ACCOZZAGLIA

and i didn’t mean to be. honest.

this is coming as much of a surprise to me as it is to probably anyone else. i’m not pleased in the slightest, and i’m not really sure what to make of it. but it looks like m.b.a. is not where i’ll be calling home in the coming months.

pending upon how fast i can get upright in this area — by virtue of client work, freelance work, holiday work and even freeking starbucks — i’m looking for a new place to live. prolly in the city, either studio or one-bedrooming it.

“why on earth,” you ask, “is she being this utterly irrational?”

turns out that someone important in my life finds her dependency upon a certain herb more important than me.

lovely. just lovely.

see, back when we got to know each other, she had explained that from age fourteen onward, she identified as a stoner, but due to more recent medical reasons, she dried up and got on with her life without relying on the green stuff.

[and as an aside, i should be clear about something: "dependency" is defined as something which you either can't or won't live without, regardless the circumstances. casually and socially? as in, "every now and then i'll imbibe or indulge, but i don't need it to get on with my daily life," then that's something with which i've never had an issue. that said ...]

save for the one time since i’ve come to know her [n.b., a casual day trip to the mountains, where, on a special occasion, she accessed some bud for the two of us], she hadn’t made any inclination that she would resume what she would call “stoner pride”, regardless of that medical situation being behind her or not. in fact, she had voiced no inclination which inferred that she’d return to the green stuff.

and this, i felt, was an important distinction to make. if i had been aware in advance that she was going back to daily reliance, then i would have taken pause in coming 1,700 miles westward to start our lives together.

why?

i come from a family chock-full of substance abuse ishoos. from alcoholism to doing the cornucopia of pharmacopia to straight-up addiction of chronic, long-term pot use, you could pretty much pin the donkey on my family tree.

– my mother is alcoholic, a valium addict, addicted to smoking (even though she has chronic asthma) and at last word, was mixing anti-depressants and anti-psychotics together that contraindicate each other.

– my uncle fried his brain on pot, booze and other rich-kid substances widely available in 1976, and he’s nicely damaged by it today, having never lived on his own, not seeking higher education and living under his mother’s roof until age 34, only to marry a pet shop entrepreneur and live with her while working for her store.

– my aunt was a recovering alcoholic at last check.

– my grandmother was a recovering alcoholic before she died of heart failure.

– my grandfather was alcoholic before his death (from asthma, incidentally).

– my cousin tried virtually everything ever concocted for human consumption. if you name it, he would have had four suggestions for ingesting it. he went dry in the mid 1990s, got his B.S., went to grad skool and is now a Ph.D. in herpetology.

* * *

i’m not exactly proud of this legacy.

and the sad part about being the kid of an alcoholic is that sometimes i’m oblivious to when chemical dependency is happening around me.

* * *

in 1995, i lived with three roommates, one whom i knew years before from when he was a high school senior. two years his elder, i worked with him at the rekkid store. when i ran into him again in 1994, he had mentioned that he got stoned regularly, along with the regular weekend venture into E-land (né X-land, but i digress). anyhow, in 1995, our paths crossed again, and while he was looking for a place to live (cos his then-roomies were kicking him out over something that seemed unfair: his slacking off, attributed to being stoned way too often), i had just secured a new rental home with an available room.

it seemed to work out.

then, several things became apparent. whenever we’d come home, the place would reek like a bad greenhouse. he’d be late with paying the rent. and if i remember correctly, he was sacked from his job for being late so frequently. however, before any one of us could argue, he’d come to his grass-smoking defence, noting how it helped him write new songs on his keyboard.

eventually, after much three-versus-one compromising (which is to say, there wasn’t much bending on his behalf), we made sure that he only toked outdoors. usually, this meant he’d go out onto the back porch and take hits to his heart’s content.

one night, though, everything changed.

on halloween night 1995, he said that he would be the last one out that evening. it had been pouring rain all day, and it was unimaginably damp and humid everywhere. so, being the last one out before he left, i reminded him to close the living room window before he split.

of course, i had a hunch that he was toking indoors again, but i couldn’t prove it. nor would i allow myself to believe it.

when i returned home, i found the lights on. the front door was wide open, as was the window. the place had been ransacked — that is, until i realised that certain electronics items were missing. plus, no one was home.

we had been burglarised, and i was the first to discover this.

after the police came to take prints and file their report of the missing items, he ambled in with an absent, “wassup?”

“ummm,” i said, “you locked up before you left, right?”

“oh!” he exclaimed. “i forgot to close the window!”

“ummm, you realise that you just let the burglars just walk right in, simply because you left the place wide open to them?”

he was incessantly apologetic. he insisted that he toke only in back from that point onward.

what he was missing was that he was constantly affected by the stuff. if he wasn’t stoned, he was distracted by the prospect of doing more as soon as he could. within a week of the burglary, he left the back door unlocked twice.

so, after much reluctance — this was, after all, my old friend — the three of us agreed to evict him. and as time for his eviction deadline neared, he made no visible efforts that he was looking for alternate arrangements.

finally, he snapped. through the THC-induced haze, it must have hit him: time was running out. he began screaming at me for being “such a hard arse” with him.

of course, he never once acknowledged the late rents, the open windows, the polluted house. rather, from his view, it was about the rest of us as roommates that were being so tough on him!

* * *

in 1997, i moved in with a gay man in a roommate situation. the home was fastidious to the point that i was afraid to let either me or my cat ever walk on the living room carpet. every fibre stood perfectly in the same direction, as if no one had ever set foot on it.

of course, i also didn’t notice how he’d imbibe three to four vodka martinis every single afternoon and evening and promptly check in for the night at 9:30pm.

granted, he was still mourning over the loss of his husband in 1988 to a car accident (if i recall correctly). yet, nine years on, he had become a bitter, sometimes visibly spiteful-at-the-world man.

one night, he was watching PBS in the breezeway, adjacent to the kitchen. the PBS documentary on jazz was playing. i was making dinner for myself while he finished his martini.

then he got up and asked me whether i wanted the telly on or not. i told him it didn’t matter either way, but i’d be happy to turn it off when i was done with my meal.

anyway, about fifteen minutes later, while i was in the kitchen, eating, he storms into the room in a screaming tirade about the television being “so goddamned loud!” i hadn’t touched it, and considering that it was on a low volume when he was watching it, i was befuddled. after trying to tell him that i hadn’t touched the television, he screamed, “and that’s another thing! yer outta here!” he slammed his door, which practically came off the upper hinge.

that was it. no warning. no indication that something was the matter.

of course, i eventually had to sue homeboy for not returning my rental deposit. i won by default in court, because he failed to appear. then, when i got home, i found a cheque in the mail from him for the complete amount, which looked like it arrived a day late.

just to be sure, i took the cheque to his credit union to cash in later that week. however, it turns out that he had placed a stop payment order on it the day of the court date, in hopes that i’d drop the case, try to cash it and be left hanging to dry.

in other words, petty fraud. moreover, the amount would have actually overdrawn his account by leaps and bounds!

in the end, the city marshal tracked him down, got the money (plus interest, i might add), and all was finally over. but the experience taught me more than i really thought i needed to know.

i made a decision: if ever i lived with another person — be it a roomie or someone significantly more important — i expected them to be entirely forthcoming and honest about their, ummm, vices.

(namely, those vices that had a strong chance of impeding upon the dynamic of our relationship.)

* * *

and so, i sit here in complete surprise and some serious sense of disgust. suddenly, i’m bound with a girlfriend who returned to toking nearly daily after her medical ishoos cleared up.

however, after the latest confrontation on the matter, she has made it clear that she is “proud to be a stoner” and that she will not compromise her love for the bud. she argues that she “only tokes once a day” and that “it shouldn’t affect the feelings we have for each other.”

and yet, why can’t i help feeling just slightly betrayed here? after all, she made no indication that she was resuming her reliance. and given that a number of her few old friends are for the most part stoners themselves, i already know that my reticence to putting up with this is going to make me the villain.

i understand that being in a committed relationship demands compromise to make it work. as we laid out when we compromised to get to this point, i mentioned that i severed my very irreplaceable network of connections back in the old city, that i gave up my easy foot and transit access to everything within my reach, that i left behind 80% of my life in storage and that i’m starting over from scratch on the fringes of a new and unfamiliar place.

of course, i also took some time off to be with her as she was in hospital and during much of her convalescence. i didn’t exactly make a lot of money during that time, one week excepted while i was in texas for family stuff.

in her effort to compromise, she notes that she’s giving me some of her space in her home for me to be here and that in the interim — as client stuff and deposit returns and getting set up with the freelance agencies here is in progress — she’s taking care of both of us.

“but,” she firmly notes, “under no circumstance will i leave behind something i love. i’m a stoner, and i’m proud of that. and i made a decision a long time ago that i would never compromise that for anyone.”

too bad she didn’t tell me this before i came out here, cos now i’m feeling pretty hamstrung.

and i dinna. i feel left with the sensation that she’s going to stick by her, ummm, reliance upon grass ’til the bitter end. i don’t think she realises the impact this carries upon others in her life.

and maybe i’m being too bloody selfish. if it were a core identity issue, i’d realise that i couldn’t turn her away. but this is an addiction. right?

it just would have been nice to have known this from her before we made the decision to live together.