Potluck Tao - Part 2
I drove across the parking lot, into sparse traffic, and headed for the tallest point I could see, the brown tipped halo of a sun burnt hill rising from the back of a faceless subdivision. We rode in silence, my hands clenching the wheel a bit too tightly, Patrick's hand making airplane motions out the window.
"I'm scared." My own voice startled me. I didn't intend to speak, but the words found their way from my stomach to my mouth.
"You gotta live a little. C'mon! It'll be an adventure! I gotta get your cherry on something." Patrick knew for all my swearing and marriages and children and frank talk about sex I was still a goody two shoes fraidy cat pot virgin.
"Ok. I'm gonna do it. It's not that. I'm just afraid. What if we get arrested? Can I drive home after? How long does it last? Will I freak out? What if I'm allergic?" I know I asked at least ten more questions, even more exotic questions about chemical compositions and heart rates and the simple cost of the stuff. Patrick just laughed.
"Geezus, girl. You're the bitchiest almost pothead I ever met."
I parked along a cement curb in front of the sorriest looking park in Southern California, a dirt bag of a park with wilted scrub and mounds of fire ants and a broken asphalt path leading to the top of the hill. We hiked halfway and sat in a drainage gutter filled with bits of trash and ruddy hardened dust, no shade to protect us, the patchwork of an almost yuppy town below us, a town baked by the sun and surrounded by ants and two old people grasping a white envelope and a green plastic lighter.
Patrick lit one of the joints. He showed me how to hold it between thumb and index finger, to inhale slowly, deliberately, deep into your lungs, hold smoke captive until it screams, expel through your nose. My first attempts were feeble, disjointed, full of coughing and the burning sensation of hot air against my throat. The joint kept burning out, I had to keep relighting it, and we sat for a long time, how long I'm unsure, lighting, inhaling, holding, exhaling, relighting, over and over.
I stared at a worker bee crawling over a browning sage bush. I stared at the flurry of ricochet wings and exoskeleton hips swollen with pollen. The most beautiful shimmer puff bee in the world. I don't know what Patrick stared at, if he stared at anything. We didn't speak. We just sat in the gutter and smoked, and somehow the smoking was enough, took the place of all those lost summer conversations, yanked me across miles of psychological hurdles, through denial, bargaining, anger, depression, straight to acceptance, straight to two old soulfriends letting life be life, bees be bees, pot be pot, death be death.
I know people say that sometimes the words spoken in high moments sound fantastic, other worldly, but in reality are common and dunce cap pothead dumb. But the only thing Patrick said that afternoon above that mosaic of normal suburban life, under the heat of the sun, amidst broken bottles and cigarette butts and miles of caked ground choked scrub, the one thing he said was the most poetic and beautiful and smart thing I've ever heard anyone say.
"Look at all of this, Birdie. When I die, I'm leaving you this planet. Look at it. It's yours."
7:18:12 AM 
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