“Is it true?” Mary was standing in the doorway of our bedroom and I was lying in bed trying to drown out the sound of her question that got louder every time she repeated it. “Maxwell, is it true?”
I was embarrassed to tell her the truth; yes, I smoke marijuana with Danny every time I go to Ladoga. She thought that it was a habit that I’d left in the mountains. When she used to come visit me in college, she’d curse me out if she even smelled a whiff of it on my clothes and she’d leave immediately afterwards. She said it was incentive to get me to stop, “It’s me or the weed, and you should know that you’re way too old to be smoking weed.” That was like five years ago.
“Is it…” I sat up in bed before she could finish the question again and she looked at me like she already knew the answer.
“Yea,” she said, then she walked out, stomping her feet. I jumped up to follow her out. I still didn’t know what to say. I could have lied and told her that I was sorry about it, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want to say anything because I knew that the next time I saw Danny, we would smoke again, that’s what the man does and I couldn’t just turn down his offer to hit the big, fat blunt he was sure to roll. I tried that before and he would gently goad me into taking one puff that inevitably turned into enough to help him finish the thing completely.
When I caught up to her, I grabbed her arm. “It’s not as much as it used to be.” And that was the truth. My lungs would probably collapse if I tried to smoke as much as I used to, when all of my friends were potheads and we claimed that we did it as a political statement, bucking the law to show our solidarity with others who called for the legalization of marijuana in the US.
“You think it matters how much? What if your boss decides to drug test you? What happens when you lose your job?” Mary is a sensible woman, that’s why I love her. She’s almost like the mother that I need in the absence of my own, but I’d never tell her that. She says all the time that she has one son and he is enough.
“I won’t lose my job,” I reassured her, “my boss probably smokes weed all the time. That’s why he never drug tested me in the first place.” She looked at me with eyes that said she didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it either. My boss is a very straight laced, older white man who has seen enough of his clients’ lives ruined by drugs to never touch anything that causes inebriation, including alcohol. But he admires my work ethic and I get a lot of work done for him, so I can’t imagine that he even suspects anything. I’ve never smoked before work, only when I see Danny and we hang out at the empty farmer’s market in Ladoga after I drop my grandmother off at her house. We don’t bother anyone, we don’t give it to kids, and we sit there for hours so I never drive when I’m high; Danny does but honestly, you could never tell, he’s very good at it.
“What you plan to tell your son when he’s old enough to get curious about it?”
“I don’t know Mary. But I can tell him the truth that I didn’t start smoking until I was 20, so he can just wait til then.” That wasn’t a good answer for her.
“Max, I thought you were going to be more responsible, I need you to be more responsible,” she said which I think is unfair. Compared to most guys my age, I thought that I was doing pretty good. I have a job, good income, I take my work seriously, I have a college degree, one child and one baby mama; that’s better than most guys my age. And it wasn’t like I was cheating on her, or running around being reckless.
“You can’t be an idiot right now, Max. Do you want to rent forever? I don’t, I want a house. “
I tried to soothe her, “I want a house too. I’m gonna give you a house.” I had nightmares about being a homeowner. Once you buy a house, you’re stuck there for 30 years slowly paying it off. And then there’s the mowing the grass and painting, and all that homeowner stress that’s nonexistent to renters. I’ve thought about being a homeowner before but I thought I was too young and I guess my anxieties come from an unwillingness to be in my thirties and settled into a life that is boring and dreadful but would be the rest of my existence on this planet.
“You should stay out of Ladoga,” she said, like I don’t have friends in Charlotte who smoke weed all the time. I don’t smoke with them; frankly I’m afraid to spend too much time with them because they sell and I don’t want to get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m not a pothead anymore and I feel comfortable casually smoking with Danny every now and then because he’s not either. It’s just a casual thing.
“Really?” Was all I could manage in response.
“Really, Max, I don’t want you getting caught up in something that you could have easily avoided.”
We went on like that for a while and I realized that the only way to put the argument behind us was to tell her that I wouldn’t smoke anymore. So the next time I was in Ladoga and I saw Danny, I had to just say no. He didn’t press the issue, “you gotta keep your girl happy,” he said. He also said that he was happy his girlfriend smoked more than he did; she always had some on her and he didn’t have to worry about being nagged.
I don’t think there are more marijuana smokers in Ladoga than any neighboring town, but I could identify the smell of it from a young age. I know my father used to smoke in his tool shed in the backyard when I was growing up and he got upset if he ever saw any of us kids in there. When I was in college, we smoked a couple times together but it made me uncomfortable, like he would change his mind and decide to take off his belt and punish me mid rotation. I’m not sure if he still does it, but he told me that he had been smoking since he was in high school and never had any trouble because of it. “Weed never stopped me from doing my job, never had me acting a fool, that’s what alcohol is for.” And that is true, my father has been arrested for public drunkenness and assault because of fights he was involved in while drinking. I can get belligerent when I drink, but I’ve learned to pace myself so as to avoid conflict.
My neighbors growing up smoked often; they were known drug dealers and there was actually a drug bust when I was in high school. I saw it on the news, apparently they had a small garden of marijuana plants in the woods behind their house. My mother was glad to use them as an example to me and my siblings for what happened to people who did drugs. And my oldest brother, who I guess smoked then, would bring up my father, “he ain’t never got in trouble for smoking.” My mother would try to gloss over that. At first she lied, said that he didn’t smoke. But as we got older, she would use my father as the negative example. “You see how fat and lazy your daddy is? He didn’t used to be like that. It’s them funny cigarettes.”
It was enough to keep me away until I met people who had a life that I thought I wanted, who I could see weren’t derailed by their usage, that made it OK for me to try it for myself. Artists and seemingly freethinkers who weren’t bound by conventions, rebels if you will. I came to see that I was just another lemming, following others who followed someone else. But that was more a reaction to feeling too similar to others around me, who decried our reading assignments as English majors as too WASPY or Western and sought out post colonial writers from India, the Middle East, and Africa to tout as their literature gods. I couldn’t help but like them too, particularly Nurrudin Farah and Ama Ata Aidoo, writers from African countries that I knew little about before going to college. But when I started to feel that my ‘rebel’ friends were bastardizing the traditions of those writers, applying them to very superficial analysis of their very colonial American existence, I decided that I could define ‘rebel’ on my own and distanced myself from many of them; I kept the marijuana though, they were on to something with that. I didn’t mean to be so possessive of those writers, but it was my reflex as a black man in predominantly white classes to feel that I could relate more viscerally to the works than they ever could have. And reading a story by a classmate that followed the basic structure of Farah’s Maps, but with all the African characters replaced with the now extinct Eastern Cougar, and the setting in Western NC, sealed it for me that my peers never felt or internalized the postcolonial struggle of having identity and culture stripped from them; again, as a black man, who grew up in the south, I figured myself to be well acquainted with those things. The story by my classmate was novel, and I may have even expressed my support for it when we were all high in that classmate’s room discussing our work, but reading it once it was complete offended me for reasons that are hard to articulate. I guess it has something to with the fact that parallels between Somalis and the Eastern Cougar are a stretch and to replicate the structure of Maps, which is arguably one of the most well known novels to come out of Somalia, you invite the comparison and it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. I don’t think that my offense came from just being a black man, though, and there were also white classmates who expressed offense; it’s mostly about an understanding of what writers like Farah was trying to accomplish, to show how their world had been turned upside down and when it was rightside up again, there were new rules and rulers that they had no say in constructing or electing, and the life that they had known before was gone. The sad fate of the eastern cougar is another story all together and deserves a tradition of its own.
But, ideological differences with marijuana smokers wouldn’t make me condemn the drug; it didn’t make people short-sighted, it only enabled their inability to see their shortcomings because they surrounded themselves with like-minded people who couldn’t see any further than they could and therefore offered no incentive to rethink their position.
And I guess that was Mary’s point. I was being willfully shortsighted.
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