The Smoking Heads Tried To Kill Me

My friend Phil is a pot head. He didn't always have rent but he always had pot. And he always knew great music.

David Byrne was appearing in Central Park. He had gone solo after being lead singer of Talking Heads, one of the great bands of the 80's. So Phil suggested we go see him and even without the Heads we went. After a few songs it was clear Byrne should have kept his day band.

It was summer and New York heat can melt the Polar Caps in about an hour. After a while we all drifted off to a corner of the park where there was shade and seats and it was only 93 degrees. Sadly, not enough to melt away cellulite but close!

Phil passed around a ceramic cigarette filled with weed. Those things looked so real a cop would have had to look though a magnifying glass to tell if it was fake or not. I took one hit. I'm not a big pot smoker. I find that unless you have a Good Humor truck or 25 pizzas at your disposal, smoking weed is really dumb.

One hit and my shoulders fell off.

I took off my Chanel clip-on earrings and put them in my purse. I felt something coming that was not going to be good for the House of Chanel.

“Phil, what’s in this pot?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t fuck with me, there’s something else in here, PCP maybe?”
“Nothing Soro, relax.”
“Heroin?”
“Nothing.”

I stood up and immediately sat back down. Crash landed onto a cement ledge, rocketing my uterus north to my brain. My legs had been lost in a terrible standing accident. I was so high God was seated on my left.

“Phil, I think I’m going to pass out.”

I was going to black out in Central Park. Where I would be tagged by graffiti artists and bashed on the head by homophobes.

Phil yanked me to my feet.

“You’re walking this off.”

In what alternate universe can you walk off marijuana? If you’re going back and forth to the refrigerator, MAYBE. But suddenly I was marching with my friends single file through the crowds in Central Park and feeling worse and worse. Not to mention appearing as if we'd lost a wedding reception and were looking for its conga line.

“Phil, I’m going to black out.”
“Keep walking.”
“Seriously, Phil, I’m not going to make it.”
“Yes you are, just keep walking.”
“Look, there’s a cop, let’s ask him for help. Oh shit, he's getting away. He could have helped me! He could have taken me to the hospital.”
“We’ll find another one” Phil said calmly.
“You're turning yellow.”
“Soro, I’m Chinese, of course you’re seeing yellow.”

At the time that actually made sense to me.

“Oh my God, everything’s turning white; I’m going down.” And with that Phil jerked me forward and as quickly as the bad crazy thing had descended upon me, it cleared. I stopped walking. I was okay.

“Holy crap,” Phil said.
“Tell me about it.”
“How scary was that?”
“Very, very scary. I could have DIED.”
“Not that,” he said, “you wanted to stop a cop and ask him to help you when you're stoned?”
“Yeah and you didn’t even listen to …….oh.”

Everyone laughed. Fucking drug addict friends. 

If you don't know Talking Heads, this will give you a pretty good idea of why they were so cool.