Written by: Jacqueline Linares
Edited by: Sierra Brown-Rodrigues

I’ve never been someone with vices. 

I don’t even drink anything harder than an IPA anymore (if you can even call that hard). 

It was only when I started working full-time that I even thought about weed as medicinal. 

I don’t want to age myself (though it’s getting harder and harder not to) but I remember when weed was illegal. I remember going to a party and sniffing the air, trying to figure out who had it. It was always either two lanky dudes slouched in a corner or the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen. Nothing in between. 

With all that being said, I didn’t pay for weed in college and only started buying my own supply when I was 24.

I remember the first time I tried to buy weed: I went on Weedmaps and made a phone call. 

“Yes, hello?”

“What can I do you for?”

“Can I have, uh, 5 grams of the Lemon Butterscotch please?”

“Sure. What’s your address?”

I was 24 and the voice on the other end of the line was gruff and deep. I was alone in my apartment and I felt like I was 9 years old again, and it felt like I wasn’t supposed to give this dude my address. So I hung up. 

I called my friend Myles afterwards. They made fun of me, unsurprisingly.

“Jacky, you dork.” They bought me weed and instead, I ordered a mushroom pizza. 

All this is to say that there has been/still is a learning curve to this stuff. I’m 27 now and I’m still making silly mistakes. 

Like, for example:

I was having a hard time at my job last summer; it’s hard to spend 8 hours at work, in a place with people you don’t care about, while the sun shines outside as you’ve gotta hammer out data into a spreadsheet. 

There was too much noise in my head and I wanted to quiet the buzzing down. I go back on Weedmaps, maybe for like the 16th time in my life and see that there’s a new dispensary 0.5 miles away from my apartment. It was a beautiful day. I could go for a walk. I could get high on the walk back and it would all be so safe since I was so close to home.

I could sprawl out on my bed, all the muscles in my back relaxing against my twin mattress as I watched the dying sunlight from the window of my room, the palm tree swaying in the indigo blue. It all felt so perfect. 

I texted my friend Renee to ask which brand of edibles we last used together. 

Ding ding ding! “El Camino!”

I walked to the dispensary in my pyjamas. I showed my ID and made sure I had enough cash. 

I never saw the face of the person who buzzed me in, though the voice sounded feminine when it said, “Welcome!. The two-way mirror the voice came from already had scratches of graffiti on it, reminding me of the kind you’d see in public school bathrooms. 

I went in, feeling confident and capable. 

Once inside, however,  the place looked nearly empty. The merchandise was sparse. It was no supermarket. There was a huge cookie jar in the corner, sitting on a plastic stool, filled to the brim with joints. It looked like the place had been robbed but I inspected the people who worked behind the counter and they seemed nonchalant, maybe even a bit bored. 

“Next!” some guy in a red v-neck called out to me. 

I approached him. 

“Hi! Do you have edibles?”

“Yeah. What kind you lookin’ for?”

“The El Camino gummies by Kiva Confections.”

“Oh, we don’t got that. We have these.”

He points with his thumb to the wall behind him. The wall was full of 5 bags of candy stuck on with Command strip hooks. I frowned.

“Oh, got it. What do you have that is only 5mg.”

Without responding, he hands me a bag of peach rings. 

“That’ll be $20. Are you new to us?”

“Thanks, and yeah. I’m new.”

He nodded and reached into the cookie jar full of joints and handed me three. 

“You’re also getting a stamp card. Visit 10 times and you get a free item of your choosing.”

He gave me a business card and stamped a little butterfly in the corner of it. 

He wrapped everything up in a paper bag, the same kind of bag that I’d buy from the Smart and Final 2 blocks down. I walked out with the goods, feeling accomplished. I opened the bag before I even got to my apartment and ate a whole peach ring. 

I walked some more. The birds chirped. There was a slight breeze that smelled like the ocean. Kids were riding their bikes in the street.

Why did work matter? Why did jobs matter? It was all as the poet Mary Oliver had once said, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.”

This was the secret to surviving late capitalism in America: drowning in edibles in the late summer afternoons after work.

Slowly I felt my brain unstick itself from the inside of my skull. I floated. Then it all got too heavy. I almost puked. I fell asleep and when I woke up at 6 AM, I was still high. I needed to be at work at 7:30 AM. At some point, I drove on the 405 North. I found myself staring at a cold cup of tea that I had left on my desk the day before. I couldn’t remember how I got there. I started to panic because I felt like I was being watched by my boss, so I chugged water and then made two shots of Nespresso. I drank it straight out of the paper cup in the breakroom.

Eventually, I felt better, but I still don’t remember a single thing I did that day or frankly, any of the conversations I had. When I got home I sat on my bed, trying to gather any focus I could muster. It occurred to me then, that my tolerance was low. I decided that the only way to remedy this was to raise it by doing more weed.

So, I took a second peach ring and got high again, almost puked again, and relived the actions of the previous day; I couldn’t remember how I got into my car, where I parked it, how I got on or off the freeway, or how I did anything work-related at all.

At home, I took a nap at 7 PM and woke up at 11 PM, deathly thirsty and with a throbbing headache. I texted my friend Renee, “I don’t think I can do weed anymore - like it’s making me sick.”

She called me and asked if I was okay. I told her the events of the day. She was silent for a bit. 

“How much did you take?”

“5mg.”

“That doesn’t sound right.”

In the dark, I walked over to my Drawer of Forbidden Objects, where I stored the peach rings. 

I looked at the bag, squinting. I turned on the light, making sure I was reading it right.

Each individual peach ring was 150mg. I had taken 150mg of weed - two days in a row, without even realizing it. Renee was still on the phone. 

“I don’t know how you don’t have brain damage honestly…” said Renee. 

It took me a full month but I eventually got through the rest of the peach rings, cutting them up in bits to lower the dose. They were $20 after all. 

It was a busy season at work. At some point, I held a kid’s pooped underpants in my hand as I looked for a Ziploc bag to stuff them in. I found a bag eventually and sent the kid’s parents an email telling them their kid had had an accident and not to be alarmed. There are little purple flowers on the kid’s underwear. They were scrunched up in the plastic bag, and the plastic bag sat on my desk. I could see the small streak of poop, touching the inside of the plastic bag. I googled “how to get tubes tied 26 years old California” on my phone. I sighed and got back to the kid who was upset about what happened. I put my phone on DND and let it charge in the dusty corner of my office. 

I was tired. When I got home, I chugged a glass of milk and took a long nap. When I woke up I checked to see if the dispensary was still open. It was only 9:47 PM and they closed at midnight. Perfect. I checked my wallet to make sure I had my ID and went on my way. The night air felt nice on my face. I was halfway there when I realized that I didn't have my weed stamp card with me. It felt important enough to walk back for.

My room was a mess, covered in clothes, books, magazines, CDs I got at the record store, a bunch of used mugs, and half-finished cans of beer (only two, I’m not an animal!). I looked for my stamp card. Finally, underneath my bed, I found the shitty little hole-punched card hiding underneath a dirty sock. I shoved it into my bra and walked out the door. 

I was halfway there again when I realized that I didn’t have cash. But, luckily for me, there was a 711 down the street. Remember: this was when gas was $7/gal in Los Angeles; I wasn’t driving anywhere less than 3 miles, NO FUCKING WAY. 

I walked a mile to the 711, trying my best to stay positive. I decided that a bag of salt and vinegar chips would HIT when I was finally as high as a kite, listening to Beach House in the darkness of my bedroom. 

I learned at the cash register that 711 doesn’t give more than $10 in cash at a time. 

After all this walking back and forth it was now 10:30 PM.

I walked back to my apartment and searched my room for cash, still determined to listen to Beach House in an altered state after living through a day that consisted of holding poopy underpants for 7 minutes, for a child I didn’t give birth to. 

Finally, I remembered the birthday card my dad had given me. There it was. A crisp 20 dollar bill. I was rich: I now had $30, enough for a whole other bag of peach rings and then some.

One final check: I had my wallet. I had my keys. I had my pepper spray (it was now 11 PM and I was a woman walking alone at night, I needed it!), I had my cash, I had my ID and at last, I had my weed stamp card. 

At this point, I was wearing one of the two potato sack dresses that I’d bought during quarantine. It was billowing at the hems. As I walked down the street I felt like Keira Knightly walking to the Bingley house in Pride and Prejudice (2005). I could taste the peach rings, their tart salt, and their gooey texture. I could practically feel the inevitable release of my brain from its calcium prison; the way my legs would feel like jello giving me no choice but to lay in bed, the Beach House CD lightly playing on my boombox, the moon winking at me with its white light through the window. 

I finally made it to the dispensary, only to get met with this. I walked back home, defeated, surrendering to the weed gods. See below:

Jacqueline Linares is a Guatemalan-American writer/director from Los Angeles, California. She studied writing and film at Long Beach State University. She enjoys walking her dog Molly, watching bad movies with her parents, and drinking beers that taste like summer.