(Part 1 is available here.)
If one does not toke the pot in high school, college and
dormitory life usually offers multiple opportunities to do so. During my first two years at college in Iowa in the late 70s, I turned such invitations down and stuck with the sugary
carbonated concoction known as "Champale" and the occasional cigarette as my
preferred intoxicants.
I was just plain afraid of repercussions. Our resident
assistant was a full-on law-and-order dorm-marm who called the students on our floor together
one day to announce her zero-tolerance policy on weed. “If I even smell it, I’m
calling the police,” she told us. “I am NOT kidding.” I believed her. I was even
a little worried to play my Rick James album, fearing that the party-hearty
song “Mary Jane” might catch her ears and put me under suspicion. After all, it
declared:
I’m in love with Mary Jane
I’m not the only one.
If Mary wanna play around
I let her have her fun
She’s not the kind of girl
That you can just tie down
She likes to spread her love
And turn your head around…
There were a couple of young women down the hall from
me who liked to live on the edge, however. Dorm-marm occasionally tagged along
when her football-player boyfriend traveled to away games. During these
authority-free nights, the stonerladies down the hall would invite a few
neighbors into their room, stuff a towel or two at the bottom of the door, and
share their Midwestern ragweed with any who desired it. I did feel a certain
pull and a curiosity – my roommate was a frequent guest and her frothiness upon
emerging from the undercover toking room was appealing. But my paranoid musings
kept me in check: Dorm-marm might unexpectedly return early. Even if I just sat
with the stoners and handed the joint around without partaking, the smell would
stick to my clothes. The police would be called and I, the
Rick-James-album-owning brown-skinned girl, would be fingered. Dorm-marm would
tell the police, “She listens to that ‘Mary Jane’ crap all the time, after all
– what more do you need to know?” I’d be arrested and convicted for Smelling
Like Pot and Listening to Subversive Pot Songs. This, I imagined, would carry a
sentence of several years, perhaps decades. My career-minded parents, so proud
of me for receiving a full college scholarship, would be terribly, abysmally
let down. I would never become the astronomer or meteorologist I’d planned on
being. My post-prison job prospects, if any, would likely be limited to burger-flipping,
housekeeping, or movie theater ushering. (Though, admittedly, ushering held a
certain appeal …)
Being an underage drinker, though? Dorm-marm had
absolutely NO problem with that.
* * *
In my sophomore year -- the fall of 1979 -- Milos
Forman’s film version of Hair came
out and was shown at the college theater. [Here is its delightful opening sequence]. Several friends and I got buzzed on Marlboros
and Blue Nun wine before viewing it one autumn Saturday night. I was already
familiar with its music (the Broadway cast recording, which I owned, also had lyrics that I felt I had to hide from the
ears of dorm-marm) but the film version -- with its exuberant dancing, irreverent songs,
trippy psychedelic sequences, and antiwar message – gave me an exquisite
thrill. At movie’s end, everyone remained seated in open-mouthed awe for a few
moments. That silence whispered: goddamn,
that was good.
The film had overflowed with a rambunctiously vivid
heartfulness and an effervescent abandon that was missing from my timid,
studious, undeclared-college-major life. And, of course, the significant
ingredient in the film’s liberating call of the wild was: drugs. Particularly pot, hash, and acid.
Not Champale. Not Blue Nun. Not Marlboro Lights.
I
need to get ahold of some honest-to-God real mind-bending shit someday,
I told myself. These sweet wines and
pissy beers are for church-goers, accounting majors, and bourgeois bitches.
(to be continued)
