Public Intoxication, Part 1
Vancouver BC, 2016-2021
Cannabis, Pre-Pandemic
In August 2016, we gave our weed remnants and extra beers to an acquaintance, stored a couple glass pipes we felt sentimental about in the guest room at my bff’s house, and crossed the Canadian border at the Peace Arch for Kaden’s PhD program in History at the University of British Columbia. Kaden proudly proffered his student visa, I my spousal work permit, and the Canadian border guard shouted at us that the border has nothing to do with immigration, and how did we intend to prove to him that we could afford to live in the most expensive city in North America? “I don’t know you,” he sneered. “Why should I believe you’re married?” We must have shown him a bank account statement or something, and, amazingly, had on hand the purely decorative marriage certificate we got from Thurston County, which holds no legal bearing whatsoever. He didn’t know the difference.
My dad, following behind us, was gravely disappointed his passport did not get stamped for entering Canada.
We took a furnished sublet in Kitsilano, which had graduated from the hippie neighborhood harboring head shops and birthing Greenpeace to a sleek, generic open air shopping mall populated by young, skinny, fashionable mothers pushing babies in multi-million dollar perambulators while their whiskered, hungover husbands slunk along behind. But it was close to the beach, which was a trip, because people actually played beach volleyball, a phenomenon we had NEVER witnessed in real life, on the Washington or Oregon coasts. Vancouver is a playground for the global elite, we’d say, knowingly, or, Doesn’t anybody work in this fair city?
I worked at a commercial print shop, as I’d done since graduating college. I applied to two shops before our arrival, and sent my mom a Google Street View screenshot of each. “The first one looks like it’s in a bad neighborhood,” she wrote back. They were two blocks apart, both in Kitsilano. Of course, I got the job at the tiny, dirty shop, and I loved it. A ten minute walk from our apartment, I could come home for lunch, and after work I’d smoke weed from my one-hitter. We’d gotten to see Mecca Normal play a show, our first time despite being fans for years, in the first weeks in Vancouver, and I’d roll the lyrics around: This city’s my home and I walk alone. But it took a long time for me to feel comfortable in Vancouver, the biggest city I’ve ever lived in. For it to feel like my home.
Recreational cannabis had been legal in Washington for two years, but in BC it was still only medical. A budtender brandished a laminated sign with a list of three-dozen ailments. “Do you have any of these?” Why, yes, I do suffer from menstrual cramps! Cannabis stores in Vancouver were how I’d imagined legal cannabis would be – the way it should be – like a kid in a candy store, huge glass jars of bud the clerk would wave under your nose and pick out with chopsticks and weigh while you watched. But during the five years we lived there, recreational became legal, with the same kind of regulations as the states: everything in a little branded foil baggie, touch screen menus, vibes like a bland coffee shop, not a groovy head shop. While Washington treated cannabis like alcohol, and you couldn’t smoke it outside, BC treated it like cigarettes. You just couldn’t smoke it with in 25 feet of a doorway.
The weekend after we moved, I had to cross the border in the other direction for my sister’s bachelorette party. My dad wanted me to bring him some Tylenol 3, with codeine. It wasn’t something you could get on the shelf, so I had to wait for the pharmacy to open, already setting back my trip timing. My mom told me she thought she remembered her friend saying you could take 200 pills over the border. I asked the pharmacist, who also believed you could take 200 pills over the border. Those first few weeks, I could only use my phone for talking and texting in Canada, so I went with that. At the border, I stated my travel purpose: my sister’s bachelorette party. I declared my items: a bra and panties for the bride, and 200 Tylenol 3. I have never failed to declare everything honestly at the border, but once Kaden buried a bottle of whiskey we’d received as a gift deep into a basket of laundry without telling me.
“DON’T YOU KNOW,” the US border guard shouted down from his perch into the little Yaris, “YOU CAN ONLY TAKE 50 PER PERSON! DO YOU HAVE ANYONE ELSE IN THE CAR WITH YOU?” I, quite obviously, did not. I still wish I’d said, “No, if I had known, I wouldn’t have told you I had 200!” So, I had to go get in the multi-hour line to explain the situation, have someone search my car, etc., etc. They let me keep the stupid pills, but told me not to do it again.
Here’s the fucking punch line: I hand my dad the bottle, he looks over his glasses at the label, and goes, “Oh, these have caffeine. I can’t take these.”
No, here’s the real fucking punch line: my sister’s bachelorette party devolved into “Never have I ever,” where I was the only one who had “licked a vagina,” and then devolved further into wife beating jokes, neither instigated nor endorsed by my sister, who is a wonderful person, she just has trouble making friends. These were gals who’d all recently lost their jobs, along with my sister, when David’s Bridal closed. I was supposed to spend the night there at her friend’s house, but I’d had the foresight to ask my parents to leave the door to my sister’s house unlocked, and I went home, totally distraught, vowing never to hang out with straight people again. I got to listen to Aaron or Matt’s show on KAOS as I drove away, some consolation.
The first thing I had done when I got into the states that afternoon was buy a pre-rolled joint in Bellingham. Listening to “Tonada Yanomaminista” by Devendra Banhart, I cried about moving away from Olympia again, where I’d landed for only 16 months since leaving Albuquerque. Later, on the way to the fancy dinner, where my bff was my date, I dropped a bit of ash from the joint onto my lap which immediately melted through the net skirt of my formal dress, and we had a good laugh about me being a fuckup. The burn hole in the formal dress felt right.
After smoking on a walk on Kits Beach, I came home and Kaden was watching “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” and I walked into the scene where the kid is, ya know, mutilating a small mammal, and had an exceedingly rare panic attack and had to lie on the bedroom floor for two hours.
My bff came to visit and the three of us smoked weed in a park, it was the first and last time she’d gotten stoned in years. On the walk home, I had to stop and the grocery store, but Kaden and my bff stayed outside, hovering on the sidewalk. When the automatic doors opened and I came out, in a synchronized movement, they both angled their bodies away from the door to avoid whomever was exiting – but it was me! I cracked the fuck up.
After smoking on a walk on Kits Beach, I came home and could hear the downstairs tenant, who often hosted obnoxious, rowdy hockey game watching parties, yelling into her phone, voice dripping with disgust, “The neighbors are playing techno again!” It was true, Kaden was. This became one of our catch-phrases, whenever one of us tunes into a House show on NTS.
I went to a Jo Passed show with my friend AK, and there, I ran into my friend AE. Kaden and I had recently seen a stripped-down version of Jo Passed play with Rose Melberg and Megabog, the whole lineup utterly enchanting. AE said, is it worth smoking a joint before? and I said oh, yes. Smoking on the sidewalk with AE, worried I’d abandoned AK, I was so amazed that I had two friends to choose from, at the same show, in this fair city. Everyone had said it would be so hard to make friends as an adult! Jo Passed with the full band wasn’t as magnificent as the stripped-down version. But I was magnificently stoned.
I wake and baked one morning, on my day off, home alone for some reason. I heard the next door tenants screaming at the landlord, the owner of the building we were subletting in, to get her shit together, after she hadn’t replaced a lightbulb in a satisfactory time frame. I was beyond shocked. Who asks the landlord to change their lightbulb, for starters? Who screams at the landlord to get their shit together? What kind of entitled asswipes? What was I so afraid of, as a civic-minded American legally smoking weed in Canada, while these asswipes felt entitled to scream at the landlord? It went deeper than an imagined scolding. I was afraid if people knew I was a stoner, which I had been on-and-off for half my life at that point, it would cause them to withdraw their love.
Coming soon: beer and pandemic!