Marijuana

First, know this: I can't smoke anything. A mere drag on a cigarette makes me gag. The only time I really got stoned was when I was eighteen and ingested an insane amount of Moroccan hashish via a cup of "special hot chocolate." After I drank one cup and noticed no difference, the chef cooked me up a more potent brew. I spent the next four hours alone, vomiting, shivering and firmly under the assumption that I was a piece of black paper cut into a silhouette of a person with red and yellow LEDs running around the perimeter.

Immediate physical reaction
Because of my general ineptitude with pot, I made this a big production number. Weed: check. Bowl: check. Lighter: check. Condoms: check. I guess if smoking were more natural to me, things would have gone more smoothly, but Erica even had to coach me in how to toke. It was embarrassing. As she prepped the bowl and fired up a lighter, I prepared to inhale. I tried to tell myself that I was just being a pussy all those years ago, that I could handle it now. But even the tang of the residue on the glass pipe caused my mouth to water and my lower lip to droop in that special, just-about-to-barf way. I closed my eyes and took a huge drag. Then I started coughing and couldn't stop. Two minutes later, the hacking subsided and I took another hit. I did this four times over an eight-minute period. Erica rolled her eyes and said that with all the huffing and puffing she'd just witnessed, she'd guesstimate I was a six or seven on the Harrelson scale of highness. I relaxed, and a tingly feeling swept over me. I started screaming, "I feel high, I feel high! Quick, get undressed!" and shoved her into the bedroom.

Tactile effect
Bear in mind that this is only the second time I've been stoned. Ever. I felt heavy, like somebody had turned up Earth's gravitational pull a few notches. Erica's skin felt like a soft, warm down comforter, the coziest thing you could imagine. I wanted to wrap her around myself completely. She held me as if I were a small child, and we started making out. The next part is kind of hazy. From what I can remember, as soon as I entered her and we hit a rhythm, my penis felt like a metal rod, pointed north like a compass. Previously, whenever I'd heard the phrase "time lost its meaning," I'd laughed at the cliché. But that's exactly how I'd describe the sex we had. Luckily, Erica prompted me to change positions whenever she got bored and/or sore; otherwise I would have kept banging away, blissed-out and stiff as a board, until the break of dawn.

Sensory/mental images
About two minutes after taking a hit, I experienced visions similar to the ones I had in Morocco, i.e. images of mid-'70s children's furniture with Muppets' heads stuck on them. These appeared like a slide show in my mind, each item scrolling from right to left. Between the images was infinite darkness. Occasionally, I'd see British TV personalities from my early childhood, decked out in mid-to-late-'70s fashions and hairdos. Strangely, the size of the hair didn't seem to match the size of the wearer, as if he or she were quivering under the weight of it all. Maybe that's what the '70s were like. I can't really remember.

Duration of sex
I'll say it again: time lost its meaning. Erica told me she called time after ninety minutes. My orgasm took a lot of concentration and arrived with a firework finale of obscure memories I'd been unwittingly harboring since I was a toddler. At one point I said to Erica, "My mind is massive."

Assistant's reaction
Erica was already sleepy when we started. We had crammed a lot of drugs and sex into the previous twenty-four hours. If I hadn't known better, I'd have guessed she was stoned too. Instead, she was taking a rare opportunity to relax — without me pulling her around, trying to induce dirty talk or folding her in half at the waist, she just chilled out while I embarked on my bizarro sex trip to the Carter Administration. Afterward, she told me that I had seemed "somewhere else" during the whole thing, my eyes screwed tight, a bemused expression on my face. Although she initially found this amusing, she said that after a while it was like being schtupped by a zombie or Tom Ridge.

Comparison to drug use without sex
Even though it was much milder, the experience was similar to the last time I got stoned some seven-and-a-half years earlier. The same mental imagery and heavy feeling were accompanied by — get this! — a different way of understanding time. I guess I'm just really susceptible to pot. I enjoyed the intensity of the experience, though. If I could take a hit without coughing up my pelvis, I'd do it a whole lot more often.

Next: Will our hero be able to perform on ecstasy, or will he be preoccupied with the softness of... everything?