I was 17 years old, a senior in high school, getting all A’s in my advanced classes, and also working 20 hours a week at the elite grocery store in town. My dad knew the family that ran it. At age sixteen, he’d marched me in there  to make a man to man request to the manager, to hire me on as a bag boy. That was this store’s gimmick: the bagboys not only bagged, but brought the stuff out to your car for you.

  Perfect damn job for a pathologically shy specimen like me.

  It gave me headaches and stomach cramps and buried anger at ‘serving’ these housewives & their clueless harried husbands…”make sure to not put anything on top of the fresh fruit..don’t want to damage it. Ok, young man?”  Yep. 

  Every customer had one eye on all the prices being rung up, and the other on me, the geek safeguarding her /his food for the long trip home to a modern kitchen kind of like my mom’s , but better. With all the appliances new and shiny and clean, unlike hers.

 Nerve wracking work…

………………………………………………………………..

  One night, as we were closing up, I scuttled to the front and planted myself next to the time clock, so I could punch out and go home to…some tv, some food, safety .  I could cook for myself in Mom’s kitchen. Maybe a cube steak?

  Kenny was up front with me, flirting with the cashiers as usual. Imagine Robert Plant & Mick Jagger    and you got Kenny. He was a sort-of musician, a well known pothead in school, but possessing a magnificently mellow & earnestly moral personality. He scared the hell out of me.

  He saw me. He knew me from around school, and of course here, where he was working in ‘produce’, a step up from a mere bagboy. A young man with responsibility, to oversee all the moist green   vegetables & ephemerally succulent fruit. He did it with a smile and a flirty attitude. He advised housewives on the type and features and care of their produce, a mighty mission in life. He liked to toss his shoulder length hair when he talked, like a girl…but in no way would one consider him effeminate…just sensual, hedonistic, friendly, a bit dangerous because of his lack of seriousness…

  He came up and said, “Hey, Jimmy, how are you? We don’t get to talk much, man. “

  I froze and wanted him gone. Out of my presence. Too much pressure. Almost black-hole pressure…

  “Yeah. I’m up here, bagging, most usually”, I said.  “Most usually”  was decidedly ungrammatic. A habit of mine, to get nervous and say the most malapropistic shit.

  He leaned in close. I was freaking. He whispered, “You look like you need to get baked. Wanna?” His smile was that of a Aslan-gone-rock n roll,

a lion of a young man extending deep masculine vibes of …solicitude…! What could he see in a shadow of a boy like me, head always down, muttering polite things to well dressed  townspeople, shy, and..well…not ugly anymore. I’d gotten contact lenses and had grown my hair long, like this new singer my older sister introduced me to, Bob Dylan, whose hair was uncontrollable and did the same kind of puffing up as mine.

  “oh sure!” that was my standard answer to any kind of peer pressure, or , well, any request.

  I tingled in anticipation…as the last customers left…I was gonna get high with the coolest guy in school. What would it be like? I was not at all scared, for some part of me told me that this was a turning point in my life, and I must pursue it.

  …………………………………………………………………………………………..

   I feared he might have forgotten. We went out into the parking lot, him singing to himself. Then he looked at me with smirky conspiratorial mirth, and said, “why not go to  Case Mountain?” meaning a small parking area where yuppies could safely keep their vehicles while they climbed our ‘mountain’, a hill technically, but a big one, with arteries of paths leading to the top where you could see for miles & miles. And miles.

 We drove there in two cars. I was worried about cops  coming by, but it was rather secluded.

  I got into his car, his parents’ car, rather,  and noticed immediately the lived-in look of  it. Cig butts overflowing, cassette tapes everywhere, old food bags. My dad kept a clean car.  This would have disappointed him, in me…..for letting things go too long…messes must be cleaned up when you make them.

  Kenny packed the bowl, took a long hit, and passed it to be. I sucked in timidly, slowly, allowing this harsh new smoke find its own way down my air tubes, not forcing it..it slithered serenely down. “Hold it,” instructed Kenny. I was an experienced smoker of Marlboros, so  I could do so easily.

  I passed the bowl back. Holding my breath. Water splashing down the mountain stream was our only music.

………………………………………………………………………

  About 3 minutes later I was a different person.

  Kenny was the same, only more open and friendly, packing and repacking that bowl..

  The fear had disappeared, every carnivorous shred of it in my belly and chest, restricting my motion, keeping me frozen in  a sort of mannequin of a ‘man’. This was the first time in 5 years, since age 12, that I was relaxed. I listened to the stream, looked out the window at the mysterious sky, black clouds silently gliding over our human world.  No fuss .

 “Wanna hear a great song,” Kenny said much much later, after the sky-brook reverie.

  He put in a tape of the Rolling Stones. Whom I knew well. My older brother had been giving me all the classic old stuff for, well, five years or so: the Stones were hardcore, all about sexuality, I thought…clever and brilliant tunes, but not much depth…

  How wrong I was.

  Kenny’s favorite song was “sympathy for the devil”. I had always thought it to be  silly jejeune bad boy song, what the stoners and the outcasts liked because they needed something to get them moving, when they were baked up good..

  He sang it with Mick, some of the lyrics…

  ……………………………………………………………………

“Whattaya think? Good music, but the words are hard to fathom, man,” he said, enjoying the word ‘fathom’ immensely, the fact that he could say it , I guess. I knew all  kinds of words I never used, kept hidden in my throat. But suddenly…

my throat was free of censure.

I heard myself start talking as if I was observing some very strange goofy fellow , perhaps a “crazy-nut” as Mom described some of my older siblings’ friends, who , according to her, were supplying them with all kinds of drugs: pot, lsd,maybe worse. She didn’t have any evidence except their erratic eccentric behavior…

“It’s fathomable, forsooth, I think, but the music is melded to the words, so don’t try and disassociate these two things..the music..is as much the full art as is the vocalization, which, um…hey, isn’t it like, mick is sayin we are all complicit in  Satan, we are satan, sort of..’who kilt the kennedys/after all it was u & me” I was out of air. I breathed. Some new sort of Air. Air was free.  Didn’t it mean ‘spirit’ , ‘pneuma’ , to those Greeks I studied last semester? What else did they say? Well..it is a reasonable universe  , they said…but..

then song changed…

“Stairway to Heaven”, which my big brother joked you could hear 10 times a day on the radio, it was always the first pick for greatest song ever…

Kenny  was looking at me with confusion.  What had I said? I could remember some of it..it was good sound insight…but ..maybe it offended him?...my mutterings often d o this…so then I gotta explain, explain, explain , very tiring…

‘What did you say?” He sat up in his seat and pushed his hair behind his ears and presented a full face encounter, the kind I had tried my entire life to avoid…yet now I enjoyed it..he was, what, human, right? Just like me. Not a damn stereotype at all.

 “Can’t remember,” I giggled..

“Well huh man you better, it was good,” he laughed.

 “Memory is a figment of our imagination, I feel, for it is always in the present moment where we remember things that happened a long time ago, sort of stiffening us up to the new moment, yknow? I mean, if I say something smart, I will remember it later, but just not short term, cuz short term is for immediacy…I say,” I pronounced grandly, “we oughta give our unconscious more credit that we do.. it will take care of us…but..the important…point..” I was getting a bit dizzy in a nice way..

  “Pertinent point, Jimmy?” Kenny laughed and offered me one of his Marlboro Reds.. “Let’s hear it. Wish I had a piece of paper, but I don’t , but who cares is what you are getting at, right? This memory, one from childhood, I feel it a lot , when my mom was sick, when I had to go to the hospital..i hated it..i don’t go to hospitals anymore. So what were we saying?”  He opened the car door and we got out into the night, breathing it in, hearing it, Zeppelin a fringe quiet lament in the background…”when one is all/ and all is one..’’

  I smoked the Marboro. He smoked his, gracefully, while I puffed at it like a carcinogenic nipple.

“You like your smoke, Jimmy, huh?” Kenny said as he began an impromptu pagan kind of dance under the stars, to music in his own head maybe…he used his hands a lot in the dance, which I liked. I was hunched against some mighty ancient tree, observing…

“yeah well yknow it helps…thought I wonder about the need for this oral contact, this lippy stuff you gotta do when you drag, I mean…am I stuck in a Freudian oral stage, maybe?”  I knew zip about Freud’ s refined theories, but I sure knew ‘anal’ and ‘oral’ types…

 “Yeah you are. ..no doubt…” Stairway was ending. Music sounds so paramount, when you are stoned silly. It is like voices coming out of the pith of reality out ‘there’, but also from your inner brain, from out of your dreams….outside? inside? Ha, what a darn dichotomy. True but not true. Whattaya do with this subjectivity/ objective split?  Whatever you feel like at the moment, what ever you need…

Kenny wanted to climb the mountain.Some stairway. To heaven.

We went up a bit, smoked some more, and flowed and glowed downhill..the same kind of feeling I got with my older brother, on  a good day…

He drove me home.