New Year’s Eve and Terry Felder had a half ounce of kind stashed in his shiny blacksploitation leather jacket.  Lots of things to get in order, I suppose, because you could see his mind working.  Hatching a plan.  Working an angle.  We talked about something or other on the way to the hotel room, buzzing down the highway in my old yellow BMW.  We had, of course, already been working on our stone since before Christmas and would have to come up with something more severe to get us where we needed to get.  There had been that Christmas party where I had choked so many turbocharged hits from the 3 foot green acrylic bong (I don’t know what everybody else called it, but I thought of it as Toby) packed with a kinder than average bud, that I had managed to get stuck to the floor, ripples of time and space swirling around me.  The pull of gravity had increased so much that my brain fell out of my head and onto the floor as I desperately tried to pull myself upward.  I must have wandered around in the dark for a period of time before I found myself in complete darkness, in what I assumed was the basement, and wandering through a maze of random and indescribable mechanisms and parts and somesuch metal workings.  I bumped into Barry Mawkish, stealthily negotiating the junk in the dark by the light of a candle.  Ominous and foreboding, I thought.  He said, "Shhh."  Then he rounded a corner and the light from the solitary flame flickered off the meandering passages of the basement and made it appear like the whole place was churning and shifting like the rocking of a boat.  Fuck this, I thought, and hooked up with my crew for the eve and beat it for the other side of town.  Lucky for us, too, since his parents showed up mere moments later to find a house full of terminally stoned and tripping fuckers wandering around their house with candles and sporadically freaking out on the carpet.

    I shifted into second to pull into the parking lot of the hotel.  This was going to be interesting.  Such a nice hotel for such an evening of planned mental turpitude and lascivious behavior.  In charge and excited, Terry, and cool and aloof, myself, wandered the halls of the new hotel, marveling at the Stanley Kubrick carpeting.  Greeting the people we met in the halls with the cheer of the truly damned, we finally had to hit the front desk up for the room number.  Stoners, despite the best of intentions and despite what you may have heard, are not much on details beyond "is it cool?" and "where the fucking weed?".  Was that a cop?  No, just a security guard.  A tightly wound bar of soap in a uniform just to let you know that the police could be there in an instant if you let things get too far out of hand.  Everything’s cool, we just forgot the room number, keep it on and on.  A stroll down the hall and a burst into the room and the festivities were about to begin.

    We planted ourselves on the bed in the far corner of the room and took inventory.  Half and ounce of weed, several Ritalin, one and one quarter packs of smokes, a wad of rolling papers, and a bottle of champagne J had run off with.  And that was just the stuff I knew about.  Terry had, no doubt, a secret stash of some sort.  Illegal and questionable chemicals to kick a back door in your skull if it was absolutely necessary.  I thought it best to begin the rolling of the joints.  Pinners for the friends and fatties for later, as usual.  But this being a special occasion and Terry being a true lover of blunts, it was somehow decided that we would roll the biggest joint we could.  Dumbfounded, I sat and watched him lick and patch what would be 11 papers together into a small pueblo village of white paper.  It looked a lot like piece of cubist sculpture and sure as hell didn’t look fit to hold a half ounce of pot.  But the man had skills most do not possess and had honed them to such a degree that, to this day, I still consider him an artist of the first order.  Packing and weaving, fingers and tongue in a symphony of actuation and caress, he molded his golem from the clay of loud-smelling herb and paper until there it was, the biggest joint I had ever fucking seen.  I kid you not, this monstrosity was the length of my hand from the end of my fuck-you finger to my wrist and was easily an inch thick at the middle.  Yes, laddies and lassies, this was certainly going to do it.  Marveling at the thing with wonder and amazement, we decided to hide it away for a grand entrance later in the evening as the guests poured into the room with drink and song.
 
    Going with the flow now, the music (suck) set the mood of the room and a sickening sort of crotch-sniffing mingle was ensuing, so I made a round and ran into Arvid.  He was silly happy and was jabbering something about taking a hit out in the parking lot.  "Nah, wait a little bit, we got something planned," I sez.  Curious and weird like that he probes for more information about the Big Deal.  He would find out soon enough, so I cruise him on over to Terry and suggest we pop the cherry on that bottle of champagne.  "But first," he says, "take one of these."  A Ritalin plopped into my palm and tiny beads of sweat began to form on my forehead and palms.  Was this a fucking joke or something?  What’s the deal? Flashes of a canoe trip gone awry, where I began shooting at things at dawn and took off down the river by myself, muttering nonsense and hallucinating badly.  Jump to staying up all night playing chess with myself, stopping only long enough to run to the bathroom and vomit repeatedly.  Ritalin, not my favorite drug, appeared to be on the menu this evening.  But not just yet I explained to the crew, waiting for the verdict.  It was time for the joint.