Few things close the gap between the haves and the have-nots faster than drugs. Out of money? Sell drugs. You’ll soon have plenty.
Got money? Get into drugs. You won’t have it for long.
Drugs do have their — pardon the phrase — selling points. In the right hands, drugs can allow the skin to be taken off of life, exposing the skeleton underneath. Bob Marley once called the sensation “being able to see behind the universe.” Both descriptions work. Drugs — especially pot and alcohol, which we’ll speak of here — take you, for better or worse, straight to the emotions, the base drives that make up all of us.
Used correctly — and, it should be said, in the safety of one’s own home — these drugs don’t add sensation to our experience. They show us things as they are, and the revelations are sometimes scary, sometimes silly and sometimes profound. They allow us to see our normal experiences for what they are, however banal or boffo. To boot, they make us crave some really weird shit.
I was one of those rare kids who ate mustard sandwiches even when the pantry was filled to overflowing. (This isn’t entirely true, actually — usually, I preferred something a little more… continental, like maybe Worcestershire sauce.) I loved the careful simplicity of it all: the sauce (whatever it was) as flavor, and the bread, the soft sweet bread, as texture. Maybe a little coarsely ground pepper. I like to think I was something of a pint-sized Ferran Adria in that way: simple, almost architectural flavors, used creatively. (I’d usually wash the whole thing down with cherry Kool-Aid.)
I understand now that this was peasant food, when you get right down to it. This is food eaten by the three kids of an out-of-work single mother in Chicago or Jackson, MS. This is bread that’s cheap, and so is a jar of mustard, and that’s like 10 meals if you use it right.
Drugs can take you to that level, and show us that a satisfactory meal sometimes needs nothing more than context, and something to put in the ol’ gullet. A great meal is a celebration of life and, hopefully, a putting off of death for a little while longer. This is food as sustainer, rather than entertainer.
In some places, they call this experience “the munchies.”
It’s a completely sensory experience, eating food while high. It’s the same “the whole world is vibrating at the exact same frequency” sort of effect that can make Linda Ronstadt and the Steve Miller Band sound like the greatest goddamn things you could ever want to hear.
Take oatmeal. I certainly don’t love it, though maybe I respected it — and enough other folks seem to like it, after all. Smoke a J, however, and it can become manna from heaven. O sweet brown sugar, crystals shining bright! O perfect dirty-white flakes, texture of pulped paper, a splash of milk! O warmth that eases into the taste buds like liquid gold (if liquid gold tasted like warm brown sugar)! Yes, this is eating, one can easily surmise, trailing his pointer finger around the sides of the recently, ravenously emptied bowl.
At its core, eating while under the influence slows down the process a bit. A great, elaborately prepared dinner of leg of lamb, haricots verts and rosemaried new potatoes is easy to appreciate. One is aware of the time and energy (and, hopefully, the love) that went into the preparation. The flavor combinations are right up front, expertly done, and designed to please the palate. Much of the flavor, however, comes from the anticipation, and from the waiting-in-line cocktail or glass of wine.
Sometimes not so easily seen — or appreciated — is the simple joy of a good slice of cold pizza. Pot in particular works nicely here. The user is reconnected to a hunger he or she is probably somewhat disconnected from ordinarily, unless said gourmand comes from a rather hard-scrabble background. It’s the same reason food tastes so good after backbreaking work — hunger is indeed a great sauce. With the right drugs, it’s a sauce you can put on everything.
It’s not to be relied upon, however — nobody wants the same sauce all the time (unless you count my brother, who puts ketchup on everything).
Every now and then, though, it can help you look at your kitchen (and everything else) in an entirely different way: “Yes, perhaps this aioli would be good on that old asparagus! That salami? If I wrapped that around a pickle, and then slathered it with corn meal and deep fried it, well, I bet it’d…”
You get the picture. At best, you may well create a new taste sensation and make a name as one of the new breed of meta-culinary artistes.
At worst, you’ll clean out your refrigerator.
Timothy C. Davis’ food writing has appeared in Saveur, Gastronomica, eGullet.com, and the Christian Science Monitor, among other publications.
This article appears in Sep 7-13, 2005.
