To Lando, with affection

Never go into a small room in the basement of a bar. Nothing good happens there – ever.

However, being just barely intoxicated – the kind of buzz where you’ll do things you normally wouldn’t but where you are still able to remember whatever it is that you do – I didn’t take this advice on a recent night. And the consequences were nothing short of mind-numbing.

The setting: A college bar called “The Grotto at Capone’s,” one of those flair-riddled bars with the kind of overblown kitsch that makes you feel like you’re in your grandmother’s basement, only a lot cleaner.

The notorious Chicago gangster is well represented here. Tommy guns line the walls, pictures of Capone with a freshly lit cigar between his teeth are within eyeshot of any particular place as is, of course, his famous mug shot.

The Grotto used to be a hippy bar, full of patchouli-oiled, dred-locked hobo co-eds who would sip microbrews and sneak hits off a bowl in the bathroom.

Those were the good old days, and I wanted to return to them one last time.
The bar was already filling-up when my best friend – who happens to be old pals with the manager – led me down a short hallway, through a door with the feel and look of balsa wood and into the break room, a small space lit by two, long fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling.

The room was full of shit – cigarette butts littered the floor, various hardware implements were thrown in the corner, un-matching chairs circled around a white thrift store table.

It didn’t take long for things to get down to brass tacks.

The manager packed weed so tightly into a short, glass bowl that I thought a marijuana diamond would emerge from the ashes of the last hit.

Four semi-intoxicated men sat at the table. Something about gangster rap was uttered and then the bowl – with a skull and crossbones emblazoned on the glass (which didn’t ally my fears one bit) – made its crazed carousel from hand to hand to hand to hand.

I can’t speak for the others, as pot packs a different punch for everyone, but this is how the session went for me.

After hit No. 1: Rising euphoria.
After hit No. 2: Growing concern.
After hit No. 3: Loss of feeling of feet.
After hit No. 4: Complete panic.

For the sometimes pot puffer, smoking with professional pot-partakers is dangerous in two ways.

First, you don’t want to seem like some kind of pot pussy, so you try to keep up. And you better inhale, because they’re watching you. “Are they watching me? I think they’re watching me. Oh my god, are they watching me?”

Second…well, fuck it. You just get blown out of your mind.

The only reason we left that room was because the weed had been cashed. What wasn’t cashed was my tab, and the four of us had every intention of taking this lightheadedness to BuzzCon 4.

As we emerged from the man cave/pot den, the bar seemed to be overflowing. It seemed like every slut and douche bag multiplied themselves five times over, like Gremlins do – with the bubbles on their back that steam and froth after they get wet, eventually spewing forth a new
Gremlin from each back pod.

This was not a pleasant thought.

Neither was the fact that we were in a dimly lit basement with capacity for about 100 but was filled with 200. One staircase, 200 people, someone drops a cigarette, bar lights on fire, mob scene to escape flesh melting fire, pathetic death.

At this point my mind was reeling. I scared two women I was talking to because I told one of them they’d never get a job because corporate America was “a big slut that fucks everybody.”

They hastily moved to another table.

The air was thick and my ears had a constant furry buzz in them, like someone was ripping apart a pad of steel wool inside my eardrums. I sipped a pint of PBR and told my friend that we should go outside for some fresh air.

Outside, I made a mistake of lighting a cigarette. It seemed like it was 10 minutes, but I took probably only four puffs. Then my legs started to give way, like my torso was being held up with over-cooked angel hair pasta. I was laughing the whole time – for no reason – and reminiscing about the time I took a landscape rock from outside the “old bar” and threw it at a frat establishment across the parking lot.

Turned out I almost hit a cop in the head. My friends at the time told me to rush into a video store in the area, but I never made it. The cop came up like gangbusters and asked me “what the fuck are you doing, you asshole?” and took my information. The stars aligned, however, and he was called to more pressing matters.

So by this time, me and my pasta legs noodled our way back down to the basement.

By now, the entire scene was a sea of tube tops, popped-collars, cleavage, gelled hair and high heels. It moved and began to drive itself into a massive, whirling mess. IT whirled faster and faster, tighter and tighter, and I thought that at any moment the energy would either crack space-time and usher in some kind of demon legion or create a black hole that would suck us all to another dimension.

It was now that I swore the manager laced the pot with crystal meth or crystal light or some kind of heavy shit that has crystals in it.

I had to leave.

“Dude, I’m out,” I said to my friend, now shooting a glass of Jameson, which made me puke in me head.
“Just hold on, you’re fine,” he said.
“Dude, I’m out.”
“What the fuck? Just stay. You’re freaking out.”
“Dude, I’m out.”
“Why? Now you’re freaking me out.”
“Dude, I’m out.”

And then I was.

I made my way through the Capone mob, past the two girls and frat guys that seemed to be 10 feet tall at the time. They reminded me of oak trees.

I made it up the stairs, clutching the railing for dear life – literally – through the upstairs malay and in to the street.

I made a zig-zag pattern through the parking lot and somehow ended up – ok, purposefully ended up – at the Campus Kitchen Chinese restaurant, an establishment that specializes in mystery meat concoctions that are sucked up with reckless abandon by drunk college kids who throw food at the help and scream about the pussy their going to get later with voices that could cut through marble.

I ordered a pint of chicken lo mein and a side of crab rangoons. I paid at 1:30 a.m. and got the meal at 1:45 a.m., but it actually took 45 minutes to make the food.

As I stumbled out, I was looking for some ambiance. I like to be inspired when I’m stoned.

The WMU campus would be perfect, I thought.

So I made my way in to the heart of this fine institution – my alma mater – a place where you go when you can’t get into MSU or U of M. In the hazy, yellowness of the streetlights, I ate my rangoons and a deep blanket of calm wrapped around me. A campus cop drove by and I waved.

He didn’t wave back.

I walked over to the Honors College, where I’d spent many semesters, and looked at my image in the mirrored front door for probably 10 minutes, noting the way the rangoons greased-up my lips and admiring how well I chew my food.

The college’s dean, a man who I’d had many philosophical conversations with, would have been so proud.

The lo mein had to be eaten in a more quiet setting. The paranoia was setting in quick now. Ten freshmen drunks were making their way back to their dorm and I didn’t want to be spotted, so I found a pine tree and sat underneath it on a bed of wet wood chips.

After each bite, I looked over both my shoulders, like I was some kind of cave man looking for a horde to come over a non-existent hill in the distance. I’ve never finished a pint of lo mein, but I did that night. Even the soybean stragglers were slurped up.

Thirst overwhelmed me now, probably from the MSG. Water? No. Salt-splattered, dirt-encrusted snowbanks? Yes. I took a handful and ate it like a snow cone. I must have looked like a transient with nothing to lose.

Now to get home, about a mile and a half away.

I walked gingerly. Why is it that, when your mind is swimming in THC, that everything you want takes forever and everything you don’t want takes a few seconds?

I cut through campus, avoiding people like they had darts tipped with the AIDS virus that they intended on throwing at me. I ducked behind bushes, dumpsters, cars. A few people honked at me as they drove by, and my heart jumped against my rib cage.

One last hurdle.

I tried to time my walk across Stadium Drive so that the least amount of cars would be to my right and left, and I timed it perfectly. Running would have looked too strange, but I had to do something different. A regular gait would not do, so I chewed my fingernails as I crossed the five lanes.

Up the hill, down the hill, then up another hill, next to the football stadium. I tried to jump the fence and get on the field, where I intended to run the entire length of the gridiron for the only reason that I was stoned. Seeing the outlines on the snow of other people’s failed attempts, I gave up, imagining a broken leg, collar bone, face, and other assorted maladies.

I was now five minutes away from my flannel sheets.

Up another hill and I ended up at East Hall, overlooking the city. I screamed with all I could “I
LOVE YOU!” and scampered off, down a staircase that leads to my street. It was so packed with snow and ice – from snowboarders, residential skiers and drunk stoners like myself – that I had to schuss my way down, which was easy because my kicks have no traction. I had to hunch the whole way, like some kind of half-alive Quasimodo, and I’m sure it appeared to the sober observer that I was about to toss the recently ingested lo mein onto the dirty snow.

I made it home unscathed, however. In the bathroom, I flipped on the lights and peered into the mirror. It looked like my eyes just had an artery explode in them. Red, everywhere, like a thousand tiny blood drenched streets converging together in a twisted, non-sensical pattern drawn up by a city planner on an acid trip.

But all was well. I was safe.

I went to bed with my shoes on.