Now Is the Hour (37 page)

Then Billie and I got some unexpected help.

We discovered something new, something differnt.

Actually it was Billie's mother who discovered it, in fact she bought it, for herself and for Billie and me.

A lid of marijuana.

My mom would never go out and buy a lid of marijuana.

As soon as Billie told me about the marijuana, I got a fear inside me that damn near stopped my heart. I didn't know it then, it took me awhile, but I came to see my fear as the same fear as my mother and father's. My mom and dad were afraid of anything new. Marijuana was new, that's for sure. But after I let the fear settle down and took a good look at it, I decided it might be just the thing. After the fiasco of Sis's wedding, my parents, and Billie and me, I was ready to try something new, really new. Not something outside me like trying out for sports or buying a car, but something inside. Marijuana held the promise of breaking down your inhibitions, a promise of actually changing your consciousness. Like Huxley's
Doors of Perception
and
Heaven and Hell,
marijuana was going to crack my world open, and at last I was going to face the fear in me. Scardino, the sex-shame-guilt thing, the fear that made my arms weak. Really, I was so tired of being a wimp.

Looking back on it now, it was the marijuana all right, but even more than the marijuana, it was my determination to change things. Some famous guy that Billie knows the name of said, Be careful what you wish for. Better said, I think, is, Be careful of what you decide to go after.

Whoever that guy is, he's right. Look at me out here on the highway alone in this silver desert with just the moon. And it's not the universe that's to blame. When you go after something you want, and you end up fucked up, nobody's to blame but yourself.

And you know what — fucked up is just a part of it. As a matter of fact, things
have
to get fucked up if you plan to go anywhere new that your parents haven't. Maybe that's why the universe conspires.

And that's what we did one night in late spring in Billie's house with Billie's mother while her father was off at a plumbing convention in Boise.

We got fucked up.

There's a beer in the fridge! Mrs. Cody yelled from the bathroom. Make yourself at home!

It was weird just pulling a can of beer out of a refrigerator. I popped the tab and sat down at the kitchen table as if I walked in the house, opened the fridge, got out a can of beer every day. Billie and her mom in the back rooms, mother and daughter more like sisters, laughing and talking, the water in the bathroom sink, the hair dryer, one of them brushing her teeth. From the back rooms, the clean smell, something French. Females, how they always sound and smell like they know they are a comfort.

Onto the green Formica kitchen table, Mrs. Cody's hands, her tiny fingernails, set down a rolled-up plastic bag that was full of something dark green.

Mrs. Cody, Billie, and I all sat there staring at the plastic bag, trying to find our breath. Mrs. Cody lit a cigarette first, then Billie, then me.

Nobody touched the plastic bag. It just lay there next to a cut-glass ashtray like some strange new British movie you wouldn't understand.

We didn't know yet, what it was, how it would make us feel.

Weird, how a plastic bag could be all I'd never done and was afraid to do. And more. What was in me, I didn't know and was afraid to know. Who it was, I wasn't and was afraid to be. All that in a plastic bag on a green Formica tabletop.

The smell. Something pungent. Dead weeds in a pile by the fence.

Moldy hay. Just my luck if marijuana turned out to be moldy hay.

Billie laid a pipe on the green Formica next to the plastic bag and the cut-glass ashtray. She'd bought the pipe from Incense Peppermints, a head shop that opened up in downtown Pocatello. The pipe was made from blown glass with blue and green swirls.

I pinched bits of moldy hay out of the plastic bag and filled the pipe, careful not to spill any on the green Formica. None of us knew how much it would take for all of us to get high, so I tamped the moldy hay down into the pipe bowl with my thumb, then laid in more moldy hay.

When the pipe was filled, I set the filled pipe in the middle of the green Formica.

Mrs. Cody reached out her hands, palms up. With her left hand, she took hold of Billie's hand, with her right, she took hold of mine. Billie put her hand in mine, and the three of us were a circle.

On the table, in a blue vase, lilacs. The smell of lilacs, the smell of moldy hay, something French, and the smell of chocolate chip cookies. Mrs. Cody was baking chocolate chip cookies.

Mrs. Cody cleared her throat and bowed her head.

Dear God, she said. Her voice was just like Billie's Simone Signoret.

My daughter, Billie, and her friend Rigby John, and I have come here and formed a circle. We think it is good to know the ways of the world, so we've decided to turn on with this marijuana. Please know we wish no harm upon ourselves or others. And we approach this experience with the utmost respect.

Mrs. Cody squeezed my hand and opened her blue eyes on me.

Do you have anything you want to add? she said.

Weird. A Jew praying to God about marijuana. My mom would have to pray a rosary and a fucking litany. But then it never could be my mom.

Billie? Mrs. Cody said.

Billie didn't look at me. If she did, she'd start laughing, so Billie looked down at her hands and shook her head no.

Well then, Mrs. Cody said, dear God, we ask that you grant each one of us a good trip. Please watch over us so that we don't freak out.

I lit the pipe while Mrs. Cody sucked on it.

You're supposed to hold it in as long as you can, Billie said.

Mrs. Cody's blue-gray eyes lit up, and she inhaled and kept the smoke inside her until she couldn't stand it any longer, then blew the smoke out.

Billie and I stared at Mrs. Cody. She still had a bubble of brown hair, blue-gray eyes. Nothing about her had changed.

Then it was Billie's turn. I lit the match again and held the match to the moldy hay. Billie sucked in deep, then pulled the pipe away, then talked like you do when you're holding in the smoke: Thanks, Billie said.

Then it was me. Billie held the match. While she was holding the match, she exhaled a bunch of smoke just as I inhaled a huge toke.

I held my breath. Some part of me started spying on everything I was thinking and doing. What I could see, hear, what I could feel. I was playing I Spy, watching everything I did and every bodily function up close.

Nothing differnt. Everything normal.

So we finished off the first pipe. Just as we finished, a bell went off. We all jumped. Mrs. Cody got up, walked to the oven, and pulled the chocolate chip cookies out.

Right then, Billie looked over at me. Her eyes opened wider, and she seemed to take me in, all of me in for a moment, and in that moment while she was taking me in, she was thinking of just the right way to say what she wanted to say.

It felt good to be looked at so full on like that again. Then I wondered if Billie was doing that because she was stoned.

Billie got up, walked into the front room, and pretty soon some music started. When she came back in the kitchen, Billie was smiling her big smile.

It's
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,
Billie said.

You bought the album? I said.

What a world in that album cover. I touched the album cover all over with my fingers.
Sergeant Pepper
so full of color and shiny things, hats and folds of cloth and jewelry, gold tassels and all sorts of weird new things. Things I'd never known.

Mrs. Cody set a blue plate of cookies on the green Formica tabletop.

We all said, What the hell, and loaded up the pipe again, smoked the pipe empty, set the pipe down, and waited for the Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell to open up. But nothing opened up.

Nothing differnt. My dream of a new consciousness was only moldy hay.

Mrs. Cody took the pipe, loaded the pipe, lit a match, and sucked in more smoke. She passed the pipe to Billie. Billie sucked on the pipe, then handed the pipe to me. I sucked in a big heap of smoke. We passed that pipe around until it was empty.

We were just going along, just Ho-hum, when is this marijuana going to work? Billie's mom brought in a red candle, lit it, and turned the lights down.
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
playing loud over and over. Billie and her mom laughing and smoking and jabbering away, the whole world just going along, going along.

That's when I looked down at my hands.

Almost seventeen years I'd had these hands.

Just beyond my hands on the table, the flame of the red candle flickered. Across the smooth green plains of Formica, the flame reflected in the blue vase was the color of blood before blood touches air. Up out of the top of the red-blue blood vase, a volcano of lilac flowers billows and billows. And just at that moment, the cut-glass ashtray caught the flame and cast whanged-out angles of light. At the base of the ashtray, the angles of light were the letters of a secret alphabet. Beyond the secret alphabet of light, the blue plate. Upon the blue plate, a mountain of chocolate chip cookies.

My God, chocolate chip cookies.

I was there sitting, watching things, I Spy a guy who'd had his hands for almost seventeen years, watching things go by, go by, on my second, on my third, on my fourth chocolate chip cookie. John and Paul and George and Ringo dressed up in shiny blue and red and gold. I just knew it, at any moment, marijuana was going to crack my world open, and the foreign alphabet would make sense, and finally I would be shiny too and free.

Just as I looked at Billie and her mom, from out of both of them the laughter came from inside and went up and out. Mother and daughter, the same smile, the same teeth, the same way they held their heads but differnt.

Such a weird sound, laughter.

The reason laughter sounds weird is because laughter
is
weird, man. I mean, can you tell me what laughter is?

Then inside me down deep, something inside that had to come up and out, and when it did, my weird sound coming out of me, laughter mixed up with Billie's and Mrs. Cody's, and all of us all of a sudden all sitting in this sound that we were all making from the inside, and we were looking one another in the eyes as we were making the sound. Three totally differnt people, as fate would have it, all sitting together around the green Serengeti Plain of Formica and a red flaming candle and a red-blue blood vase with exploding lilacs and the secret alphabet of light from the cut-glass ashtray, with John and Paul and George and Ringo, Mrs. Cody, Billie, and me in a kitchen in a house in Bannock County.

Born in a trunk in the Princess Theater in Pocatello, Idaho. Every one of us.

Which makes us laugh even harder.

The rest of the night, it's hard to remember. I mean, I can remember everything — I mean, I think I can — but the way of remembering is differnt. Usually when you think back, you think, Well, this happened and then this happened and then this happened. Things happened and then after they happened, you make sense of them. But that night with the marijuana, it wasn't this and then this and then this. It wasn't consecutive. The way I remember it, it all happened at once. You didn't have to wait for it to happen and be over for it to make sense. It was always just happening, and as it happened the sense of it was going on at the same time.

That's why we laughed so much. Because things were constantly making sense, and we didn't have to wait till they were over.

So as the night went on, that was the way it went, more tokes, more cigarettes, more beer. Talking and laughing, everything just going by and going by, making sense. Then all of a sudden, for some reason, Mrs. Cody wanted to be shiny like George, Paul, John, and Ringo. The next time I looked up it was Mrs. Cody in her old wedding dress. She was twirling and twirling to
Sergeant Pepper's.
It made perfect sense.

But that wedding dress, and what that wedding dress contained for me, I had no idea what I was in for.

At first Mrs. Cody's wedding dress was just another white dress. Silky and shiny and the sound silk makes. Twirling and twirling, shiny white, how white can be so many colors in the candlelight.

Then Billie tried the dress on. Billie's boobs, pushed up and out, looked like they were going to burst over the top of the dress, but she got the dress to fit. We were laughing, and Billie was twirling, and white was all the colors you could imagine, and everything was going just fine. Then “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” came on, and things started getting weird. Something about Billie in the wedding dress. Shit bunched up in my chest, and I felt like I was going to throw up or shit my pants.

Billie in a white wedding dress, like my sis in a white wedding dress, the way Billie's mother, my mother, was in her white wedding dress.

A simple shiny white dress and all it stood for. All the heartbreak it brought.

In a moment, how clearly I saw: the shiny white wedding dress was a prison, a way for women to make themselves cold and faraway and unhappy, and then, more than anything, above all, make you be the one who has to pay for their suffering.

In nothing flat, the world went away, and I was dizzy and alone with my breath coming fast and my heart beating loud in my ears.

Everything was making sense, but now it wasn't funny.

Be careful what you go after.

I wanted to go outside, get some air, breathe deep, run far away. But I didn't run. I sat. So still. Me on the chair with my fear.

After a while, an eternity, after more smokes, more beers, Billie took the dress off and laid the dress on the kitchen chair beside me.

The next thing I remember was I was in the bathroom.

You have to be careful in other people's bathrooms when you're stoned. There's all those things in a bathroom that have smells and stains in the sink and leaky toilets and shower curtains and bath soaps and creams and makeup and deodorant and medicine, but most of all the mirror is what you have to watch out for.