Smoking Pot with My Parents (Based on a True Story)
My family has just finished dinner, when I tell my mother: “Let's smoke some pot.” I don't mean what I say, of course, the way I don't mean most of the things I say to my mother. It's just a joke, I guess, a postprandial joke, which, like all other kinds of jokes, is supposed to make people laugh. A postprandial joke. Ha-ha. “Let's smoke some pot,” I repeat half-heatedly this time, still expecting a belated roar of laughter from across the table, a chuckle, or at least a smile acknowledging my petty humor. Hello? Even a frown is welcome now, a reprimand, a good old scolding, anything but this accusatory silence. If the laws of physics are correct, I must expect a reaction to my action, right, some sort of emotional engagement, which would prove I'm not alone in the kitchen, in the universe. When you poke a frog with a stick, the frog jumps; when you poke a bear with a stick, the bear eats you alive - that sort of thing. I don't want to suggest that my mother resembles either a frog or a bear, though she is well known for her croaky voice and voracious appetite. All I'm saying is that I try to tell a joke after dinner and it doesn't quite work out. Instead, she looks at me with those calm, terribly calm eyes of hers and says, “Let us!”
“Let us” is an odd expression, especially when it stands on its own. Because my mother never deigns to complete her sentences, it's impossible to know whether she means “lettuce,” in which case she probably wants me to get some more lettuce from the fridge, or “let us,” which would be tantamount to her expressing a preposterous desire to smoke pot. To be on the safe side is my philosophy of life, so I opt for the lettuce. I get up, open the fridge, and deliver the coveted vegetable. As I place it on the table my mother bursts into laughter. “You're a moron,” she says, “Are we going to smoke lettuce?” Obviously, I have never known my mother. My father stares at her in disbelief. Obviously, he has never known his wife.
When I return to the kitchen, I carry a plastic sachet with a quarter ounce of marijuana. It's from my personal cache, my Treasure Island book-safe, which I've been hiding in the farthest reaches of my library for fear that my parents might decide one day to peruse something by Robert Louis Stevenson. Such unfounded fears we have! Just to think that all these years I've been creeping and crouching and prowling and skulking, trying to deceive an enemy who was bravely fighting on my side. Mother, dear, forgive my lowly estimate of you! O wonderful mother, that can so astonish a son!
I brush aside the bread crumbs from the table and spread out in their places little clumps of THC happiness. My babies swaddled in green. Now that the secret is out and my parents have recognized my illegitimate children, I feel somehow relieved, morally unburdened, like the minister with the black veil who has finally found the courage to confess his quandary. I take one of my green babies and lay him in his crib of smoking-paper. Rocking him gently from side to side, humming an old lullaby my mother used to sing, I roll him to sleep. A lick of the tongue and he is already dreaming, tightly sealed in his white innocence.
Let's get this straight. I'm not some kind of filicidal monster who just slaughters his own children for a bit of narcotic fun, a Saturn devouring his offspring. No. No. No. I vehemently reject such cold-blooded comparisons. Rather, I prefer to think that by lighting a joint, wherein my green baby lies fast asleep, I kindle the flame of his genuine life, and not his funeral pyre, as some might rashly conclude. In the smoke I inhale, in the smoke I exhale, my children attain a communion with the divine, immortality. Or is it me? I'm starting to get confused here. I'd better get on with my story.
I roll the joint and light it. I take a few tokes - seven, eight, nine, ten seconds, nine, eight, seven - funny that the clock is moving backwards now - but still refuse to pass it over to my mom, vaguely wary that she might suddenly decide to stub it out directly into my eye socket. Maybe this is all a complicated trap, designed by my diabolical parents to catch me, long overdue, in the act of wrongdoing.
“Pass me the roach,” my mother says to my disbelieving, choking self. A roach? My mother? Where the hell has she learned her dope lingo? There was a movie on TV about a mother who turned out to be the neighborhood pot dealer. Was it based on a true story? I decide I’d better keep mum about it. Unwitting, perhaps, that she is transubstantiating her grandchildren into bluish smoke, mom takes a deep drag, so deep she might have been sniffing the blooming rose-bushes in the family garden. She doesn’t cough, she doesn’t retch, she doesn’t show any of the rookie symptoms that plagued me so persistently at a more tender age. No pot-headed, Rastafarian friend of mine could survive such an overdose, I swear. And she handles the joint, I mean, her roach, with such virtuosity and ease, that I cannot but imagine a pianist, say Vladimir Horowitz, performing Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No.3. Mother, mother, who the fuck are you?
She calmly passes her flat piano key to my father, whose apparent squeamishness and bewilderment are ranker than the marijuana smoke filling up the kitchen air. His entire life, as far as I remember, he has been an inveterate tobacco smoker, but now he behaves like a complete amateur – pallid face, fingers dithering – as if someone has given him a cup of hemlock instead. Even though he is an anesthesiologist by profession, a state-sponsored narco-baron so to speak, and it is his main responsibility as such to administer every day the most potent mind-altering substances known to man, he looks cowed, terrified by the innocuous appearance of the simplest of recreational drugs. I’m starting to pity him, poor dad. My mother’s fantastic whim has taken him by surprise and has become the Trojan horse whose belly pours forth enemy fighters determined to burn and pillage their long happy marriage, while he’s still rubbing his sleepy eyes, all his defenses down, unable even to put a decent fight. Without further comment he takes a cautious whiff. To see my mother –a conservative, humorless lady – or so I used to think – toke up is one thing; to see, however, a reefer sizzling between my father’s lips is a totally different matter altogether. Just looking at him gives me the surreal creeps: the father I have always respected and feared, the father who, as a member of parliament three years ago voted against the decriminalization of marijuana, has now fallen victim to the most reprehensible vice and his worst nightmare. Puckering his face in disgust, he hastily returns the roach my way, guilty to the bone. And yet, I do believe I can sense something else about him too: an unfamiliar glint in his eye, a mysterious smile.
We’ve come full circle then. After so many years of festering secrets, arguments, slammed doors, broken plates, tears, we’ve finally managed to become a real family. No masks, no pretences. Our lowest selves are out in the open, high…
“Pass me the roach,” my mother says again, and I gladly obey. This is going to be a pleasant family evening.
