25 YEARS/ELECTRIC WIZARD

 When I was 26 I had to move in with my father. You know if you move back in with your parents after moving out, this is not exactly a sign of success. I was doing heroin almost every day. I would go to a day program at the hospital basically every day. My father would drop me off. I pretended to go in the hospital, when his car had left the parking lot I went to the pay phone and called my dealer. He had gotten me a job in town driving a Taxi cab. Basically all I did was drop people off at the airport, there wasn't really any cab stuff in our town. This was Concord, Mass, a very rich town. Every night I'd pass out on the couch and be woken up later that night by my father doing sit ups in front of the TV. In the dark. Fucking counting as he did them and breathing really heavy. It was awful. He had a carton of Camel Straits on the driver's seat of the car and he had another carton on the kitchen table. That was open, too. One day I was probably looking for porn and I found a closet that was full of Members Only jackets. I'm not kidding. There were like 50 jackets and each one had a pack of Camels in it. There was also a case of cartons on the shelf above the jackets. After seeing all this and doing the math, I asked my father,"When is the last time you had to go to the store and buy a pack of cigarettes. Like when was the last time you went out to buy some?" And he goes, "Jeez, it's gotta be 25 years." And I was like, "So the last time you bought a pack at the store I was one?"

When I was in my thirties I was living here and we went to see Electric Wizard. They were known pot heads. They played super slow Doom metal and extolled the benefits of marijuana with every song just about. They were from England and they had never toured the US. We were at the Bottom Of the Hill and I was fucking psyched to see them. They got on stage and started playing, then the singer asked for a hit of weed. Some San Franciscan gave him a bowl, he smoked it. The whole band had a hit. The problem was, this was like '03 or something and California weed was fucking crazy powerful then. Before Sativa and Indica it was just all heavy duty, this shit was purple. Electric Wizard all took a hit and it was obvious that they were too high. The show became a practice session. They were playing, they were not singing they were just playing shit that came to them. They were clearly too high to be there, it was fucking funny.