Sam and Zak – on what can be smoked.

[Cheryl Wagner is a writer in New Orleans. Sam and Zak (see photo, below) are members of Mysophilia, a death-metal band based in Florida.]

Cheryl: How old were you when you first started smoking things?

Zak: I think I smoked reefer before I ever smoked cigarettes. I was probably like ten or eleven years old.

Sam: I think I smoked reefer when I was fourteen.

Cheryl: What was the first thing not meant to be smoked that you smoked?

Zak: I don’t know. I remember when I was younger, around the same age that I smoked reefer, we rolled up pine needles and smoked them.

Sam: I’ve smoked those little things that fall off pine trees that look like little dicks and you can crush them up into an orange powder. Do you know what I’m talking about? I rolled that and smoked that a long, long time ago.

Zak: It’s like inhaling a forest fire.

Cheryl: Do you usually plan to smoke something in advance or is it kind of a spur-of-the-moment, “it’s here why not smoke it?” kind of thing?

Zak: The first time I would say I usually smoke it trying to get high from it and then, like, use that as my judgment of whether smoking works better than the other ways you can do it. Like some drugs, from just hearsay we already knew we couldn’t get high from smoking, but we smoked them anyway.

Cheryl: Like what?

Zak: Like Percocets and prescription drugs that you wouldn’t normally even guess to smoke, we would try to smoke.

Cheryl: How come?

Sam: We just have a plethora of drugs to try and maybe it’ll get you more fucked up, like the way you want to be.

Cheryl: How many more items do you think you have smoked than the average person?

Zak: I would put anyone besides like a good drug-dealing one of my friends to the test. I could have outsmoked them by ten. I’d be really surprised if somebody’s outsmoked me.

Sam: I think we have probably smoked more shit than most of the people we know.

Zak: Any drug I’ve taken, I’ve smoked also.

Cheryl: Why?

Sam: Just curiosity. Most drugs that you can eat or inject we’ll try to see what effect it has, because we want to see if it gets you more fucked up. But a lot of shit we’ll just smoke because we’re curious what it tastes like and what it does to you, you know?

Cheryl: Where did you get embalming fluid?

Zak: A girl we know was studying to be a mortician and she stole it for us.

Cheryl: Had you heard that it was a good thing to smoke or did you just think you’d try it?

Zak: It’s an ingredient in PCP.

Cheryl: So what was it like?

Sam: I didn’t like it. It made my lips feel really numb and tingly and made my lungs hurt really bad, and I think when you start smoking a shitload then it just makes you psycho. I just smoked a bowl and I was like, I can tell this sucks, so I stopped smoking it. But I think it must really warp you out, kind of maybe similar to PCP, if you smoke a lot, because my friends kept smoking it and they were like…I think it warped them out.

Cheryl: What’s smoking PCP like?

Zak: It’s like the whole world is rushing through a straw and you’ve poked a hole in the side and there’s a tiny bubble coming out but it’s actually like cycling liquid the whole time, you know, but it’s not dripping down, and you’re in that little bubble.

Cheryl: Is that positive or negative?

Zak: I don’t know. It depends on your personality.

Sam: I really don’t like smoking dust because it makes my lungs hurt really bad. It makes you feel like your lungs will totally collapse. It’s like a suffocating feeling almost for about a week or so afterwards.

Cheryl: What common household items are best smoked?

Zak: I’ve smoked laxatives. There’s always some degree of laxatives in most of the cocaine you get because baby laxative is a really good cut.

Sam: It makes you want to shit a lot.

Zak: Yeah.

Sam: You do it and you’re like, damn, I have to take a shit really bad.

Cheryl: How about Tylenol and stuff? Have you tried to smoke any medicine-cabinet things?

Zak: I tried to smoke some, I forget what this stuff’s called, it’s like menthol-smelling cold-sore gel.

Cheryl: Vicks Vapo-Rub?

Zak: Yeah, it’s kind of like that but it’s a liquid. I cooked that into a crystal on the stove and I smoked the crystals from that.

Cheryl: Did it do anything?

Zak: No. It tasted bad. But if I knew there was a consistent household source of getting high I would do it.

Sam: But there’s not. I think they really think about that.

Zak: Yeah, they’re smart, the people who run the country. They’re smarter than to let people have an easily accessible thing to get high off of.

Sam: They don’t want people having shit in their house that they can always get.

Zak: They don’t want people to get high. Whether it hurts you or whether it doesn’t, they just don’t want you to get high.

Sam: Or if it makes you even better than you were before.

Zak: Right. Like if there was something that made you super-smart and super-creative, they probably wouldn’t want you to take it.

Cheryl: When did you smoke your skin and why?

Sam: We smoked skin several times.

Zak: Yeah, we smoked skin a bunch of times. And then one time this girl held a lighter to my hand and I had a huge blister, like that big, because I let her do it for like a minute. Then I popped that and we put the pus onto reefer we were smoking and smoked my pus. And then any good cuts we’ve had, we’ve tried to smoke our blood.

Cheryl: Would you smoke each other’s skin?

Zak: Yeah.

Sam: Sure. I’m sure we’d all smoke each other’s skin.

Zak: And I think we’d all drink each other’s pus or blood, too, in like a close-knit group of friends. Not just anyone’s pus.

Sam: Yeah, not just anybody. Piss is different though.

Zak: Yeah, urine’s different.

Cheryl: Why is urine different?

Zak: I won’t drink guy’s urine, but I will drink girl’s piss.

Sam: Yeah, definitely.

Cheryl: Would you smoke a female’s urine?

Sam: Yeah.

Zak: Yeah, I’d smoke guy’s urine too.

Sam: I’d rather smoke urine than drink it.

Cheryl: If I wanted to smoke, say, my shoe, what might be a good method?

Zak: I would say to smoke the top parts of it first and probably the bottom last. Or I would maybe even scrape off the stuff on the bottom and smoke that first.

Sam: Yeah.

Zak: You’re more likely to get high off that than the rest of your shoe. You’re more likely to step in something that’s somehow poisonous to you to get you high than what they make shoes out of, or people’d be smoking their shoes.

Sam: What was that one shit called that Craig and all them were smoking and it made them crazy?

Zak: Some plant from Africa.

Sam: What’s that called?

Zak: I don’t know. It tasted like peanut butter when you ate it. It was this African plant and our friend took it and he never recovered.

Sam: He’s crazy.

Zak: He’s like, not sociable any more. You can’t talk to him.

Sam: They just smoked so much it warped them.

Cheryl: Have you noticed any negative side effects from your years of smoking?

Zak: I went on a trip last year to Philadelphia and I smoked with my friend. We bought a bunch of liquid PCP and smoked it, and I know that when I came back I wasn’t the same person I was when I left. But I think I’ve pretty much recovered by now.

Cheryl: How long did it last?

Zak: Probably about six months.

Cheryl: You were different in what way?

Zak: Just everything.

Sam: All his thought tracks were changed. I thought he was totally psycho and crazy and would never be the same again. I was like, bullshit, he’s crazy as hell and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Cheryl: Do you think you’ve suffered any brain damage from your years of smoking?

Zak: Of course.

Sam: I’m sure. But I think I’ve suffered even more from drinking too much alcohol since I was twelve than I have from all the drugs I’ve smoked.

Zak: I think in the last year I’ve suffered more brain damage from hits to my head than from any drug that I’ve done in my life.

Cheryl: Do you get a lot of hits to your head?

Zak: Yeah.

Cheryl: How?

Zak: All sorts of ways. Been in car accidents and fallen out of trees and been punched in the head and slammed my head through doors and walls and stuff.

Sam: Had punching competitions. Like who can punch each other as hard as they can in the head and still like it.

Cheryl: What is the effect of that?

Zak: It’s almost like a hit of nitrous, but it’s all natural. Me and my friend Joe have both broken our hands on each other’s heads. It’s just like burning yourself or whatever. It’s just like doing something really nice for someone else and you get a feeling of goodness to yourself.

Cheryl: Is there a place on your head where you prefer to be hit?

Sam: It’s usually in the forehead.

Zak: Anywhere from like my temples forward and mid-eyebrows up, but sometimes I like getting punched in the cheekbones really hard.

Cheryl: Is there anything you’ve smoked that you wish you hadn’t? If you could go back and “unsmoke” something, would you?

Sam: No.