by John Hodgman
This did not end up happening. Jonathan took the car keys away from me. We said good-bye to our new friends, who seemed happy to leave. I do not know where they went in their lives after that, but I have learned to be comfortable with that. Jonathan and I went back to the house. We probably watched a movie or worked on a puzzle. I don’t remember. It was nice to be home.
That night, Jonathan was taken by witches. He should have listened to me. I miss my friend.
Pills Are Science
Obviously, Jonathan Coulton was not taken by witches and replaced with a duplicate Jonathan Coulton, a bearded, pop-folky golem made of cursed wax and twine. He is just fine.
But I was not lying about the marijuana, and now I feel I owe some explanation to my children, who may be reading this. Children, here is the truth: I like marijuana. Not often. And never when you are around. I am a grown-up; I like marijuana pills; and from time to time I eat them.
I appreciate that this conversation is awkward. I remember when my mom made her own marijuana confession, and she didn’t have the decency to write it in a book so that I could just quickly close it and walk away. She cornered me in a hotel room in the mid-afternoon. I was about twenty-one, I suppose, and we were all on a trip to Seattle. There was some professional reason for this, a nursing conference or something. But that was an excuse. They would bribe me with a plane or train ticket and I would take it because (a) Seattle in the early ’90s! And (b) I loved them and (c) I was growing up, and we all knew we would not be taking family trips like this for much longer.
So maybe that is why she seized this moment to say, “I tried marijuana a couple of times in college. I didn’t like it.”
I don’t recall if I believed her story or not. I was concentrating too hard on staring into the middle distance, waiting until it would be acceptable for me to leave the hotel as planned on my own and drink some beer and listen to some grunge-rock music. There are few things I dislike more than beer and rock clubs, but you have to understand I was experimenting at that time. It’s embarrassing and I apologize.
I also don’t recall if I told her the truth when she asked if I had ever tried marijuana. I had, just once, and not that long before.
The first time I had marijuana was in the South End of Boston with Michael and Kenny. Kenny was a projectionist at the Coolidge Corner Theater where I had worked summers and vacations. He was tall and quiet and wore fedoras and was gay. He had a Doberman pinscher with a girl’s name that I am ashamed to say I have forgotten. Let’s call her Alice.
The group at the Coolidge was a mix of young people like me and an older crowd, mostly artists, for whom it was a night job. I had become very close friends with some people at the Coolidge, but Kenny was not one of them. He was shy. Michael, the man who today would be Kenny’s husband, often kept Kenny company at Coolidge and was his bright and loquacious conduit to the world. One day, Kenny showed up with an eye patch. He had gone blind in one eye because, we all soon learned, he was dying of AIDS. Alice, meanwhile, was dying of sadness.
Kenny got worse and stopped coming to work. Around this time Michael invited me to lunch at their house on a Saturday afternoon, one of a series of good-bye lunches he was arranging. And even though I didn’t know them well and no part of me wanted to do this, I knew that you cannot say no to such an invitation. And now, children, you know this too.
They lived in three tiny rooms in the South End. I don’t remember much of lunch other than that the food was good and Michael was funny and Alice was sad and Kenny was quiet and brave and his eye patch looked amazing. Small comforts. After lunch we went from one tiny room to another, and Michael drew the blinds and asked, “Would you be interested in smoking some pot?” Which is slang for marijuana.
I was honestly not interested, and Michael seemed prepared to accept that answer, even to anticipate it. But then he mentioned that he had the same marijuana source as the Kennedy family. Well, look. I enjoy the finer things. And I wasn’t going to turn down the chance to be a part of history. So I smoked.
By this time I probably had already begun smoking cigarettes. I have asthma, and cigarettes would eventually kill my mother, who could not have been smarter or more unselfish in life except in this one very specific area. I inherited her dumbness regarding cigarettes for the same dumb reason many dumbs do: it feels good, once it stops feeling terrible. And plus no one is ever going to die, so why not?
But I also smoked cigarettes for another reason: they were legal.
I am not against drugs. I love drugs. I have taken them all my life. I have been sucking on a bronchial dilator since I was younger than you, children, along with an increasingly exotic array of inhaled steroids and antihistamines. Once I stole a handful of Vicodins from my friend’s dorm room after he broke his leg, and I don’t apologize for it. Because pills are science.
I like pills for the same reason that I prefer liquor to wine. Gin and whiskey are chemistry, carefully formulated and distilled to create a single repeatable experiment in intoxication, the same precise flavor and effect across the brand, bottle after bottle, glass after glass.
Wine, on the other hand, is like religion: it’s mysterious, sometimes literally opaque, and there are too many kinds of it. You never really know if a particular wine is good or bad; you just have to take it on faith from some judgy wine priest, an initiate to its mysteries. And wine is also like religion because the people who really get into it tend to be fucking unbearable.
But marijuana was worse. It was witchcraft, a dank and unpredictable weed pulled from the earth like screaming mandrake roots, delivered to your dorm room by some glassy-eyed druid with bad-smelling hair, and ritually burned in a brazier. More important: it was illegal everywhere and all the time back then, and, children, you know I was a good boy. I didn’t even taste alcohol until I was eighteen, and then only in England, where the drinking age was eighteen. That’s how far I was willing to go to follow the rules.
But now with Kenny and Michael and Alice, I smoked marijuana for the first time. We didn’t talk much, and what I remember most was the sound of Alice’s occasional long dog sighs, and around them that silence, getting warmer and softer. I felt the room fold and unfold around that silence. I was afraid to break it, because I didn’t know what would come out of my mouth. And that was how we said good-bye: by not speaking, in a room that contained cruelly three phenomena that would also soon pass on—two men unable to marry each other, AIDS as a certain death sentence, and adults hiding from their neighbors behind closed blinds as they take quiet, sad communion in each other over their Kennedy-grade chronic.
So yes, children: if you are offered to share comfort in marijuana with a dying man and the man and dog who love him, I will support that decision. If you are offered marijuana at a party by a drummer, on the other hand, do not do it.
I never meaningfully tried marijuana again until I was forty-one. Then I began experimenting. Two reasons drove this decision. One, my metabolism was changing, and I figured that marijuana is probably less fattening than my nightly martini gallon. And two, as it has been legalized or decriminalized in various states and commonwealths, it has been regulated. The doses are state measured and chemically predictable. You can go into a shop in Seattle and a very nice man or woman with impressive tattoos will describe to you the very specific effects of each micro-strain. They will guide you through the world of innovation that legality has fostered: they are making marijuana into strips and tinctures and cookies and sodas and restorative soaking baths and things they call mints but we all know they are pills. The packaging for these items is well designed with contemporary typefaces without serifs or a single Grateful Dead dancing bear. And where once you would have been smoking marijuana out of a pipe shaped like a three-eyed wizard skull wearing a top hat, now you vaporize it in any one of a number of beautiful glowing iPhones. Once the new weed entrepreneurs essentially put marijuana into an asthma inhaler for me, who
was I to say no?
But before you take this as a complete endorsement, children, please heed these fatherly warnings.
Your brains and bodies are working at peak power right now; give them time to do their thing. Don’t undercut them with marijuana now. Wait until they begin to break down and betray you with knee pain and heel spurs and undefinable sadness. Then—YOU MAY GO FOR IT.
Wait! Don’t go for it! First make sure you are not an addictive personality and are otherwise healthy, stable, and part of a functioning emotional support network.
And also that you are an adult who has finished college and/or are established in a career you love. While I sort of love the fact that the tattooed smiling weed pharmacists of Seattle get to work legally and seemingly lucratively in a field they clearly love, DO NOT BECOME ONE.
And maybe wait till you’re forty.
OK? Good. Now GO FOR MARIJUANA.
But wait, my forty-year-old children! Before you begin your own experimentation, listen to my chilling true story. It follows.
Daddy Pitchfork
A couple of years ago, when I was truly in the prime of my midlife marijuana research, I was invited to speak at a college. It happens from time to time that colleges invite me to stand in a gym or a multipurpose room at the campus center and perform my imitation of stand-up comedy for students who are inevitably half-listening while wearing their pajamas. I enjoy doing this. I like sharing my life wisdom with young people. And usually on college campuses, unlike most American cities, you can get food after the show. There is usually one diner or sub shop or food truck open very late where I can get an extremely ill-advised steak bomb or scrapple, egg, and cheese hoagie with hash browns in it that I can eat by myself in my hotel room while watching reruns of Friends dubbed in French, if the college is near the Canadian border. That happened once. It was a worldly experience.
I was especially excited to speak at this college, though, because my appearance was scheduled for 4/20, a marijuana-specific date that I know about. And because college is where marijuana lives, and because Jonathan Coulton was nowhere nearby to stop me from making really good decisions about my life, I predicted that those kids would love me and give me marijuana.
I will not reveal the name of this particular college. I will only say that it is a lovely, small liberal arts college in the northern part of the American South. I had been asked to give the school’s annual Samuel Clemens Address. Now as you know, I am striving to be more candid and vulnerable in my storytelling, so I feel that I can confess to you that I know very little about Mark Twain. I have never read Huckleberry Finn all the way through. I have never read Tom Sawyer at all. In eighth grade we read Pudd’nhead Wilson, the one about fingerprinting and race ambiguity. Then I went to an alternative high school and skipped most traditional American lit to read One Hundred Years of Solitude twice. This is a very embarrassing thing for an American humorist with a mustache to admit, but I am done lying to you.
The fullness of my Mark Twain knowledge was that he had a big white mustache and wore a white suit, and that the actor Hal Holbrook made a career of impersonating him onstage. Here I felt a kinship, as this is the same as my own stage show, except I impersonate myself. I know that his real name was Samuel Clemens and that “Mark Twain” was an old steamboating term that a steamboatman would yell after measuring the river’s depth. “Mark Twain” meant the boat had two fathoms of water beneath it, which is to say: safe for steamin’. I learned that fact when I was eight from a toy robot called 2XL that asked you trivia questions. As I type that, I realize that the many hours I spent alone on the floor of my room answering the trivia questions encoded on the eight-track tape you shoved into 2XL’s belly still provide the core of my world knowledge today. 2XL was my Socrates.
I explained these deficits to the professor who invited me to give the lecture. To protect his privacy I will call him Mark Ta-ree, or “three fathoms of muddy depth!” as riverboating is apparently the best source for pseudonyms. He was a Twainologist, and so I felt especially nervous, but Professor Mark was reassuring. He said I had nothing to worry about. His department just had some money set aside for this annual Clemens Address, which he used to bring down comedians and writers he enjoys. I didn’t have to say anything about Mark Twain at all. “Just come down and do some comedy and hang out,” he said. Once I realized we were both opportunistic frauds, I felt much more comfortable.
I liked Professor Mark instantly, even though he liked me. He was about fifty years old at the time, not from the South but the American Southwest, and he was friendly in a way that a lot of white guys from those regions can be when meeting other white guys, which is to say instantly friendly and, to a person from New England, unnervingly so. He was there to greet me at the Campus Guest House, where I was to stay. I opened the door and Professor Mark was just there in the foyer. He smiled and said a big “Hey, buddy!” and I thought I was going to be murdered.
But he did not murder me: he showed me around the house. He showed me the living room and the screened-in porch overlooking the wandering, silvery river (fathoms unknown). He showed me the two bedrooms upstairs and then back down to the little kitchen with an array of Panera Bread sandwiches and a bottle of bourbon he had left in tribute. It was really nice. I said, “Is this really all for me?”
And he said, “Well, I was hoping I could change my clothes here,” which is not something you expect or desire to hear from someone you have just met.
I said, “Right now?”
And Professor Mark said no, no, no. He explained that he lived forty minutes away. Rather than make the round trip home to change before the Clemens Address, he was hoping it would be OK for him to use the spare bedroom upstairs to change into his suit and tie.
“But don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t be in your hair. I’m going to go take a walk and let you rest for a couple of hours. Then I’ll take you over to the Address. So go ahead and feel free to shove all the chicken from those Panera Bread sandwiches in your mouth while pacing back and forth in a full-on, preshow calorie panic, and then wonder if I would notice if you drank half that bottle of bourbon before I came back to change clothes and bring you over to the show.”
He did not say that, of course. There was no way he was going to know that that was exactly what I was going to do. I did eat all the chicken and threw away the bread, but I didn’t drink the whiskey. Instead I went upstairs to fall into a Panera-induced, deep, dreamless nap, the cotton nubs of the white bedspread digging deep into my cheek. Then I woke up and got dressed in my three-piece corduroy suit: a terrible outfit for even the north of the American South on a muggy spring evening, but it was the closest thing to Mark Twain cosplay I owned.
Professor Mark had come back while I slept, which is not as creepy as it sounds. Apparently he was changing into his nice clothes at the same time as I was, in the other bedroom down the hall. And when I opened my bedroom door, he opened his bedroom door at the exact same moment, and there we were in our best suits, facing each other across the little landing. I thought it was like the opening of a sitcom, or a heist movie about two guys planning to rob a small liberal arts college. But Professor Mark nailed it. “Look at us,” he said. “We look like two brothers going to a wedding.”
“That is a good line,” I said. “I guess that is why you are an expert Twainologist.”
We walked across campus together, two brothers in their suits in the golden glow of a northern southern twilight. It was a beautiful campus, less manicured than most, full of lush lawns rambling down to the river, crossed with slithery paths of tarmac upon which beautiful young people floated by on their strong, jogging legs or various iterations of wheels. They all greeted the professor, and he greeted them, one by one: “Hello, Cody. Hello, Paige. Hello, Trip.” (Those were their names.)
One by one he would ask them, “Are you coming to the Clemens Address tonight?”
And one by
one they would smile and say, “Nope!”
Young people are such natural sociopaths. They could have lied and said, “Yes.” Professor Mark would never have noticed their absence when they didn’t show up. But why should they bother? Why lie to spare the non-feelings of this faceless older mannequin who makes mouth noises about Mark Twain to them twice a week? They were asked a question, and so they gave an honest answer: nope!
Cody in particular was taken aback by the question, and answered it only with a face full of guileless confusion.
What? his face seemed to say.
What did you ask? Am I going to the Samuel Clemens Address tonight? Well, let me think. Even if I had bothered to remember this thing you’ve been talking about in class for weeks (which you have to admit, professor, is a pretty unreasonable expectation), even then the answer would probably be: no.
Because this is Saturday! And may I remind you, professor, it is also 4/20. So as for tonight, I hadn’t really thought it through, but I think I’ll probably smoke marijuana. In fact, now that I say it out loud, I’m going to make it a plan. I’m going to smoke a little, and drink a little, and maybe go to a party. I’ve heard Paige is having a naked party tonight. (That is something we young people do because we all look good naked and are too young to give a shit about our furniture.) And after that naked party I’ll probably go out and eat two or three whole pizzas, or a steak bomb. But rather than going sadly back to my room to watch Friends reruns, I will instead go back to the party. And surprisingly I will be thinner and better looking than when I left, because I have the metabolism of a white-hot sun.
Then I’ll probably have sex with a man or a woman—we don’t really use labels anymore. And after that, I’m not really sure. I might just go back to my dorm room and watch a movie. Yeah. I’ll probably just watch a nostalgic movie from my childhood. Because even though I am physically mature, inside I’m still very much a child who is terrified by the drunken, high, naked, fornicating adult I’ve become.