How I Became a Smoker

How I became a smoker

I had just moved into a house with my friend Liz, her absolute bongo brain boyfriend James and a girl called Melissa who we met through an ad on gumtree. Of our potential housemate suitors, we picked Melissa because we didn’t mind her mustard sweater, she wasn’t french and she was wearing red lipstick; essentially she was the hottest applicant.

I’d heard on the grape vine that James had already punched a hole in the kitchen wall so I flat out refused to fork out cash for a bond that would never find its way back to me. Melissa however, being the new one got slogged $600 which she unsurprisingly, never saw again.

It was around this time that Kevin Rudd had been promising everybody a special $900 bonus and to our delight, he delivered. I spent mine on a trip to Alice Springs and my first ever ounce of weed. Inspired after visiting the red lands, my friend and I hatched a plan to become drug dealers and get rich. I texted my friend Robbie who was notorious for being constantly stoned and requested that he help us hook up an ‘oz’. We arranged to meet some guy at the uni bar and freaked everybody out by pulling the ounce out and loudly trying to ascertain whether or not it looked like good value for $250. The seasoned drug peddlers sensibly distanced themselves from the loud-mouthed girls waving around a sandwich bag of weed in a public venue so we decided to go home and start bagging up the weed into little J-bags we had decorated with pictures of jewels.

We only got 8 bags. This was disappointing as we had to sell each bag for $25. We were not going to be rich. We were not going to break even. And by ‘we’ I mean me, I was the cashpig of the operation since my friend had noticed that business wasn’t going to be profitable and felt it may not be the right time to invest in the company. This foray into business resulted in us become fully-fledged stoners.

As I was the only person in the house with a supply of weed, Liz’s stupid boyfriend James suddenly became very keen to hang out with me. It became apparent very quickly that James was a manipulative, sneaky and fairly useless person to have around. He earnt the nickname ‘Prawns’ because he used to steal prawns from Coles by shoving them down his pants and then feeding them to us for breakfast. This was perhaps his most redeeming feature. James paid no rent, contributed no money for bills and was happy to consume our food, drink and drugs as he pleased. I don’t mind sharing my things with people but sharing with him felt dirty and it pissed me off. James was always asking us for ‘just one more little bud for hot knifing’ which was infuriating as hot knifing is probably the stupidest method of weed smoking I have ever encountered. We refused him often, telling him he had to have a bong or nothing, and if he did agree to have a bong it had to be mix, not straight weed because we didn’t want to waste a single stem on that greasy little greaser.

As you’d expect, the weed ran out and I was left with an overwhelming desire to continue being stoned every day. Sadly I was out of Rudd money and was waiting for my next centrelink payment. Luckily James had found a semi rewarding relief.

The respectable baccy bong.

Tobacco compiled from cigarette butts collected outside the 6th avenue chip shop. I had always had nothing but disdain for tobacco smokers but I really, really wanted to smoke a bong, of anything, and smoking tobacco bongs gave me a brief rush that was good enough to keep on doing it. Plus Liz and James were doing it, Melissa wasn’t but she endorsed a whole lot of stupid behaviour in our household , so I jumped on the bandwagon whole heartedly. Many people were disgusted by my tendency to indulge in baccy bongs which I guess is the reason I made the obvious upgrade to smoking cigarettes. So by the middle of 2009 I had become a person I had never expected to become, a filthy SMOKER.