A Close Call, 1973

My Mom had arranged an interview for me for a summer cashier job at the local Stop ’N Go. It was owned by a family friend. I was nineteen, back in the LA area after my first year at UCSC, in slang “Uncle Charlie’s Summer Camp,” because it was a college campus nestled in a coastal redwood forest. Paradise, I would have called it. University of California, Santa Cruz, officially. I had heard, or been told, that the interview would include a polygraph test. Alarm bells went off. This did not bode well.

When I arrived in Santa Cruz in the fall of 1972, I had never experimented with illegal drugs. Although I had known several high school friends at (Catholic) Crespi Carmelite High School (all-male) in Encino who did smoke pot, I had never been tempted to indulge. Some who did wore wigs to hide their forbidden long hair. Seriously!

Away from home, I determined that I would experiment. My first attempts to smoke marijuana with my dorm mates had been uneventful. It wasn’t until Easter of 1973 that I was told that I had to inhale. Much like Bill Clinton, I didn’t know how, since I wasn’t a tobacco smoker. I tried, and was rewarded with hallucinations of candles dancing in the air. Success!

I was concerned that my prospective polygraph (lie-detector) test would force me to disclose my budding marijuana use. But mostly I was horrified that it might ask me sexual questions. Was I a homosexual (unclear, probably)? Had I ever engaged in homosexual sex (not really, maybe, depends)? Did I secretly want to (yes!)? The disclosure of this was potentially life-threatening!

The anxiety that this crisis created was unbearable. I went to bed, concerned about the next morning’s interview and lie-detector test. I needed to do something to deaden the pain, so I got up, went downstairs, and turned to my parents’ liquor cabinet, above the refrigerator. I took a half-gallon of FedCal vodka, and poured a tumbler full. I wanted to numb these anxieties and “kill these thoughts.”

I was discovered by my mother wrapped moaning around the downstairs toilet. They called the paramedics who rushed me to the hospital where my stomach was pumped. I remember my medical providers asking me what substances I had taken, and I answered “marijuana.” Tonight? No, in general. I laughed. They said this wasn’t funny. I said, yes, it was. I was answering them as I would a polygraph test. They didn’t ask me any sexual questions.

My Mom told me, when I awoke late the next morning with the world’s most amazing hangover, that I didn’t have to apply for the job. I was visited later that afternoon by my Aunt Ginny, who I would discover had her own alcohol-abuse issues, who told me it was OK to drink too much on occasion. OK, thank you! Mostly, I didn’t have to talk to anyone, and no one ever followed through with this (nearly fatal) incident with me ever again. Survived, good. Move on. Actually, I was so grateful that my sexual secret remained intact, and that it was best to move on and ignore my issues. A kind of deferred success of sorts.

Although I almost succeeded in killing myself, I don’t believe I was suicidal. I wanted to “kill” my troubled consciousness, at least temporarily, but not to end my life. I have never otherwise considered suicide, unless it was just prior to my 1977 “coming out.” At that time, I figured I had three choices: 1) coming out, 2) insanity, 3) suicide. If I was too afraid to come out, either insanity or suicide might result. Fortunately, I eventually settled on coming out as the lesser of three(?) evils, but I think I would have opted for insanity over suicide. 

But that is another story.