#mud series

   A big brown bottle which looks like it came from a holistic medicine store; a bottle that could quite easily be mistaken for one holding essential oils and put in the dead box for other residence to pilfer through and utilize.         Luckily the night supervisor is a closet junkie who likes to make tea and check the dead box when she’s bored. Opening the bottle, she expected to smell camphor or eucalyptus. Instead, she smelled nothing. She dribbled a bit onto her finger and tried smelling it again, still nothing. So she tasted it. there was something there…”faint but familiar”…and that’s when her tongue went numb. “Holy shit” rings loudly in her head. Swiftly and deftly she pocketed the 16oz bottle in her uniform with a crooked tingly smile. . @legoule

Thanksgiving day. We have dinner at about noon. The whole family is there, including at least 5 grandkids, of which I am one. All the adults work for the same nursing home. They all have to go to work on thanksgiving, because who knows, but they all leave. It’s me, my aunts Sara and her younger sister Michelle, who goes by “Mish” and like 4 other kids. All the food is put away, the folks are gone, and Mish ’s boyfriend jimmy shows up. Now Mish ’s locked in her room upstairs with jimmy. The kids are downstairs, restless, but tired and it’s almost 2pm. Sara and I start leading the kids to naptime, and it’s working. Everything is quiet, Sara and I go upstairs, I try Mish’s door. It’s locked. Sara bangs on the door and Mish yells “what?” Sara yells back. “I need to see jimmy.” “why?” Mish asks. “you KNOW why.” Sara answers. Jimmy opens the door a crack and hands Sara a lid, basically an ounce of weed. Sara calls through the crack to Mish, “hey, hand me the lid to my record player would’ya?” “No” Mish says. Sara throws back, “You want to be alone in there with jimmy or do you want to watch these friggin kids?” (Sara and I both know they’re all asleep, but Mish doesn’t) She back peddles, “You want the what now?” Sara reiterates, “The cover to my stereo, just lift it up, it comes right off.” Mish hands Sara the stereo cover and slams the door locking it from the inside. Sara beckons me to the music room. “The music room” was a joke of a label. When their father was being handed the keys, the girls were on the front lawn looking at the outside of the house and picking favorites. This was the spire room that both girls wanted, but when they finally got inside, it was very disappointing. The room was unfinished. No insulation, nothing. It did have a couple of pretty curved windows, and 2 regular ones, but the floor, the walls, every bit was rough and in disrepair. Poised in the center of the room was a guitar case on its back. They rushed to open it. Inside was a tiny dead bird, and that somehow became the joke. “The music room.” I enter the room behind Sara, and its cold as fuck. She leaves the door open and we sit down so Sara can do her thing. She takes the lid from her stereo and turns it upside down. She pours the lid she got from jimmy out of the sandwich baggie and into the stereo cover, now a sifting tray. She fumbles for her wallet and takes out the laminated card size copy of her high school diploma, which she then uses to sift and clean the pot for rolling. I am familiar with the procedure but am impressed by her swiftness. In no time the bag is clean and she asks me “have you ever rolled a joint before?” I say no, and ask her to show me how.   She relates detailed steps and basic rudiments that I hold true to this day, though I don’t practice much rolling anymore. (more of a bowl girl i would say) When she is finished rolling the bag, she shuts the door. Man it’s cold with that door shut. She then lights one and opens a window. “What the fuck are you doing?” I blurt. “Smoke dude” she calmly says. I stand to leave with a “fuck a bunch of this” under my breath. She grabs my hand and says, “Dude” and nods toward the open window. I stop and move to kneel at the window. She hands me the joint. Now I have smoked before and was quite disappointed when it had no discernible effect, so I’m not expecting much. I follow along. Puff, pass, “hold it in” she says, and I do. She tells me that the music room is the perfect vantage point from which to smoke from. It’s the only spot on all the property where you can see the one road leading to the neighborhood a mile out. Which given stop signs and the speed limit, (yes she gave this some serious thought) would save your ass by 10 minutes at least if you needed to adjust for parentage. We laugh and talk about random philosophical shit. I am convinced the pot has done nothing to me, until I stand up. “Woozy, what? Hello wall, and thank YOU for the support. Shit. Splinter. Ok gotta pee, but damn I’m hungry. “ “Bathroom is downstairs dude” Sara says. I jerk around, “what?” comes out of me at an odd inflection. “Dude, you have said “I gotta pee” like 3 times”… “are you ok?” Sara is now wondering if it was a good idea to get the 12 yr old high…. I tell her I am fine and turn to face the stairs and freeze. With my family, I have a pretty well established fear of heights at this point. “Dude I can’t do the steps” I say with my eyes closed. “You have to dude, bathroom’s downstairs” She says chidingly. “I know THAT” I fire back “I just can’t look at the stairs” “well…then don’t look at em” she suggests. After some debate, we decide that the best way down that infernal staircase was to do so, on my hands and knees, backwards, with my eyes closed. Sara joined me in my silly endeavor for moral support. “Look! We’re doing it!” she said. “Shut up, I’m counting.” I replied. “You’re what?..nevermind.” and she just let it go with a giggle. By the time we reach the bottom, we are giggling uncontrollably. “shhhhh, we’re gonna wake the charges” Sara hiccups. “Right” I agree, trying to stifle my laughter. We stand up and high five. Our hands clap together too loud and we both say “shit” also too loudly. Smiling into our hands, we make our way to the kitchen. There is a half bath attached to the kitchen. I go in. when I return, Sara has opened the floor freezer looking for pie. She takes out the extra uncooked rolls and some ice cream, rummaging for her target. I open the fridge, we are singing with the radio in at a low volume so as not to wake the kids. “we are fa-ma-lee…do do do do do do do, I got all my sister’s and me…” I reach for the turkey, but it’s wedged behind many containers of the remnants of many covered dishes. Sweet potato casserole, gherkin salad, 3bean medley, cranberry sauce that was still shaped like the inside of the can it came from. I take each container and dish out of the fridge one at a time and place them on the island in the middle of the kitchen, which is right behind me. Now for that turkey. It still smells wonderful. More so, I have never been so hungry in my life. I put the turkey on the island and uncover it. Sara has a table spoon and is taking bites of everything she finds that pleases her. With a mouthful of dressing she says, “debbelled eggff” “what?” I ask she chews her mouthful to the side “get the deviled eggs” she says. I turn to the still open fridge and grab the plate of eggs, but I turn back around too fast. Centripetal force plays its part and 3 of the eggs go flying. We start laughing, and Smedley the dog who was watching the whole thing with great attention is on the eggs in 2 seconds, one second more and they are history. “Well, that solves that” I say, still laughing. I reach for the uncovered turkey and start pulling pieces off of it to munch on. I get a spoon and join Sara in the feasting. She asks if I want some of the pie. I suggest we make smoother lines in the pie to make it look like we actually cut slices. She agrees that this is a good cover up. I delve into a combination of mac-n-cheese and more turkey. All at once I am thirstier then I have ever been in my life. My mouth is completely dry. I almost choke on the food I am still chewing. “What?” Sara asks “dude” ..cough “thirsty” I respond. “haha cotton mouth” she laughs. “Huh?” I get it, but not really. I bury my head back in the fridge and return with a gallon of creature kooler, which is the local dairy’s version of kool-aid. It’s mostly full. I spin the cap much harder than I mean to and it takes off whizzing across the room, and bounces off the toaster oven on the counter. We laugh. The last thing I remember was turning up that gallon and drinking straight from the jug, and hearing Sara say “breathe dude, or you are going to hiccup and make yourself sick.” Whatever we ended up doing after that, neither Sara nor I remember a thing. At some point I curled up on the couch, because that’s where I woke up when Mud came to collect my sister Zoë and I after her shift. She asked how my thanksgiving was. I said that Sara and I hung out with her stereo and ate some leftovers. Which was kinda true, but not. I smiled most of the way home, thinking about my buzz, now gone, and trying to remember what happened past the drinking of the creature kooler. I knew two things for sure, this was fun, and although i was only twelve on that Thanksgiving day… …a stoner was born. . @legoule

My mother was a functional drug addict, she was high every day of my life. I denied this for a long time, “But…she just knows how to have fun” I would tell myself. --A drug addict destroys lives and steals shit. --A drug addict Has trouble finding or keeping a job. “but…she was continuously employed, never missed a day” --Drug addicts are filthy homeless people. WE weren’t homeless really…at the worst of times, we slept on couches, but that was always temporary. She wasn’t an addict that I could see, her ability to function hid the truth rather well. Sure she hoarded medication and dosed herself every 6-8hrs, but that’s how she got through her day. It took years for me to recognize a pattern. What a person grows up with is their own personal brand of normal. As children, our first taste of “the world really IS different outside this door and behind another” is the first sleep over at “their” house. It’s our first unsolicited lesson in perspective. The differences just glare at you. Then you get to decide who’s right, and who’s wrong…and which you think is better. By the time I knew she was a serious hed, I mean got high every day, or most days, I saw it as she was someone who could keep her shit together. Being functional and dependable were things I didn’t think a junkie could do. So I labeled her something else. Mud was into pills, opiates to be specific. She had a soft spot for speed in her teens-twenties, but by her 30’s she only did speed/coke to hasten a downward spiral. At those times it was never much of a fun up thing for her. It amplified the pain to a point where she couldn’t feel anything at all. She only spun out twice in my 17years with her. The last one is when the Sydney plan was hatched…but we’ll get to that. She liked her opes and I was a pot head. I did pills here and there, she would dose me every once in a while. I saw it as our drug bonding. It was special. It somehow meant I was cool. “Is she cool?” yes I was. But she didn’t like to smoke pot, so it’s not like we hung out and did drugs all the time. Drug time was an event. It was playtime. On many a payday we rented a stack of VHS, bought 10dollars worth of burgers and fries. Gorging in front of the tube, we would sit with a deck of cards and a righteous buzz. Amid the cigarettes and laughter, we would come up with stories and lines that we never wrote down. When I smoked pot it was mainly with Liz. She was the first one to get me high. Not to say that she smoked me out first…no that was Jody, the 10yrold son of a drug dealer back in Florida. Because drugs played such a part in my family’s life, in many of the stories I tell, you could play “where’s the high one”.  Hint: there is always a high one, and sometimes several.  . . @legoule