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By

Hank S. Kirton

Joseph remembered the time he got high with his mother. It was a weird, painful, bleeding memory. It taught him nothing. He was fifteen. His mother, Estelle, worked over at the lightbulb factory in Chelsea. She worked third shift. His dad had died when Joseph was four. He’d been a janitor at the high school and sometimes Joseph felt grateful that he had died so he wouldn’t have to say “Hi,” while his dad mopped up puke in the hall. He felt guilty about these feelings but there they were. Joseph couldn’t always control his thoughts.

     Joseph had been smoking weed sporadically since the sixth grade. It was no big deal. He didn’t smoke often, usually just with his friend Billy, and sometimes Raoul and his sister Shjma.. He never got high alone. He got high by himself once and it horrified him. He saw his whole personality. Besides, weed was an expensive commodity and hard to come by. Billy was the only other kid he knew who had a drug connection. And even that was pretty weak and unreliable. They called it “Acapulco Gold” (whatever that was supposed to mean) But the product was grassy and harsh. They did a lot of coughing around Billy’s  rip-off crabgrass.  The high was barely existent. Billy stole the rag-weed from his parents and had to be discrete; he had to be stealthy as shit. You didn’t fuck around with Billy’s parents. No sir. His folks cultivated the stuff in the basement and they did it all wrong. But hey, it was better than nothing

     Joseph kept his drug activity hidden. He sneaked around his mother’s antique, Audubon world, snickering to himself in his sneaky little head. He honestly enjoyed the keen feeling of getting away with something forbidden.

     One drizzly Wednesday afternoon, Joseph got home from school to find his mother sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. “Hi honey,” she said, in an odd, deep voice that was out of character. And what was she doing up? She should be in bed, warming herself with the glowing stories on the television. Resting before another shift with the lighbulbs. But she was up now. Strange.

     “Hey, mother.” Yes, Joseph had been trained to call his mother “mother.” He was often ridiculed by his friends for this weird formality.

     His mother was wrapped in her ratty gray bathrobe, her eyes swollen from sleep. She had just gotten up. Her work schedule was upside down. She lived like a vampire.

     She said, “I know what you’ve been doing.”

     Joseph grabbed a can of Coke from the refrigerator, snapped it open and took a quick slurp. “What?” he said.

     “It feels good, doesn’t it?”

     “Uh, what are you talking about?”

     She swept strands of oily hair out of her face. “I know you’ve been smoking grass, Joseph.”

     He was stunned for a second, then he lowered his head and said, “Oh.” He saw no reason to deny it. Getting caught was always a danger. It was part of the thrill. But how did she find out? He was so careful. He didn’t have a stash in the house. In fact, he hadn’t smoked since he and Billy Rodgers got high behind the sand pits. That was weeks ago.

     “What do you think I should do?” she said.

     Joseph shrugged. “I don’t know.”

     She stood up. “Come with me. I have an idea.”

     She led him outside to the back porch. They stood under the green canvas awning. The rain came pattering down. They faced each other. Joseph’s hands turned into fists. He braced himself for her verdict. There wasn’t much she could take from him. Getting grounded wouldn’t break him either. No way would she get the police involved.

     Then she smiled. “I have something for you. You can think of it as a punishment or a reward. The choice is yours.” She reached into the pocket of her robe and removed what looked like a fat, tightly-rolled joint. She had a blue Bic lighter in her other hand. She plugged the joint into her mouth, lit it, and took a long drag. Then she held the joint toward Joseph and said “Here.” The word came out in a croak as she held the smoke.              

      Joseph looked at the joint, shocked. The familiar smell of the pot was so incongruous to the situation he felt like he was dreaming. He had no idea what to do. He’d never seen this side of her. It was new.

     He hated it.

     His mother finally released the smoke and said, “Go on. Take it.”

     He slowly shook his head and said, “No thank you.” His voice had lifted, gotten higher. He sounded afraid. Hell, he was. The situation was scarily surreal.

    She scowled. “Joseph! You listen to your mother. Smoke this fucking joint, NOW!” She stabbed the joint toward his face as if trying to burn him and he flinched.

     He took the joint. He looked at his mother and said, “Really?” Everything seemed warped, sliding to a burning afterlife. He wanted to run. There were demons behind him.

     She nodded. “Yeah, really.”

Joseph’s mother was thirty-six years old. She was a tall, attractive woman. Her hair was jet black, her eyes as dark and bright as polished anthracite. Joseph’s friends thought she looked like a witch (a real witch, not the silly old-crone Halloween kind) and frequently brought up the fact that she was beautiful (hot), much to Joseph’s embarrassment and dismay. Joseph’s mother had received her BA in contemporary literature from Brown University but was afraid to teach, so she took a job as a human resources manager at Brite Electric. She didn’t date even though she was single. She was still mourning her late husband and Joseph’s father, Harry. Harry suffered a stroke and collapsed in front of Estelle and Joseph in February of 2008. He was forty-two. He just groaned and crumpled and then he was gone forever. Estelle decided she’d never get over the tragedy and moved through her days in a kind of moping, morbid fugue state. Her coworkers were concerned at first but now they just avoided her. Even at work she gave off witchy vibes. She also had a habit of saying inappropriate things; but what could they do, go to human resources?

     “You’re not supposed to just hold it, Joseph, you’re supposed to smoke it,” she said.

     Joseph nodded. “I know.” And then he put the joint to his lips and sucked in smoke.

     “Hold it deep down for as long as you can.”

     Joseph held the smoke as long as he could then it hushed out of his lungs. He coughed.

     His mother said, “You’re supposed to pass it back after you take a hit, you know.”

     Joseph handed the smoldering joint back to his mother. The familiar feeling of a marijuana buzz curled around his tired mind like a warm snake. It was a bad, vaporous, paranoid feeling. Yet he began to feel calmness and soothing relaxation. But, yet; this was not right, he thought. This was not normal. His fucking family was fucked the fuck up. He felt very small and very helpless indeed.

     His mother sucked another hit. Not wanting to look her in the eyes, he moved his gaze to the ground. His mother was wearing flip-flops. She had pretty feet.

     “Here you go, kiddo. Your turn.” She held out the joint.

     “I don’t want any more,” he said. His voice pinged and reverberated in his head like someone playing a triangle underwater...

     Whoa, he was stoned. After one puff.

     “You don’t have a choice. Have another hit, kiddo. You’re the reason we’re here.”

     He plucked the joint from her fingers. He took another hit. Okay, he thought, You wanna see me get high, let’s get high. Then he realized his defiance was misguided. After all, she wanted him to smoke. She wanted to make him sick and freak out and never touch the stuff again. He took a third hit, watching the rain, looking at the muddy ground. He noticed an earthworm. He looked at tough bunches of crabgrass. A bent bottle cap. There was a whole other world down there in the mud. A scary, bizarre world. He moved his eyes back to the safety of his mother’s feet. Everything felt threatening.

     “Once again I have to remind you to pass me back the fucking joint. What’s the matter with you? Didn’t I teach you to be polite? Where are your manners? Is it my fault you’re so rude? Am I a bad mother?”

He handed her back the joint. “I’m sorry.” He looked at her eyes and immediately regretted it. His entire existence and his mother’s constant presence in his life were soft, bleeding concepts leaking from her black galaxy eyes. He tasted desolation. Small moments of his life bubbled and churned. Millions of images. That time he walked in on her on the toilet. The shock of it. How she screamed at his father, telling him to kill her, holding out a knife for him.  “Here! Kill me!” When he was ten she kicked him out of the car for misbehaving, making him walk the eight miles back home. Memories like papercuts. The horrifying fact that his mother was locked forever in his mind, in his fucking DNA smashed him across the face like a baseball bat. The mere fact of her existence was like an alien parasite inside him. He was part her! Forever bound by a double helix and, Oh god oh man this was a total fucking nightmare. She was his mother! He lived inside her once! She used to spank him. She worried about him. Taught him. Potty trained him. Provided for him. Loved him. Everything inside Joseph was screaming like the suffering of millions.  He wanted to run away and kill himself...

     “Here you go, kiddo,” his mother said, holding out the joint. She was smirking at him. Her smile was evil, poisonous, filled with dark history. She had gone crazy but she was still smart. Oh yes. She knew what she was doing. She was diabolical. She stared at him, reading his thoughts. He wanted to kill her. Whoa, he almost said that out loud. He could see his mother seeing him and he felt like he was trapped in a funhouse hall of mirrors. Reflections of memories were battling each other for supremacy but every reflection lies. Joseph felt sure she was rifling through their shared memories. Like; she used to attach a towel to his shoulders to make a cape. Then he would run around the yard like Superman. He was five. One day, while playing Superman, he stepped in a hidden hole and snapped his ankle. It took his mother three days to get him medical attention. His mother finally got sick and tired of his  screaming and crying. He had to get a cast and they gave him crutches. School. Joseph couldn’t do math no matter how hard he tried so they placed him in a remedial math class for retards and fuck-ups. But Joseph was a near-prodigy in English (thanks largely to his mother) so he was well-spoken and had a vast vocabulary, which meant he got beaten up a lot.  It wasn’t until he entered high school that the harassment stopped. They had better security at his high school. Of course, that didn’t mean it was better or safe. If a student carried a grudge (against whatever) he could still wreak havoc with firearms, despite the metal detector and the black cameras staring from the ceiling.

     He took the joint, took a long drag, passed it back.  His mind was a river.

     She received it and inhaled another hit, then passed it back. Why wasn’t she as baked as he was? Dancing and the imprecise  words were covered in sloppy mud and he wanted to die yet she seemed straight as a t-square. He’d had enough. There wasn’t much left to the joint and he flicked it into a puddle. There. He was done. He kept his eyes on the mud, though. He couldn’t look his mother in the face again, not right now. He had never gotten this fucked-up before. And his own mother had done it to him. It was insane. It was obscene.

     He was standing over a Roman coliseum. The wind blew. He heard trumpets.

     She said, “You never throw the roach away, Joseph. You save them so you can pool your resources later, when times are tough. You never know what’s coming. Waste not want not.”

     Joseph had nothing to say. All he could do was nod. He felt like his head might fall into the mud. He wished it would. His mother laughed. “How you feeling, honey?”
There were strange, translucent butterflies fluttering above her glowing black halo.

     He shrugged and felt the motion with almost painful sharpness. His shoulders felt like jagged wheels. His mother’s face kept changing. How many people was she?

     Joseph’s mother laughed again and said, “It is REALLY good weed, isn’t it? Better than that cheap skunk-weed you get from Billy. But guess what! I put my own secret ingredients into the mix. And do you know what the main ingredient is?”

     Joseph managed—somehow—to shake his head. The sky was black with locusts. He felt his sneakers beginning to melt.

     “Love,” she said. Then she smiled and leaned toward Joseph and kissed him on the lips. He kissed back and the word ETIQUETTE flashed like black neon in his doped-up brain. He felt her skittish tongue flicker over his own, then his lips, and then she withdrew, still smiling .The entire episode had taken a few seconds but it would last for the rest of his life.

     “And that’s why I have to punish you. You wanted to do drugs? Well, there you go, kiddo. You got it. Now I’m going back in the house. You will remain outside until you start to come down. Which should be in about ten hours.” She laughed again, seemingly unaffected by the drug(s?).  

     “I’ll see you when I get back from work. I hope you learn your lesson. I wouldn’t go anywhere if I were you. Do yourself a favor and stay in the yard.” Then she turned and went back into the house. Joseph heard the clack of the bolt. It sounded like a gunshot.  

     He slowly turned and faced a dense, tangled jungle filled with giant, starving predators and scavengers hunting for flesh.

     Memories and reflections. He was all memories and reflections. 

     He wished he had a gun so he could destroy all the ugly things in his life.