I'm the One That I Want (9 page)

Some time later, my friends and I were having coffee on Telegraph Avenue and I saw Bob walk down the street with a hippie girl. He was wearing the same tie-dyed shirt and some shorts that showed the crack of his extra-small ass. I screamed and hid behind my friends. He didn’t see me, thank God, as he was lost in his girlfriend, who had put her hand on his ass (covering the whole ass), and walked away into the heart of Berkeley.

Years later, I worked in Tempe and one of the waitresses asked me if I knew a man named Bob _____. The name made my blood run cold. I hadn’t heard it in years. She said he was the creepy manager of the apartment building she lived in back in Oakland and he’d get the young tenants high and hang around for uncomfortably long periods of time. She told me that once when they were all stoned and watching Comedy Central, I came on and he got all misty and reminisced about how he and I used to be together. That is pretty lame for someone whose last words to me were: “Fuck you and everyone who looks like you.”

8

STAND-UP AND SM

With Bob out of the way, I could completely focus my energy on being a drug addict.

POt had been a cure-all for me for most of my life. When I lived in my parents’ moldy basement, I smoked and smoked to forget my life. When I was on the road, I smoked to forget where I was. When I was at home, I smoked to celebrate. It almost didn’t affect me anymore. My head would get a little hazy and warm and my throat would get dry and I would be immediately self-conscious or hungry. For some reason, I equated this feeling with peace.

POt is an insidious drug because it can steal your life away from you, without you even being aware of it. I had a love affair with pot for ten years. Pot was my most devoted partner.

I Was fifteen when I met pot—back on an old railroad track behind my high school with two guys named Chris Long and Ken Datre. Ken called me “Baby,” which is astounding to a fat teenage girl, who feels invisible and sexless. We smoked a badly rolled, spittle-wet, seedy, paraquat-laced joint. It made me feel tired and as heavy on the inside as I was on the outside. I went home and crashed for hours.

Pot got me deep inside my head to a safe place. I wanted to go back there all the time. I lived there for a decade. It got me to sleep, which I could never do with my parents fighting and screaming at each other all night. It helped me eat, drowning out the existential pain even further with entire boxes of macaroni and cheese, deli potato salad, potato chips and cereal. It was just the state I needed to live in at the time.

When things got really depressing, I’d wake up at two in the afternoon, so far into my head that I’d almost turned inside out. I was living back at my parents’ house after the brief stab at “independence” at Bob’s. Being sixteen isn’t easy for anyone, but I had to make it harder for myself by being expelled from school, having a horrible twenty-six-year old boyfriend, and a quickly escalating drug problem. I couldn’t take the nights alone without blowing pot smoke out the window of the basement bedroom. The carpet looked like a pizza, and I would have killed myself without the pot and
SCTV
reruns on Nick at Nite. I stayed an addict out of fear, fear that this was my life, and that I couldn’t escape without stoner-sleepwalking my way through it.

As much as I loved being high, I also loved copping. Paging the dealer and the beautiful sound of the ring of him calling you back. Then, nervously going to pick up the drugs, the entire time envisioning DEA agents kicking in the front door as the money changed hands. I loved the fast exchange and hasty exit, escaping the dealer’s house with a huge beautiful green bag of perfect weed—once I got one that looked just like Easter grass—sticky and voluminous. It would always fill me with hope and renewal and good will toward man. I got out of buying drugs what most people got out of Christmas. It also made me feel like I knew how to take care of myself, and that even though the world was a scary, unsure place, everything would eventually turn out okay.

I copped from a friend at work, who got it from some artsy old man who lived on the beach and who got high and stared at the water all day. What a beautiful life!

Oh! The drug dealers I have known. One guy sold dime bags out of his mail slot, conveniently located behind Petrini’s Market on Masonic (where a friend got stabbed in the meat department). You’d step down into the doorway and tap on the door, and fingers would take your ten and hand over a little plastic packet of verdant dreams, and that was that. No conversation, no feigned friendship in the uneven power play between addict and pusher. You didn’t have to talk about bands you didn’t like, or even break open the bag and smoke the token joint with the dealer. Best of all, there was no painful waiting for the phone to ring after you had paged your dealer—watching the minutes ache by as your jones got stronger and threatened to take you over. Even though the waiting could be unbearable, you could console yourself with the thought that any second, he might call, any second your whole day could change, and that made the ache perversely fun. This place was like a drug drive-through, and acquisition met desire in a perfect dance. Walking home from work, I could duck in that doorway, and within the space of a minute, I felt complete. In those days, I found true happiness in my empty house, midday rain outside and a new stash in. You almost didn’t have to get high—just knowing that you were going to momentarily, and then later, and again and again. I darkened that drug doorway many times—I even got inside once or twice. The guy that ran the place looked just like Santa Claus. He started selling bad, powdery, baby laxative crank out of the mail slot and the whole operation soon ended. I miss him to this day. He showed me that life as an addict could be surprisingly easy. A mail slot and ten dollars and a little bag of green could bring such happiness. That was the best way to get drugs.

The worst Way was hanging out with Cone. Cone was this disgusting guy who was friends with my friend June’s dad. He sold drugs to us—but we had to spend a long time talking to him, because he wasn’t even exactly a dealer. He was some kind of a middleman, a pusher once removed. We spent days waiting around for other dealers, hanging out at his scary house. Cone hung carpet over the door of his bedroom so that it was soundproof. This was doubly evil because not only could nobody hear you scream, but the fabric would soak up the smells of pot, gross pot dealer guy BO, and the faint sour-ball smell so specific to Cone, and recirculate it around the room. There was a whole lotta foul going on. Cone was fat, but he wore these tight Daisy Duke shorts that not only went up his ass but up in the front, too, so it looked like he had a vagina. One time, I accidentally took his turquoise-and-silver-covered Bic lighter and he came over to my apartment to get it back. My roommates and I clung to the walls so he couldn’t see us in the windows, and screamed silent screams, sneaking looks outside to see the side view of his Man-gina as he banged against our front door. Cone had a big-screen TV and always stopped at the Playboy channel and lingered over the soft-core porn until we would yell at him to change it. As we waited for our drugs, he would argue that molesting children was justified, as long as the child made the first move. But pot was worth it. And worth more.

POt Was the basis of many relationships. I smoked pot with Sledge every day, every two hours, for five years. We couldn’t do anything without first being high. It started in the morning right after coffee. We’d jack up high as kites on caffeine just so we could surf on the head waves with hits off his bronze bat, a small pipe that could be easily concealed in a clever pot box or your front pocket. It looked a little like a miniature cigarette holder. After getting sufficiently high, we’d laugh or make mixed tapes or go shopping or try to write or get more coffee to get wired again. Sledge would get up early because he was a shame-based stoner. He didn’t like what he was doing, so he had to try to deny it as much as possible. His pockets and black nylon gay man-purse were filled with stony accoutrements: mints, eye drops, gum and lip balm, an arsenal of products to cover up the tell-tale signs. I got up early, too, and we’d get together at his Castro Street apartment right away. If the phone rang, we let the voice mail get it. We’d be burnt to a crisp by 4 P.M. and need the sludgy, silty coffee from Café Flore to jolt us back into the world of the living. I hate that time of my life and I hate Sledge now so much for making all that waste seem like so much fun. I wasted so much of my life just walking around high and shopping, and if I were to do it all again, I wouldn’t, and that is the truth. Yet I had so many chances to get away from pot addiction and I always went back. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t have to buy the drugs anymore. Sledge had the dealer. And I didn’t have to be high alone anymore. I had my drug buddy. We ruled the Castro and smoked and ate and smoked and ate and ate well into the night. I always felt fat, but now I felt fatter.

SOmetimes, We did Ecstasy, which was good because it would help me lose weight, if only for a day. I think one of the reasons I was so attached to Sledge is that he always told me that I was pretty and thin. I needed that then as much as I needed being high. He was my most frustrating friend but also one of the closest and the hardest to give up—just like pot. Pot will make you go insane, eventually. It also makes you hungry. I remember countless stony feasts up at Sledge’s apartment. He had this foodie boyfriend for a while who’d make us real Caesar salads, where he would actually rub the bowl with a piece of cut garlic. That was the gayest thing I have ever seen.

We would sit in the kitchen and watch him seasoning that big wooden bowl, and pass joint after joint after joint, and then pass thin slices of salami wrapped around hunks of cream cheese, which we would swallow whole between tokes. I think we were looking to bombard all the senses at the same time. First, the “Sledgehammer”— choking, nasty hits of green, sticky bud—and then trying to retrieve yourself from the Great Green Beyond with the creamy, crunchy, chewy, pungent, subtly sweet everything of food that never seemed to stop coming. Each new dish appeared with a collective groan and a sigh as if the expulsion of air would create more room in our bulging bellies crammed full with escape and bread.

After that, there would be more pot to make you forget the pain of overeating—and to make you want more, even though you are not sure if your body can take it. Then, eating again to take away the guilt of the eating in the first place. Sledge was so thin. I thought I’d be okay. I thought I could do it if he could do it. He told me I was thin. He told me it was okay. But it wasn’t.

COmedy helped me pull away from this self-destruction, at least at the beginning.

It gave me something to look forward to, besides the constant state of numbness that had been my only pursuit. I couldn’t be too high when I performed. I was paranoid enough onstage. Trying to do it high was impossible.

My first performance in a comedy club was with Batwing Lubricant, my high school improv group. We did a showcase night at the Other Café, the legendary comedy club in the Haight, where performers like Robin Williams, Paula Poundstone, and Bobcat Goldthwaite regularly took the stage. We killed and were invited back for another night. The comics hated us because we were so young and cocky, but that didn’t take away from what was a life-changing experience for me.

I saw, in that dark and smoky club, the rest of my life. I thought if I could just be allowed to go onstage and make people laugh every night that I wouldn’t care if I made money or became famous. Just the ability to do it would be payment enough. I don’t know if I feel that way anymore. I have become jaded in my own way, and I love the material success that I have been so lucky to receive, but the way it all started was with my intense love of comedy and everything that went with it.

It wasn’t easy in the beginning. The other comics were suspicious of newcomers, and I was scared of most of them. I would go to the Sunday Showcase at the Punchline, where the local acts ruled the stage, and I watched and learned from the masters. On a good night you could see Bobby Slayton or Will Durst, and at the Other Café, you could go watch Paula Poundstone. Rick Reynolds ruled the Improv, and in those early days, I went to shows like I should have been going to class.

COmedy Was all I ever wanted. When I began, I don’t think anyone believed I would go anywhere. After I dropped out of the School of the Arts in my senior year to do drugs and go to Europe, it was no surprise that I didn’t end up getting into college. My parents lied and told their friends that I was living in the dorms, when in reality I was frying my brains out on LSD in Amsterdam. I came home in a black mood, drug weary and confused about what to do with my life. Comedy was the answer, and my indecision became resolve. During the day, I worked at my parents’ bookstore with Dante and Forbes, and at night I would prowl the clubs, trying to get in, trying to get on. I didn’t do as many drugs, because I had something outside myself to focus on. This comedy obsession pulled me out of a major depression. Going to clubs gave me something to look forward to. It showed me there was a life after school. My glory days were not over. They were just beginning.

My parents did not understand, of course. They never even came to see me perform. They finally saw my show once last year. Even then it was a struggle! In the very early days, I would urge Trace and AJ and Duncan to come to the Rose and Thistle to see me. After the shows, on the car ride home, there would be long, uncomfortable silences, followed by a “Wow, it’s really brave of you to get up there and do that . . .” The experience of going to clubs and hanging around hoping to get noticed was terrifying. The first time I played the Punchline, I was worried I’d have to pay to get in. I was afraid to go into the greenroom because the other comics were in there. All these grown men seemed to be having such a good time with each other, and they had staked out that territory for themselves. They sat around in that holy room smoking, laughing, talking about how bad the crowd was, and patting each other on the back for a job well done.