Hashish

A long, long time ago in an artificial suburban hamlet called Barclay Park,

beside a high stucco wall covered with ivy,

behind a flowering bush (Calochortus nudus),

Lethe smoked his first cigarette.

Tasting the harsh fumes of death, Lethe grew hardened and ambitious to continue smoking each week. He slipped out of the house when his parents weren’t looking and he ran to the end of his street to smoke. He knew the family who lived in the house at the end of the cul de sac, he played soccer with their son. Nevertheless he pretended they couldn’t see him going into their backyard and hiding behind their flowering bushes.

He was born into a gated community. Smoking, being the great rebellious act of any adolescent, instilled him with a sense of expansive liberty. He was saving a corner of himself for misdeeds, a part of himself which his father couldn’t influence.

The dark deed of smoking was repeated over and over like a ritual. When he entered high school, he could say that he smoked, not once, but often.

The shadow of his youth became like his double. When he wasn’t studying to get good grades to earn his father’s approval, the shadow took full possession of him. At times, the shadow felt more real than anything else.

The neighbors never did see him scurrying into their backyard. They never ran out of the house to evict him from the flowering bush, the site of his early transgressions. And if he wanted to jump the stucco wall, he did so fearlessly. He threw his bicycle over it and rode across the highway where there was a hotel and a golf course.

Sometimes he spent whole afternoons wandering through the hotel. Like a gentrified dandy, he sat on the couches and drew in his sketchbook. He was mimicking his mother, who used to do the same. She would sit for hours in expensive hotels with her sketchbook, capturing the faces of the crowd. He made doodles and comic strips only he could decipher. He pretended to be a guest in the hotel. If anyone asked him what he was doing there, he would say he was the son of a wealthy politician.

His father was a doctor. A prescriptive man by nature who communicated to his son mainly through lectures. His father never understood his mother’s inclination toward art, and he appreciated Rose the artist only in the sense that this calling was alien to him. Because Lethe took after his mother, he tended to develop in opposition to his father.

Cigarettes tasted like the harsh fumes of death. Lethe grew used to the taste, but never completely. There was always the residue of something bitter and coarse.

During his senior year he smoked every morning while driving to school. He drove his father’s Oldsmobile; he was never given a car of his own. In the neighborhood where he grew up this was unusual.

If he wanted to escape Barclay Park, which he often did, he had to climb the stucco wall. When he was able to drive, he roamed the leafy suburb at night, smoking cigarettes one after the other.

On the balcony of the Senora’s apartment, Lethe removed the tobacco from one of his cigarettes. He kept the paper. It was three o’clock in the morning. The night air had a wavy, moist feel. The stars in the sky fell under the horizon like lost buttons and pins. You had to search for them. Directly above him there was nothing. Only a gulf of darkness.

He filled the cigarette with the hashish he had just purchased. A Moroccan sold it to him. You could find Moroccans in almost any park after 11:00 pm. They clustered around benches and stone steps, drinking whiskey and shouting gleefully. You simply had to approach them and they understood what you wanted. Lethe learned these things from living in Spain.

The leader stepped up to Lethe. He pressed his body against Lethe’s and took his cash. Then he removed a little piece of clay wrapped in plastic and tore it in half between his teeth. Muttering something in Spanish, he put the hashish into Lethe’s hand.

Lethe caught sight of the Moroccan’s mouth. It was the dirtiest mouth he had ever seen in his life. The Moroccan was missing all but four of his teeth, and those teeth were yellow and stumpy.

The rest of the Moroccans had pockmarked faces and greasy hands. They grinned whenever you were communicating with them. They couldn’t stop grinning.

The joint tasted like his first cigarette: overpowering, dirty, coarse. But he sucked on the end of it until his head was full, and his senses lazily unstrung. It was like slipping out of the house and running to the end of the street. It was like hiding beside the flowering bush and taking those first drags off a half-smoked cigarette. It was like jumping the stucco wall.

The neighbors wouldn’t notice a thing.

The early morning pleased him in a disorienting way. It was somewhere between morning and night and for Lethe this was a comfortable place to be. He liked how the trees below the Senora’s apartment grew out of their little concrete squares. He liked how the storefronts gleamed in the oily moonlight. He noticed the fruit seller’s wooden cart which had fallen on its side from the wind.

Hashish was weird. It didn’t fill him with ecstatic energy. It just sort of dulled his senses and dropped him onto plateaus of vacant emotion. There was nothing immediately pleasurable in the effects. But having spent so much time in the Senora’s apartment, doing practically nothing, the slightest difference in his well-being greatly satisfied him.

“What are you doing out here?” The Senora asked suddenly.

Lethe looked at his watch; it was almost 4:30 in the morning.

“Oh, I came outside to have a cigarette . . . I must have fallen asleep.”

“When Don Quixote fell asleep, he was attacked by highway men.”

Lethe smiled. “Are you a highway man?”

“Not tonight.”

They laughed together. “Go to bed, nino.”