Spicy Puff

Annmarie Throckmorton, M.A.

46 minutes ago

When I was twenty, my roommate and I went to a huge public dance in a barn located somewhere or another out in the night in Minnesota. The barn was several stories tall, dilapidated, a large open-air building. There were more than a hundred people milling about on the dance floor, most of them were not dancing. So I climbed up some temporary scaffolding that leaned high up against a wall and sat down to watch the spectacle.

My roommate came by and with a smile on her lips said, "Hi! Here look, I got this, smoke it!" and she proffered what I thought was a spicy cigarette, clove, cinnamon, or at worst marijuana-with which I was unfamiliar. I took a polite puff and my world effervesed with sparkling sheets of light and glowings. It made me feel very light, bright, and happy. She laughed and asked me what I wanted. Drugged with what in retrospect was likely to have been cocaine, I did what I wanted to do. I chose a tall, lean cowboy who was shuffling man-style around on the dance floor. I had admired him before because he was so confident dancing alone, moving just a little, very male. My roommate went down and fetched him up to me, I felt like a queen commanding my king. I was joyously full of the drug. He was a little older than me but still fresh-faced under a white cowboy hat, with pearl snaps running down his plaid shirt, clean jeans, and scuffed work boots. He and I found each other agreeable so we left together, pairing off into the night to the construction site where he had worked that day. It was not very good. I was simultaneously and unpleasantly both there and not there as the drug wore off. He was distant from me. As we walked back to his truck, my cowboy was quietly upset. He reprimanded me for going there with him, saying that someone might hurt me in such a secluded spot, and he tersely said that I was never to do that again. (I didn't.) And I never saw him again. He had been good to warn me. I have been a very lucky woman.

Spicy Puff