I don't have a stoner Christmas story. In fact, though I had some stoner periods, I pretty much avoided the extremes of the recreational drug experience. Oh, I indulged in all the usual suspects, but not in high dosages or for extended lengths of time. Okay, there was that one cow pasture full of mushrooms, but that was an exception. Hell, they were free, for God's sake! If God hadn't wanted people to eat the things, He wouldn't have put 'em out there, would He? But that's not the story I'm gonna tell. I'm gonna tell you about something that happened early in my senior year in college*....

My then-wife and I were living in a small mobile home park with a bunch of other students for neighbors. We'd been there for a few days when the fellow who lived in the trailer next door came over and introduced himself. Frank was his name. Frank asked if we had a teabag he could borrow. Sure, we had a teabag. "Great!" Frank said, "Ya'll wanna get high?" Well, I'd heard of pot bein' referred to as "tea" by some folks, but I'd never heard of actually smoking real tea. But Frank sits down at the kitchen table, breaks open the teabag, puts a joint-sized quantity of orange pekoe onto a rolling paper, reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a small pill bottle filled with some black goo, pours some of the goo onto the tea, rolls it up into a joint, sets it on fire, we pass it around.... Within two tokes I was higher than I'd ever been off of anything that didn't have the name "Owsley" associated with it.

Well, it seemed that Frank had spent the previous summer abroad and one of the places he'd been was Lebanon. He had gone there with the intention of scoring some good Lebanese hashish, but had happened upon this new stuff called "hash oil" which was like the essence of cannibis, distilled down to liquid form. Ten times more potent than regular hash. An eyedropper full was the equivalent of an ounce of average strength pot, and he'd brought back a couple of wine bottles full of it. It was such a new thing at the time that the customs people had no idea what it was. He said an agent had opened one of the bottles, smelled it, made a face, put the cork back in and waved him on.

Anyway, we got blasted with Frank pretty regularly for about a month until one day Frank came knocking on the door again, looking white as a sheet. "Aw, man!" he exclaimed, "You aren't gonna believe what happened!" Well, seems that Frank had decided the hash oil wasn't quite strong enough to suit him, so he'd poured his last pint or so of it into a sauce pan, put it on the stove on low heat to cook it down a bit more, and promptly fell asleep. When he woke up, the trailer was full of smoke and what was left of the hash oil was a lump of charcoal in the bottom of the sauce pan.

Shortly thereafter, Frank withdrew from the university and disappeared. Whether he went back to Lebanon to get some more hash oil. I have no idea.


* "In college" means the same as "at university" for you UK types. Don't ask me why we Yanks always say "in college" regardless of whether the institution calls itself a college or a university. Maybe "university" has too many syllables and abbreviating it "uni" just sounds too pansy-assed. It's something you UKers can get away with, but we can't. Sorta like calling football "footie". That'd get your ass kicked at any sports bar in the US.