How to roll a perfect joint:
Go into your bedroom and shut the door. Ambiance is half the game. Turn on lights, inflorescent. Pull your curtains closed if it’s past sundown. Get some music on while you clean off your desk. Make sure you have these materials: an herb grinder, rolling papers, a filter, an index card, pair o’ scissors, a pen. De-stem and grind up the flowers. Fold your index card, hot-dog style, then fold the ends down to make an “M” shape. Place the rolling paper in and add the filter. Sprinkle on that ground up mary jane. Not too much, not too little – just right. Pick the thing up with your thumbs and pointer fingers and start rubbing them together. This packs the flower into a perfect cylindrical shape. Now your thumb’s gonna make a lateral movement, but the pointer works perpendicular. Then you just roll and tuck the end into the filter. Let the paper fold against itself to make a tighter joint. Keep twisting your fingers to try and get the other end tucked in, and then… ta da! It just starts to roll itself. No, not like that. Just try it again, remember, thumb and pointer twisting… You know what? I’ll just do it for you. Like… that! And then you just push in the top with the back of a pen. Only twist if you’re taking it to-go. Can you hand me a Bic? Flick. Scrape. Hiss. Crackle. Let there be light.
I lay in the backseat of my ’94 Maxima. 17-years-old, I stare out the moon roof inhaling in the smoke-stained upholstery. On the stereo, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, Pt. 2. She knows it’d be tragic, if those evil robots win. I suppose it would be, wouldn’t it? Tragic. She knows she can beat them. I blink away tears and climb into the driver’s seat. I check the rearview and smear mascara away from my eyes. I start the ignition and pull back onto the freeway. The speed limit is 65, but in these parts you’re good at 75, since everyone else is doing it. The best is when one car speeds by at 85 and another races past at 90, leaving me with delusional reassurance. I flex my ankle, stretch my knees. Speed starts as an idea, a spark. It seems nothing more than a possibility born of consciousness. 100. It takes on a life of its own, and it translates to your eyes into yellow and white lines vanishing, appearing, vanishing, until the lights translate from neuron to synapse to neuron, until the energy shoots through your veins in every direction. It shocks you from your core to the tips of your fingers and toes, wrapped around the wheel, pressed into the floor beneath the gas. 120. Don’t blink, don’t breathe. You’re airborne.
But you’re toxic, don’t you know? Why else would you stare at the ceiling for hours, praying to a guy who isn’t listening to make it go away? It starts somewhere between your shoulders and seeps through your body. It leaves in its wake electric hills with tiny flagpoles across your arms and legs, so you rub them down and hold yourself. You sit and shake, and listen. How many times will you, stupid girl, try me one last time? Drink me down. Breathe me in. Touch me. Wouldn’t you love to crawl out of your own skin?
Sam is lecturing me over a final goodbye coffee. He tells me things are simple. The things that really matter can be explained in simple words. Big ones are for people who can’t say what they mean. I tell him it breaks my heart when he describes the people he loved as “nice.” I hope they’re so much more than that, because nice is such a baseline thing to be. He tells me not many people are nice. I disagree. He says most people are nice to people they like, but some people are nice to people they don’t like, and don’t know, and don’t have to care about. Those people are good people. He says maybe someday I’ll be a good person too, but for now I’m not much more than a selfish bitch. He says I only ever think about myself, and I’ll always hurt the people I love. I’m a bad person.
Elbow-deep in the back of a stove dressed in four years of grime, I’d spend any number of minutes scrubbing crevices with a toothbrush if it meant I got to sit on his floor for just one more. He watches me from across the room, where he’s packing his things into a big brown box, and I wonder if he wonders why I’m still here, but manage to not feel that horrible stomach feeling I always get when other people watch me, because it’s him. I know he wonders, but I also know he likes the fact that I’m here. Now.
It’s October Baseball Season for the first time in 108 years. Do you even know what that means? He asks me. It means that we were about to witness the moment of the American sport zeitgeist. Barely a living soul had witnessed a Cubs’ World Series Championship, much less a W. This was going to be the pinnacle of any cultural soup I’d ever swim in, he says. I roll my eyes. Go Cubs Go, he sings.
“Oh please Ricky, you’re from New York.”
“Ye, I adopted the Cubs the minute I moved here.” He calls me Ye, which is short for Kimye. It’s one of the only words I know he uses because he’s full of obscure phrases I couldn’t conjure up if I tried.
“You picking up the Rangers next?”
“Doubtful.” I smile.
Game time comes around, and we drop all the cleaning supplies for the pub. He’s supposed to be meeting up with some friends for goodbye drinks, and I don’t want to impose. I put my things into a tote bag and start for the door, when suddenly, his singsong voice tosses me an invitation. I can’t turn around, because I’m literally grinning from ear to ear. I guess I have to meet up with them, but to be honest, I’d rather spend the time with you. Eight innings and two Bud Light towers later, the Cubs were about to take an L and Ricky was one inning away from missing his chance at experiencing live Chicago history, as well as one inning away from drinking himself under the table. We stand outside with a group of smokers, inhaling “Indians Win!” and exhaling “Someday.” The guy is supposed to call me a car, because his friends want some solo Rick time before he leaves for good, but it gets quoted at (you’ll never believe) $108. Carpool. I start walking back to his place when midnight strikes instead of trekking to the South Side, but he comes in for his own 10th inning OT.
He grabs my hand and pulls me across the street to the glowing golden arches. Crowds of people stroll in following our first Home Game Loss, and it is not for a happy meal. I stand in line and look up at his Lake-Michigan-blue eyes scanning the menu.
“What’re we getting?”
“All of it.”
We sit at our plastic booth with one of everything on the menu, shoveling burgers and nuggets into our mouths. He looks at me in this super dopey way, the way you do after too many beers so that one eyelid is a little more closed than the other. His phone rings off the hook, messages popping up one after the other. “Where the fuck are you?” “Did you leave the bar?” “Okay, well we’re just gonna go home then.” He doesn’t even look down at the flashing screen, he just keeps looking at me in all my stuffed Big Mac glory.
“Seconds?”
We don’t hold hands when we walk together, because I need both palms on my stomach to soothe my gut. He laughs at me because I just made fun of him the night before for eating himself sick.
“Who does that? Children do that,” I had said, standing over an empty pizza box, a bag full of Thai takeout containers1, and a grown man sick to his stomach. “Guess I’m just regressing tonight,” I say. We stumble a few blocks back to his apartment, and I cannot push the elevator button any harder. The guy asks if I’m going to yak.
“Most definitely,” I run down the hall, “so it’s a good thing I just cleaned. I’ve been looking forward to wiping vomit off the floor.”
“That’s fine. I’m actually going to come in and barf after you.”
Knees on the tile and face on the seat, my heart swells. I watch full-length French fries reemerge through my esophagus, and I feel absolutely no regret. I learn three truths when I open my eyes the next day. Hangover pro-tip #1: if you upchuck fermented poison plus deep fried poison eight hours prior to wake, you reduce your chances of an AM fit by 90%. Hangover pro-tip #2: if you wake up next to a snoring giant cuddling his bright green blankey, the usually blinding morning sun transforms into a soft haze that drapes over his dreamy face. Hangover pro-tip #3: when you wake him up to kiss him goodbye and see him looking at you in full sobriety, you’ll forget every L, knowing you’ll meet again. Someday.
“Why are you here today?” asked Doc #7. I’ve been in the hospital for at least four hours now, and I am more than ready to leave.
“I’m not supposed to be here. I really don’t know.” She looks at me with just the slightest look of exasperation. Like she was really going to have to deal with one of these naysayers today.
“Okay, I do know. But I wasn’t supposed to end up here. Listen, I’ll just give you the shortened spiel which I’m sure you’ve already heard from Docs #1-6, but are gonna match-analyze to this one. I woke up this morning, and I wished I hadn’t. And that scared the living shit out of me. I opened my eyes and I stared at the ceiling and I felt something awful. It felt like… like I don’t even know how to describe it. It didn’t feel good, that’s for sure. All I know is, I tried to nap it away, and next thing I knew the sun started going down, and that also gave me a shitload of anxiety… Why? I mean, who likes sitting in their room from dawn to dusk wishing they could just crawl out of their own skin? I know you’re just supposed to wait it out, right? Nothing lasts forever. But there’s something hideous about when the sun gives up on you, and you lose even your chance to get some Vitamin D today, and you probably won’t be able to sleep again, since you already slept from… from dawn to dusk, for lack of an original phrase. And at some point you start thinking, it can’t get worse. Like, it’s actually that bad, and you would trade anything to make it better. In fact, you give up on the ceiling and you look for real shit, something that will actually listen when you talk. And then you imagine calling your dealer. You imagine scoring some dope and collapsing on the floor like they do in the movies, and waiting until things are better again before you have to wake the fuck up.” She starts scribbling on her clipboard.
“Wait, don’t write that down. I’m no heroin addict. I just had the passing thought. But you’ll never guess what my next one was.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I’m not gonna do stupid shit that’s gonna kill me. I want to live to see another day. In fact, I don’t just want to see any other day, I want to see tomorrow. I want to see the Cubs win the World Series.” She laughs.
“I’m serious. I would never, ever kill myself before seeing this. You know this is the pinnacle of any cultural soup I’ll ever swim in? I’d be an idiot to miss it, and ma’am, I am no idiot. But I did scare myself. I did think about doing so much coke my heart would just explode and I’d never feel so much ever again. I thought about falling from a tall window and I thought about hanging from a short rope, and then I thought – you need to get help. Right. Fucking. Now. So I took my dog and I walked my ass right to student counseling and I told them, and they called the fucking police, and now I’m here.”
“I see. But what triggered all this?”
“I really don’t know.”
“…”
“Okay, I do. But it’s embarrassing. Like, really embarrassing. This guy I like moved away yesterday. Like, to Texas. And I knew he was moving, and I tried so, so hard to mentally prepare, because I know this always happens to me when people leave. And I was sure that I’d be fine, because I prepared all month, and I knew when the moment was coming and when it’d be over. I said bye yesterday and I went out with my best friend. I remember walking down 53rd with Maria, and I said everything was going to be okay, and I believed it. I wasn’t lying, I was actually happy. Hopeful and happy and ready to patiently wait 108 years for him to come back. I shut my eyes for a second, and when I opened them back up, I was in so much pain I couldn’t imagine surviving one more minute without some kind of capital H Help. So, yeah, I’m here now. And I don’t have shoelaces, but I also don’t have a toilet, because you people just gave me a freakin’ bowl on a chair, so I’ve been holding in my pee for a long-ass time and I just really want to go home.”
“Do you think you have something to live for?”
“Are you even listening? I have history to witness.”
“Further than tomorrow.”
“… Well of course. I actually like myself a great deal, that’s why I’m here. It’s hard, you know? I know everything’s going to be okay. It’s actually going to be more than okay. I know I’m set to do great things, if I can just make it through today, tomorrow, and eventually next year and the next few. I just don’t think I know how to do that, but I know if I do, I’ll get to do more than just witness something spectacular. So… Can I go now?”
“… Yeah. Yeah, you can go now.”
- We order takeout every night, because neither of us like getting off the couch very much. Why bother when the beer is cheaper by the dozen? He picks Thai food, but tells me to order, because he doesn’t know anything about Thai food. We get the Thai food starter pack: Pad Thai and Pad See Ew, right? He tries the Pad Thai. It’s aight. He tries the Pad See Ew, and my God, if you could’ve seen this boy’s face light up.
“What is this vegetable?” I tell him there’s broccoli, carrots, onions… not much, in essence.
“No, the slimy one. It’s so good, I’ve never had this before.”
“…”
“Mmmmhm. Mmm. Mhm. You can have the Pad Thai, I’m sticking with this baby.”
“Oh!”
“What?”
“Noodles.”
“What do you mean?”
“You idiot, those slimy vegetables are noodles. What kind of grown-ass man doesn’t know what noodles are? You lived in New York City for fucks sake.”
“I know what noodles are, Ye. They never look like this though!”
“Surprise, surprise. There’s more than one kind of noodle in the world.”
“See? I knew you were one smart cookie.” ↩︎
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