The Pothole

The Pothole 1701 words

It was 1994, and I still considered myself a recent graduate. Technically, I was an adult. Emotionally, I looked back on getting caught with chewing gum in class and still thought it might permanently ruin my future. I wasn't rebellious or overly adventurous. I was the girl who’d gotten 98% A’s for the majority of high school and walked the straight and narrow line each day hoping to stay as far under the radar as possible.  

Scott had graduated the year before me. We dated briefly while we were both in school together. Although we'd broken up, we still occasionally hung out. We would spend hours talking on the phone at night. Halfway through our conversations, Scott would simply...stop talking.

"Scott?"

Nothing.

"Scott?"

Silence.

Each time, I genuinely believed he had fallen asleep. But one night I realized he hadn't suddenly developed narcolepsy. He was just higher than a kite. Sixteen-year-old me had been so naive. I’d never even seen drugs; just one person on them. We broke up soon after this realization, but remained friends. 

So when Scott called and asked if I wanted to see a movie, it was not out of the range of normal. What wasn't normal was everything that happened after that. Instead of heading straight toward the theater, Scott pulled into a quiet parking lot. He reached into the console and pulled out what looked like a crooked little cigarette.

"You want to smoke?"

It took me a second to understand what he meant.

"You mean...marijuana?"

He laughed.

"Yeah."

Every anti-drug commercial I'd ever seen flashed through my head. You know the ‘80’s commercials: This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Que, the frying pan, the egg and the dramatic music. At no point in that commercial did they actually prepare me for what to do if an ex-boyfriend casually offered it to me before a movie.

I hesitated for maybe three seconds. Then the eighteen-year-old part of me, the one desperate to appear cool, won the argument in my brain.

So I nonchalantly said, "Sure."

Scott lit the end and handed it to me. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I'd seen people smoke in movies. So, I mean, how hard could it be?

I watched the tip of the doobie glow bright orange as I inflated my chest as big as it would go. The smoke hit me like a baseball bat. It felt like someone had reached inside my torso with a blowtorch and singed the ends of my lungs. 

I coughed. Then I coughed harder. Then I entered a coughing fit so violent I briefly wondered if lungs could simply fall out.

Scott looked over.

"Ya good?"

I wiped tears from my eyes.

"Yeah."

I wheezed.

"I'm fine."

I was not fine. I had just assaulted my respiratory system in the first degree.

A minute passed. Nothing happened. I looked over at Scott. He looked normal. He wasn't floating or seeing dragons, at least that I could tell. He certainly wasn't acting like that egg I'd seen on the frying pan in the commercials. Maybe people exaggerated marijuana. Maybe my dramatic coughing fit was just due to inexperience; virgin lungs.

So I took another hit. A little coughing, but still nothing. Another. Nothing. Clearly, I thought, this stuff doesn't work on me. Then it did.

I didn’t feel it all at once. It crept on quietly, like someone slowly turning the dimmer switch on a strange new reality.

My arms felt heavy. My legs felt numb, but also like bugs were crawling under my skin. I looked at the clock and swore that no time had gone by at all. Time seemed to stretch out, like one minute became an hour. Sounds became louder. I swear I could see my heart through my shirt, beating from the inside of my chest.  

Then came the paranoia. Not a little paranoia like, "Did I lock my car?" I'm talking about full-blown, cinematic, Oscar-worthy paranoia. Somewhere deep inside my brain, every reasonable thought had packed its bags and left.

As Scott drove us toward the theater, I contemplated everything. Why was he so quiet? Had he always been this quiet? How was he able to drive right now? Why did he keep glancing in the rear view mirror? Was someone following us? Were we following someone? Did he know I knew? But what did I know? I had no idea. But apparently he knew.

Once at the theater, we bought tickets for Drop Zone starring Wesley Snipes. I have almost no memory of the actual plot. I do know a ton of people jumped out of airplanes. There were lots of explosions. There was a bad guy…

The one thing I clearly remember believing, is that I had somehow become part of the movie. Every action and reaction made my heartbeat surge full throttle and I could hear it in my ears as if it had relocated. All the loud sounds felt like they were happening either to me or directly behind me.  

I’m not being metaphorical when I say, these things were literally happening to me at that moment.

No exaggeration.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

I became convinced everyone in the theater could hear it too. Could they tell? Did my eyes look weird? Were they bloodshot? Were my pupils enormous? Were my pupils too small? Did I still have pupils? Could they tell this was my first time? Why was that woman eating popcorn so loudly? Was she staring at me? No. Definitely yes. Absolutely yes. She knows. She knows everything.

Meanwhile, Scott appeared completely relaxed. He watched the movie. He laughed at appropriate moments. He ate candy. How? How was he functioning like a regular human being while my brain had become its own hostage negotiator?

After what seemed like a decade, the movie ended, I had developed a new theory. The marijuana had to be laced with something. It was the only feasible explanation. Because this couldn't possibly be what people voluntarily did for fun. I’d been under the impression that marijuana made people giggle and made them feel light-hearted and happy.

Nobody had mentioned the sensory overwhelm and the impending feeling of doom with an imminent time lapse giving you hours and hours to contemplate your own demise.  

The drive home was infinitely worse. It wasn't just dark out. It was a Michael Myers - Halloween night, “I hear a chainsaw”, scary dark.  

The roads were mostly empty. Scott kept driving. He made a left turn and then a right. We came up to another road and another stoplight. Was this the way to my house? I couldn't remember. Maybe we'd passed it. What if he wasn't taking me home at all? OMG, this was it. Tomorrow my parents would have to report me missing. The investigators would discover my remains in not just one county, but several. I couldn’t believe this was happening. 

I sat perfectly still. 

“Just act normal”, I told myself.  

Scenes from Horror Movies 101 were playing in my head. People who panic die first. Make conversation. If you hear scary music start to play, it’s all over…

"So..."

My voice sounded strange.

"...how's work?"

Scott answered casually.

I heard approximately none of what he said because I was busy wondering whether this would be the last conversation of my life. I was in the middle of thinking about how I could open the car door and roll out if necessary, when Scott pulled into my driveway.

We were in my driveway; not an abandoned warehouse, not in a field in the middle of nowhere with a swamp. We were at my address. Scott unlocked the car doors. 

He smiled. "Catch ya on the flip!"

That was it. No murder. No kidnapping. No dismemberment. Just a retro worded invitation to get together again when we were both in town.

I took a deep breath and climbed out of the car. My lungs felt sunburned. Walking felt almost impossible. My feet had transformed into elephant hooves. Each step landed with the subtlety of a wrecking ball.  

In my mind, I heard:

THUD.

THUD.

THUD.

The porch light had been left on. My dad was waiting up for me inside. He was definitely going to know. Either by appearance or smell, he'd look at me once and immediately accuse me of the worst crime in humanity.

 "You, little lady, have been smoking marijuana."

I opened the door. There he was, watching television.

He glanced up. "Hey."

"Hey." Just keep walking…

Don't stop. Don't breathe weird. Don't blink suspiciously. Actually don’t blink, at all. Somehow, defying universal odds, I made it to my bedroom. I didn't even put pajamas on. I collapsed face down onto my bed. Or at least I thought I did.

Instead, I spent what felt like hours falling into my mattress over and over again. I'd hit the bed. Then I'd fall again. Then again. It was like my body had become trapped in an Alice in Wonderland amusement park ride.

At some point I wondered if this was permanent. Maybe I'd be eighty years old, still falling into the same bed. OMG, what if this was my life now? As I contemplated life at that moment, exhaustion eventually won. I fell into bed for the last time and my body settled in for the night.  

When I woke up the next morning, the inside of my mouth felt like I ate a cat and my eyes were dry and pasty. But the room was still. I was still. Gravity had returned to normal. My heartbeat no longer echoed through my skull. I’d finally climbed out of the pothole. I sat up slowly, noticing that I had the clothes on that I was wearing the night before. I giggled as I realized that I was alive - completely, wonderfully and very much boringly alive.  

I don't know what surprised me more, that I survived my first experience with marijuana or that millions of people willingly repeated using it.

As for me, it was enough to give me perspective on two things; Marijuana is funny only in retrospect, and…

…I should have known better.