“I Inhaled, Dear Reader, Briefly”

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

TEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—6/28/10—I was brought up a Presbyterian. In Pasadena. In the 1950’s.

If you’re an anthropologist, just that one sentence, and pair of sentence fragments, tell you almost everything about me.

I was born harnessed to a wagon and, by God, I was going to pull that thing, straight and true, till I dropped in my tracks.

From infancy, since the time I could walk, I was on full academic scholarship at one tony school after another. My father was a lay analyst: there was no money for luxuries. A pair of patent leather pumps; a pair of Keds; a pair of saddle oxfords. No other shoes. No other shoes desired.

What I had in life more than sufficed: the love and loyalty of my extended family; the rigorous demands of my teachers; the California, then Greek, sunshine. I did what I was told, when I was told. I finished high school at 15, entered the university at 16, and never drank a sip of beer, never took a drag on a cigarette, never got beyond what we called heavy petting back then till my last semester of college.

That heavy petting, I’ll admit, nearly took the top of my head off: seems I’d found my one bête noir in life, damn it all, and it would take all those hours in pews and choir rooms and church camp at Balboa to enable me to put the brakes on. But that’s an entirely other, and much longer story.

This story is about drugs. So-called “recreational drugs.” And they, too—homegrown pot, hash, and pharmaceutical-grade cocaine (that latter discovered in the late 70’s in Paris—didn’t hold much interest for me, either.

The first time I smoked pot—and it was good stuff, grown by my botanist-neighbor-boyfriend, Dennis—was powerful medicine. I remember sputtering down a couple of tokes while pouring tea from a graceful if hefty, narrow-spouted teapot and, before I knew it, all the tea in the pot was on the table, in my lap, and on the floor.

Watching it flow out translucently was just such a trip.

My Presbyterian soul took me aside, then, for just one moment and said: “You’re in grad school, Idiot, on full scholarship, with a T.A. If you try this stuff again, you are NOT going to get your paper on Victorian Lit finished (or even begun), you’re NOT going to get your students’ essays graded. Hell, you’re not even going to make it out of the kitchen.”

So, I put aside childish things, and got what was left of my Presbyterian nose back on the grindstone.

Dennis went on to drop out of school, set up a marijuana plantation somewhere in Georgia, and work odd jobs till I lost track of him. Sweet boy, but utterly lost to the demon weed. Probably in jail now, alas.

Flash forward.

I had a few more isolated encounters with hash and coke and grass, but I still didn’t smoke or drink, and it took me some five decades even to start swearing in earnest (Bush and Cheney will do that to even a Presbyterian). Even four-letter words don’t come easy to a Pasadena-reared Presbyterian.

I still thought, though, a la Elizabeth Taylor, that in order to sleep with a man, he had to marry you, which made for a very colorful marital history. Mine wasn’t a case of sleeping around: it was a strange case of not sleeping around, unless I had a brace of diamonds on one left finger.

I took just about everything that came down the pike—political causes, advanced degrees, book deadlines, teaching; and, then, Reiki mastership and Iyengar Yoga education and teaching—very, very seriously.

I broke no laws. I returned no library books late. Ice cream—Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch—was my one carnal sin, and I repent every time I engulf a pint, which is often. (I often wish I were a Catholic.)

But I did not count on the advent of one wily antagonist into this somewhat orderly life of mine, and that was pain. Pain like I had never known it before (and this is a woman who’s experienced exploding ovarian cysts, abscesses of the jaw, scratched corneas, and one serious encounter with a Portuguese Man O’ War).

The pain I refer to now is lumbar-sacral spinal pain, before and after spinal fusion surgery performed on 20 May of this year, and the experience is (still, at worst) something like being hit across the iliac crest region of my back by . . . my beloved Jose Reyes or David Wright, boys who can really swing a bat.

The initial pain is followed by every muscle in my core seizing up and screaming bloody murder, which is why I’ve been on Dilaudid (To which I’m allergic. Very.), Percocet, and Ambien. These drugs, cheerfully produced and marketed by Big Pharma, are not nice substances. Mother Nature did not have a hand in their provenance. These drugs are addictive, have a s&^%load of side effects, cost big money, and don’t really do the job. You want more and more of them. You wake up crying for more and more of them. And they do not, and never will, have the accuracy of Reyes and Wright.

As palliatives for pain of the sort I have had since May 20, these drugs suck.

But they are legal.

They are legal, Dear Reader, in America, where alcohol and cigarettes and big fat cigars, which cause cirrhosis and cancer and emphysema, etc., etc. are for sale, no questions asked, at every corner store, every bodega, every Wal-mart.

Come one, come all: step right up for Percocet. It’s legal!

I wouldn’t be so incensed, so completely off my nut, so furious, if I had not just recently discovered that a couple of—two or three, to be precise—hits of not very high-grade, homegrown marijuana did not completely remove the clenching, raging lumbar-sacral pain for me.

A friend from a state on the O.C. where grass is legal brought me the tiniest, child’s-water-color-brush slender and not even a quarter-ounce in weight roach (the ones we made in the 70’s used to look like cheese sticks by comparison to this little twig). I took two cautious Presbyterian inhalations and, in about five minutes, I was not one tiny bit high, my lumbar musculature had “let go,” and I relaxed back on my 12 prop-pillows in peace. For the first time in weeks.

Houston, we have a problem here.

Percocet and Methodone and Ambien and Clonazepam and Gabapentin are legal. They’re monitored and quality-controlled, and kept out of the hands of kids and maniacs. But pot—simple, homely, ages-old pot—at least in New Jersey, will get you fines and prison time that’ll make your head spin off at the atlas vertebra.

I get it. I understand. Don’t sell pot to kids. Don’t sell booze to kids, either, while you’re at it. Don’t let pot-smokers or booze-drinkers drive. (Or Blackberry texters, while we’re at it, too.) Regulate who grows and sells pot like we regulate who produces and sells booze . . . or spinach or kale or cauliflower.

But, for God’s sake, make this friendly little substance available to people like me, and a couple of my other acquaintances who just happen to have Stage 4 cancer—without calling in the men in blue like those of us who use pot for pain are “Made Men of The Mob.”

I can’t get any more grass now, as it would involve breaking the laws of New York and New Jersey, and purchasing something questionable—oregano, praying mantis dung, bits of hummingbird nest?—from some demented dealer I don’t know from Adam.

I’m a Presbyterian, remember? I’m risk-averse.

So, it’s back to the seizing pain and the narcotics, on which I’m now uselessly hooked; and living in a state where the big fat Governor is dragging his great big feet on legalizing something which it is in our power to regulate and manage. Believe me, we can do this. If we can regulate lottery tickets, the issuance of drivers’ licenses, doling out beauticians’ permits, and assuring the public their sushi isn’t made of salamander feet, we can manage the production and sale of marijuana.

Hell, we should have enough 50-70-year-old Presbyterians around in New Jersey to accomplish this. Let us run the pot emporia.