Valhalla
It was the first warm night of the year. The city had that good loose feeling that follows a long winter and I was heading to meet a couple of friends in a park o Third Avenue. It was just that time of day between afternoon and evening when no one seems to know what to do with themselves. When I found them, they were all stoned and lying on blankets in the grass. Only Adam was awake, scrolling aimlessly through his phone from behind an orange hat. Adam, an ex boyfriend and old friend, an and unmarried wedding photographer — and a bit of a Mephistophelian gure in my life—said:
“Neens! Whats up? Where have you been? Shit, we’ve been smoking all day and everyone’s totally out.”
“I walked,” I said. “You look wrecked.”
“I feel amazing. Just brought this stu back from Thailand. It’s incredible. Have some.”
Now, whenever I’m in a situation where the marijuana is supposed to be really good, I’ve always felt that I should try it. Maybe this time it would be di erent. Maybe I would feel the extraordinary sense of peace and be able to absorb it into my heart like so
many people say they do. Maybe I’d fall into a bohemi- an kind of slumber. You see, marijuana tends to unlock my Kundalini in the worst way. All my chill seems to get bound up somewhere in the back of my throat and I can’t retrieve it. But I was hoping to get my switch ipped. So, I said, “Sure, pass it over.”
I lay down between Adam and a girl I did not know and took three deep breaths and really waited for the moment to land and by the time the joint made its way back to Adam, I was leagues out to sea, waves of anxiety licking at my ears.
Afraid that I might be working myself up, I tried to remember how to calm myself down, instead of counting sheep, which I thought might put me to sleep and I didn’t want to do that, I remembered an old trick. You see, I have three sisters, all of them yoga teachers, and I know very well there’s nothing better for getting back a whacked out prana than a dose of awareness. I started practicing my I-am-one-who-is-doing-this method. How it goes is this: No matter what you’re doing, you say, “I am the one who is doing it.” “I am the one who is in the park,” “I am the one who is lying down,” “I am the one who is believing that it’s hunkydory.” And eventually, they say, or at least my sisters say that they say, that you get something of a liberating distance from your suffering. My sisters are always trying to distance themselves from their suffering and whenever they bring it up they say it just like that: “my suffering” the way you hear people talk about “my arthritis” — as if it’s suddenly been acting up. And when they talk about their suffering they are always talking about the gurus and the gurus are always talking about Enlightenment and my sisters are talking about ways to fast track it and one of them is awareness.
Neither they nor my sisters had said anything about a bit of bad Thai hash but I figured the principle was the same. (Not that I don’t occasionally get turned on by the gurus, I do, but I think the problem is just that my suffering doesn’t act up quite the way theirs does and so there’s less of a need and, well, I’m rather lazy so unless there’s a need I don’t usually get involved.)
So, I closed my eyes and tried to be the one who was here now and see myself floating up above the clouds, which is another sort of last-resort tactic I learned from the yogis. When all else fails, just imagine yourself in the clouds. But instead of clouds I saw this mouth the size of an opera house with a big lips almost like the Rolling Stones logo, opening, opening, opening closer, coming forward. A gigantic tongue unrolled like a red carpet inviting me in and I knew somehow that I should walk inside, that this was how it would happen. I was going to have my big journey into a blissful high that everyone says that I’ll have. The high I wanted was inside the mouth. I just knew it. So I went in.
It swallowed me. And I fell down very fast through its throat and as I was falling I could see all around me every moment of my life, but not every moment, just certain moments, in fact, just the mo- ments in which I did the wrong thing. There they were in rapid- re progression, every moment when I missed the pass or didn’t get the joke, the times when you think of the perfect comeback years later. If only I’d had a chance to learn from my mistakes, I would, but there are too many things that you don’t do twice; in fact, the most important things are things you don’t do twice so you can’t do them better the second time. You do something wrong, and see what the right thing would have been, and just when you’re ready and you want to call out, “Put me in, Coach, I can get it this time,” it’s gone and the next experience is quite different and your judgement is wrong again because you were expecting the last thing and though now you are prepared for this experience, should it repeat itself, it won’t and you’re at bat with zero hits and there’s another one flying. And then you hit the bottom, inevitably, and there it is: the moment that you knew you’d run into, the one you’ve been running into over and over, awake or asleep, hash or no hash, kundalini intact or in chaos.
You know if he would just die a second time, then, you would do it right. You would know what to say. You would know to fight for a private room that had no other person in it watching nightly news. But if you were prepared to fight for that, and did, you might have to lose him again in order to know enough to ask them to put his teeth in the right way and not the wrong way before they carried him out, grinning so strangely, and then yet one more time to make sure you folded his clothes nicely before you took them home in- stead of throwing them on the backseat of the car like you did the rst time.
I am the one sitting here, I say.
I am the one in the park.
I am the one lying in the grass
I am the one deep in emotional plumbing, I am the one feeling very sick.
I am the one who is high again and it isn’t valhalla.