THE LONG DOWNWARD SPIRAL

Joey continues his downward spiral from the Esperanza fallout!

The next night, I decide to buy that dime bag of Jamaican from Marc, and I pass the next few timeless days and nights, toking up by myself. I like this feeling. I mean, I really like this feeling. The solitude, too. I realize I also enjoy fucking with people, just like I did with Fat Jim that other night. It’s fun! I want to do more of it. Forget Esperanza. The hell with trying to understand freakin’ spirituality. This is my new religion - smoking up and fucking with people.
“Hey Marc, I want that hash, man.” I declare a few nights later, through the steam of the dishwasher. Marc halts in mid-scrub and looks at me proudly, as if I had just taken it up another level, or something.
“Yeah, dude - excellent choice!
Excellent!”
Marc has been philosophizing about its grandeur for, like, a week now, touting the miraculous benefits it beholds.
“Dude…this is, like, going to totally obliterate your perception of this reality, man, it’s-”
“I’m ready man.”
“Yeah…check it out man” he says as he pulls out a chunk of neatly wrapped aluminum foil from his army jacket pocket. This is what the Navajo Indians used, man. They’d, like, ingest this in their rituals, right, and then, like, totally go off into these other dimensions, man! They’d be turning into, like, wolves, and eagles, and shit…flying away, and coming back with these visions and prophecies and -
“Whoa! That’s bugged out, man”
I whisper in a kind of semi-belief.
I hand over twenty-five dollars for the privilege of turning into a bird. As a present, he even throws in an authentic ceramic hash pipe.
“Dude, he confides to me in a tone of reverence usually reserved only for Jethro Tull.
This shit is fuckin’ sacred, man.”
He must be right too. Although I remember very little of that first experiment with hash, I do recall this overwhelming need to save the soul of Jack the Barber, for some reason. Then later going up to his shop, and trying to drink a bottle of his Wild Root hair tonic.