Zachary Crosby
ENC 2135-77
Maddie Kahl
5th April, 2018
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Warning: Drug Use and Explicit Language; Read at Your Own Risk
Imagine a wooden table. Your standard wooden table with four wooden legs and a rectangular wooden tabletop, about knee height. The table is part of a set of army surplus decorations for Northgate Apartment C-202, a sparsely decorated apartment permanently stuck in the 1970’s. My freshman year the table sat in the apartment of a Junior named Drew. I practically worshipped Drew and he opened my eyes to the world of cannabis. He became a sort of older brother figure to me and guided my transformation from naivety to “hoodrat”-dum. Drew was the first person in my life to use the table; I never would have expected to see it again after he left Ole Miss. Of the many hours I spent in his apartment, one story sticks out as a formative experience in my life.
“Step one: Get yourself a paper and kinda spread it out a little,” Drew said, pulling the green, slightly translucent paper from its packaging.
“Ok so now you have a choice to make: whether or not you want to make a filter. If you do, I usually take a piece of index card and roll it up,” he explained, tearing off a piece and expertly fashioning it into a filter. He positioned himself over the table and opened up the grinder, tapping it out over a piece of printer paper. The bright metallic green of the grinder, the light from the lamp hitting it with every tap, shone beams over the living room.
“Now here comes the fun part. Put your filter at the end of the paper and shape the whole thing like a canoe. Start sprinkling your bud inside the paper until you think you have enough.” Deftly packing the weed into the paper, Drew explained the final step:
“This is the part most new smokers mess up; you have to get really good with your fingers to roll a tight one. Pick up the paper and use your thumbs to close the side closest to you over the ganj and then use your index fingers to keep it closed as you slowly roll upwards with your thumb.” Despite saying to do it slowly, Drew had his joint already ready to close, licking the glue from left to right and closing it tightly.
“The last bit is pretty obvious: lick that fucker and close it good; twist the top to look like a tootsie roll and you’re all done.” Drew laid his joint back down on the table. It was perfect: Closed tightly around the weed and beautifully cylindrical. Definitely something that would put me on my ass in a few minutes.
“Why don’t you try for yourself?” Drew had already slipped his into his pocket, taking away any chance for me to observe his masterful creation for inspiration. Trying the best I could to follow Drew’s steps precisely I crafted a joint: It was loose throughout and all crinkly. I was sure that Drew would laugh at me. He looked at it and shrugged his shoulders, saying,
“It’ll smoke.”
“But it looks awful, I want to try again.”
“It's not about how it looks, the principle is the same. If it lights and stays lit, it’ll smoke. Don’t concern yourself too much with the joint itself. If you roll one for someone they’ll be grateful no matter what it looks like. Stoners aren’t shallow and are always thankful when someone shares with them. It’s one of the things I love about being a stoner.”
I appreciated Drew not only for the basic lessons about rolling joints, etiquette, and for the countless adventures we had stoned out of our minds; he introduced me to a culture I had never experienced before. He shared with me decades of culture, accrued through millions of people who all loved one thing: pot. I didn’t realize there was such a depth to being a stoner. Respect for oneself and others is paramount. Sharing is expected and encouraged. And most importantly stoners all share a love for life and for each other. It was these central tenets that fascinated me so much, changing the experience of smoking weed into a cultural phenomenon that made me feel included and embraced.
Unfortunately, Drew left Ole Miss and my life about as quickly as he came into it; leaving Apartment C-202 vacant. Winter came and passed, as did the second semester of my freshman year. By the beginning of the Fall semester in 2016 I had almost entirely forgotten about that apartment and the role it had played in my life. New characters entered onto the stage of my life; each taking up a role in my fast-paced adventures. I soon befriended a gay couple, Liam and Corey, who I sought out solely for their role as enablers of my drug use. My occasional smoke seshes freshman year turned into smoking five-plus times a day, skipping classes and spending hours high as a kite without an end in sight! It was these glorious times that were spent in Apartment C-202. Corey had managed to finagle his way into moving from a shitty dorm room into a slightly less shitty apartment. That kind of upward momentum is pretty big for a poor college student; I made good use of my friendship with them by coming over nigh every day and smoking out the apartment.
We spent hours talking about random shit; Liam and Corey were avowed socialists and used any opportunity to push their views on us. I also met my current partner Grace during that semester as well as her best friend Chris. We all became so close that it was pretty much expected that each of us would meet at the apartment at some point during the day; we all came over uninvited anyways. However, very soon my life would change because of events that transpired in that apartment. Apartment C-202 was my hub to the strange and fantastical world of psychedelia.
On a breezy Thursday in late October, as I was on my way to Arabic, class my partner’s best friend Chris approached me in the lobby of our dorm. Chris pulled me aside quickly and said:
“Dude, I’m like, tripping really hard right now.”
“No fucking way dude! On what?”
“1-P LSD. It’s like LSD except made in a lab for research. I’ve never tripped before and I kinda bought this impulsively.”
“Shit man, I kinda wanna explore this with you.”
“You wanna go out into the woods and chill?”
“Wait, what? That was random as fuck! But yeah sure man, I’ll even smoke you out.”
“That sounds excellent.”
So a smoke sesh and deep conversation in the woods turned into one of the most emotionally, physically, mentally, and visually enthralling experience of my life. To pay me back for the weed, Chris gave me a tab of LSD and thrust me into the world of psychedelia. Little did I know that, not only had Chris purchased LSD, he had also bought a substance known as 4-AcO-DMT which imitates a psilocybin mushroom and turns into the psychoactive compound psilocin in the body, initiating a psychedelic trip. Later that evening, Chris, my partner, our other two best friends (amicably referred to as the Gays), and I all gathered in apartment C-202 of Northgate Apartments, now occupied by the Gays. It was so bizarre to me that somehow my new best friends occupied the same apartment that I spent days and days in my freshman year before the departure of Drew. And, sitting in the middle of the living room, was the table.
On that night, we realized the table was the center of our universe. On that table, the doses of DMT were split up and taken. We returned that night, time and time again circled around the table, for many activities. We suffered a problem on a number of occasions where we struggled to pack a bowl of weed to smoke and just left it lying around on the table, until there were tidily constructed piles on each corner of the table. It was also on that night and the next morning that my partner and I decided to start dating and is now our anniversary.
I miss that apartment a lot these days. I miss my hijinks and my grand adventures. I miss the feeling of camaraderie and shared feeling of delinquency. Looking back it occurs to me how odd it was that the apartment was formative for the creation of my character and outlook on life. Apartment C-202 was just a location, but through my experiences there my life was opened up to so much more love and beauty than I had ever felt before it. I look back fondly on my time at Ole Miss and in that apartment, confident that I was built up as a man and as a human with plenty of love to share with the rest of the world.