Pothead by Neal Pollack

Author:Neal Pollack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Central Recovery Press, LLC
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE HAND YOU’RE DEALT

A few weeks after Mom died, my friend Zack sent me a GChat message inviting me to a free poker tournament at a shitty chicken-wing bar called Sidelines. Sidelines was like a bar out of the apocalypse. It anchored the street-side slot of a massive strip mall on a busy boulevard in Cedar Park, Texas, befouling the landscape with cheap banners advertising happy hour, enticing divorced men to come in and watch the Cowboys. While Sidelines may have called itself a “sports grille,” it was really a cheap-beer troll hut that kept its clientele sedated with video gambling and various “sweepstakes.”

Zack was fifteen years younger and liked to describe himself as my “#1 Fan.” After a few months on the poker circuit with me, that was downgraded to “begrudging ally.” If you invite a vampire into your house, you have to deal with the consequences.

“Okay,” I said, sealing my fate. “That sounds fun.”

I descended into a swirl of addiction and poor judgment, forcing the people who still loved me to suffer more than usual. I placed my marriage in mortal danger while I pursued drugs and low-rent gambling, extracurricular activities that would have seemed immature for a man twenty-five years younger than I was. But the addict wants what he wants, and nothing will stand in the way of his pleasures, especially not his family. I didn’t care that my behavior steadily chipped away at the foundations of the modest home life that I’d carefully built over the last twenty years. Domesticity and emotional honesty didn’t have much appeal. I wanted to be a hairy, thrashing man-baby. My mom was dead. It made me reckless.

The grief was like an insane low-grade buzzing in the back of my head. I wanted to fill that space with whatever I could to drown out the noise and the pain. So that’s what I did, all summer long. I desperately needed a distraction. “Immerse yourself in work,” said a friend who was also mourning a recently dead parent. But that’s never been my style. My goal in life is to work less.

By then, my editor had left The Cannabist, and the site had become just another marijuana-related content aggregator. I was no longer a marijuana journalist, but I still had all the swag. In the mornings, with my cup of coffee, I’d charge up my little vape pen, bring the coffee cup to my lips, blow the vapor into it, and re-inhale it with my second gulp of coffee. Repeat this ritual once or twice, and I was good and jacked to start the day.

By midmorning, I was ready for another round of vape hits. Around lunch, I’d eat a gummy or a candy or some other cannabis snack, assuming I had some around. When things started to lag midafternoon, I’d switch to flower and load a handsome bowl, walk outside to the back deck and take a huge stinky hit, swatting mosquitoes while listening to the birds chirp and the airplanes blast and the summer bugs croak.

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