by Jason Good
“Yes!” Dad responds. “Do you have something like that?”
Kyle nods. “You’re gonna want a product that’s indica dominant,” he says, pointing to one of the buds. “The Sour Monkey is popular.”
“Great,” Dad says. “How much should I get? Like half a pound?”
“Oh my God,” I blurt out with a sarcastic puff. I need Kyle to know that I am at least a little hip to what’s going down here.
But Kyle is in the moment, a moment that appears to be happening elsewhere, but a moment nonetheless. “Well, I think you’d probably go with just a few grams unless you’re a heavy user,” he says.
“Oh, I’m not a heavy user at all,” Dad says. “I haven’t really smoked any grass since the sixties, if you know what I mean.”
I close my eyes before rolling them. I fear Dad’s getting close to sharing the story of how he turned back on the road to Woodstock because of traffic.
Then Kyle looks at me and nods his head, cocky, like a bouncer at an exclusive club. Apparently, I can pick out some cannabis, too. I guess once you’re in, you’re in.
“I don’t want anything that’s going to make me anxious at all,” I tell him. “I’m not even sure I want to be creative.” I turn to Dad. “Last time I smoked pot I lost my sensation for pain and bit my fingernails until they bled.” Kyle’s disinterest is causing us to blabber. He’s the therapist who gets his patients to open up by remaining silent. I’m sure if he knew he was having that effect, he would have chosen to talk more.
“Okay, so you want something that’s gonna mellow you out?” he asks me. “I’d go with a blend that’s more sativa dominant.” Kyle motions to another bud. “The Harlequin is good for sinking into the couch and watching a movie. We recommend it for older people who don’t have much experience.”
“Perfect,” I say, embarrassed that my drug of choice is named after romance novels and my sixty-eight-year-old father’s after a surly primate. The Sour Monkey comes in a manly Mason jar; the Harlequin in a dainty pouch. I tuck it into my brassiere as we walk out.
We find Mom in the backseat of the car, listening to All Things Considered at an inaudible volume. “We got it,” Dad says, grunting his way into the passenger seat. “Now we have to go to Big Al’s because the vaporizers are overpriced here.”
Unalarmed by Dad’s sudden fluency in paraphernalia, Mom simply fastens her seatbelt and offers a friendly plea to avoid the freeway.
I haven’t been to a head shop in at least twenty years. Admittedly, I’m not even sure if they’re called head shops anymore. In college, my friends and I used to go to a place called Waterbeds and Stuff on High Street in Columbus, Ohio. I think drug paraphernalia stores in Ohio were illegal at the time, so this particular establishment chose to smatter the showroom with a few waterbeds and some velvet paintings of cats wearing pirate hats to make themselves appear legit. Though we always went there for the “stuff”—pipes, whip-its, bong extenders, pens that revealed a topless woman when turned upside down, monk figurines that popped an erection when you pressed on their heads—we also frequently bluffed interest in purchasing a waterbed. “Tell me about this particular model. Can I fill it with beer? Will the frame fit through the door of my trailer? Do you think my wife who’s also my cousin will like it? Does it come with a free monk statue?” We were such charming assholes.
After exiting the highway and turning onto University Avenue, the aroma of patchouli, Thai food, and liberal self-righteousness lets the three of us know we’ve entered Berkeley. I pull into a handicap spot across the street from Big Al’s and reach for the placard. Dad stops me, “I don’t think we should use that. I can walk.”
“Oh please,” I say. “Just think of it as an apology from the universe for giving you cancer. Really sorry that you’re going to die. Would letting you park anywhere you want make it any easier?” From then on, he never let the placard out of his sight.
Giant black speakers with red subwoofers frame the door to Big Al’s. They blast reggaeton, and from the look of helplessness on the security guard’s face, they’ve been at it for some time.
“I’ll be in the shoe store next door!” Mom says, and disappears, leaving Dad and me to embark on our second subversive experience of the day.
A man, who from his size I can only assume is Big Al, works the front. A wiry Turkish gent with a tattoo of a scorpion on his face mans the booth in back, and Dad marches straight toward him. I hang back to browse all the modern gadgets lining the walls, spotting a case containing electronic cigarettes. I haven’t smoked in ten years, but figure since my father has cancer and is currently talking to a man with a scorpion tattoo on his face, not to mention there’s a brown paper bag containing two different strains of pot sitting on the front seat of my parents’ car, that I, too, might be up for something a little weird.
I ask Big Al for a battery and a pack of cartridges, while checking the back of the store to see if Dad is looking and the front of the store in case Mom walks in. My heart is racing, like I’m fifteen again and shoplifting R.E.M.’s Murmur CD from the local record store. The last thing I want is for my parents to worry about me, or more accurately, to tell me I’m an idiot. I sign the credit card slip and walk briskly around the corner. When out of sight, I unwrap the components, screw them together, take a few puffs, nearly faint, throw them in a trash can, and then return a minute later to dig them out. No one in Berkeley finds this behavior remotely odd.
I stuff the cartridges and battery into my jeans pockets and returned to Big Al’s, where Dad is finishing up his consultation. They settled on a portable black handheld vaporizer for situations in which, as the Scorpion puts it, “You just need to take a few tugs while driving.” Dad’s other option, the Volcano, is not only painted to resemble a volcano but comes attached to a giant inflatable bag of some kind. It looks like the steampunk cousin of a dialysis machine.
After Dad pays in cash, because he’s still paranoid, we leave to fetch Mom next door, where she’s struggling to sort out her shoe options. Finally, she chooses ankle-length red leather boots, which I think will go quite nicely with our new vaporizer and e-cigs.
I drive the speed limit back to San Leandro. The equipment and drugs are all legal, but I still feel as if we’re trying to cross the border with a kilo of blow stashed in the engine block.
In the apartment, Dad and I head to the family room—Dad’s room. Mom joins us a few minutes later in her comfy evening clothes; a sure sign that she is supportive, or at least curious. I’ve only seen her sit in this room maybe half a dozen times. It’s so cluttered with laptops, cords, routers, and various other electronic boxes that she’s always done her best to avoid even peering in. “It’s just so full of wires,” she complains. And the fifty-inch television is “nothing but a box of strangers yelling at me.”
But this isn’t just Dad’s TV room; it’s also his personal nail salon. For reasons I may never understand, Dad maintains an alarmingly tight nail regimen. Upon meeting him, one would never guess he has an emery board and professional-grade clippers stowed in a lacquered, velvet-lined box that he purchased during a trip to Vietnam. I don’t know whether he saw that specific box and thought, “Finally! I’ve found an adequate home for my most prized possessions,” or he simply enjoyed the kimonoed geisha on the lid. He has other similar boxes, each housing various supplies: toothpicks and floss in one, Allen wrenches and SD cards in another.
Normally, men who tend so meticulously to their nails have an occupational excuse (guitar player, massage therapist, drag queen, and so on). But Dad’s a professor. I’m not suggesting that he isn’t manly. He is, but not in a traditionally stoic way. If his father ever used an emery board, it was only to sharpen a fishing lure. Quiet brooding men who tend meticulously to their nails are usually serial killers, but Dad’s subtle vulnerability somehow makes his pristine nails less murdery.
Now the TV room/nail salon is a marijuana den, albeit an unusual one. Instead of a Rush poster hanging over the sofa, t
here’s a triptych of pomegranates painted by a family friend. On the large leather ottoman, next to the vaporizer and pot, there is a bottle of eyeglass-cleaning solution, individually packaged multivitamins, and a biography of Karl Marx’s wife.
While I hide in the bathroom puffing on my e-cig, Dad finds some instructional videos about how to use his new toy. Made by dudes freelancing for websites like vapes.com and vape-usa.com, we are worried about their legitimacy, but when I notice one of them wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt, I assure Dad that the guy is a pro.
Tommy shows us exactly how to adjust the temperature and how long we should “pull on the mouthpiece.” Randy, from easyvapedigital.com, displays the proper way to pack the marijuana into the receptacle: “not too tight, but not too loose, neither.” And it is Kevin, a.k.a. “The Vapeman,” who reminds us to let the mechanism “get properly heated up and stuff” before using it.
With Mom going on a rampant “liking” of Facebook posts on her iPad, Dad and I remove a bit of the Sour Monkey and place it in the grinder. Once we agree that it is “a medium-fine dust,” I press the red button to initiate the heating sequence. After about thirty seconds, a red light on the side of the vaporizer turns green, indicating that we can now place the weed in the “chamber.”
Mom looks up to mention something about an old friend from Ohio who is retiring and moving to Naples, Florida, while I gawk—my mouth hanging open, as the man from whom I spent the greater part of my teens trying to hide my own marijuana use wraps his lips around the mouthpiece.
Dad inhales deeply and, through a controlled exhale, squeaks, “Now that’s some good shit.”
I have a theory that when someone uses marijuana after a long hiatus, their age regresses to the last time they got high. Dad is somewhere in the Carter administration.
He looks over and catches me staring at him. “Something wrong?”
“Of course not,” I lie.
I remove the Harlequin and place some in the grinder as Dad takes another pull. With the vaporizer already prepped, I remove the gray pot corpse, replace it with mine, and inhale a few times.
Within seconds, I’m feeling intensely uncomfortable. I remember why I stopped smoking pot so many years ago: I become cripplingly self-conscious of my self-consciousness, paranoid about my paranoia. Every move feels calculated and then critiqued by my inner thirteen-year-old girl: I’m supposed to be laughing and having a good time, right? Okay, I’ll pretend like I’m doing that. What does my face look like? Do I look stupid? Oh my God, everyone thinks I’m lame.
If marijuana is my medicine, then confidence is my illness.
My fight-or-flight instinct in full-on flight mode, I know that a pace-and-pant panic attack would be a buzzkill (I’ve regressed to Clinton’s second term), so I force myself to laugh. Sure enough, I sound like a nervous salesman caught in a lie. The sixty-eight-year-old with leukemia sitting next to me is having a fantastic time: his laughter is sincere, and is interrupted by requests for hilarious snacks. “Jody, grab those wasabi pork chews I bought at the Chinese grocery, will ya?”
I am the overeager rookie, and Dad, the grizzled veteran. He becomes a little annoyed by the kid who can’t hold his weed. If only Dad had gotten cancer fifteen years ago, we might have been able to enjoy this together.
Mom glides away in her nightgown, and soon thereafter—too soon, in fact—Dad starts yawning and talking about “bedtime.” Though he’d never have admitted it, I’m sure he’s disappointed that I haven’t been a fun weed buddy. I’m certainly let down by it.
After Dad leaves, I’m a bit more comfortable. My thoughts drift to Lindsay, Silas, and Arlo, and I nearly call home, until I realized it’s 1 AM in New Jersey, and I am extremely high. I decide to watch a movie because I’m smart enough to know that staring at my hands will eventually become uncomfortably interesting. Five minutes into a flick about time travel (poor choice), I drop the remote in my lap. I feel around, but it’s gone. I’d been sitting on the sofa. How far could it have possibly gone? I get up and wander, looking in places it could only have arrived via flight.
Is it behind the Bill Clinton biography? No, just a random nail file there.
What about inside the shoebox containing ear scratchers and fake Rolex watches Dad bought in China?
It must have fallen behind the sofa. No, only some peanut shells there.
The room is so chaotic that I can’t find something I’d dropped in my own lap. When in doubt, blame the room. Never blame the weed.
I go on an organizing frenzy. Mom was right about the wires. I tie up the Ethernet cords, put the vaporizer back in the box, and line up the remaining remotes on the ottoman. I imagine doing this for Mom after Dad is gone. Then I spot the remote resting innocently in the exact spot where I’d been sitting. It will be at least another decade before I smoke, vape, eat, or drink pot again.
Enjoy Every Sandwich
The next afternoon, Dad is watching Law & Order: Criminal Intent and filing his nails in the den. He calls this “meditating.” Thankfully, we haven’t spoken about the prior night, nor will we.
I’d been fiddling with Mom’s iPad that morning, and I was unable to resist opening her notes application where, among some banalities, I found the name and number of a crematorium.
I walk into the kitchen where Mom is steaming four pieces of broccoli to accompany her lunch of an avocado sandwich.
“Do you think Dad wants a funeral?” I ask her.
“Oh, I doubt it.”
“So, what would we do then?”
“I don’t know. Do we have to do anything?”
“Umm, yes.”
“We don’t know anyone here, and I’m not doing it in Delaware or Dayton.”
“Why not Dayton? That’s where everyone is, or at least they’re all close by. Family, I mean.”
“The last two times I went there, it was for my parents’ funerals. I don’t want the third to be for Dad’s.”
Dad walks in and gazes in disbelief at Mom’s meal. “Jesus, Jody. Squirrels eat more than that. Jace, what do you want for lunch?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I have this leftover roast. I could make you a sandwich,” he says, leaning his head into the refrigerator.
“No, thanks. Do you want a funeral?”
“I don’t care. You guys can do whatever you want.” He places an unidentifiable slab of gray meat on the counter. “I’ll be dead. Doesn’t really matter to me.”
“In high school, there was a nice thing for Emily’s mom. It was a celebration of life or something,” I offer.
“Yeah, sure, if you want. Jody, do we have any mayonnaise? Never mind, I found it. You sure you don’t want a sandwich? This is some good beef. Got it on sale at Costco.”
I’m confused by Dad’s flippant answer. He gave me specific instructions two decades ago. The summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, he and I were sitting outdoors at Caffè Rivoire, staring at the Palazzo Vecchio less than two hundred feet away. Italians dress nicely when leaving the house, so I was the only customer wearing cutoff jean shorts and a Bob Marley T-shirt. To complete the nineties liberal arts college student look, I was smoking a Camel Light.
I’d returned stateside to Ohio that summer, rather briefly. For less than a month, in fact. Dad whisked me back to Florence after a wealthy Chicago politician accused my friend and me of stealing thousands of dollars in foreign currency. (We didn’t do it.) Dad realized I shouldn’t have been couch surfing at friends’ houses waiting for the semester to start. He was also getting me out of the country to avoid possible prosecution.
At the café, he wiggled his fingers at me, “Gimme one of those.” He didn’t smoke, but sometimes tried to if everyone else was. Mismatched pals, we puffed in silence, gazing upon stones that were once walked by Machiavelli and at the fourteenth-century palace in which the Medici decided to have him tortured and exiled. Dad was pensive, and I could sense a lecture coming.
“This is where I want
to be forever. Right here in this piazza,” he said, exhaling. “You know what to do when the time comes, right?” he asked.
“Yup,” I said, relieved that we were talking about his death instead of the missing currency.
“You’ll have to figure out a way to get up there. It’s closed to the public.”
“I bet Elaine or Rab can help me with that.”
“Elaine can. Rab is too straight to get involved in anything like that. Plus, he’ll probably die before I do.” Elaine Ruffalo ran the onsite trips for the Syracuse program, and had unfettered access to almost everything. A spunky redheaded expat, she loved my dad, and Dad loved her.
“It’ll have to be at night, obviously,” he added.
“Don’t want to sprinkle any ashes on unsuspecting tourists.”
“It’s a lot of ashes, too.”
“I know. You think it would just be in a tiny box, but they come in a huge bag.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll lose some weight.”
I laughed.
“I’m going to order a scotch,” he said. “You want anything?”
“Peroni. I’ll climb that castle if I have to.”
“I know you will.”
“I might have to get drunk first.”
“That’s fine. Just don’t fall off.”
In Mom and Dad’s apartment, I lean on the kitchen bar, chin resting in my hands. “At the very least, I’m sprinkling your ashes from the Palazzo Vecchio tower,” I say.
“I can’t believe you remember that.” Dad slices the meat. “It’s not necessary. I mean, only do it if you want to.”
“If you want it, then I want it.”
“I’m not going to want anything when I’m dead.”
“I understand that. But you can have desires for yourself after you die while you’re living,” I argue.
He hands me half a sandwich. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t. What do you think the rest of your family would want?”
“No idea. Why don’t you ask them?”