pigeon
Do you feel like your eyelids are inside-out?
The girl who asked me that — I don’t remember her name, but she had a name. I don’t know who she was, but she was somebody.
“Tha’s abou’ right,” I drawled, through a vapid grin.
“Yeah, he’s stoned!” someone said, and everyone in the car laughed and I felt included and inducted. I was 15 or 16.
For the next indeterminate period of tiiiiiiiime, all I did was sit there in the back seat, slackly swaying with the motion of the car, intensely aware of the preternatural beauty of the girl sitting next to me — what was her name? who was she? The music from the 6×9 speakers in the deck behind us washed through me — that, I do remember! The centerpiece of the soundtrack was Boston. The bright jagged current of the guitar, pulling you downstream into the harbor of the night, bittersweet, triumphant, aching — it demands to be turned up, loud, let it punch you in the heart, wash away any traces of the mud of mediocrity still clinging to you from the day, from your life before this moment right now, tonight, the only moment there is.
Broadway morphed into a giant circle, a closed loop of time-lapsed streaks of colored light; then, slowly, inexorably, one side of its galactic disc began to rise, arcing thru 90 degrees until the circle stood on edge, still rotating majestically, vast against the horizon like a ferris wheel of brobdingnagian proportions.
Back and forth had become round and round with no beginning and no end, orthogonal to reality, but there was no practical difference. My stepsister’s white Datsun persevered in cruising the loop, along with the rest of Cape Girardeau’s idle restless youth.
Oh he’ll be all right, I overheard a phantom angel say, talking about me! A sylph of inner blue light, a blip of electricity in the mind, a quasi-dream fragment amplified by cannabinoids. A shifting glyph spawning a surfeit of egotistical narratives in the months and years to come — look! I had a vision! I’m special! Was the offhand prophecy borne out? Unfalsifiable. It’s a self-selecting prophecy. I’m still alive, so I’m “all right” by some fundamental definition, right? If I hadn’t survived, presumably I wouldn’t be remembering this, so the question would be moot. After all, whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
There were a couple of other times I got high with my stepsister, and they were pretty awesome too, autumnally fresh, tiny personal campfires of connection, unfettered emotion, unchained intuition. In those days, the piercing smell of cannabis combusting was exciting, enticing, an olfactory clue to a source of cosmic mischief — now, of course, it lurks on every street corner and smells like depression.
One of the times, I remember lying in my twin bed, same one I’d had since I was about 5, overcome by a sense of dread and imminent pain and destruction, failing to self-hypnotize my way out of the feeling that I had majorly fucked something up, not just for the moment but possibly forever. My inner dialog’s “it isn’t real, it’s just pretend” morphed into “try to pretend it isn’t real” and kept repeating, more and more ominously as the night sat on my chest and glared into my puny soul.
If those early occurring angelic and demonic moments were the highest and lowest points on the graph of my relationship with THC and related substances, the rest of the trend is easy enough to describe: generally downward, toward a mediocre flatline. It was just never that amazing ever again, although, being a dumb addictive human rat, I kept pulling the lever for years and years, because, you know, maybe I just wasn’t doing it right ...
Eventually, thankfully, I finally quit rerunning that same fruitless experiment. After a while, I couldn’t fool myself any longer: a blasé dollop of pleasure simply isn’t worth the price of admission. Sometimes you really do need to put away childish things, you know? Like sneaking down to the lake to smoke grapevines. Candy cigarettes. Syrup is still syrup in a sippy cup. Maybe 95% of growing up is figuring out which things you don’t need to stick in your mouth anymore.
Since then also I’ve met and known plenty of real angels, not the illusory prophetic kind. They’ve been nurses, parents, children, dogs, cats, friends, colleagues, random people on the bus —
Who knows, maybe that girl whose name I can’t remember is one — was already one, then — she must have been — and I was too stoned to appreciate her as she really was, in her actual form as a real human being.
Through a glass — the windows of a late-1970s Datsun with no destination, burning gasoline — darkly, indeed.