Double Double (9 page)

That wasn't my year of living dangerously, but it set the stage for what was to come. These experiences in Hawaii added to the “made” category. Soon to come would be high school, where I'd meet new friends who would push me into “thrust upon me.”

S
o, you don't get high?” said one of my classmates in amazement. It was my first week of ninth grade in an experimental high school program that fused academics with camping and hiking trips.

“No, but I've gotten drunk before. Twice,” I said proudly, hoping that would get me over.

The group of kids looked at me and then at one another. “Ha, we'll call you the boozer. You're so uncool.” They moved on, with their blue-jean jackets and long hair, smirking and making jokes.

It was starting all over again, and this time I knew I couldn't take it. Not after a year of reading by myself in a college library in Hawaii. Not after a year at the Catholic junior high school where I was humiliated every day. I knew I couldn't survive being an object of ridicule again. I knew that drugs were bad, period. I didn't want
to do them just to fit in, and I didn't, declining my classmates' offers for almost a month.

I wrote in my diary on October 14, 1978, two weeks before I turned fourteen, that I had decided to “cross the Rubicon” and smoke marijuana for the first time (I was a Roman history buff with a flair for the dramatic). The first time, I didn't feel much of a sensation, just tired and a little out of it. My friends studied me for signs of change, hoping they had “given me my wings,” as junkies say about turning someone on for the first time.

The third time, I felt the full effect. After smoking some blond hash, I flopped around in a semi-psychosis on the grandstand in the auditorium, and I felt better than I ever had before. My new “friends” liked to get high; I loved it. The sensation of being free, of being silly, of colors and sounds and the light all reflecting back to me, was sheer bliss. It was a sensation that I would chase for the next eleven years, even as it became harder and harder to recapture. I upped the quantity and variety of drugs, but no matter how much more I consumed, they worked less and less.

I was quickly accepted by the hippie cool kids in ninth grade, most of whom were older, since I was usually the youngest kid in the class. Most important, I didn't care about anything anymore. When I lit that joint and drank that beer, the feeling of well-being, of warmth and genuine acceptance, of everything being all right with the world, flowed through me.

Soon I discovered I could make stoned people laugh.

A few weeks after I got high for the first time, a pretty girl in my class told me, “Ken, you're fucking funny as hell.”

I'll never forget it. She was infamous for her tight jeans and tank tops and had always completely ignored me when she wasn't making fun of me. I was standing in the woods behind the school
where the smokers and the partyers went to hang out and light up. I could see the cafeteria through the trees, and I told tight-jeans girl something that had happened earlier in the woods, and she laughed and laughed and laughed, throwing back her long reddish-brown hair, the green of the trees, the green of her eyes, the redbrick cafeteria behind us, all mixing together.

I had the eureka moment I had been waiting for all my life. I'd get high and make people laugh. A sense of humor I developed as a kid to entertain my mother, my uncle, my grandmother had finally found a purpose. I had studied my mother and absorbed some of her crack wit and razor-sharp putdowns. Her sense of humor improved while drinking martinis. Soon my ability to make people laugh improved while smoking weed.

My buddies and I dealt with teen angst by smoking pot; listening to the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, and the Rolling Stones (how we cheered on Keith Richard's heroin-induced blood transfusions); and competitively pursuing the prettiest girls in school. Some of the other kids were put off by this artificial extension of the 1960s. The music scene going on then was punk, and that didn't appeal to my friends' mellow Quaker-hippie-affected ideals. Some of the other kids cared about their classes and studying, and some just didn't want to join in.

I had always enjoyed being the center of attention. In my experimental Rudolf Steiner elementary school, I was a personality to be reckoned with, starring in school plays and excelling academically. Then we moved to Hawaii, and I had no chance to receive the attention I deserved. I swore when I returned home that I was going to be a doer, not a watcher. It wasn't enough to be cool—I had to be the coolest. That's how I went from a Catholic school–mandated uniform of a white shirt and blue slacks in
twelve months to a uniform of my own creation. By sophomore year, I was sporting a big blue hat with a wide brim similar to Tom Laughlin's in the 1960s counterculture judo movie
Billy Jack
; long, bushy brown hair; and a jean jacket with Jimi Hendrix sewed on the back by a girl I had a crush on.

In a little over ten years, being cool almost killed me. When I graduated from high school, the final school newspaper of the year gave senior predictions. Mine was “Will open a school for acting cool and own a fleet of Mercedes.” When I read that, I thought I had made it. In my senior year, I had several girlfriends and was inducted into a “secret society.” Its high coolness factor was based on smoking pot, being popular, listening to the right music, and being an excellent Ultimate Frisbee player.

All of my decisions were based on what was cool and what wasn't. I was a fair actor, but when I realized that the thespians at my high school weren't cool, I stopped trying out for plays. So I didn't pursue something that gave me genuine pleasure. Perhaps it was also because I couldn't take the risk of opening up, of revealing myself onstage.

My grades suffered, though I reeled in enough A's and B's to keep my mother off my back. I took the SATs hungover, the morning after I went to a keg party. No Kaplan classes, pre-SAT practice tests, or college visits in our family. Our family entertained people. We'd make them laugh, keep them happy. My grandmother, June Dunnington Grimes, had not been a physically affectionate mother, as I came to understand later in reading my mother's semiautobiographical books. But she was affectionate with me, and we had some kind of special understanding that circumvented my mother. My grandmother made me Halloween costumes, stuffed animals, and let me watch the
The Honeymooners
with her. She could do anything, she was magic, and her opinion meant a lot to my mother and my uncle. She was the only person left from their childhood. Their father had died when they were young; they had no living uncles or aunts and only a few cousins whom they rarely saw.

I knew I had reached the mountaintop in our small family when I would make my grandmother laugh and she would say, “Ken, you just slay me.”

My sense of humor is exactly that of my mother (except I'm not as funny) or my uncle, a man with a veritable Ph.D. in humor. Their humor is situational and based on quick retorts. When my mother and uncle got together, hilarity was guaranteed. Some of it was fueled by alcohol—the telling remark, the verbal shiv to the ribs, sometimes to the person in the room (that took at least two martinis)—though more often gossiping about people long dead or far away. But it was always entertaining.

After I crossed the Rubicon, when I entertained, there was no stony gaze from drunk adults, no clink of martini glasses. We were in the woods behind school, at my friend's houses for keg parties, in cars passing joints while we turned up the radio, at rock concerts with the music blasting.

I enjoyed the passing of seasons in those woods, the honey-chestnut of the leaves in fall, the vibrant greens of spring, the spare gray branches swaying gently in the winter. You could party before school, during morning break, between classes, at lunch hour, and after school, smoking cigarettes or getting high. Clouds of smoke would emerge from “first log,” where people gathered around an enormous log, with a trash can for cigarette butts. If you wanted privacy, you could saunter down to “second log,” thirty feet away,
to spark a bowl with a few friends. If you really wanted to get away from it all, you could wander down the path to the creek. People would argue the merits of various pipes and bowls, musicians we liked, and gossip about kids or teachers.

When Bob Marley died, my Ultimate Frisbee team climbed one of the largest trees in the woods and passed around joints in his honor. Once I moved on to my junior and senior years, I saw the younger kids smoking to fit in, saw them age right in front of me, some of the aging natural—there's an obvious difference between a thirteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old—some of it induced by alcohol and marijuana. Pot opens people up and gives a community feeling, much more so than alcohol. You share pot in a way that you don't share beer or liquor. Pot makes you mellow and easygoing, as opposed to alcohol, which often switches on aggression. But frequent pot smoking aged me in a way that's hard to describe; it made me distant. Perhaps it was because I desperately wanted to be older than I was, to be accepted.

The need to be cool is a common driver of adolescents and can be expressed in many ways. My problem was that, almost immediately, pot smoking wasn't enough of a high. There were many times when I smoked so much pot it no longer worked: that I “smoked myself straight.” I wanted, needed, to be even higher.

People argue that marijuana is a gateway drug to hard drugs, and I would have to agree. Tobacco was my original gateway drug. When I was twelve years old, chewing Copenhagen and Skoal—“A little dip will do ya”—gave me a wicked head rush. I quickly moved on to Marlboros. Pot took me on the same elevator ride up, even higher than tobacco. I wore that out, and the spent embers of the 1960s and early 1970s promised more with LSD, so I took that.

Try explaining to your mother that you can't talk right now because you're hallucinating and she's turned into a dragon. I was able to go to school for a week straight, chewing on the corners of hits of acid, maintaining a steady buzz. I functioned, went to class, and spaced off on how the trees looked or on the color of the sky, until I had a strange deteriorating sensation in my brain and body, and stopped.

Tenth grade was the garbage-head year, the year of living dangerously, of someone saying in the woods, “Give it to Ken, he'll smoke anything.” I soon had a rep of being the druggie's druggie. Underclassmen I didn't know were greeting me with a cheery “Hi, Spent Ken!” I snarled at one of them once, “You haven't earned the right to call me that.” I was horribly embarrassed. Was I such a burnout that kids I didn't even know were talking about me?

I forged on to speed, downers, quaaludes, mushrooms, and finally, the drug of choice of the 1980s, cocaine. By the time I graduated from high school, I had settled on marijuana and beer. Cocaine was too expensive, though always desirable as a high unto itself.

I trained for alcohol and pot like some high school athletes train for distance running. I kept a running tally of the quantity I consumed and would brag about it to friends while the older kids rolled their eyes. Woe to me if I threw up, for the taunting was vicious; puking on someone's rug or in their car would tab you as a “lightweight” or “totally uncool.” From the beginning, I was determined to be cool and to handle the rapidly increasing amounts of chemicals I consumed.

Just as I was turned on to drugs by friends and older kids, I lived to turn on others. I'll never forget the pretty Dutch girl telling me in the woods that I was getting her high for the first time. I was
giving her “her wings,” just like my first time in ninth grade. It was a real feeling of accomplishment to pass on to her what had been so eagerly passed on to me.

Except, in my case, it almost killed me.

W
hen did I first start drinking alcoholically? At one of those University of Maryland football games where we sat in the stands and guzzled a combination of gin and grape juice that we called Purple Jesus? I don't think so, party girl though I turned out to be in my sophomore year. My freshman year was spent in getting good grades, probably because I didn't know many people.

My sophomore year was such a stereotype of university days, it's laughable. Fraternity parties, dances (formal dances, with evening gowns and gardenias), mugs of beer at Bernie's; hanging around a piano in a fraternity house, singing a mildly obscene version of “Coffee in Brazil”; Les Paul and Mary Ford's “How High the Moon” playing for the thousandth time while we crowded into one of the glass-enclosed listening cubicles in a record store on D.C.'s F Street; crawling in the dorm window after hours
because otherwise we couldn't get by Mrs. G., our dorm's ubiquitous drill sergeant of a housemother. Getting drunk, nursing hangovers with pride as if a hangover were a badge. All of that college stuff.

Was it all of those back-office cocktail hours, the pitchers of martinis Mrs. D. shared with me? I don't think it happened there, either, the tip-off when drinking meant more than a good time. There was a point when it became a need more than a want, when it broke away from partying or those happy, rudderless hours in the back office. There was a point when Jim Beam and Gordon peeled themselves off the labels and came to sit down beside me.

I think the alcoholic drinking might have started with that innocent bottle of sherry I kept in the closet. It could have been Amontillado or Harveys Bristol Cream. We speak of a trigger—a drink that triggers a real thirst. That bottle of sherry might have been it.

Perhaps it sounds impossibly quaint—an English teacher with a bottle of cream sherry in the cupboard. This is the same person who was quaffing martinis in the back office of a hotel for years. Why didn't I keep a bottle of gin or vodka in the closet, for God's sake? Because I associated martinis with the back office. I was quite happy with the sherry.