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you could say my admiration went up in smoke

Public service announcements about saying no to drugs never made much sense to me. I didn’t understand why anyone would want to do drugs, for one thing, and for another they were constantly blathering on about how you should “tell your friends no when they pressure you to do drugs with them” and the worst thing my friends ever pressured me into doing was going to a school dance when I knew I was going to have a terrible time there.

“Smoking is smelly and doesn’t make you cool,” the over-voice in the ads would intone, and I would think, “Yeah, obviously. Your point is…?”

I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t eat meat. I don’t do drugs. Once someone asked me if I had ANY vices.

I was reminded of my One Run-In With The Seedy Underworld Of Drugs while talking to a friend about this very subject, and thought I would talk about it here. My freshman year of college, there was a very suave, sophisticated woman named Autumn who lived a few doors down from my dorm room. She was very bright, always had something witty to say, and by the second week of school also had a sultry boyfriend. He was the sort of boy with a string of broken hearts stretched out behind him, but this time it was Autumn who had his heart on a string, and not the other way around. Although the strictly enforced rules were No Boys Overnight, Autumn’s boyfriend moved in with her and no one said a word. I wanted to be her friend; she seemed so worldly and sophisticated and smart, not to mention seemingly the only other politically liberal person in the whole town. But I was too shy to say much more than hello or ask what was on the menu for dinner at the cafeteria that night.

I happened upon her phone number that summer after school had let out and called on a whim, she seemed glad to hear from me and asked if I felt like going out to the movies and of course I did. I was surprised to learn that she’d thought of me as one of her few friends in school, and chuckled at her description of the sultry boyfriend as something of a dolt, though not half bad in bed. She took me to an artsy theater where we saw The Object of Beauty, which I remember because the whole artsy theater experience made quite an impression on me, and after the movie neither of us wanted to go home. Since she was staying with her father, who was ill, and I was staying with a friend, she asked if I wanted to go to her best friend Robert’s apartment and hang out there. I said that would be fine. So she drove us on over in her creaky old red Volvo and we arrived at Robert’s apartment after dark. She knocked, he opened the door, they said hello and hugged and she introduced me, I was really excited to be given the opportunity to spend the evening with such interesting, intelligent, cultured people. “Sage is a writer,” Autumn told Robert. “She’s an English major.”

“Yeah?” Roger gestured for us to sit down. “Do tell. What sort of things do you write?”

“Um, short stories mostly. Some really bad poetry, too.” I took a deep breath and plunged in. “Actually, I have a really short story with me, I could, um, read it…”

“Yes! Read it to us!” Roger turned to Autumn. “Hey, wanna have a joint?”

I already knew at that point that Autumn smoked pot; to this day the funniest thing she ever said to me, and she said it in all seriousness, was “Oh, you know, I love pot but I’m not addicted…I only do it once a day.” I just hadn’t expected her to do it right there in front of me. But I was hip, and I was cool, and I still remember how scornful everyone was at the one slumber party I was invited to in elementary school when they put Risky Business into the vcr and I hid my head under my sleeping bag because I wasn’t allowed to watch R rated movies, and I wanted Roger and Autumn to like me. So I thought I’d pretend that nothing was happening and while they were rolling and lighting the joint I preoccupied myself with finding the story I wanted to read to them in my backpack. I’d just recently written They Say Hell Is Fictitious and almost no one had read it, so the prospect of being able to read it aloud to them was twice as exciting as it might have been otherwise.

But here’s the pitiful part: I had no idea what pot did to a person. I assumed that I could read the story and they would be completely focused on what I was saying, that it would be no different from reading a story aloud to a stone-cold sober person. Before I started reading Autumn held the joint out to me and said, “Want some?” and I smiled and said, “Nah, no thanks,” and that was that. So I still don’t understand what people mean when they talk about peer pressure. I was shaking as I was reading the story; I wanted so badly to impress them and for them to like my work. I read it all the way through, didn’t flub one line or anything, and when I looked up for their reactions what I got was: nothing.

They stared at me blankly. They said, “Uh, was that it? Is it over?” and I nodded and they lay down on the floor and started comparing how spaced out they felt. So that was my first and last experience with drugs and, incidentally, the end of my interest in Autumn.

© 1997 QN Podcast (formerly Quirky Nomads).