THE NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR

Autofiction about smoking weed for the first time

The summer before my freshman year at Verona High, my next-door neighbor Violetta and her best friend Lois decided to get me stoned. They were both eighteen. I was thirteen.

I had never smoked marijuana before. Cigarettes yes, mostly Marlboro Lights I stole from my aunt, so I had some idea of how the procedure would go. I’d gotten drunk by myself once, not really realizing it, off a few slugs of slivovitz my mother kept in an unlabeled bottle in the cabinet with all her old vinegar and pickles, etc.

But “being high” was a foreign concept—something vague and adult, like income taxes or birth control pills. Yet I had some precognition that marijuana would alter the way I felt about my own mind, that it would damage something in me, and that was an exciting prospect. This is a problem: I am drawn to self-destruction. I always think it will improve my life somehow, it’s never true. Plus, I looked up to Violetta. I would have smoked crack if she had suggested it.