Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir Read online

  1. Editor’s note: No. That’s not even close to the weirdest thing about getting a cow pregnant in high school.

  Draw Me a Fucking Dog

  DISCLAIMER: My agent and editor don’t love this chapter, because it’s about me doing drugs (poorly) and it doesn’t really fit with the rest of the book, but I pointed out that druggies will totally relate to it, and nondruggies will feel smugly self-satisfied with their life choices when they read it, so I’m basically hitting all the demographics. But then they said that it’s just too rambling and confusing to be a real chapter. They may have a point. This is why this chapter isn’t a real chapter at all. It’s a bonus story that you can skip so you can feel like you accomplished more today. Or you can underline parts and write notes to yourself in all the margins so people in the subway think you’re either really smart for reading a textbook on the subway, or just rich enough to use hardback books as Post-its. You aren’t allowed to judge this chapter, though, because it’s not a real chapter. As a Post-it note, however, it is pretty fucking impressive.

  Special note to any teenage children I may one day have: Anyone who does drugs is a moron. Don’t do drugs. They will kill you and make your boobies fall off. It happened to your aunt Rebecca, and that’s why you’ve never heard of her. But we keep her boobies in a box to remember her terrible lesson, and if I ever even smell pot on you I will put them on you while you are sleeping, and you will wake up with a dead woman’s boobies on your forehead. Now, skip to the next chapter, because I’m about to start writing about having sex with your father.

  PREFACE: There isn’t really a preface. I just wanted to see how many paragraphs I could fit in before actually starting a chapter.

  PREFACE ADDENDUM: Four. The answer is four.

  I was eighteen the first time I did acid. And it was awesome. And horrible. And also I was kind of an idiot, because I’d managed to unintentionally wait until one week after I could legally be charged as an adult for drug possession.

  My friend Jim had been doing acid since he was fifteen, and I was captivated with his stories of LSD experimentation, including his recent drug-induced epiphany that the one thing that brought all of mankind together was our common possession of nipples. “I mean . . . we all have them, right?” he asked me feverishly. “And what possible reason is there for men to possess these useless body parts unless it’s an undeniable sign that men and woman are all one in this giant, cosmic soup that we call the universe?! Men and women . . . we’re all the same! It’s all relative!” He’d called his epiphany “The Theory of Relativity,” until someone pointed out that that already existed, and so he grudgingly changed it to “Jim’s Theory of Relativity.” At the time I thought it was brilliant, but at the time I was also drunk.

  I was both terrified and fascinated by the idea that there was a whole world known only to acid users, and I was completely intrigued by the accompanying drug lingo that Jim so naturally bandied about. I longed to “have a connection” in the drug trade, and I felt that the only way I’d be able to use this phrase in good faith would be to sleep with a pharmacist or to meet someone who occasionally sold speed. The latter seemed easier and less likely to end with VD. And also I didn’t know any pharmacists.

  Jim once told me about the time he was waiting at his house for some friends to pick him up so they could drop acid together. He decided to get a head start and took three hits while his mom was watching TV in the other room. Unfortunately, his friends had also decided to take acid a little early and found themselves completely high and driving to Jim’s house, which would have been extremely stupid and dangerous except that they were actually sitting at the dining room table just thinking that they were in the car, so it was less dangerous and more just really stupid. And they stayed at that table for the next four hours, because none of them were willing to get out of the car, since no one knew where the brakes were. It was basically the longest car ride in the world that didn’t actually involve a car. Meanwhile, Jim began doodling on a phone book in his bedroom, and he’d just finished drawing a little stick figure when the little stick figure dude came to life and said, “Dude. Draw me a fucking dog.”

  This is when Jim realized the drugs had kicked in, and when Jim’s mom walked in a bit later and an enormous eagle flew past her and landed on his bed. Jim told me that the stick figure started screaming, but Jim ignored him, because he was high, but not so high that he didn’t realize that talking to a drawing on a phone book would probably look suspicious.

  Jim noticed that his mom was staring at him warily, but at this point he was so high that he couldn’t remember whether he’d asked her a question that she hadn’t answered, or if she’d asked him a question that he hadn’t answered, but he thought it would be weirder to follow up whatever question he might have asked her with another question, especially since he couldn’t remember the question he hadn’t actually asked her in the first place. So basically they just sat there having this really awkward staring contest. Then the stick figure pointed out that if the eagle was not a hallucination his mom would know he was on drugs, because what kind of guy would be all, “Oh, it’s perfectly normal to have this eagle here”? Jim laughed nervously and tried to give his mom a look that he hoped said something like “Wow. The world is a weird place when eagles may or may not land on your bed, right?”

  But in reality it must have said something closer to “Holy shit, I’m fucking high,” because the next day Jim’s mom sent him to the local psychiatric/rehab center, which helped him find God and introduced him to narcotics far more addictive than any drugs he could have found on the street. When he came back he was all about lithium and Jesus, and when I mentioned that I really just wanted to try LSD, he rolled his eyes at me as if he were some sort of wine connoisseur and I’d just asked the best way to unscrew a bottle of Strawberry Hill. Druggies can be surprisingly judgmental. It’s pretty much the only social circle where the same people you just witnessed shooting horse tranquilizers up one another’s butts will actually look down at you for not being as cool as them. Unless maybe there’s some sort of horse-enema-fetish social circle, which I’m not sure exists. Hold on, let me check the Internet.

  Ohholyshit. Do not look that up, y’all.

  Luckily, though, when you run with drug crowds you eventually run into the perfect dealer, and for me it was Travis. He was a long-haired blond guy in his late twenties who lived at home with his parents. He always seemed to know someone with drugs but seldom ever actually had any himself, which makes him not really a dealer at all, but whenever my friends and I needed pot we called him, because he was the closest thing we had. He was more like the middleman who protected us from the “real dealers,” who we imagined were large, angry black men with pierced ears and pagers, who would probably make fun of us. To death. Also, in my mind the angry black men were all badasses and they all carried switchblades that had names like “Charlie Firecracker.” (I didn’t actually know any black people at the time, which I probably don’t even need to clarify here based on this paragraph alone.)

  A guy I knew had a house on the outskirts of town and offered to host a small LSD party for me and several other people in our group who’d never done acid before either. So we called Travis and asked him to bring over enough acid for six of us that night. Travis arrived and told us the drugs were on their way, and about fifteen minutes later a pizza delivery car pulled up. The delivery guy came to the door with a mushroom pizza and an uncut sheet of acid. The delivery guy was in his late teens, about two feet shorter than me, and very, very white, but he did have a piercing and a pager (which was very impressive, because this was still back in the early nineties, although probably the pager was just used for pizza orders). His name was Jacob. Travis told me later that anyone could buy acid from Jacob if they knew the “secret code” to use when you called the pizza place. At the time I thought it was probably something all cloak-and-dagger, like “One pepperoni pizza, hold the crust,” or “A large cheesy bread and the bird fli
es at midnight,” but in reality it was probably just “And tell Jacob to bring some acid,” because honestly neither of them was very imaginative.

  Jacob sold Travis the acid for four dollars a hit, and then Travis turned around and sold it to us for five dollars a hit, which was awkward and also a poor profit margin. We each took a hit and Travis said that for another ten bucks he’d stay and babysit us to make sure we didn’t cut our own hands off. This wasn’t something I was actually worried about at all until he mentioned it, but now that the thought was implanted in our heads I became convinced that we would all cut our hands off as soon as he left, so I handed him a ten. Travis cautioned us that if we thought the house cats next door were sending us threatening messages, they probably weren’t. And he warned us not to stare at the sun because we’d go blind (which might have been great advice if it hadn’t been ten o’clock at night). “Ride the beast . . . don’t let the beast ride you,” our wise sage advised us.

  Secretly, I was worried that the acid wouldn’t affect me at all. I’d smoked pot before, but I’d never actually felt the full, dizzying pleasure that High Times magazine promised. I developed all of the side effects with few of the benefits. While my friends sprawled out on papasan chairs, overwhelmed by the fact that nothing rhymes with “orange,” I ate an entire box of Nilla Wafers and became paranoid that the neighbors were calling the cops. “Schmorange!” I’d yell, while compulsively spraying air freshener to dampen the smell. “Schmorange rhymes with orange! Now will someone please fucking help me push this refrigerator in front of the door?!”

  No one ever helped.

  My inability to get stoned was probably related to the fact that I was never able to hold the smoke in my lungs. A lot of people say that coughing when you’re smoking pot gets you higher, because it makes you suck in more smoke, but those people are liars. I’d take a drag and the acrid smoke would hit the back of my throat like a red-hot poker, and I’d start hacking like an emphysemic coal miner. Who also had tuberculosis. And . . . I dunno . . . bird flu. What’s worse than tuberculosis? Whatever that is, I sounded like I had that. Also I was constantly inhaling stray seeds into my windpipe, and none of my friends were sober enough to even pronounce “Heimlich,” so every hit was like playing Russian roulette. Each inhalation brought on several minutes of spastic coughing where I’d spray everyone with what I’m sure were lacerated chunks of my lungs. I was pretty much the most unsexy drug user ever.

  “All right there, Doc Holliday?” someone would ask.

  “Coughing like that makes you higher,” I lied, my voice sounding like I’d swallowed a gravel slushee. “You’re supposed to cough as hard as you can until you feel like you’re going to throw up. I think I read that in Rolling Stone.” And by then everyone else was so high that it sounded plausible, and so they’d intentionally cough, and the whole car would be filled with flying spittle, and then eventually someone would almost make himself throw up. And then we’d laugh. Because almost throwing up is kind of funny when you’re vaguely high and covered with other people’s spit.

  Even though I seemed mostly immune to pot, I still never turned down a joint, since it gave my hands something to do in social situations. I was still painfully shy, and would have rather costarred in a Tijuana donkey show than to have to make small talk with semi-strangers. The beauty of marijuana is that it instantly brings people together. Two minutes earlier you’re standing with strangers in awkward silence because you brought up dildos, and then someone whispers that the hostess’s brother died in a dildo accident, and you feel terrible about bringing up such a sensitive issue, but also really curious, because how does someone die from a dildo accident? Unless maybe a box of them fell on his head? But you’re afraid to ask, because you already feel bad enough for bringing up the subject of dildos, which may have somehow killed a man, and you inwardly tell yourself that you shouldn’t even be bringing up dildos at parties at all, but you know you won’t listen, because next time there’s a lull in the conversation you already know you’re going to blurt out something about the girl you know whose brother died from a dildo accident. And then you’ll remember that that girl is the girl you’re actually talking to at the time. And then, just when it gets so terribly uncomfortable that you consider stabbing someone in the knee just to distract everyone so you can run away, someone pulls out a baggie of pot—and suddenly it’s all cool. You’re standing shoulder to shoulder, watching the ceremonial rolling of the joint while people give rolling tips and reminisce about flavored rolling papers and proffer treasured Zippos. (Note: proffer. It’s not “offer” or “prefer.” It’s a combination of them, and it’s a real word that you can use in Scrabble. And now you can tell people that you’re reading a totally redeeming educational book and not just one about dildos killing innocent men. You’re welcome.) Individuals who only minutes before might have disdainfully placed a protective layer of toilet paper over the hostess’s toilet seat were now cheerily sucking on a joint moist with the saliva of a dozen strangers, and detailing their botched circumcision as if we are all old war buddies.

  In the interest of truthiness I should point out that there was one time when I’d actually felt truly high. I’d smoked some Mexican weed with my friend Hannah, whom I’d been drawn to because we both had a penchant for wearing baby doll dresses, purposely torn stockings, and combat boots. We both had complete contempt for everyone else in the town who followed the herd mentality and was afraid to be unique and individualistic like us, the two Goth chicks who were dressed exactly alike.

  When Hannah was a kid she’d had this Betsy Wetsy doll that she carried around everywhere. You were supposed to feed her with a bottle and then she’d pee, but Hannah would always just pry off Betsy’s head and fill her up to her neck with the garden hose. She also decided to skip the whole diaper thing and would simply squeeze Betsy’s distended midsection, and a half-gallon of faux pee would squirt out of Betsy’s rudimentary plastic urinary tract onto the neighbor’s bushes. “She takes after her father,” Hannah would explain. “Runs right through her.” Eventually Betsy’s neck hole became stretched out from her head being pulled off so much, and the body was lost, but Hannah held on to Betsy’s head, possibly as a reminder that she probably shouldn’t have children. Then Hannah got older, and we went through this stage where we made everything possible into a bong: Coke cans, lightbulbs, melons. Then one night we used the baby’s head as a bong. (I’m pretty sure that’s the only time that sentence has ever been used in a memoir. One would hope. I’d check it out on the Internet, but to be honest, that whole horse-enema-fetish stuff scared the shit out of me, so I’m not even going to look.) We poked some holes into the top of Betsy’s head, covered it with a wire screen, lit the pot, and sucked the smoke through Betsy’s pink rosebud lips. After a few hits I realized I was giggly and dizzy and nauseous . . . and totally high. Hannah cockily claimed it was her exceptional Mexican marijuana, but I suspect it was the toxic fumes from the burned plastic of Betsy’s soft spot. Regardless, it seemed worth the accompanying cancer risk, because it was the first time that I actually felt high, and I didn’t want to take anything away from Hannah, because honestly this was kind of the pinnacle of bong crafts, and I thought it would be like the first guy Leonardo da Vinci showed the Mona Lisa to asking, “Why’s it so small?” And this was pretty much exactly what was going through my mind the night I took acid from the pizza boy.

  Wow. This is a really convoluted story. I blame the drugs.

  Anyway, I waited two hours for the acid to kick in and felt only mildly dizzy, and I began to resign myself to the fact that the only thing that might ever get me high was Betsy’s burning scalp. Then suddenly things felt different. My body started to ache and get tight, and I figured I was either about to start tripping or I had the flu. I asked Travis and he assured me that this was normal and was caused by the strychnine. And I was all, “Uh . . . strychnine? Like . . . the stuff in rat poison?” and Travis nonchalantly said, “Yeah. They add a little strych
nine to get the acid to bond with the paper, and it gives you mini-convulsions, but it’s not enough to kill you, so chill out.” Then I was like, “I’M PRETTY SURE YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO TELL SOMEONE ON LSD THAT THEY’RE HAVING CONVULSIONS FROM RAT POISON, TRAVIS,” but I didn’t say it out loud, because I was suddenly afraid my shouting would go into my tongue instead of over it and then it would swell up and I’d choke to death, and that’s when I realized I was probably high.

  Then I got distracted because I could hear this ringing sound, and I kept telling the other people to shut up so I could figure out what it was, but they were too busy licking the walls because they said the texture was exactly like licking a jawbreaker. I considered pointing out that it was exactly like licking a jawbreaker made of lead-based paint, but then I remembered that we had all just ingested rat poison, so I figured the damage was done at this point, and that if we survived it would only make us stronger.

  Then I heard the ringing again and I started creeping around the house on my knees, because I thought maybe I could get under the sound waves of my drugged-out friends, who were now freaked out at the revelation that no one could ever see their faces in real life because “mirrors couldn’t be trusted.” I wondered whether Travis thought to hide the kitchen knives before we began, and I was going to find him and ask when the ringing started again. Travis was struggling to pry a can opener out of a girl’s hands, and he yelled, “Could somebody answer the goddamn phone?!” And that’s when I realized what the ringing was.