Motherfucking Pot Brownie

Last Wednesday it was Yasmin’s birthday party. Yasmin and Alexi are my Wednesday night DJs at a little bar called Black and White on East 10th Street where I bartend. For Yasmin’s birthday there were cupcakes and brownies. Note: Ethan Minsker loves chocolate and hates drugs-drinking-smoking-caffeine. So I asked Alexi for a brownie. She gave me a strange look. “What, I can’t have a brownie?” I said.
“Sure,” she brought one brownie and a cupcake for me and the other bartender to share. Damn. I wanted one of each all to myself. After the party moved on, I found another brownie sitting at an empty table wrapped in wax paper. I served the room and no one seemed interested in it. So I scooped it up and went behind the bar, turning my back to the few people in the room and opened it up. This brownie was different from the others. Its top had a marshmallow gummy paste on it. If my wife were there, she would have said, “One is enough.” But she wasn’t there and two is always better than one when it comes to brownies. Fuck it. I ate it in one bite.
Two hours later, it was just after 4 am. I was closing the bar when I started to feel strange, dizzy, paranoid and off. “What the fuck is going on?” I thought. Am I about to have a stroke? Should I go to the hospital? What had poisoned me? The only thing I had eaten was the brownie. Then it came to me, pot brownie. I stumbled home, turned on the light in the kitchen. The light woke my wife, who then came into the room, took one look at me and said, “What’s wrong with you?”
“I think I had a pot brownie.”
“What! You don’t even smoke weed.”
“It was by accident.”
“Come to bed and sleep it off.”
I lay in bed. Waves of warm tingling rolled over me. As soon as I closed my eyes I had visions of robots in yellow, mixed with cartoon images like something out of the pages of Juxtapose magazine. Very trippy. I could feel my teeth, then the back of my earlobe and other parts of my body I didn’t know about. The next day I noticed little things out of place from when I came home the night before, like my contact lens case - both lenses were on the same side.
The next week I asked Yasmin about the brownie. “You guys drugged me.”
“The brownies we had were fine. Is that what you ate?”
I told her about the last one on the table in wax paper.
“You should know better than eating strange food left on a table,” she told me.

How true.

-Ethan H. Minsker