Summer of 2003, Hixson, Tennessee

By Katie Flannery

My sister and I sat transfixed, watching the formerly restless legs now sitting still in scene after scene, all while listening closely to the voiceover about the wonderful new drug.

“Some patients experienced intense drowsiness while engaging in certain activities, such as driving a car,” the disembodied voice said cheerfully. “Most patients were not bothered enough to stop taking the drug.”

I looked at my sister. “What I want to know is, were they bothered enough to stop driving.”

“You should read the list of side effects from my interferon.” Diane had been diagnosed with Hepatitis C four weeks earlier and interferon was the treatment of choice. She handed me a paper from her end table drawer.

I read the list aloud. “Side effects include moodiness, hair loss, depression, and trouble thinking.” The list was long and I continued with growing concern. “More serious but rare side effects include suicidal thoughts, seizures, hearing loss, blood infection, and death from liver failure.”

I put the paper down. “My God. No wonder you feel so bad.”

“Yeah.”

“You have got to stop reading this paper!”

“That’s not funny,” Diane said.

“I know, I know,” I replied. “We might as well make jokes about it, though. You look like death warmed over, already. How bad will you look after a year on this stuff?”

“Katie,” Diane said quietly. “You are not being helpful.”

“Sorry, I’m just thinking out loud.”

“About how horrible I’m going to look in a year!” Diane began to sob. My sister never cried, not even at funerals.

“Oh, God, Diane,” I said, reaching out but stopping short of touching my sister. I’d seen moments when I actually thought Diane was going to bite someone for touching her. I let my hand drop to my side. “I didn’t mean anything by it. You’re beautiful, you know that. I….”

“It’s just the medicine,” Diane said, wiping her eyes. “I’m not that shallow, you know. I seem to cry over just about everything.”

“A year is a long time to cry about everything,” I said.

“I’ve got to do something.”

“I know,” I agreed. “I’ve been thinking about that.” I paused. This was the opportunity I had been waiting for. “I have an idea, but you might not like it.”

“What is it?”

“Close your eyes.”

“You’re not going to shoot me, are you?” Diane asked. “I have children.”

“Just close your eyes.” After digging around in my pocket a minute I said, “OK, you can open them.”

Diane’s eyes went directly to the joint lying on the coffee table in front of us. Her eyes opened wide.

Neither of us had smoked marijuana since high school, but I thought Diane’s hepatitis necessitated a return to the past. At least, that was how I had justified it when I got the joint from my cousin. The interferon Diane was taking wasn’t killing her - yet. Since she had started taking it, though, Diane had lost all her energy and was sick with flu-like symptoms.

“It’s not even the hepatitis causing you to feel so bad,” I said. “It’s the chemotherapy. Just consider this a medicine to help combat the side effects of the interferon.”

“What if my kids come home?” she asked.

“Mandy won’t be home all weekend,” I said. “And Andy won’t be here before the wee hours.”

“But it’s illegal.” Diane nodded at the joint.

“It’s legal in California.”

Diane frowned.

“It’s legal in Colorado,” I pressed. “And Oregon.”

“We aren’t in any of those places.”

“I know,” I said. “But if you don’t eat something soon you won’t need to worry about doing any jail time.”

Suddenly, I broke into a pretend slow-motion run across a beautiful field. In my most sultry voice I said, “Side effects may include decreased nausea, greatly increased cravings for food of every sort, and impaired driving ability. More serious side effects include a propensity to laugh at pretty much anything, and a slight possibility of feeling that the police are right outside your house watching you.”

Diane groaned.

I danced around the room. “Do not use while operating heavy machinery or in the presence of children. If munchies or laughter continue for more than two hours, your pot may have been grown in Jamaica and you should contact the nearest Chinese delivery service immediately.”

Diane looked at me. “OK,” she said. “But you have to smoke it with me.”

“Absolutely. I’d never expect you to go through something like this alone.” I looked around. “Got a lighter?”

She handed me her Zippo. “I’ll start,” I said. I stuck the end of the hand-rolled marijuana cigarette in my mouth and lit the other end in one fluid movement. I took a deep drag off the joint and held it. After about 30 seconds I exhaled and smoke filled our little space. I never even coughed.

“Like riding a bicycle,” I said, handing the joint to my sister.

Diane put the joint to her mouth and inhaled. I watched the orange-red embers light up. “Well, it smells good, anyway,” my sister said.

After we had smoked about half of the joint Diane said, “I don’t feel anything.”

“It must not bree any good,” I said, gingerly stubbing the joint out on the side of a ceramic ashtray my niece had made for Diane in art class. I laughed. “I mean, it must not be any grood.”

Diane laughed. “You can’t talk, so it must be.”

“Must be what?”

“You know,” Diane answered, leaning over to get her coffee from the table. “What you said.”

“What did I say?”

Diane laughed. “I don’t remember.”

“Your memory is horrible.” We both fell into uncontrollable, heaving laughter.

The phone rang. Diane looked at me in a dead panic, all traces of mirth erased from her eyes. “The phone is ringing.”

“I hear it.”

“Who is it?”

“Well, why don’t you answer it and find out?”

But Diane tossed me the phone instead and as she did I got the funniest idea ever. “Instead of saying ‘hello’ when I answer,” I whispered to my sister, “I’m going to say ‘Jell-O’.” Diane, being uncommonly bright, found this as hilarious as I did and we laughed hysterically once again.

“Oh, no!” said Diane. “The phone stopped ringing!”

The caller had evidently given up. “Oh, well,” I said. “At least –“

Just then the phone started its shrill call once again.

“Oh, good,” I said. “Get ready.”

I pushed the button and put the phone to my ear, but just as I was about to verbalize my fiendishly funny greeting I realized just how incredibly comical it really was. Instead of greeting the caller I started laughing so hard I couldn’t inhale.

“What is so funny?” Diane asked, starting to laugh again, too.

In response to her question I exhaled the most obnoxiously loud laugh ever directly into the phone.

“Hello?” asked a voice.

I dropped the phone and stood up, bent at the waist. I was laughing harder than I had laughed in years. “It’s tough being high when you’re 37,” I managed to say between guffaws. “I gotta pee. I don’t have the bladder control I had in high school.”

“Good idea,” Diane agreed. “David would die if he came home and I’d peed on the couch.”

We rushed out of the den together, me toward the bathroom in the front hallway and Diane to her own master bathroom, both of us laughing like lunatics.

“I’m starving,” I said when we met in the hallway a few minutes later. We walked into the kitchen. “Oh, my God! Are those candy bars?” You would have thought I’d never had a candy bar before.

Diane tossed me the box. “Mandy’s selling them for school. Four bucks apiece. Can you believe that?”

Before I could reply, Diane said, “Mmmmm. Peanut butter.”

We ate for a very long time. We ate tortilla chips with salsa and we ate chocolate bars. We ate smoked almonds and cheese and we ate chocolate bars. As we sat eating squares of chocolate with peanut butter on them, we laughed so hard I worried we might choke. At one point Diane said, “Do I look like Don Knots?”

I stared. “Uh. Noooo.”

Diane leaned to the right about six inches. “Now do I?”

“You do sort of sound like Don Knots,” I offered.

A few chocolate bars later Diane asked, “Who was that on the phone?”

“Oh, no,” I said, getting up. “What did I do with the phone?.”

We raced into the den and searched everywhere until we found the cordless receiver crammed between two couch cushions. I put the phone to my ear. “Hello?” I looked at Diane. “No one’s there.”

“Really?” she asked. “I don’t understand why they’d just hang up like that.”

Diane and I looked at each other and nearly fell in the floor laughing.

Just then, headlights flashed in the front window.

“Oh, my God!” Diane whispered. “Who is that?”

I peeked out the window. “I don’t know,” I hissed back at her. “But whoever it is is coming up to the door!”

I rushed over to the coffee table and began carrying the huge sandalwood candle from my sister’s coffee table around the room, trying to cover up any leftover smell of marijuana. I was convinced we were going to jail.

Evidently Diane was convinced of that, as well, because when I turned in her direction I saw her shove the entire half a joint we hadn’t yet smoked into her mouth and swallow.

“You can’t eat that!” I yelled. “I need it!”

“You aren’t the one who’s sick,” Diane whispered.

The front door opened. I nearly fainted. Diane was deathly pale. David, Diane’s husband, appeared in the doorway.

“What’s going on?” David asked, his standard greeting.

He leaned over and kissed my sister on the cheek. He sniffed the air. “Ya’ll been smokin’ pot?”

So much for the sandalwood candle.

The fear of being raided by the police had sobered Diane and me both up quite nicely.

Diane, frazzled, said, “Why didn’t you call? You always call before you come home.”

“I called tonight, too,” David said, putting his paperwork on the mantle. “But somebody just laughed into the phone.” My brother-in-law smiled at me. I see Mandy sold all her candy bars.”

“Oh, no,” I groaned, looking at the empty box on the kitchen table. “How many did you say were in there, Diane?”

“Ten,” Diane answered. She looked at me. “We ate 10 candy bars?”

“And a whole lot of other things, it looks like,” David said.

“You know,” said Diane thoughtfully. “If we were trees and everybody else in the neighborhood was a tree we’d be in a forest.”

“We ate $40 worth of candy?”

“Oh, no,” said Diane. “We can’t tell Mandy we ate them all.”

“What’re we going to do? Tell her we sold them to the neighbors?”

“That’s better than telling her you ate them all in a fit of the munchies,” David said.

“It was therapeutic,” I said.

“So how come you were smoking it, too?”

Diane looked at him. “Oh, knock off the smuggery,” she said, hands on her hips. “You just suggested the same ‘cure’ for me last week.”

“Smuggery!” I howled. “You made a word!”

“Smuggery isn’t a word?” Diane asked.

“Ha,” Diane said. “I ate. I ate a lot. I’ll have to do this once in a while.”

I rummaged through my wallet and handed Diane $10. “For the candy bars,” I said.

“They were only $40 for the box,” she laughed. She reached into her purse and gave me a $20. “There,” she said. “Now we’re even.”

“Is there any more weed?” David asked after us.

“Diane ate that, too,” I yelled.

We laughed.

Katie Flannery is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 | Email This Post

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