JOLENE

One morning, I woke up with an enormous hangover and the word “JOLENE” written across my chest in Sharpie.

I also had “STAIR” written down my right hip, and my left forearm was a mess of words and tracing veins in several different colors.

Here’s how this happened:

Freshmen year of college, living in the dorms, my roommate and I are having a party. The theme of this party is that one of the Music Major kids on our floor got absolutely shitfaced in the early afternoon, got kicked out of a public event and was now passed out. His roommate, CG, was a good friend of ours, who despised his alcoholic roommate. Alcoholic Music Major also happened to be totally loaded and had an impressive collection of liquors. CG, my roommate and I came together and decided we had to help him with his Problem and the easiest way to do this was to drink his booze and tell him that he had drank it all in the morning. So CG nabbed a bottle of 100-proof Smirnoff vodka and we had a party.

Several shots and a few beers in, I started writing on myself. Just simple words on my left forearm to remember the next day. This is a thing of mine. Anyways, even more shots in, CG and I started tracing out our veins in marker, then got abstract and turned them into tree branches. We made several jokes about ink poisoning and blood brothers. More drinking led to our inevitable desire to get high. CG thought his passed out alcoholic roommate might have bud, so he ran off to see if he could pinch some. Unfortunately, only the smallest nugglet was produced from the heist. We toweled the door, turned on the fan, cracked a window and ripped a bowl...to no real effect. CG’s eyes then lit up, and he raced back to his room.

He returned with a pile of pale grey-greenish leaves, clearly also procured from his unconscious roommate. We had no idea what it was, and his only response amidst his cackling laughter was “Salvia Divornium.” I instantly knew this was going to be one of those nights.

We had a few more drinks, some guests came in and out, but it was not long before temptation overtook us. This was a new type of plant we had never burned before, so we made to make an occasion out of it. We had to go to the Pond.

The three of us left our guests and their intoxicated merriment and set out across campus, through parking lots, and down into the woods to the magical pond where many a drug user has used drugs safely and securely. We sat on a rock and lit our bowl up. (Note: later research into salvia divornium would tell me that the preferred method of inhaling was through a water pipe, or bong, but we were unaware of this at the time.) The vodka and beer were already playing havoc with our brains so we did not notice anything out of the ordinary at all. The pond was still serene, cool and safe, our occasion was had. We went back to the room to drink more.

Over the next few hours, many different people came in and went out of my room. I’m not entirely sure who all of them were. Someone played the guitar. My roommate took a girl back to her room. Someone brought their friends over. One way or another, a lot more drinking was done and I was feeling very, very messed up. It was like being high, but more like a super-high. A new high. And drunk. I was very, very drunk. My loose lips let slip to another denzien of my floor that we had a bunch of salvia. He immediately wanted to try it, as did another. And this time, we had my ghetto-bong from earlier in the semester. Windows up, fan cranked, flame on.

I’m not precisely sure how much salvia we smoked. But it was a lot. The leaves burned very quickly, and one of the guys told me that you’re supposed to smoke the extract since it was more potent, so we just smoked as many of the leaves as we could. My roommate came back, drunk people left, we turned the music down, the night began to settle in. This was OK. I was feeling very OK with everything.

When the last person left and I started to get ready for bed, I started to notice the first signs of tripping. I didn’t even expect to actually trip from just the leaves. I didn’t even know what tripping felt like. But I got into bed, there was a weird incandescent light filling the room from an outside streetlight, the White Stripes were playing. Everything was kinda groovy. I lied down on my back.

Then things got less groovy. The song got really loud and dirty. It was the song “Jolene.” I thought about this, and as I thought about this, the ceiling spoke to me. Those separate panels you always see in classrooms split right down the seam, becoming the two sides of it’s mouth. One panel with a fire sprinkler became the eye. The sprinkler/pupil swivelled and looked right at me, and I meant right at me. The lips moved apart and I heard a deep booming voice inside my head. “You should write Jolene on your chest,” my ceiling said. I agreed with my ceiling.

I had a Sharpie on hand so I scribbled it right then and there, backwards J and all. As I gazed upon my body, I also must have found a good reason to write “Stair” down my side. Couldn’t tell you why. After this, I promptly passed out.

I awoke the next morning with the residual hangover and the discovery of my self-graffiti. I immediately went to the shower to take care of this. As my roommate came in the floor bathroom we all shared, he spoke to me through the curtain which made me really uncomfortable but we were both fucked up so it didn’t matter.

“Dude,” he said. “I had a dream I talked to Bob Sagat.”

“Really?” I replied.

But I guess he moved away from the curtain at that point. It took a while to wash off all the ink.
Forever, I’ll remember the name Jolene, but never know why the ceiling thought it was so important.