The Last Time I Smoked Pot. I Think.

I had a gig at The Comic Strip in New York the first year I did standup. My friend Melanie came to that show. She and I went to the same university in Paris and after graduation she moved to London. I visited her there but hadn’t seen her in years until she relocated to New York because she got a job working for director Martin Scorsese. I can still hear her chastising me for mispronouncing his last name. “It’s ScorSESSY, not ScorSAZY.” Rude.

Melanie arrived at the club that night with two men. After my set I hung out at her table and we started to catch up but one of the guys kept interrupting her so he could talk to me. He was annoying and kept touching my arm and I rolled my eyes at Melanie who appeared not to get the Girl Eye Roll. Maybe they didn’t have that in London. I finally gave up trying to talk to her and asked Annoying what he did for a living and he said he worked for Werner Herzog, the German film director. I smiled and said ‘that’s nice’ as Melanie glared at me. Londoners don’t get the Girl Eye Roll but feel perfectly fine shooting you The Girl Glare? Eventually Annoying went to the bathroom while the other guy went to get us more drinks.

“Who is this moron?” I asked Melanie.
“Are you kidding me?”
“Oh my God I’m sorry, is he your boyfriend?”
“No, he’s not my boyfriend. What’s wrong with you?” she hissed from across the table.
“Me? What’s wrong with him? I mean look at him, look at me. As if I would give a guy like that the time of day. Why won’t he stop touching me?”
“Well maybe because fifteen years ago you slept with him in London.”

Oh. Well if you’re going to count that, fine.

Sidebar: I can hear you judging me from here. Like you never forgot the face of a person you slept with. Or their name. Or in what country you slept with them.


Nine years ago I remembered the story of Annoying because nine years ago was the last time I smoked pot. I had given up alcohol a few months prior to that and apparently was not entirely clear on the meaning of sobriety. I was having dinner in my neighborhood with a girlfriend when a couple of guys asked to join us. The one who sat down next to me seemed familiar which made me flash back to Annoying in New York.

Familiar lived a block further down the street than I did so he offered to walk me home after dinner. He knew a lot about art and since I collected it, I invited him upstairs to see what I owned. Familiar flipped through my CDs, put something on the stereo and then brought out a baggie of weed. I liked the guy but hoped he wasn’t a pothead like my friend Ken, who lives up the street. Ken is a musician who doesn’t get gigs and who smokes dope for breakfast, lunch and dinner. If parents want to show their kids how potheads never get ahead in life, they need to buy them tickets to see Ken.

Familiar was getting over a bad break-up; his girlfriend had left him for his best friend. He was so sad that it prompted me to tell him that I was having trouble getting over Elvis, the love of my life. As we commiserated, he extended the joint he had just rolled and I took a hit. Within seconds I took another hit because the first hit always fools you into thinking you might not get high and God forbid you shouldn’t get high in one point two seconds. We talked for a while but then, like with all good pot, we started to laugh. I’m sure it was about something really funny, like how air conditioning works. Suddenly Familiar leaned in to kiss me and I pulled my head back.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. I just stared at him so he tried to kiss me again but this time I turned my head away at the last minute.
“Your face, has it…has it always… been like… that?” I sputtered.
“What?”
“Is that the same face you had back at the restaurant?”
“Dude, how high are you?”
“Just answer the question, is that the same face you had back at the restaurant?”
“Okaaay, here’s the deal. I’ve had this face since I was born; only it was a lot smaller. But since the restaurant? Yes, this is the same face I’ve had since the restaurant.”

And then it hit me. No wonder the guy seemed familiar. He looked exactly like Elvis. I was about to kiss a facsimile of a man I wasn’t getting over. Great.

I didn’t kiss Familiar and never smoked pot again.

You’re all sitting there trying to think of everyone you slept with, aren’t you? Admit it; a couple of those faces are pretty blurry aren’t they?

Why I Can't Do Drugs

I am not a pothead.

My friend Phil is. Phil always had pot. I’m not sure he always had rent but he always had pot.

Back in the late 80’s David Byrne was appearing in Central Park. He had gone solo after being the lead singer of Talking Heads. He wanted to be Sting. After a few songs it was clear Byrne should have kept his day band.

Even without the Heads my friends and I were huge fans so we went to the Band Shell in the park to see him.

It was summer and the heat was so blistering that after a while my friends and I drifted off to a corner of the park where there was shade and seats.

Phil passed around a ceramic cigarette filled with weed. Those things looked real and a cop would have had to look though a magnifying glass to tell if it was fake or not. I took one hit. Because Peer Pressure is my middle name.

One hit and my shoulders fell off.

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

I looked at my friends, all who had smoked with me and looked fine. Or maybe I'd gone blind?

“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 then sat back down immediately. 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, bashed on the head by homophobes and then raped by an Irish gang. Phil suddenly yanked me to my feet.

“You’re walking this off.”

In what alternate universe can you walk off marijuana? Going back and forth to the refrigerator, MAYBE. But suddenly I was in a conga line with my friends marching single file through the crowds in Central Park and feeling worse and worse.

“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 stop him and ask for help. Oh shit, the cop just passed us and he could have helped me! He could have taken me to the hospital.”
“We’ll find another one.”
“Phil, everything’s 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 your stoned, sorry ass.”
“Yeah and you didn’t even listen to …….oh.”

Everyone started laughing. Fucking drug addict friends.

I blame David Byrne. Although he is totally my husband.

The Pot In Spain Grows Mainly On The Government Official

This is a satellite photo of the Strait of Gibraltar, where Spain and Africa attempt an Eskimo kiss with only 7 miles between them. It's also where the Atlantic Ocean (lower left hand corner) is separated from the Mediterranean Sea (top of the photo). It reminds me of how much trouble I got into when I passed through this part of the world.

I was traveling with a girlfriend in the south of France and we went down to Barcelona for a few days. I met a guy named Craig and he and I decided to go on to Africa while my friend went back to France. We crossed the Strait on a ferry and ended up in Ceuta, Spanish Morocco, at the northern tip of the African continent. (the red dot on the photo below) Spain still controls this city and has since 1580.

Craig was a smoker. I was not. He bought cigarettes over food and when I complained he told me cigarettes took the hunger away. And presto-chango I became a smoker. Thank God I quit, 12 years later.

Because Craig and I had little funds between us, we spent a few nights at youth hostels and then decided to sleep on the beach with a lot of the other tourists. I had a big leather bag that I’d bought in Paris. It had our passports, the top of my bikini, some silver jewelry I’d picked up in Spain and most of our money in it. The first night on the beach I had carefully dug a hollowed out space in the sand, laid the bag in it, covered it with a sweater and used it as my pillow. Craig and I went to sleep and the next thing I knew I was jostled awake. It took me a few seconds to realize the purse was gone.

Beach thieves are really smart. They wait until you’re moving in or out of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, the dream state, which is the deepest part of sleep. You know when you’re in a dream and there’s a car coming and you can’t move out of the way? It’s called Sleep Paralysis and it’s when the body is disconnected from the brain, leaving the body paralyzed. It occurs when you go in or out of REM and somehow these beach thieves know exactly when it happens. They lifted my head and stole the bag from under the sweater while my body remained immobilized. This also sometimes happens to me during sex. But I digress.

Craig and I went to the police and they put us on the first morning ferry back to Spain. And then we had to get to Seville, since that was the nearest consulate. We were in deep shit. With no papers, how were we going to get back into the U.S.? All I could think about was that I was the one in my family who always got into trouble and I was certainly going to hear about this for years to come. But I was also the only one in my family who had an interesting life since the rest of them were all chicken shits. Don't be a chicken shit with your life. You'll have nothing to talk about when you're in an old folks home drooling creamed corn down your bib.We arrived in Seville in the middle of the night and the consul was alone in this huge mansion that served as the consulate. If there were servants or a staff, we didn’t see them. The consul helped us get in touch with our parents. I have mercifully blocked out what my father said to me but I’m sure there were swear words involved.

“We can get you new papers, but you'll have to stay here a day or two until your backgrounds have been cleared to travel,” the consul said as he pulled out a joint, lit it and passed it to Craig.

The three of us took a few hits and within fifteen minutes I felt really sick. The kind of sick where you know something is really, really wrong. I went to the bathroom and emptied every part of my intestine. All 39 miles of it. I was gone for so long that Craig came looking for me.

“What are you doing in there?” he asked.
“Making breakfast, what do you think I’m doing?”

Men.

“Is there anything I can do?”
“I’m scared.”
“You’re high. That’s all.”
“It won’t stop coming out, I think I might die of evacuation of the bowel.”
“Yeah... again? Just high. And that’s not a disease.”
“You don’t know.”

A few days later Craig and I parted company at the Madrid airport. I flew into Dulles International in Washington D.C. and as I waited in the customs line, the kid in front of me asked if I was old enough to bring liquor into the country. I said that I was and he passed me a sealed box of Courvoisier. He cleared customs and then I cleared and when I looked up, two armed guards took my arms and told me to follow them.

I was led to a small room and interrogated for about an hour. Why was I smuggling drugs for the American boy? How did I know there wasn’t heroin in the sealed box? Why did I have a hand-carved ivory hash pipe on me? Yeah, that last one was tricky.

Both the kid and I were released at the same time. Customs had made many calls. My Dad was a Colonel in the Army AND worked for the U.S. Government. Oops. The kid was in the top of his class at West Point. Oops squared.

I stayed at my Dad’s house for a while and for the first few months his phone was tapped. I would talk to my friends and we could hear the little click that went off every minute without fail. After a while I started making fun of it and saying that the feds had stopped me for smuggling drugs and how dumb they were and oh yes, I COULD HEAR THE TAPPING.

End of tapping. And chat.