Pot Brownies and Speed
You’re gonna think I’m a junkie.
I’m not. I was just an early bloomer where it concerns recreational drugs and alcohol. I started when I was 13 years old and stopped at 19.
Since I am afraid of my own shadow, I still cannot believe that I was brave enough to try those substances. Still, I loved every minute of it.
Sort of.
Many times, I was terrified of trying something new because I had no idea if the side effects would land on the side of loving it or being paranoid by it. Looking back, I think the wonderful adventures I had while taking them is what made me risk spinning the roulette wheel.
Here are some of the highlights.
My older brother was part of the back-to-the-land movement of the 70s, as was I, by way of him.
He built his own cabin in a remote place called Brushy Fork, West Virginia using trees that he felled from his land. His home had no running water, electricity or indoor toilet. However, there were 125 acres of pristine fields and woodlands to grow your own pot on.
I was almost 18 years old the first time I visited without my parents.
In one innocent, action-packed summer, I lived in an abandoned cabin just up the hill from him and smoked pot around the clock. I rarely got paranoid, likely because I was surrounded by all that beauty and the feeling of safety that nature provides.
One day, while we were high as a kite, my brother’s wife and I had a long discussion about how we were going to stick to our diets. I was as determined as she was. Until I got the munchies. Which was exactly five minutes after our conversation ended and I was caught red-handed eating a whole wheat tortilla wrap. I didn’t even like tortillas. Still don’t. And just so you know, at the time, I weighed 122 pounds and thought I was fat, and only because the world told me I was fat.
With no electricity to power a television, for entertainment, we’d sometimes listen to a battery-operated radio.
My favorite program was when the station featured an actress reading from the book Little House on the Prairie. One night, she read a chapter that described a massive blizzard the Ingall’s family were living through and the scene was accompanied by howling wind. I was so high and so caught up in the story that when I opened the door to go back to my cabin, I was fully expecting to brace myself against the wind to be able to trudge back up the hill in 10 feet of snow. I was never more shocked to find that it was still a sultry summer evening.
Other entertainment at Brushy came by way of dinner parties with my brother’s community of like-minded friends.
After the meal, instruments would be broken out and the strumming would go deep into the night. I remember one particular time when there were pot brownies for dessert. Back then, I didn’t know that ingesting pot made you a lot higher than just smoking a joint. All I knew was that I was hungry all the time so I ate three or four of them.
The full effects kicked in once I returned to my cabin, laid down to go to sleep, and felt like the cabin was sliding off the hill, with me flying down it backwards in my bed.
That time, I was afraid.
Thankfully, someone was sleeping over, so I yelled across the studio and asked if the cabin was collapsing. My friend laughed and said no, that it was just the pot brownies making me feel that way. Hearing that, my heart sunk from knowing how many I had ingested. Turns out, pot brownies in those quantities have the same effect as acid. Luckily, I was able to force myself to go to sleep before fear totally overtook me.
Not too long after that experience, I discovered white crosses.
Those were tiny little pills of wonderfulness. Other people called them speed. It’s still unimaginable to me that one pill that is half the size of a piece of dot candy could make you feel so great.
I had no side effects from them whatsoever other than I was in love with life.
It was like I was seeing the world for the first time, and the world was a huge, living, breathing paradise. The fear that I was living with every moment of every day was replaced with confidence and joy. So much so, that when under the influence, I didn’t think it was possible to return to my normal curled-in-a-fetal-position way of walking through life.
With just one tiny pill, I felt like I could do anything. Be anything. And never be sad.
The tablets were always gifted to me. One time, delighted to be given a dose, I drove my truck to the lumber yard with the windows rolled down, my hair flying in the wind, singing a Grateful Dead tune at the top of my lungs. “Goin down the road feeling bad. Well I’m goin down the road feeling bad. Goin down the road feeling bad, bad, bad-aye-ah-yahah. Don’t wanna be treated this-ah way.”
When I arrived at the store, I felt so “bad/great,” that I lost my normal shyness and asked the clerk if I could take some of their scrape pieces of lumber home with me. Since I was cute as a button back then, he told me to have at it. I walked down the steep incline with my tarp, piled it high with the best looking pieces of wood I could find, grabbed one end of the tarp and proceeded to pull it back up the hill to load in my truck.
It wouldn’t budge.
There must’ve been 200 pounds of wood piled on top of it, and there I was, absolutely sure that I could drag that weight back up the incline. Instead of going back and forth with lighter loads, I thought WTH, and left everything there, including the borrowed tarp, returned to my vehicle, and kept goin down the road feeling bad, looking for the next slice of paradise!
There was nothing better in life than white crosses.
Except when you mixed them with cigarettes and beer.
One night, after taking a hit of wonderfulness, I was sitting on a bar stool at the Cozy Corner enjoying live Bluegrass music. Before long, my soon-to-be boyfriend Marty said he wanted to show me the “false fronts” on the buildings in our tiny college town. I had no idea what he was talking about, so I downed my beer, told my friends that I’d be right back, and went outside with him and lit up a cigarette.
The bliss from the combined substances kicked in all at once.
After extinguishing my cigarette, I followed Marty around the back of the building and climbed up the fire escape after him. Standing on the flat rooftop, he led me to the front of the building and told me to look down. There, I saw the entire town below me, the “entire” being one block of buildings lining each side of Main Street. Anyways, I learned that false fronts were facades that made buildings appear grander than they were. I remember thinking to myself about the people I knew who also had false fronts.
Soon, Marty and I went back to the Cozy. Once I was no longer under the influence, I drove back to Brushy and fell instantly asleep. The next morning, I got out of bed and fell to the floor. It was if my legs were made of rubber. I laid there stupefied, not understanding what had happened. I stood back up with no problems, but sadly, it unnerved me enough that it was the last time I ever took a white cross.
Here’s to you! if you also think back to some of the wild things you did when you were younger. When I see new parents with their children today, it makes me reflect on how I raised mine. I would’ve hit the roof if my kids had done the same things as me. As a mom, I had very few rules, but those that I had always concerned their safety. This was one of the many areas where parenting got confusing. I had the best time in my teens. Thankfully, with my riskier explorations nothing bad happened. Perhaps I should’ve trusted my children to have those experiences as well? I mean, think of all the things they missed out on!
The Photo. Me, playing poker in my brother’s cabin at Brushy. I can’t claim to be good at too many things, but I always seemed to win at poker. On a side note: Funk wants you to know that he still thinks I’m cute as a button!