1969
“You ought to get some posters in here,” Ali had said, leaning against my bedroom door. It was Ali’s first time home since she started Columbia. Our parents hadn’t mentioned that she was coming home for my birthday. Likely she didn’t tell them. I was glad she remembered.
“Posters?” I said.
“Anything. Dylan. Hendrix. Mao.” Ali wandered aimlessly around my room, picking stuff up, putting stuff back down. Her mind appeared to be wandering too. A lot.
“Mao?”
"Not Che,” Ali said. “Jim Morrison."
“Why not Che?" I asked. "Tom Seaver?"
“You're funny," she said. “You were always funny.”
I wasn't trying to be funny, I really wasn’t. I didn’t even know what was funny.
“Zach,” she said, “you have got to change the station.”
“Change it to what?” I asked. I waited for my sister to continue but she didn’t say a thing. It was like she had a point that she kept losing.
“Zach,” she said again. This time she looked at me. And then she leaned across me and flipped the white dial on my brown plastic transistor radio from AM to FM. “Just listen.” Her voice trailed off. "Just listen,” she repeated as she adjusted the dial.
A DJ, Paul Jacobs, was talking calmly about happenings around New York. He mentioned places I’d never been to and causes I’d never heard of. Then he put on a record and dropped the needle on Dylan. My mind exploded as it tried to wrap itself around ideas being used as maps. Each line cried out with consequence and I raced to try and keep up with every word. Lies and jealousy and mutiny and equality. Dylan spoke these words with greater understanding than I could gather.
When the song ended, I was feeling much younger than before Ali walked into my room. I leaned back exhausted as Paul Jacobs calmly introduced a Phil Ochs tune. I had never heard of Phil Ochs. There was so much more happening here with and I wondered how I did not know that this other world had been inside my radio all along.
“You weren’t ready before,” Ali told me.
“Ready for what?”
Ali laughed. “Come on,” she said.
• • •
Out on the street, the pumpkin sun hung in the sky like it was never going to set. This was a time of day that I pictured children in Kansas or Nebraska helping to bring the animals in for the night. The air was so still that noise seemed muffled. The sounds of television mumbled their way across the neighborhood while sprinklers rhythmically whipped water over small patches of grass.
“Let’s take a walk so I can give you your present.”
“Okay.”
Ali wanted to go somewhere private so I led us to the Little League fields. We turned onto Short Street and then down Hernia Hill. At the bottom, we crossed both sets of railroad tracks and walked onto the baseball field and into the third base dugout. Ali sat on the bench and pulled a pack of cigarettes. She removed a very crumpled one and offered it to me.
“I don’t smoke,” I said.
“Good,” Ali said. “And don’t start. But this is a joint.” When I didn’t respond, she added, “Pot. You know, marijuana, not a cigarette.”
“Okay.” That was all I could come up with.
“You’ve never tried any?”
“I’m 12.” I didn’t mean to say it that way. Besides, I’d be 13 the next day.
“I’m going to light it and pass it to you. When you take it, inhale slowly, and then hold your breath as long as you can. Okay?”
“Cool.” I was pretty sure that I thought it was cool. I was ready for cool. I really was. I just needed help picking what new stuff was cool and what was not. That meant figuring out which adults to follow and which not. Ali was my sister and she was right about the radio. So, maybe she was also right about pot.
Ali lit a match and I watched as she inhaled. The smoke had a kind of skunk smell to it, but not in a bad way.
“Here,” Ali said through her held breath.
I took the joint. Inhale and hold it, I said to myself. Inhale and hold it. I looked at the reefer between my fingers one more time and wondered what my life was going to be like after I inhaled.
“Don’t waste it,” Ali said through her used up smoke. “Zach, you have to trust new stuff even it if scares the shit out of you. Especially if it scares the crap out of you. It’s the only thing that can save you.”
“What do I need saving from?”
“From sleepwalking through life.”
“Am I sleepwalking?”
“Not yet. But it’s what happens to adults,” Ali said.
“And this will help?”
“No more talking.”
I put the tip between my lips and sucked air. The smoke expanded and filled my lungs until they could hold no more and I coughed hard.
“Tiny breath,” Ali said.
The next time I barely inhaled. I felt the smoke fill my lungs again, but I did not cough. Ali and I finished two joints with determination and not much talking. Something was definitely happening and I did not know what it was.
“That was fun,” Ali said.
“Are we criminals?”
“Outlaws.”
“Like cowboys?”
“Like revolutionaries,” Ali said.
“What revolution are we part of?” I asked.
“The revolution that is happening all around us,” she said.
“Where?”
“All you have to do is look.”
“In my room you said all I had to do was listen,” I said.
“Look and listen.”
“To what?” I said.
“Everything,” she said. “Change is everywhere. Just look all around you. Change is going to come.”
“Is change always good?”
“It’s always inevitable.”
“How will I know when I’m high?” I asked. “Are you high?”
“I was high when I got home, little brother. It’s the only way for me to tolerate being home,” she said. “Relax for a while. Let’s smoke another joint and then we’ll walk back home for your birthday cake ritual.”
“What if I’m high and don’t know it and no one tells me that I’m high?”
“No one will have to tell you,” Ali assured me.
“Okay.” I believed her.
We smoked another joint and started walking back.
“You know how they say it’s always calm just before the storm?” I said as we climbed up hernia hill.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. People.”
“Sure.”
“It's not true. It's never calm before the storm.”
“Okay,” Ali said, laughing.
“I'll tell you another thing.”
“Please.”
“It’s not always darkest before the dawn. I stayed up all night and that’s not true either.”
Ali put her hand on my shoulder and stopped me. I turned to look at her and she put her other hand on my other shoulder.
“Congratulations, Zach,” Ali said to me. “You are officially stoned.” She didn’t say anything else for a while, she just stared at me as if looking for something.
Maybe I was supposed to say something?
“You are now a man,” she finally said. “Be careful how you use it.” She removed her hands from my shoulders and started walking.
“Wait,” I said catching up to her. “What does that even mean?”
“You’ll figure that out soon enough.“
“I’d figure it out quicker if you just told me,” I said.
When we could see our house Ali smiled, “One last thing. When we get back there will be cake and desert. You’re going to have the urge to eat a lot.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Don’t fight it.”
Later, after my parents went to bed and Ali went out to meet some friends, I went upstairs to my room and turned on the radio. Paul Jacobs had left and a woman was on the air. Her name was Jenny and she called herself the Night Owl. She read poetry between songs. I didn’t know I loved poetry. I wanted Jenny to keep talking forever. I drifted off to sleep with the sounds of Jim Morrison singing about the end seeping into my brain.
Elan Barnehama’s first novel, Finding Bluefield, a road trip through the 1960s, explores what happens when society’s invisible become visible. His work has (will) appeared in Rough Cut Press, Boston Accent, Jewish Fiction, Route 9, Drunk Monkeys, Running Wild Press Short Story Anthology, HuffPost, the New York Journal of Books, public radio, and elsewhere.