It starts before it begins but there’s nothing we can do about that.

 

MARCH 14th 2022

I leave for Jamaica in less than thirty-six hours. I have smoked weed every night for a little over a year. I do not know how to get weed in another country because I am awkward and uncomfortable around other people and the D.A.R.E. program in Fifth Grade left an indelible mark on my psyche. My plan was to smuggle edibles in my children’s Whole Foods Multi-Vitamin gummies, but I have run into some trouble on the internet.  

 

I read a story about a man flying from Baltimore to Montego Bay in July of 2021. He is detained for possession of THC gummies and misses his flight. I cannot miss this flight. My children are very excited about their first trip out of the country. The other family vacation we tried to take during COVID ended in disaster on the first day and we’re all scarred and it is very, very important that I not miss this flight.

 

A few more clicks and I find a hookah lounge that sells weed, supposedly, not far from our all-inclusive resort. Instructions are vague. Reviews are mixed. Logistics are terrifying. I ditch the original plan to unwittingly drug mule my elementary-school-aged children and decide, instead, to use my powers as a writer for good and pen The Definitive Guide on How to Buy Weed in Jamaica.

 

The trip begins the night before, with screaming. My anxieties and my wife’s anxieties are engaged in a skirmish, a kind of wrest for control. The trip has taken on more weight than either of us can safely hold. And so here we are – arguing about check-in times, how early we need to leave for the airport, and I’m pacing, uncontrollably tense, obsessing over my stack of books. I am hesitant to include the titles I carry with me, for fear their inevitable intrusion into the text will be too glaringly obvious and I’ll be hung and quartered as a fraud, the indisputable copycat. But the books you bring on vacation are the most important decision you will make. The balance is key. Potential moods must be vetted and accounted for. You once sat in a holding cell for eight hours with only a stapled thesis paper on Heart of Darkness from an admittedly strikingly-fall-to-your-knees gorgeous graduate student. You will not make this mistake again. Every book could be your last. Every vacation could be your last. You may have to sit and wait for the authorities to figure out what to do with you – pack wisely. There is also the matter of the island itself. We are not entirely antagonistic to the idea of a ‘beach read,’ with its pleasant numbing qualities – particularly on a trip where the nerves are already well-frayed. Another thing to consider: a book should conform to, or enhance, the setting. And lastly, my fear of being away from home and entering unknown zones and spaces, the feeling I am lost in time, out of place and stuck in the wrong, diseased consciousness can sometimes be soothed, even slightly, with the calming comfort of familiarity – a welcome text from another time in your life, to ground you and return you to another version of yourself. I miss cigarettes. Those worked too.

 

I decide on four books of varying length, for varying purposes. I bring Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis, to distract myself in what I expect to be a sea of designer fashion labels and narcissistic, naked ambition. Hopefully some tight, biting dialogue. To pull a laugh from a knotted belly. I bring Agitation by Alexandrine Ogundimu. This is the second installment of her excellent, absorbing, haunting auto-fiction series, following last year’s release of Desperate. I hate complaining about hypocrisy in publishing, because complaining about anything in publishing is a waste of cell activity, but it bothers me greatly that a mainstream lit fic world supposedly hell bent on championing diversity and ‘own stories,’ ignores Alexandrine Ogundimu – a highly skilled technician, a brutal documentarian of the private and public human drama of a trans black woman living and breathing and writing, right fucking now, in America.

 

I bring Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, a book I have been starting and stopping and trying to read for the better part of a year now. This is a last-minute pull, and fulfills the role of marrying text to locale, the foreigner in the realm of the exotic and perhaps even some of the substance abuse, though Lowry is a Picasso and I am a finger painter in this regard. But really this title makes the cut because when I pitch this article to my housemates, Gabriel Hart immediately cites Under the Volcano and I think, “perfect, I can now introduce my housemates into my story & why we’re all here, gathered around Jake’s ramshackle pyre, sipping mushroom moon juice, and listening to the story of my middle-class family vacation.”

 

We are here because I need drugs. Every time I’ve found a drug, I’ve had some trouble letting it go:

 

After a high school spent drawing X’s on my hands in thick black sharpies, I sit on Emily *****’s rooftop with Adam Lazzara, before Caleb dies & before Adam leaves for New York, and we drink our first sips of orange hooch. I am seventeen years old, maybe eighteen. I will drink to drunkenness every night after this until my mid-twenties. I will be convinced I cannot sleep without it, cannot stomach the long, dark, lonely hours of the night with just the racing, intrusive, harmful thoughts.

o   I will get a DUI outside Baltimore, while disassociating.

o   I will lie to other addicts in church basements, just to get my court-ordered documents signed.

o   I will not keep going.

Following a series of panic attacks and debilitating bouts of derealization, magical thinking, attempts at self-harm, whole-body numbness, and crippling, constant anxiety my mother sends me to a doctor who prescribes me Clonazepam at age nineteen and I take it every day, usually twice and sometimes four times, until I am thirty-eight years old.

o   I stop taking them when I start smoking weed.

o   The weed seems safer, somehow.

 

The last book I pack is a Library of America edition of two Raymond Chandler classics, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. These are my comfort food, for the moments when the panic won’t subside, when my mind races to a darkness, to an empty spill of a body in the march towards not existing. I can sit by the pool and Marlowe, as he did outside the Cameron Village Library [where I once lied to my wife about going to the gym to work out and instead sat in the parking lot eating K&W pecan pie, sticky fingers, glaze oozing down my mesh basketball shorts in a sure sign of my secret shame], will carry me from one moment to the next with a kind of light, confident lilt, necessary in unfamiliar waters.

 

MARCH 15th 2022

By the time I land, my new piece, Depression Chess, will be released. My winter depression will be laid bare. I abhor this entire intrusion of non-fiction into my oeuvre. I do not want to be known. I do not want to be understood. Meanwhile, I am in White Boy Spring. It takes literature a long time to catch up. I have been reading Bret Easton Ellis, waiting to board, and now I sense an unlikely confidence in my writing. This sounds like an insult, but mostly is not.

 

On the first leg of the flight over I take 1 mg Clonazepam to stave off a mild, familiar panic in flight. The feeling of feet not firmly on ground, unable to run. The feeling of trapped: trapped in this steel cylinder – trapped in this fearful, erratic mind. I visited New York recently, to meet my publisher in person and read from my upcoming debut novel, Characters. Shortly after I arrived, which itself came after months of intense raw nerves spilling out into every corner of my life, I had a panic attack at a Mexican restaurant. Outdoors eating Tamales, with my publisher and some writer friends, I kept it together, just. My publisher has a keen eye for moods (as well as talent, clearly), and asked, later in the evening, as we walked from one spot (dead, too early) to the next spot (too much flannel, & dreadful lighting), “are you ok?” I told him I needed to know where the exits were at all times. Up here, in the sky, the exits elude me, and I take another milligram just to be on the safe side.

 

I put Irv Teibel’ Environments in my AirPods. Specifically, A Country Stream. Irv Teibel was a field recordist who processed ocean loops at Bell Labs with the help of a neuropsychologist (“The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore”) and elicited a confession from Richard Nixon (“I had prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in”) through the science and magic of magnetic tape technology. A Country Stream is a regular aural escape for me in times of distress. I am drawn to the beautiful idea that one soul might record a peaceful moment – I imagine him sitting quietly by the stream to soak up the sounds of a pleasant day – so that he might transfer that calm, to trap it like lightning bugs in a bell jar at dusk in Summer, and send it through the waves of time and space to me. Receiving this stream next to a mountain, I close my eyes and dream:

 

I am itchy knees, wet grass, staring up at a mountain (some years it was a hill), listening to the sounds of shotguns in the distance. Uncles arguing in the nearness. Sight of a young, pale cousin chasing air in dandelion fields. It will be many years before what is happening inside those curing barns comes to light. A snake slithers in my direction at the bank of a creek. Papaw says it’s a water snake and to be careful. Papaw’s eyes set back and strong, like all of him. Papaw says they’ll bite. The snake gets closer. It is pink and red and winding, and a skyscraper and its teeth are nerf bullets and the captain has turned off the fasten seatbelt sign and you are free to move about the cabin.

 

We walk out into the hot island sun and into a crowd of busses, cars, trucks, vespas, and pedal bikes, and are quickly ushered to a black Toyota sprinter van for the 25-minute ride to our resort. While packing my suitcases into the back of our ride, a friend of the driver pats me on the shoulder, asks if I’m all set. Do I need anything for my trip? Would I like some ganja? Yea, that would be good, I say. We walk over to his sprinter van, parked beside. He pulls out the bag, names the price, and we swap and settle up. Walk back to our ride, my daughter asks where I was, “getting some Jamaica currency,” our driver asks me if everything was to my satisfaction. I hand him a twenty and say, “everything for my satisfaction, let’s roll.” Everywhere are angels. This, it turns out, is how you buy weed in Jamaica.

 

MARCH 26th 2022

I am on the floor, screaming into a pillow. My wife is rubbing my back, concentric circles, firm palm. I beg her to take me to the emergency room. The emergency room has the drugs. The emergency room will feed me the drugs to make this moment end. To skip time, to skip in time, to skip over time, and then I can write this instead of having to feel it.

 

“You don’t need to go to the emergency room.”

 

My body is completely numb. Part of me is over there, in another room, in another year. I am sweat. I am heart explode. I am person erase.

 

“We’ve been here before. Everything will be ok. You are safe. We always make it through.”

 

Bite the tip of my tongue until it pops and pulses. Gnaw the inside of cheek flesh. If it hurts, I must be real. If it hurts, it must be happening. When can I take another pill? I’ve been lying on this bathroom floor for two hours and nothing is working.

 

“I have a timer on. You took a pill six minutes ago. Give it time to work.”

 

I took a pill six minutes ago. I took a pill sixteen years ago. I am the house I grew up in. I am the cries of my brother. I am a begging, shivering hole of memories disintegrating quickly and slowly from two decades of benzodiazepine dependence.

 

APRIL 4th 2022

Now is later, thank god. She adjusts the rim of her glasses, fidgets with a pen, sighs.

 

“Exercise, of course. You know this. I’m sure everyone you have ever met with has told you this. That energy needs somewhere to go. Sweat it out! Ride a bike, go for a long walk. Commit yourself to thirty minutes a day. But, Derek, you have to make some other changes too. We need to talk about the marijuana.”

 

The marijuana. Holy shit, is this lady one hundred and fifty years old? The marijuana. The marijuana? The marijuana is how I sleep. The marijuana is how I don’t take so many of those goddamn memory erasers you keep prescribing. The marijuana wrote half of my debut novel. It’s the half everyone hates, but still.

 

“I’m not saying you have to cut it out entirely. In fact, that would probably be a bad idea for you right now. Let’s start slow. Weekends only, small doses.”

 

I only had 10 milligrams from a weird edible I bought in D.C. in my system when I found the bathroom floor. It’s not the weed.

 

“It’s a cumulative effect.”

 

I need drugs to give this life some color. I can’t stand everything being always the same all of the time and beige or tan. I’m writing an article.

 

“An article? What do you mean?”

 

I mean I’m writing an article. On how to buy weed in Jamaica. I’m the weed guy. That’s me.

 

“Did you buy weed in Jamaica?”

 

Yes, of course.

 

“Do they have dispensaries there?”

 

They do, but I didn’t even have to go to one. Some guy came up to me right outside the airport.

 

“And this is for an article you’re writing?”

 

Yeah, well, it’s more like a guide. A ‘how to.’ This way, when someone googles how to buy weed in Jamaica they’ll find my article.

 

“And you’ll tell them to buy drugs from a stranger in a foreign country that just walked up to you outside of the airport?”

 

…

 

“Maybe you should write a different article.”