You didn’t even hear a pop when the needle dropped.

The older dude started laughing. “Naw, you can’t hear this record through speakers, man. You’ve gotta hear it in here!” he tapped his temple. Then he picked up a pair of chunky Koss headphones. “And you really should prepare your head for these phones!”

With that, he reached under his bed and pulled out a tray on which were rolling papers, marijuana, and a plastic device I later learned was called a “Powerhitter,” a sort of soft plastic bottle that allows the user to contain and control smoke from a joint. The dude lit a joint, placed it in the Powerhitter, and took a big drag. He then handed it to Tommy, who casually administered himself a hit with no difficulty. He then handed it to me with the expectation I’d take a toke myself. I looked at it, then at Tommy, then squeezed and started to draw the smoke into my lungs. They immediately spasmed in revulsive coughs.

“Hold it in your lungs, man!” The dude was disappointed at me, helplessly coughing out whatever benefit he saw in the smoke.

Try as I might, I couldn’t ingest the smoke long enough to induce the famous “high.” Instead, I felt uncomfortable and criminal with these two practiced tokers. Even when the dude placed the headphones on me and played the first tracks of the album, I couldn’t appreciate it. I was waiting to go home.

If I had gotten the desired “high,” and got to the last cut on the album, “Eclipse,” perhaps I would have felt a grand sense of the interconnectedness of all things, earthly and cosmic, as in the last lines:

“…all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that’s to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.”