don't break the seal

“I started to cough, but I’d breathe in and just inhale more smoke,” my friend recalled. “You’re an asshole if you leave though.”

“‘Don’t break the seal,’ people really say that.”

We all laughed. He was talking about hotboxing, the ancient art of locking yourself in a small space or room with a handful of brave companions and smoking weed, joint after joint, blunt after blunt until, well, you all ran out. Common hotboxing spots included cars (leather seats preferable - doesn’t hold the smell as long) and small bathrooms (but only when parents are away - don’t forget to remove towels first).

There seemed to be a sort of frugality that went along with ‘boxing, as it was often called; it was considered a better, more thorough use of the precious bud that had taken all too many hours of minimum-wage work and sneaker reselling to afford. This way, every last puff of smoke was available to be sucked into someone’s lungs, none to be stolen by the hot summer air.

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I don’t remember the first time I saw a person slice open a cigarillo, or the first time someone pulled out a tiny ziplock bag of green in front of me. There was no pivotal moment - instead, it seemed I was just gradually enveloped by the culture that took hold of my friends. At some point, around age fourteen or fifteen, I just found myself in the middle of it all, squinting and waving smoke from the air.

Marijuana was dangerous because it wasn’t. Unlike drinking, which for a high schooler was inextricably linked to vomiting, embarrassment, and losing valuables, weed allowed for carelessness and didn’t roll over into the next day with a hangover. With no fear of blacking out, people just smoked and smoked until they were as high as they dared (but usually just until they had no more weed to smoke). It possessed a culture of excess that would be more treacherous with alcohol – take in as much as you possibly can, whenever you can.

Although a smoker would be quick to tell you that weed isn’t addictive, they would probably agree that it’s too good to be true. For stressed, confused teenagers, that is all they need. At the party becomes this weekend, and this weekend becomes Thursday night, and for some, compact, portable vapes do away with the waiting all together. The smoke creeps into every possible event; going to a concert is met with we could smoke first? and making plans is generally considered easier when high.

The magical thing about the stuff is you could do just about anything in the hour or two that followed and it’d automatically be at least somewhat fun and amusing. Gathering a group of seventeen year-olds in a park just to talk would be absurd, but with a blunt circling around, it was completely normal. Over time, however, the conversations grow more dull - existential debates become more rare and harder for participants to keep track of with increasing volumes of weed, and sessions become more and more often accompanied with slow reminiscing (in between passes) of times when especially copious amounts of weed had been smoked by each participant. Everyone becomes too comfortable with the format, and it loses its original allure; no longer is the high mind-bending, just a bit better than sobriety. But as tolerance increases, and everyone becomes more aware of the vast network of dealers and ever-diminishing prices, the frequency of those moments rises, and regular smoke-free chatting and galavanting is just no longer enough.

I was always there to pass the lighter and queue up a song while my friends rolled. Once I publicly adopted the belief that “it’s fine if you do, I just don’t want to,” there was no issue as long as I didn’t mind sitting there waiting. If legalization will do one thing, it’s speed up the process; with the amount of time I’ve spent watching friends fumble with a torn Backwood’ I could write a book.

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My friend swore loudly, his voice echoing across the abandoned soccer field. It was hard to see through the black, but judging by the wringing of his left hand, withdrawn rapidly from the shining steel of a pocket knife, I guessed he’d accidentally cut himself.

Wiping the blood off onto his shorts, he resumed his work.

With his thumb bracing the spine of the blade, my friend traced the lower ring of a plastic water bottle, slicing through just below the blue Dasani label.

His companion was tugging at fused round balls of green, pulled them apart and using a penny to brush remnants into neat piles. He worked with a concentration like I’d never seen. The one crafting a makeshift bong out of the water bottle had graduated, and was home for the summer. A previous lab partner and longtime friend, we’d met through long text conversations over facebook debating music and sports. He was passionate and inspired, and we’d recorded songs together what seemed like an eternity ago.

I asked him what he’d been up to lately, and without looking up he described college dorm experiences in a haze. He smoked several times a day now, and god damn it was great.

I looked down at the small pile of discarded tobacco from their last smoking vessel, the classic standby cigarillo. Watching him pause to raise a little plastic rectangle from his pocket and inhale into it, I remembered claims long ago of “I’d try weed, but never cigs.” He offered me a hit of the vape and with a shake of my head, I mentally tallied everyone I knew who now craved nicotine like we once craved Antonio’s Pizza. There were more than a few.

Eventually the plastic water bottle bong was finished, and an 11:30 PM search to find water for it began. With most restaurants closed, the best option was to siphon water from a university-branded barrel in the parking lot nearby. It wasn’t as bad as it could be, and the experience was accompanied by stories of converted toilet bowls and rancid lake water that made it feel all the more normal.

I watched the two smoke, and afterwards we drove around into the older boy’s Toyota Prius for a while before exhaustion hit and it was decided we’d all head home. We exchanged daps and handshakes and there was a muttering of a “good time” and “we should do this again.” My friends drove off and I tried to remember how it was we’d spend our weekends before.

© 2017