by Alex Rose
I can make a bong out of anything, says Neil.
I believe him.
We go to Store 24 and buy everything he says we need. A tall black thermos. A sturdy bendy straw. A little dish. Some innocuous office supplies of this and that kind. Tape.
Don’t forget the food, he says. I get a large bag of Doritos and a bottle of A&W Cream Soda and some of those little mini-muffins that can be swallowed whole.
Give me a half-an-hour, he says.
We go home to construct the bong. The physics are not immediately apparent to me; what water has to do with the inhalation of pot smoke. But, as I say, I trust him.
Neil and I met last summer at a thing. He wore plaid flannel and frameless circular glasses and gigantic corduroy pants. His look was rumpled and grungy, every article meticulously selected from thrift shops. I admired him for his lanky grace and his outcast charm. Girls made out with him at parties. He had an Asian fetish, if a preference for olive skin and black hair can be called a fetish. He listened to Primus and tried, futilely, as many did, to play the bass like Les Claypool.
It is done, he says.
We throw the clunky black obelisk into my knapsack. He takes the food and the small, tightly packed plastic dime-bag in his. Bong water and dime bag are the vocab words for the week.
It is nighttime already. We head down to the end of the block. It rained last night and forsythia is in the air. Along the small side street is a cement staircase leading to the basement of the Evangelical church, where they supposedly hold art classes. The bottom of the staircase is a cube of blackness. This was the designated location. A bluish lamp from the churchtop throws a slash of dim light in the dark chamber, measuring a storey underground.
We descend.
The space – a peripheral glance on my walks home from school – is now charged with the illicit badboy shiver of clandestinity. I am nervous, as if I’d taken a date here. Neil carefully sets up the thermos, eyes wide in the dark. Pot, he says to me, like scalpel. I hand him the tiny bag and he unwraps it. It smells like mulch or a spice cabinet. Something they’d make incense out of.
He delicately portions out the crumbly little leaves into the plastic bowl. Ah, I get it. The smoke travels through the straw into the water chamber, which filters and cools it before being siphoned out through the mouthpiece above. An elegant, if crudely assembled contraption. Neil demonstrates: he holds the lighter over the bowl and flicks it; a flintspark snaps into a flame, illuminating his face in a dull wavering glow, glasses shining – he presses his lips to the mouthpiece and takes a long deep drag – the leaves suddenly red like coils of tungsten filament.
Mmp, he says, holding in the smoke. After a long beat he exhales, releasing a specter of carbon into the darkness. He passes the warm thermos to me. My fingers tremble. Because the air is cold and I am giddily nervous. Neil lights the bowl for me; I suck on the tube, producing a bubbling sound, like the purr of a coffee brewer or ice-foam slurped from a milkshake. And as I take the smoke stingingly into my lungs, a cloud of purplewhite springs up out of the shadows before me; a flash, like the visual afterburn of a bright light – a phosphene.
I cough it out, my mouth hot with a metallic or chalky taste. Neil nods, he knows it hurts the first time.