Passin' the pipe around

I've been reading Beat authors voraciously lately, Kerouac, Burroughs, and J.C. Holmes. I've studied their adjectives and moods with haughty condescension, knowingly judging them from the perch of my newfound sobriety. A perch where psychoanalysis is now so heavily reliant on placating the patient with legal prescription drugs that make us dry drunks and smokeless stoners fitting uniformly into the shifting patterns of our labyrinth society.
I've read them, now and again, after a shot or two of Tequila, but only a shot or two, wanting to be where they are. I've read them with enough of a glazed over expression that I felt as though I could more completely relate to their faithlessness and their heartache in the aftermath of war. The vain hopes that something higher than themselves still may hold an explanation for a species now capable of annihilating itself entirely.
But only one or two shots. I never lost control.
Yesterday, I made a mistake. I lost control.
As I sat with some young friends, one of whom just made the realization this year that she is, in fact, an artist, I thought that realization cause for celebration. And it was. So I took the pipe in my hand and in a display of camaraderie, I took a toke.
“When was the last time you burned?” Carrie asked me.
“I don't even remember. It's got to be five years at least.”
“That's a really long time.”she nodded, putting the lighter to the bowl.
We talked about how many Niel Cassidys each of us knew. We talked about Virginia Wolfe. In the profundity that only comes when you can get out of your own way, I shared the moment with my friend when I too finally realized that I am an artist.
I had read “A Room of One's Own” and subsequently decided to make a writing space for myself. In my tiny 800 square foot house, I had my own writing room, with my Witchcraft books, my posters of John Lennon and Barack Obama, my prints by Michael Parks and Tamara De Lempika and my altar with Ganesh and Diana amidst earth, air, fire, and water blessing and pushing forth my creative prosperity.
When in the midst of trying to have a child their would be an occasional glimmer of hope, I would hold my breath. Because if I got pregnant or we could adopt, my writing room would have to become a nursery. Now that I'd finally had the confidence to grant myself a sacred space, I didn't want to let it go. I had married a man who could support me, true, because I wanted a man who could support a lifestyle filled with children, with life.
But in fact, as I stood in the doorway of that room of my own, taking in my files full of stories and notes and ideas, I realized that a child was not what I wanted to create at all.
I had met my partner in the champagne room. I had married a customer. Like Anais Nin, my consort was a proper sponsor of my craft.
I have resigned myself to my role as an artist and I have constructed my life so as to achieve that end.
“But why would you choose to say you've resigned yourself to it?” Jimmy asked me. “Why not just say you've assigned yourself that role?”
“You can assign yourself the life of an artist because you're young. You can still choose to opt out of the lifestyle. You've got TIME!” I answered.
“Ah TIME ...” mused Virginia.
“Yes. The very thing the Beat authors were always pondering. You've all got plenty of it. I, on the other hand have to resign myself to the role because I've blown all my other options, burned all the bridges, that might have led to more conventional careers with more linear ascents up some corporate ladder.”
“You see, I once thought that even an artist's career path could be a linear ascension up the corporate ladder. That's why I pushed my ex so hard. I thought that if he got a sitcom, that only then could I be a stay at home mom, and really, that would have been the only way we could have afforded it.”
Into this my friend Carrie interjected, “Yeah, see that's what's so fucked up about America. On the one hand we have the woman's movement, and that's great and all but in Europe where the gender roles are more traditional. There's more of a focus on family and kids don't get the shaft.”
“Exactly. Women get one year paid maternity leave in Italy.” I offered.
“My parents were never home man, they were drunks.” piped up Virginia. “I can remember ... this is my earliest memory, okay? My dad stuck an empty KFC bucket in the corner of my crib once when I was sick and I woke up and there I had puked in a big circle all the way around the outside of the bucket because how was I supposed to know what the bucket was for!”
All around the table there were nods of understanding and I sat there broken hearted at what had happened to these young kids who, had not had the kind of dedicated parenting that only comes from a mother either from the old country, or one who is straight with herself as to the ideals that entail womens suffrage. Both parents had been working and they had raised themselves as a result.
We agreed that it was better to be a single woman in America but that the more traditional roles seen in Europe were of better service to the children. Wanting to care for children is seen in America as selfish and that attitude makes a second class citizen out of every American kid.
I thought about that as I went on to explain the moment when I came to the realization of what my ex's acting career really was – a roller-coaster ride. There was no dependable linear ascension. No job promises that a wife could count on. So I left him to look for a man with a stable linear career.
But once I had read, “A Room of One's Own” and had finally given myself permission to be a writer, I had to take a very sobering look in the mirror. This would mean that I too, was in for the roller-coaster ride. Nothing safe would occur from here on in. I had lost twenty years of concentration and self-esteem to Bi-Polar Disorder , a disease which at the time left me feeling like my life was a vision quest, a search for the answer to what the devil was wrong with me. With that illness under control now, the prospect of a child would take another twenty years away from my room ... if I was to do it properly, as my mother had, and not raise Peter Pan's Lost Boys, as I now saw the gaggle of twenty somethings before me.
I had to make a choice. I was running out of TIME and I have something to say.
In the midst of this discussion on self definition, the pot had hit. Like a tidal wave pulling me out to sea, I felt over come by one certainty.
On top of knowing that I can openly claim my choice of writing over motherhood, I now know that I can re-claim my sobriety and still claim my artistic temperament and voice.
I didn't want to write with the pot buzz. It frightened me, that loss of control, whereas when I was my friends' age, pot got me out of my own way. (or so I thought) I would justify smoking pot by saying it helped me write but it didn't make me want to write at all last night.
As Carrie and Virginia and Jimmy chattered on about the best of film and the worst of internet porn, I got my cell phone out of my purse and called my husband.
“Hey. I made a mistake. I need you to come get me 'cause I got high and I can't drive home.”
The kids looked at each other nervously.
“Are you okay?” Carrie offered feeling a slight sense of obligation.
I shook my head lazily, feeling all the purple caterpillar fuzz it was suddenly filled with. I held up my hands as if in defense.
“Don't let me be a downer on your party. This is where you're supposed to be at your age. I just have responsibilities now that I forgot about for a minute, that's all.”
“Www... we're sorry to be a bummer.” Virginia offered tentatively.
“No, you're not a bummer and you didn't do anything wrong.”
“You didn't do anything wrong either!” Jimmy exclaimed.
“Well that's actually all kind of relative.” I said, looking at the forlorn flea covered cat my phone call had displaced from my lap. Carrie's brow furrowed, asking a question without words.
“It's all well and good to be a disappointment in your mother's eyes when you're a teenager.”
Virginia's hand shot up in the air. I smiled.
“It's all well and fine to be a disappointment in your mother's eyes in your twenties. And then you hit your thirties and you start asking yourself deep questions about what you want to be, and in the back of your mind, whether you admit it or not, you're thinking of her. But to be a disappointment in your mother's eyes when your forty?! No. I can't be that. I'm an Aunt. I have a husband. I'm supposed to be a role model for my nieces and nephews. I can't be this anymore.”
My cell phone rang. Mike was in their driveway.
I walked into my house and kissed my dogs and let them smell Carrie's cats. I curled up in a ball on the love seat and didn't move for the rest of the night. I felt weak and incapable of any movement at all, like the purple tingly caterpillar ectoplasm had over taken my insides, robbing me of proprioception and vocalization. Fuck you Kerouac and Hemingway too for that matter, I thought to myself. This is no way to live.
What I ultimately came away with was a sense that I now know two things for certain:
1. I have resigned myself to the only role in this life I am capable of playing. I am an artist, and I can be nothing else.
2. I no longer need drugs to write well. I have enough life experience to fall back on now and in fact, drug use only serves as an impairment now. I write better and get out of my own way more efficiently now that I am on the sober path.
I thought about the Beat authors and how they had drawn me in, duped me. I thought about TIME.
There was a passage in “Naked Lunch” where Bill is talking to a dealer. The dealer says to him,
“You have something I want ... five minutes here ... an hour someplace else ... two ... four ... eight ... Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself ... Everyday die a little ... It takes up The Time ...”
That's what the vision quest takes away from you. TIME. That's what I related to in the endless traveling and hitch hiking and partying and jazz jumping and hard ass drugging the Beat authors expounded upon, the search for something more than myself. Something more than a culture that could, with the push of one red button create a nuclear winter comparable only to the gray dust and rubble holocaust of my own recurring nightmares. If the Patriarch of monotheism is anything less than a fire breathing predator, then explain the Taliban to me. Explain the Bush dynasty. Explain how one percent of America's population, by virtue of being investment bankers can buy government policy. Explain why I have to choose between having a career and being a good mother, and further, explain why I am condemned for whatever decision I make in America.
I woke up around eleven the next morning. I woke up slowly, full of remorse. I cleaned the house better than I ever do when I don't feel guilty. I shot Carrie an apology message on Facebook.
After the porch was clean and I'd set out some steaks for dinner to defrost, I sat down and gave into the dark somber lull that comes in the suspension of time before the pen touches the paper. With a clear head and with confidence, I started to write.