When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,90

throwing open the windows and telling me I smelled like a casino, it seemed that Hugh didn’t want me to quit. “You just need to cut back a little,” he told me.

Not being a smoker himself, he didn’t understand how agonizing that would be. It had been the same with alcohol; easier to stop altogether than to test myself every day. As far as getting wasted was concerned, I was definitely minor league. All I know is that I drank to get drunk, and I succeeded every night for over twenty years. For the most part, I was very predictable and bourgeois about it. I always waited until 8:00 p.m. to start drinking, and I almost always did it at home, most often at the typewriter. What began at age twenty-two as one beer per night eventually became five, followed by two tall Scotches, all on an empty stomach and within a period of ninety minutes. Dinner would sober me up a little and, after eating, I’d start smoking pot.

Worse than anything was the dullness of it, night after night the exact same story. Hugh didn’t smoke pot, and though he might have a cocktail, and maybe some wine with dinner, he’s never seemed dependent on it. At 11:00 you could talk to him on the phone, and he’d sound no different from the way he would at noon. Call me at 11:00, and after a minute or so I’d forget who I was talking to. Then I’d remember, and celebrate by taking another bong hit. Even worse was when I placed the call. “Yes,” I’d say. “May I please speak to . . . oh, you know. He has brownish hair? He drives a van with his name written on it?”

“Is this David?”

“Yes.”

“And you want to speak to your brother, Paul?”

“That’s it. Could you put him on, please?”

Most often I’d stay up until 3:00, rocking back and forth in my chair and thinking of the things I could do if I weren’t so fucked up. Hugh would go to bed at around midnight, and after he’d fallen asleep I would have dinner all over again. Physically I couldn’t have been hungry. It was just the pot talking. “Fry me an egg,” it would demand. “Make me a sandwich.” “Cut a piece of cheese and smear it with whatever’s on that shelf there.” We couldn’t keep a condiment for longer than a week, no matter how horrid or ridiculous it was.

“Where’s that Nigerian tica-tica sauce Oomafata brought us from Lagos last Tuesday?” Hugh would ask, and I’d say, “Tica-tica sauce? Never saw it.”

In New York I got my marijuana through a service. You called a number, recited your code name, and twenty minutes later an apple-cheeked NYU student would show up at your door. In his knapsack would be eight varieties of pot, each with its own clever name and distinctive flavor. Getting high on Thompson Street was the easiest thing in the world, but in Paris, I had no idea where to find such a college student. I knew a part of town where people lurked in the shadows. The way they whispered and beckoned was familiar, but as a foreigner I didn’t dare risk getting arrested. Then too, they were most likely selling moss, or the innards of horsehair sofas. The things I’ve bought from strangers in the dark would curl your hair.

You don’t withdraw from marijuana the way you do from speed or cocaine. The body doesn’t miss it, but the rest of you sure does. “I wonder what this would look like stoned.” I said this to myself twenty times a day, referring to everything from Notre Dame to the high-beamed ceiling in our new apartment. Pot made the normal look ten times better, so I could only imagine what it did to the extra-ordinary.

If I survived in Paris without getting high, it was only because I still had drinking to look forward to. The bottles in France are smaller than they are in the States, but the alcohol content is much higher. I’m no good at math but figured that five American beers equaled nine French ones. This meant I had to be vigilant about the recycling. Skip a day, and it would look like I’d had Belgium over.

In time I knew that my quota would increase, and then increase again. I wanted to quit before that happened, but practical concerns kept getting in the way. When drinking and working went hand in hand, it