Pot Damn! (Or: "Colt", Or: "The Most Stoned You Can Get")
I first started smoking pot a couple weeks before I left for college, and when I got to college, it turned out my roommate was a bona-fide, hellified stoner. Great kid. Former baseball player turned hipster turned gangster turned stoner turned my freshman year roommate.
Unfortunately, because I was so new to the game, I was still coming to grips with this new paradigm, and so for my first year in college, I didn't smoke nearly as much as I do today. My roommate and our friends would smoke every day; I would smoked seldomly. Maybe twice a week.
I don't know what I was thinking.
But anyway, that's important to remember.
So two quarters later and it's time for Spring Break. Now, it just so happened that Ohio State's spring break (where my friend Jordan went to college) and mine fell on the same week that year. So what other choice had we than to spend the week partying...
In Salt Lake City, Utah.
In a dorm.
Yeah.
But a dorm in Salt Lake City was where our good friend Wes could be found, so a dorm in SLC was where we were bound.
My first ever trip farther West than Indianapolis. Quite exciting.
So we get into SLC and for the first night just chill out. The second day, our friend Wes goes out and picks up a bag of some shit he refers to as "the poops."
"You know, 'the poops' is the shit."
And indeed it was. I once again swear on my life and my mother's that when a common civilian would merely open the bag to examine its contents, the room would STINK like a blunt had just been smoked in there. I've never come across such an uncommon potency before. Particularly coming from Ohio, where there are no different names for different hybrids like the cannibus culture out here takes for granted. In Ohio there's two types of weed. $30 weed and $50 weed.
With $30 weed you basically get the roots of the plant, some stems, a few leaves, trace clumps of soil and maybe a toy GI Joe arm or something. And the $50 weed back there would be given away to the homeless out here.
So bear that in mind. There are three important factors to consider when approaching the story I'm about to tell.
1. My then-neophyte stoner status. My body was still relatively pure after a relatively pure youth.
2. The vast differences between Ohio "weed" (plants of some variety that somehow get the job done) and Rockies 'n' West weed (burpleberry freight train, snozberry three alarm whoopsidoodle, cannibusiness pleasure farm hallucinogen mindbenders, or whatever the hell the names the weed-snobs out here use).
3. SLC is in the Rocky Mountains, and therefore the air there is much thinner.
So the evening of day two in SLC comes around and we (Jordan, our Utah-dwelling friend Wes and I) decide to walk over to Wes's friend's dorm to take some....
President Hits.
*President Hits Tutorial* (I'd never heard it called that before, and I've never heard it called that since, but that's what we called them that night)
1. Buy a 16 or 20 oz. bottle of Gatorade or PowerAid.
2. Consume contents.
3. With a lighter, burn a hole through the very bottom of the bottle. Small enough to be able to be blocked with one finger.
4. Again with a lighter, burn a hole through the cap of the bottle, large enough to be able to fit a makeshift aluminum foil bowl into the top.
5. Fashion the aluminium foil bowl.
6. Pack the bowl and set it into to hole in the cap of the bottle.
7. Fill the bottle with water (making sure to cork the bottom hole with a finger)
8. Fit the cap back on.
9. Light the bowl using a lighter and uncork the bottom of the bottle. (This allows gravity to let the water drain out and in the process, create a natural "pull" on the bowl up top, which fills the bottle with more and more smoke as more and more water falls out.)
10. Once the water's completely run out, quickly unscrew the cap, fit your mouth into the bottle and...
And that's a President Hit.
It's a lot like a gravity bong, only a little more MacGuyvery.
The potency of the president hit ultimately depends on the three factors listed above, as well as the size of the bowl being used and how much you pack it.
We get to Wes's friend's place -- Wes's friend is a dude named "Yota" -- and there's a couple other people there as well. Amongst us was me, Jordan, Wes, Yota, some other kid and a dude named Colt.
I'll never forget Colt.
So before too much fore-twenty play has gone on, Wes suggests we adjourn to the bathroom and smoke (precautions still being necessary, as we were in a freshman dorm).
I only took one President Hit. I watched a thick, milky, almost liquid smoke billow into the Gatorade bottle; I briefly looked down into the broiling madness below the cap just before I fitted my mouth into the portable gravity bong, and I watched a eruption of smoke explode from my mouth shortly after my lungs, and indeed my entire being, reached critical mass-inhalation.
I coughed for no less than five full minutes. Thick saliva flooding my mouth not unlike in pornos when a girl's taking the dick a bit farther than normal into her mouth/throat/stomach. My eyes were immediately 3/4's shut. I didn't know if I'd make it. I kept fucking coughing.
I could not stop.
While I was in my personal misery, spitting thick saliva and coughing myself silly, Jordan, Wes, Yota, that other dude and Colt all took their hits.
We stumbled out of the bathroom and into whatever flat surfaces we felt would be comfortable enough to sit around on. At first I was a little disappointed. I had smoked a bigger hit than any I'd ever taken. At a much higher altitude than I'd ever smoked in before. But I wasn't really any higher than I would be after smoking a buncha $30 weed at OU.
But I couldn't smoke anymore. My lungs were... well, pardon the pun, but my lungs were smoked.
However, after five minutes of grooving on my growing interstellar buzz, Colt suggested (adamently) that they go back to the bathroom to smoke a bowl.
(Wow!)
Every moment I sat there I noticed I was getting more and more baked.
"No, thanks," I say.
But the others didn't.
So Jordan, Wes and the gang headed back into the bathroom to smoke another bowl (which to this day stills seems surreal, if not suicidal, to me).
Jordan tells me that that "Colt" dude was in rare form. Taking huge hit after huge hit. His thirst for baked goodness incapable of being quenched.
So eventually they come back out, and by then I'm trashed. Fucked. The protective layers of my being having been stripped away -- I sat there like an exposed nerve. Twittering and twitching in reaction to even the lightest of stirrings of the air, or jerking my head violently towards any uncommon sounds.
At some point -- I have no idea how or when -- Wes and Jordan decided to head back to Wes's place. (Perhaps they saw how I was entering another dimension.)
So we stumble back to Wes's dorm, which is probably about 200 yards away. And just as we're about 50 yards from the front door to Wes's dorm, this VERY AUTHORITATIVE voice calls out, "Hey!"
"Hey, stop!"
And all of a suden, Wes is running.
And then all of a sudden, so are Jordan and I.
We book into Wes's dorm, shoot up the stairs and sprint down the hall, collapsing into his dark room. We all agree that we're just way too baked to do anything else, and seeing as how we had plans to go snowboarding the next morning, decided to call it a night (though I can hardly remember any of that line of thinking or discussion).
So we're just about settled into our bed/couch/floor/etc., really enjoying our pre-sleep buzz, when...
WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!
(It's not stopping.)
WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!
(The light under the door leading to the outside hallway is flashing.)
WHOOOP! WHOOOP!
"That's the fire alarm. Fuck."
Could that VERY AUTHORITATIVE voice have wanted to talk to us so badly that he decided to (ironically) smoke us out? Now that's the core of paranoia.
No matter the cause, we had to get out of there.
So we stumble downstairs, keeping our eyes locked on the ground, avoiding eye contact with everyone (our eyes were demonically red -- almost pitiably red).
"Holy shit, dude! Look at that!" someone calls out.
I look up from the rock I was staring at and try to see what he was talking about. As I looked at Wes's building I began to notice that the windows exposed to the face we were looking at had a dark cloud of something slowly blotting them out. It was headed from the side opposite of Wes's room towards his room.
It looked the place was filling up with smoke from a fire. (All our belongings, our plane tickets, identification, money... everything was in Wes's room -- in a building that was burning down.)
And I was STILL getting progressively higher. And more paranoid.
Now the way the U of U campus is set up is like so: all of the dorms surround one main central student-relations building. This building houses the cafeteria, a lobby, a small grocery store and a bunch of other stuff. We were told to head to this building while the fire department came.
So keeping our eyes to the ground, we shuffled into the center building and headed for a group of two couches off to the right.
Now imagine this: the building we're in is predominantly marble, and currently houses about 100-200 irritated, concerned, very talkative college students. Now imagine what the sum of all of their conversations sounds like bouncing off of four marble walls and a bunch of other odd acoustical architecture.
It sounds a little something like this:
"Angiena ngaoienag ang akng as gnalsdhg aeng agnaiena kgna geininbgaknwpojgnab ignaofigna bn gweoiangranb aawndogiawrh g agnioang agnaroign ag aeoignaw ov nawogh agrh gba ehbioabhaeonv asHoIsaofghaorgn wonfo NAO NAEOGHWORINVAEGNAJHSFOA N AHGOAIWH AS oighaw egng asfg hahgawnf sdfh asdfj asfsfjs iewaoutpewa nba vnas!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Now imagine that vulgate of tongues lapping at the ears of a young man spiraling certainly into insanity. A TRILLION voices at once, none of them any more distinguishable than the others. Wes and Jordan pretty much asleep on the couches. Me laying there on the ground, unable to put any coherent thoughts together. Baked absolutely out of my gourd. Impossible to think, or for the world to have any semblance of order.
It was like I was returned to when I was a baby. The world was nothing but a washing machine of colors and sounds, all whooshing and swooshing around, and I was in the center, unable to tell a painting on the wall from my own mother.
The voices bouncing from wall to wall to wall to my eardrums making no sense whatsoever. Nobody talking to me, yet I could hear everything everyone was saying...
Certain that we had been "smoked out" of the dorm by AUTHORITATIVE FIGURE, I searched for ways to hold onto the tattered cordage of my fleeting sanity.
So what did I do?
The only thing that made any sense to me.
"Your name is Daniel Green Genes, your social security number is.... Your name is Daniel Green Genes, your social security number is..."
Over and over again I repeated it to myself. It was the only way for me to hang on.
I was totally fucked. Fucked and fucked and fucked.
"Your name is Daniel Green Genes..."
What felt like THREE HOURS of that later, we received word that we could go back to the dorm, that it had been some pranksters playing with the fire extinguishers that caused the "smoke" to fill the halls.
So we head back to Wes's dorm and lay down for the night. Wes and Jordan go back to sleep, but not me. I lay there praying to God.
"Dear Lord, please, if you have any mercy at all, please, I beg of you, let me be sane again when I wake up."
Over and over again until I fell asleep.
I just wanted to be sane again.
And that's the story of the best time I ever had.
Haha.
