When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,82

could anyone, really, make a habit of something so fundamentally unpleasant? When my sister Lisa started smoking, I forbade her to enter my bedroom with a lit cigarette. She could talk to me, but only from the other side of the threshold, and she had to avert her head when she exhaled. I did the same when my sister Gretchen started.

It wasn’t the smoke but the smell of it that bothered me. In later years I wouldn’t care so much, but at the time I found it depressing: the scent of neglect is how I thought of it. It wasn’t so noticeable in the rest of the house, but then again, the rest of the house was neglected. My room was clean and orderly, and if I’d had my way it would have smelled like an album jacket the moment you removed the plastic. That is to say, it would have smelled like anticipation.

Three

At the age of fourteen I accompanied a classmate to a Raleigh park. There we met with some friends of his and smoked a joint by the light of the moon. I don’t recall being high, but I do recall pretending to be high. My behavior was modeled on the whacked-out hippies I’d seen in movies and on TV, so basically I just laughed a lot, regardless of whether anything was funny. When I got home I woke my sisters and had them sniff my fingers. “Smell that?” I said. “It’s marijuana, or ‘grass,’ as we sometimes call it.”

I was proud to be the first in my family to smoke a joint, but once I had claimed the title, I became vehemently antidrug and remained that way until my freshman year of college. Throughout the first semester, I railed against my dorm mates: Pot was for losers. It pickled your brain and forced you into crummy state universities like this one.

I’d later think of how satisfying it must have been to them — how biblical, almost — to witness my complete turnaround. The reverend mother becomes the town slut, the prohibitionist a drunkard, and me a total pothead, and so quickly! It was just like you’d see in a made-for-TV movie:

FRIENDLY FELLOW FROM DOWN THE HALl: Oh, come on. One puff’s not going to hurt you.

ME: The heck it won’t! I’ve got some studying to do.

HANDSOME ROOMMATE OF THE FRIENDLY FELLOW DOWN THE HALL: Just let me give you a shotgun.

ME: A shotgun? What’s that?

AGAIN THE HANDSOME ROOMMATE: You lie back while I blow smoke into your mouth.

ME: Where do you want me to lie?

I remember returning to my room that night and covering my lamp with a silk scarf. The desk, the bed, the heavy, misshapen pottery projects: nothing was new, but everything was different; fresh somehow and worthy of interest. Grant a blind person the ability to see, and he might have behaved the way I did, slowly advancing across the room and marveling at everything before me: a folded shirt, a stack of books, a piece of corn bread wrapped in foil. “Amazing.” The tour ended with the mirror, and me standing in front of it with a turban on my head. Well, hello there, you, I thought.

I let a college kid give me a shotgun, and for the next twenty-three years my life revolved around getting high. It was pot, in fact, that led me to smoking tobacco. Ronnie and I were by the side of the highway, making our way to Canada, and I was whining about having no marijuana. The sameness of everything was getting on my nerves, and I asked if cigarettes made you feel any different.

Ronnie lit one and thought for a minute. “I guess they leave you sort of light-headed,” she told me.

“You mean, like, nauseous?”

“A little,” she said. And I decided that was good enough for me.

Four

As with pot, it was astonishing how quickly I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life was a play, and the prop mistress had finally shown up. Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill and then empty. My hands were at one with their labor, the way a cook’s might be, or a knitter’s.

“Well, that’s a hell of a reason to poison yourself,” my father said.

My mother, however, looked at the bright side. “Now I’ll know what to put in your Christmas stocking!” She put them in my Easter basket as well, entire cartons. Today it might seem trashy to see a young man