I was watching this live last night…Andy Cohen asking Snoop Dogg if he’s been high on CNN, at Martha Stewart‘s home, at the Obama White House, etc. Anderson Cooper was having puppies; I didn’t see the humor.
I stopped getting high so long ago that it didn’t matter what appropriate or inappropriate location it happened in because nobody cared.
I once tripped while playing drums with the Sludge Brothers at a club in Vermont — not a good idea. A girlfriend, also tripping, watched us play from the dance floor. During the first break she said with an astonished look on her face, “How are you doing this? How can you play drums?”
Back in the ’80s a cartoonist friend got ripped during a black-tie dinner in Manhattan. He had a tendency to succumb to “the fear” (LSD anxiety) but everything was okay until special guest Mike Wallace began speaking. My friend started to melt when Wallace, quoting FDR, said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” There was something extra-creepy about Wallace’s facial expression when this moment arrived, or so my friend had decided, and a barely controlled freak-out began to take hold.
It wasn’t my friend’s fault for getting stoned at a black-tie dinner, he told himself — it was Wallace’s fault.
What did my friend do with the spreading miasma? Simple — he told his wife he had to step out, and then left the banquet room, left the hotel, took all his clothes off on the sidewalk (except for his black dress shoes and black socks) and walked into moving traffic on Fifth Avenue like Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and began to warn motorists that Mike Wallace (yes, that Mike Wallace) was only a block or so away, and that he might be the devil, or at the very least was spreading evil.
No, seriously — I don’t know what he did. I’ve been through “the fear” and the only remedy is to take a couple of strong downers. (Percocets, Thorazine.) The last time I experienced it was during a Cinevegas gathering in the late ’90s or early aughts. There were no downers around so I had to drink half a fifth of Jack Daniels.