Why I Don’t Smoke Pot Anymore

David Byrne went solo after he left Talking Heads, one of the great bands of the 1980s, so my friend Zhang suggested we go to the band shell in Central Park and hear him play. It was summer and New York heat can melt the Polar Caps in about an hour. After a while, we drifted off to find shade and seats. And a place where it was only 97 degrees, not enough to melt away cellulite, but close.
 
 Zhang is a pothead. He didn’t always have rent but he always had weed. He passed around a ceramic cigarette filled with dope. Those things look so real a cop would have had to look through a magnifying glass to tell whether it was fake or not. I’m not a big pot smoker. I find that unless you have a Good Humor truck or twelve pizzas at your disposal, smoking weed is just an enhanced nap.
 
 I was the last one of my friends to take a hit and when I did, my shoulders fell off. I removed my Chanel earrings and put them in my purse. I could tell there was something coming that was not going to be good for the House of Chanel. 
 
 “Zhang, what’s in this pot?”
 “Nothing.”
 “Don’t fuck with me, there’s something else in here, PCP maybe?”
 “Nothing, relax.” 
 “Heroin?” 
 “Nothing.” 
 
 I stood up and immediately sat back down, my legs lost in a terrible standing accident. I crash-landed onto a cement ledge, rocketing my uterus so far north it was surrounded by Canadian Mounties. I was so high God was sitting on my left. 
 
 “Zhang, I’m going to pass out.”
 
 I was going to blackout in Central Park, where I would be tagged by graffiti artists and bashed on the head by poorly dressed homophobes.

Zhang yanked me to my feet. “You’re walking this off.”
 
 In what alternate universe can you walk off marijuana? If you’re going back and forth to the refrigerator, MAYBE. But suddenly I was marching with my friends in a single file through the crowds in Central Park and feeling worse and worse. Not to mention appearing as if we’d lost a wedding reception and were looking for its conga line.

“I’m going to black out, seriously, Zhang, I’m not going to make it.”
 “Yes you are, just walk.” 
 “Look, there’s a cop, let’s ask him for help. Oh shit, he’s getting away. He could have helped me! He could have taken me to the hospital.” 
 “We’ll find another one,” Zhang said. Calm, unworried.
 “You’re turning yellow.”
 “I’m Chinese, of course you’re seeing yellow.” 
 
 At the time that actually made sense to me.
 
 “Oh my God, everything’s turning white; I’m going down.” Zhang jerked me forward and as abruptly as the bad crazy thing had descended upon me, it cleared. I stopped walking. I was okay. I discovered later, much later, that before a person blacks out, everything appears yellow and then finally, white. You do not ever want to see white.
 
 “Holy crap,” Zhang said. 
 “Tell me about it.”
 “How scary was that?”
 “Very, very scary. I could have DIED.”
 “Not that,” he said, “you wanted to stop a cop and ask him to help you while you were stoned.”
 “Yeah, and you didn’t even listen to … oh.”