Memory behind the memoir
Johanna
In Delirium Vitae, I wrote about my episode of drug-induced psychosis. In real life, this episode took place years after the journey chronicled in Delirium Vitae had ended. Some scenes, because they so perfectly captured pinnacle moments of my life and because I didn’t want to drag the narrative out any longer, were folded back into the memoir. That folding over of scenes, displacing events in time, meant I had to cut out some people. One of those people is Johanna—a woman I met online. My episode of psychosis happened in Johanna’s apartment, not in Phoenix, as it very well could have.
Johanna was a tall, short haired blonde. Her dog, some medium-sized thing, had the right side of its skull and face caved in. When I first met him, I couldn’t tell what kind of dog he was supposed to be.
“This is cowboy. He’s a rescued dog,” she said, crouching and hugging him. “Someone hit him with a baseball bat when it was a pup. He almost died.”
“That’s brutal.” I said, pretending the dog didn’t scare me—pretending to be looking at down at the dog, when I was looking at Johanna’s short blue dress and her tattooed thighs. There were sketches with jagged edges, skulls, a tree with its root system, and two naked women. The top of her dress hung low. She had purple and black heart on her sternum.
I followed Johanna into the house and sat on the sofa. The beige leather sofas, lamps, and coffee table looked like they’d once belonged to other people. She sat next to me and reached for a giant glass bong she had stashed beside the sofa.
Johanna lit the bowl of her bong, bubbled it and drew in the thick smoke. She exhaled through an empty paper towel tube she had stuffed with dryer sheets.
“Does that work?” I asked.
“Probably not.” She laughed. “You want a hit?”
“Of course.”
“All I got left is keif. Pack you a fresh one.”
She’d accumulated the crystals in her grinder. I took a big hit—inhaling twice to pull all the smoke out of the chamber. I coughed into her paper towel tube and handed her back the bong before I dropped it.
She laughed. We sat close, and she pushed her leg against mine.
“You okay?” she asked, seeing me slumping over. No response came. I shut down. Cowboy came to me and stuck his deformed face in mine. Telepathically, I begged him for help.
Twenty minutes of this, while Johanna sat listening to music, waitin
g for me to say something, but all I could muster were whispers. An hour later, the paramedics were there, my mother had been called, and I’d told her I was having a stroke. And as the paramedics led me to the door, one of them holding my shoes because I couldn’t figure out how to put them on, I offered Johanna my brown sweater. I really thought I was dying. And the way Johanna said , “Awwe, you should keep your sweater,” made me feel a little better.
And I think of that now because I hadn’t seen her in fifteen years, so I looked her up last night. All I could find was her obituary. It said she’d died two months ago—that I’d forgotten her after I’d folded pieces in time. It didn’t say anything about cowboy, the squashed-faced dog, but I knew he was dead too.
Nice work, David!