Jacob Dylan Ericksen Silverman

*Note: Although this not completely about my character choice, I hope it can be recognized that the theme is still within the piece.


“We were like one, the mushrooms and I,” Jake explained, wide-eyed.
“Wait, what?” I asked.
Shaking his head in annoyance, he muttered, “Whatever, never mind.”
Oh Lord, not the ‘whatever, never mind’ head-shake, I thought. If you don’t hear him the first time, he never gives you the chance to hear it again. He figures that you don’t care about what he’s saying and if you plead with him to repeat it, he simply says, “It was nothing; forget it already.”
I’ve been enduring this crap for all my life, seeing as he lives in the room next to mine. And when I say ‘live’, I mean he spends all his time in that bedroom cooped up with his guitar and his feelings.
The rare times he’s away, most likely gathering mushrooms in the foothills, I wander in there and read his journal. Of course, there’s the occasional entry about the new hottest girl he’s spotted on campus or his deep desire to stab my so-called black heart. Hey, sibling rivalry is nothing of the past. But when I flip past those pages of fluff, I find myself dwindling into the world of a depressive, pot-smoking poet. Illustrations of mind-blowing highs, wild drug hunts, and induced adventures of streaking through fields and sneaking in abandoned buildings.
He never knew it, but of course I would never allow it to be known; I looked up to him in a crazed sort of manner. I’d never inhaled smoke in my life unless some crept out from the fireplace at Christmas, and I definitely never knew the meaning of an altered mind. I was merely a spoiled brat in his eyes who asked too many questions at the dinner table. In this case, he’d look gravely at me and say, “Get a fucking dictionary” or “God, you’re stupid.”
Frequently, he’d grow tired of any company, including that of “Fat Ass” or more correctly, Gill, the neighboring lump of lard that aspired to be as cool as Jake. He’d tell Gill to get a life, take a hike, or bluntly exclaim, “Brown-nose elsewhere, dude!“ Eventually, Gill got a clue and found another thin ass to kiss, and alas Jake came to me for companionship, when loneliness had finally taken it’s toll.
I’d been asking him for months to take me on one of “those trips to the orchards” that I had read about in his journal. He’d always say, “I go places to get away from you. Not to mention oh-so important Mom.”
But here he was now seeking a smoking buddy, and although I knew I was his last resort at this point, I was ecstatic to alter my consciousness.
So flying down the city streets in his new white T-bird, he packed a pretty glass pipe-looking thing with this stinky green herb. “You can have green hit. Just remember, I ain’t wasting good weed, so you hold that shit in till you can’t anymore.” As we sat at a busy intersection in broad daylight, he casually ignited the plant under my nose and I inhaled as deeply as I could. My throat fought back the descending harsh smoke as my head swam in instant sedation. The stoplight turned green and “go” was what I did when I couldn’t hold the scratching sensation in my esophagus back any longer. I gagged and I coughed fiercely as Jake rolled his eyes and grabbed the pipe from my hand. “That was like two seconds, you dumbass. Seriously, just watch me. Hold the wheel.”
As I shakily steered the car down an onramp to Highway 99, I glanced back at Jake as he smoothly sucked on the still lit pipe and tightened his lips. He slapped my hand off the wheel and swiftly merged into traffic. For the next fifteen minutes, we took turns smoking the pipe and as the city faded behind us, scorched grass stretched out beyond. “Whoa,” he spoke in a raspy voice, “do you see the clouds turning purple? Man, I wish life really looked like this.”
Lost in my own tranquil thoughts, I said, “Anyways, it’s really --”
“Anyways? Okay, whatever.”
Shit, I thought. I can’t believe I uttered the other word Jake hates. ‘Anyways’ and ‘what’ were the two words his majesty took offensively as they seemed like he was being ignored.
As I expected, he clicked on the radio and turned the volume from soft to blasting as he looked for a road to turn around on. I had done it, alright. I had displeased the master and now we were going home.
Astonishingly, he took me out the next day and with my lips as tightly sealed as his were around the smoke, we finally made it to the orchards where he laid sprawled out in the driver’s seat enjoying his high, and I, mine.
Almost everyday we would take these trips and we became more friends than siblings after awhile. Even when he went away to college in New York, I would continue to go to the orchards, smoking that fine green and watching the purple clouds pass above. Sometimes, I’d take a friend, but not always would we make it to the glorious orchards for I began to feel ignored by the feeble-minded ‘what’ and ‘anyways’ mutterers.