A Young American
It was a cold day in late October, 2011. The first dusting of snow greeted us when we woke. I pushed coiled strands of copper hair out of my face and thought about falling back asleep to avoid waking Hallie. We were woven together like a human pretzel, her face snug on my chest. The sun dropped a couple heavy beams through gaps in the curtains, and one fell slant over her shoulder and onto the olive comforter.
As if she knew I’d woken she opened her eyes and stretched out, reaching up and touching the headboard with her fingers and relieving me of my aesthetic dilemma. She offered a coy smile and rolled over to grab a glass bowl packed with marijuana from the bedside table.
I rolled out of bed and threw the curtains open, not surprised to see the faint layer of white reflecting the splendid sun rays from the parking lot below. Hallie and I were both juniors at Central Michigan University. Both of us had part-time jobs (she in the Writing Center, and I in the University Cafeteria) but we were living lavishly off our student loans. We knew we weren’t going to be able to pay them back any time soon so we figured we’d spoil ourselves.
Hallie lit the bowl and beckoned me back into bed where I began kissing her arms and neck. “You’re a cuddler, aren’t you?” She teased. Hallie’s boyfriend, Thomas, was out of town for a few days and she’d invited me over to spend that time getting messed up and sleeping together. It wasn’t a fair situation. Hallie knew I was lonely and that I really liked her, and she was just using me to get her fix while Thomas was away as long as I lied and told her it was platonic. I was morally conflicted about the whole thing, sure, but I’d seen the way Thomas treated Hallie in the past and it wasn’t hard to convince myself that my actions were excusable, if not justifiable.
We’d partied hard the previous night, smoking, drinking, and gallivanting through the empty streets, yelling a little too loudly and swearing a little too much. My head felt like a funnel and there were fuzzy sweaters on my teeth.
“What should we do today?” Hallie wondered absently, smoke falling from her nose like a waterfall.
“My friend Hannah is throwing a party tonight” I said. “I told her I’d stop by.”
“We could see a movie,” she suggested, as if I hadn’t said anything.
I told her that sounded like fun, but I wasn’t really in the mood for a movie. Besides, I needed to pick up from Cory because I was just about out of weed. We’d smoked all of mine the previous night, sneaking one-hitters in-between bars and in back alleys where gray cats were digging through the edges of too-full dumpsters for scraps of food.
“Do you want breakfast?” Hallie asked. I told her no, I’d grab something on the way to Cory’s and that I’d text her afterwards.
“You’d better.” She leaned over and kissed me, biting my lower lip hard enough that her teeth made a click when she pulled away. God, I loved it when she did that.
* * *
Cory was the kind of dealer that every pothead dreamed of. He played video games for a living, always had a ton of fresh bud, and didn’t give a damn when you stopped over to pick up so long as you sat down and smoked a bowl with him before you left. I asked him once why he insisted that I smoke with him, not that I minded, of course, and he told me that narcs aren’t allowed to smoke with you when they’re under police custody, so if somebody refused to smoke, he refused to sell. Period. It was pretty smart thinking.
I packed the very last layer of marijuana dust from the bottom of my dug-out as I rolled down the back country roads on my way to Cory’s apartment in my gold Chevrolet Blazer. The day was bright and crisp, and despite the chill I had my window cracked so the smoke I exhaled was sucked out. Because of this I had the heat blasting at my feet, which were a nice and toasty juxtaposition to the rest of me.
The closer I got to Cory’s house the more thought I gave to the matter of the amount of weed I wanted to pick up. I typically got an eighth, which would last me the week if I smoked it alone, but there was always some social occasion for smoking or another. I thought maybe I’d get a quarter, just to make sure I had enough to share for Hannah’s party that night, and enough leftover to roll a big fat joint for Hallie and myself later on.
But then I thought about the last time I’d had a really sizeable amount of weed. It had been quite a while, months, in fact. Maybe I’d get an ounce. It was the fiscally responsible thing to do, because an ounce was cheaper in bulk than it was to buy an eighth at a time. Besides, it never hurt a smoker’s reputation to be the one that showed up to the party with an ounce.
The problem with buying an ounce was that it could provide one with a sense of superfluous wealth, and bestowed the adverse tendency for over-consumption justified by the condition of having a surplus. It could quickly spiral into smoking through the whole ounce in a week or two, if one wasn’t careful. Maybe it was best to stick to the quarter. . .
When I arrived at Cory’s apartment and knocked on the tan door it took a few minutes for Cory to answer. I’d discovered that Cory didn’t answer the door if he was at an un-pausable point in whatever video game he was playing, and as a result I typically waited a few minutes after knocking before he cracked the door open and said, “come on in.”
Cory’s apartment was a glorified boy-cave. There were posters of just about every super hero created covering the walls. He’d given up trying to make them look neat and opted for the collage-style display. He had stacks of books and comics waist high, and a gaming station that looked military grade facing a 50-inch LED-backlit LCD TV. Hanging from the ceiling was a frozen-in-time battle between multiple Star Wars space ships. A Millennium Falcon was making a run for the Death Star with some X wing fighters in hot pursuit, and elsewhere Boba Fett was swooping in on a second Millennium Falcon and so on. All of the ships had laser pointers on them, so when you smoked the room out with the lights dimmed low, you could see the lasers crisscross like a real battle.
Cory handed me an already packed bowl and a lighter. I took a hit and exhaled, blowing the smoke up into the laser field, watching the green and red lines take shape.
“How much you looking for?” He asked me.
“Half,” I told him. He pulled dense, cheesy smelling nugs out of a mason jar and dropped them into a red SOLO cup that sat atop a small scale on his coffee table. He weighed out the half, adding an extra two grams because he’s a good-hearted guy, and bagged it up for me. I was standing there kind of awkwardly during the process, not quite committed to sitting down, but not quite sure if standing up was too formal. Eventually I took a seat on his black leather sofa and crossed my legs. I was over-thinking.
“How’s shit going with Jane?” I asked him. Jane was Cory’s on-and-off girlfriend. I gathered that she didn’t take his job seriously.
“We’re taking a break,” Cory told me. I nodded and said that was too bad. He said it was cool. He wasn’t sure how many more times he was going to try to fix their relationship. My phone vibrated in my pocket. It was a text from Hallie. She decided to throw a party at her place that night, and I should invite anyone I wanted. I figured I could still stop at Hannah’s party before Hallie’s. I’d promised her I’d stop by, and I didn’t like to break promises.
I asked Cory if he wanted to come to Hallie’s party. His forehead wrinkled up and I was pretty sure he was going to say no, because Cory doesn’t like to go out too much, but he said sure, he’d go.
I paid Cory for the half-ounce and we finished smoking the bowl. He looked pretty eager to get back to his game so I tucked the weed in my coat pocket and left him to it. It was really stinky weed, so I stashed it in the toolbox in my trunk just in case. I thought about rolling a joint and taking a walk through the woods, or maybe checking out the art galleries downtown. There future was teeming with infinite possibility and the day was mine to do with as I pleased. But then I remembered I hadn’t eaten yet, so I fired up the Blazer and set a course for Stan’s Diner. My favorite part about Stan’s was that they served breakfast until 3:00 pm.
* * *
A late breakfast at Stan’s really hit the spot. I typically only drink a cup of coffee per day, but the cute waitress kept topping me off and after the third or fourth round I figured I’d drink as much as my stomach could handle if it meant she’d keep topping me off. Afterward I stopped at a gas station to fill up the Blazer, had an awkward conversation with an Indian exchange student about the engine specs of his Dodge Challenger (awkward because I know virtually nothing about cars), and then made for the biology fields off-campus by the river. The allure of a lone walk through the woodland trails was far too great for me to pass up. Hallie called but I’d missed it.
There was a good-sized plot of land between the forest and the back-corner of a neighboring cattle ranch that was owned by the school and reserved for the Biology Department, whereupon students could conduct any number of biological studies and experiments such as measuring the pH of the soil or classifying micro ecosystems of insects or flora and fauna. I’d run into a few classes in session on my way to the river before. Groups of bug-eyed students would huddle around a patch of soil with pH testing kits while the less eager students stood off to the side awkwardly like when you see a government road crew barricaded behind a staggering row of orange cones and two of them are jack-hammering away at a shapeless hole in the road while the other four supervise from behind cigarettes and cell phones.
The field was empty when I arrived. I removed a joint I'd rolled in the parking lot of Stan's from behind my ear and sparked it up. Into the woods, a procession of golden sunbeams promptly fell through gaps in the trees and cast horizontal bars on the leaf-strewn path. Fat squirrels plundered the forest floor like thieves in the night, leaving no nut, berry, or knot unclaimed.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. It was a text from Hannah about her party that night. She wanted me to show up early, claiming she had a surprise for me. I had a pretty good clue of what that ‘surprise’ might be, and I was trying to avoid exactly that.
Hannah and I met in a chemistry lab the previous year. She was tall and freckled and smiled a lot, and for some reason she picked me, out of the thirty of us in the lab, to force friendship upon. And I say 'force' like it was a bad thing, and it kind of was, but it was also kind of nice. After a few months and a few dates I called it off romantically. It wasn’t that we weren’t having fun, it was just that I didn’t feel any sparks. I know it sounds terribly cliché, but I need to feel some sparks or I’m not going to push romance. I told her I didn’t want to go on any more dates and she gave me her rendition of the complexity (or lack thereof) of the internal workings of my mind, and the reasoning behind why I do what I do, why I’m addicted to drugs, and what that made me. I mean she gave me the what, where, when, why, and how, all in about three minutes of furious exposition. Almost none of it was right, but she did strike a few wounds that smarted. I didn’t blame her for what she said, though. Hannah was lonely, like me, and she wanted to pour her loneliness into somebody else.
The river shimmered silver and white as the sun hit ripples like curved glass. Nothing moved me emotionally quite so much as nature did. Nature is mathematics, and each thing, each instance of nature, whether plant, animal, planet, or star, is an imperfect manifestation of perfect geometry. To understand the mathematical function behind the tree, for example, and to observe its functions in relation to other life forms as they interact, to know that these systems of interactions between plants and animals, wind and rain, are simply representations of pure geometric forms as rendered in three-dimensional spacetime and cast in the light of the electromagnetic spectrum: to know these things, or to assume that one knows these things, is both as inspiring as it is utterly terrifying.
The English and American romantics of the nineteenth century referred to the effect of being overwhelmed by the inscrutability of nature as being in the presence of the “sublime.” Once in the presence of the sublime, one cannot but help to feel awestruck by the beauty, mystery, and often terror of the subject of the sublime. Take, for example, the first time you laid eyes on the ocean, struck motionless by the great and terrible size of the thing, the sound of millions of pounds of water slapping the shoreline. It’s nearly impossible to put words to the exact feeling of encountering the sublime, else the experience would be describable, and the sublime would (by definition) cease to be sublime. In my case, I found the sublime reflected in the river currents, in the shimmering ribbons of silver and white that folded the water’s surface like curtains of silk. It wasn’t necessarily terrifying, or mysterious, but it struck me so profoundly that I felt a warm tingle at the base of my neck that reached down my spine and up and around my skull, followed by the welling of tears behind my eyes.
I did not find clarity of motive in the river, however, and another vibration in my pocket reminded me of my social institutions. It was a text from Hallie. I ignored it. I wasn’t trying to be rude; I just needed time to think. I felt sparks with Hallie, but she chose Thomas. The more I thought about Hallie the worse I started to feel. I would talk to her that night, maybe even tell her that I liked her, but until then I was going to enjoy the afternoon. The future was teeming with infinite possibility. I had to believe that.
I found a strong looking tree at the edge of the precipice overlooking the river and sat with my back to it, feet out in front of me in a wide V. I hadn’t planned on rolling another joint, but thinking about my feelings for Hallie had brought back the familiar hole in my chest and I wanted to numb myself to its existence. I took a few hits and closed my eyes to focus on my breathing. The sunlight was warm on my face, and the ground was oddly soft. Before I knew it, I was drifting down the river in a long canoe with Edmond Burke, Romantic Philosopher from my PHL 480 class, and he was shouting, “Infinity! Infinity, boy!” He thrust his arms about him in a grand gesture, and with a grin overtaking one-half of his face he leaned in close and whispered through a course mustache, “infinity has the tendency to fill the mind with that delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and the truest test of the sublime. Don’t you agree, my boy?” After which he proceeded to evaporate into luminescent waves.
* * *
The sun had sunk below the apartment line in the distance across the parking lot and I sat outside Hannah’s unit on the overgrown lawn drinking a beer. I didn’t feel like drinking too much but a few beers were good social lubrication. Plus, I needed to wake back up after that riverside nap. A few people had shown up for Hannah’s party but it wasn’t in full swing yet. I wanted to wait until there were more people inside before I made my entrance. In my anxiety I hadn’t texted either Hannah or Hallie back yet.
After the party filled up a bit more, I popped another bottle top with my lighter and strode inside. The apartment was cozy. The carpet was maroon and the walls were gold. I knew they were the Central Michigan colors, but my mind jumped immediately to Gryffindor and for a moment I expected to see Daniel Radcliff and Emma Watson chatting it up over a butterbeer in the corner. A large television played the “song” Rack City from a connected phone, and for that reason alone I had half a mind to turn right around and leave. Then I made eye contact with Hannah and she smiled and came over to greet me.
“I didn’t think you’d show up,” she hugged me.
“I told you I would,” I reminded her.
With a bright look in her eyes, she told me to follow her. I suspected she might want to jump me and make out but I followed her anyways to humor her. She led me across the living room and down the stairs to the basement, where her bedroom was. Inside there were three other ladies and on the bed between them was a biology book with what turned out to be about a gram of molly piled on top like a deposit of salt.
Do you want to get fucked up? Hannah asked me.
It was an unfair question.
There were numerous strings attached to her offer, I was sure of it, but I hadn’t done molly in over a year, and the last time had been great. The white powder looked innocent enough sitting on the biology book. After a few moments of careful deliberation, I decided to go for it. Hannah scooped up a small pile with a butter knife. At casual glance I estimated it to be between a tenth and two tenths of a gram, enough for a solid roll. She told me to open up and poured the powder under my tongue. It tasted like metallic paint, but as far as bitterness goes it wasn’t much worse than cilantro. I swished some water around my mouth to make sure all of it was getting into my system.
I pulled a joint out of my pocket and offered it to Hannah. I didn’t have any cash on me and I didn’t want to owe her anything. She giggled and began rummaging around her desk for a lighter. She was definitely rolling. Her pupils were huge and she couldn’t stop smiling or giggling. She found a lighter and sparked the joint.
Smoke clouded the room as we talked for the better part of an hour while I waited for the Molly to kick in. We talked about school and student loans, and we talked about the teacher’s strike that happened at the start of the semester. The teachers were pissed because the administration was cutting their wages while simultaneously raising tuition, making it the fifth year in a row to do so. The tenured faculty went on strike to send a message to the administration that they couldn’t keep treating the school like a business first. It was an ugly affair that lasted three weeks. Collective bargaining was no help because in the end it was determined that, due to some University bylaw, if no agreement could be reached between both parties the administration reserved the full right to do whatever they wanted. So, naturally, the administration refused to come to an agreement and the faculty was caught in a checkmate.
I started to feel a little light-headed so I excused myself to the bathroom. Once in the hallway I, like Gregor Samsa from Kafka’s Metamorphosis, became a beetle. The hallway grew longer the more I looked at it, and I felt the strong urge to giggle as I crawled on six legs to the bathroom.
I fell inside and shut the door behind me, drawing a deep breath as I tried to grasp at reality. The air I drew tickled the insides of my lungs with a million tiny fingers. I flicked on the light switch and made for the mirror. Two of me stared back, one outlined in red and the other in green, and slightly off-set like when you watch a 3D movie without the glasses. Neither of them were beetles. I gripped the faux-granite sink top and marveled at its smoothness. I was definitely rolling. Through the blur of digital light, I managed to see that I had two more missed calls from Hallie and a text from Cory. I’d already stayed at Hannah’s longer than I intended to, but I wasn’t sure how to escape without upsetting her. I texted Cory back and told him that I’d be over at Hallie’s soon, and he could head over in half an hour. That gave me a deadline and solidified my mission to get out of Hannah’s apartment. But damn, did that faux-granite feel smooth!
Back in Hannah’s room the four of them had elected to go back upstairs and join the party. Hannah told me to hang back a second because she wanted to ask me something. When the other three were gone she closed the door and pounced. To be honest I wanted it. She wrapped her legs around my waist and started kissing me. After that I don’t think I could have stopped her if there’d been a gun to my head. She ripped my shirt off and ran her hands over my chest and shoulders, sending involuntary spasms of pleasure up my spine. An image of Hallie flashed before me and I felt a pang of guilt for sleeping with Hannah, which was ridiculous because Hallie was cheating on Thomas with me anyways.
Afterwards, Hannah left for the bathroom to “freshen up.” It was my cue to escape. As soon as the bathroom door closed, I bolted upstairs, pushed my way through the cacophony that was, at that time, choreographed to Bruno Mars’ Grenade, and out the front door into the frosted night. I pulled out my phone and checked the time. It had been longer than half an hour, and my phone was at one-percent charge. Hallie was surely wondering where in the hell I was, and Cory might even be at Hallie’s waiting for me. I should have been stressed but I couldn’t put my damn smile away.
* * *
The walk was cold and each breath felt like a rush of peppermint. My feet were tingling in my shoes and my jaw was getting sore from grinding my teeth. My subconscious played a deep house song, some creation of its own, which echoed in the hall of my mind. I was jamming.
There were a decent number of people inside Hallie's apartment. I estimated maybe twenty, at first glance. Most were people I knew by face, if not name, plus a few that I didn’t recognize at all. Hallie was locked in conversation with a guy who looked like a young Dennis Quaid, and Cory was nowhere to be seen. I tapped Hallie on the shoulder.
“Where have you been all day?” She asked me. She was definitely messed up. Her voice was airy and she slurred her words a bit. I told her I stopped at Hannah’s like I’d planned earlier and that she’d kept me longer than I wanted. Hallie gave me a sigh that sounded more like a yawn than a sigh. I asked her if she was okay and she smiled at me through crescent eyes. She said she’d taken some Vicodin and was feeling groovy. I was relieved that she wasn’t mad at me for ignoring her all day, but kind of upset that she was using painkillers again. She’d developed a serious addiction to painkillers freshman year and it messed up her body pretty badly, resulting in a trip to the E.R. She told me she hadn’t touched pills since. Except Adderall, of course. And ibuprofen for cramps.
I told her to be careful, and not to drink too much. She tried to punch me in the arm but it ended up looking more like how I imagine an eel would look if it were flopping around in a nightmare. I leaned in and kissed her on the forehead and then made for the sink. I hadn’t consumed any water that evening and I wanted to make sure I was properly hydrated. I drank three glasses before I remembered it was possible to over-hydrate and forced myself to stop. For the next minute or ten I contemplated the importance of balance in the universe, spawned by the realization that I could die if I drank too much or too little water, before Cory caught my attention.
He was wearing dark jeans and a baja hoodie. He asked me if it was cool to spark up a blunt right there and I said it most definitely was. Within minutes the apartment was wrapped in a dank smog. Cory told me that he’d gotten a call from Jane. She’d said she wanted to give him another chance and that she understood he was serious about video games, but he told her he didn’t want to try to make it work anymore. I thought he’d made the right call. I asked Cory what strain of weed the blunt was, and he told me that it was Agent Orange but he’d dipped the wrap in codeine so we’d be feeling really loose.
At some point in the night Hallie grabbed me and wheeled me into her room with a lot more force than I thought she could muster in her condition. She shut the door and started kissing me, and I was about to tell her that I was rolling because I felt bad that she didn’t know, but when I tried to talk, she bit my neck and dug a few fingernails into my back. The addition of new chemical reactions occurring in my brain as a result of Hallie’s aggressive foreplay brought the number of sensations I was experiencing to a boil, and suddenly I really had to piss. I told Hallie I’d be right back, and she slapped me, hard, across the face, and then winked at me. The look in her eye as she watched me exit the room, even cast in the lazy light of the painkillers, was razor sharp and predatory.
I felt alive.
I stumbled out into the party and made a fast beeline for the bathroom, fumbling a bit at the buttons on my pants. I wish I had clocked that piss, because in my mind it was twenty minutes long. I splashed a little water on my face and checked my reflection. There was only one of me looking back but he was fucked up. His eyes were bloodshot and droopy, and his smile was out of control.
Once I felt presentable enough to return to Hallie, I exited the bathroom and hurried back to her room. I threw open the door and there she was, lying back-down at the edge of her bed, legs thrown upwards in a flying “V” while Thomas, who was supposed to be gone for another day, thrust his pale, hairy-assed hips at her in a fury.
Both of their heads snapped around at my intrusion and four eyes glared at me with a myriad of emotions.
Awash with shame, I pulled the door shut and melded back into the party. All of the noise and commotion around me might as well have been a television program with the volume muted. I could hear only an echoing in my head, a single high pitch, sturdy and pure. Where the hell had Thomas come from? What if he’d walked in a few minutes earlier, or later? Had I really pissed for twenty minutes? The volume of the party flushed back into existence and I found Cory standing in the kitchen watching an argument between two white guys about the true definition of racism. They were really getting into it.
“This party kind of blows,” Cory said. I nodded. I told him about Hannah’s party but he didn’t seem very interested. He said he was probably going to go home and watch a movie or something.
I walked him out the door and then hung back for a minute as he made his way across the blacktop, weaving through the throng of cars. I was so stunned by what had just happened that I didn’t know what to do so I lit a joint and started walking. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew that I needed to get as far away from Hallie’s apartment as possible.
I wasn’t really worried about Thomas finding out that I slept with Hallie. Nor was I worried about retaliation of any kind. I wasn’t even worried that, despite having done Molly, smoked copious amounts of Marijuana (and codeine, apparently), and drank a whole six-pack to myself, I suddenly felt pretty sober.
What did worry me was the vastness of it all, of the human condition, this electromagnetic experience we call consciousness. The number of choices that we make, the repercussions acting in response to those choices, and the number of chemical reactions, representative of quantum interactions, representative of pure geometric forms. So many choices, so many paths, and here we are grasping at leaves in the wind, seeking validation from anyone or anything we can hold onto.
“Infinity, my boy,” Burke whispered from the catacombs of my mind, his voice aching with regret. “Infinity has the tendency to fill the mind with that delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and the truest test of the sublime. You’ll see, my boy. You’ll see.”