Free Walking Through Walls by Philip Smith Page B

green (including myself), I discovered electric bananas. I thought my father would approve of my method of obtaining cosmic consciousness through the fruit of Mother Nature. Perhaps I could convince him to light up with me one day.
    I loved the idea that I could get high for free using leftover bananas. The process involved scraping out the inside fiber of the banana peel and then drying this “tobacco” in the oven. After I had dried my Chiquita stash, I then crushed several aspirin, added a bit of tobacco from my mother’s Camels, and tossed the ingredients together as if making a psychotropic Caesar salad. I must have read about this recipe for a low-cost legal high in one of the San Francisco or New York alternative publications that I subscribed to, like Ramparts or the East Village Other. This was the problem of living in a hick town like Miami: I believed everything I read in any newspaper or magazine as long as it was from somewhere other than Miami. Donovan would memorialize this ridiculous ritual in his hit “Mellow Yellow.”
    After a few puffs, my skin would begin to tingle in an unpleasant way, as if there were bugs crawling up and down my arms, and the room began to spin. This creepy sensation was followed by a drenching cold sweat, which was the signal that I was to collapse into bed and remain there for the rest of the day—feeling nauseous. I would then switch on my black light and stare at the psychedelic posters that were tacked to the ceiling. Somehow I convinced myself that this “high” was fun and enlightening. I liked the idea that I didn’t have to risk arrest by buying marijuana in the Grove. It was safe, it was legal, and it didn’t work. I would remain slightly comatose until about five o’clock, at which point I crawled out of bed and started all over again. This was how I spent my summer vacation as a thirteen-year-old—sick to my stomach.
    One afternoon late in August, I was just about to emerge from another wasted day in bed when I noticed a shadowy figure standing in the doorway of my room. “Wow,” I thought, “I’m finally hallucinating. Maybe it takes time for the banana chemicals to build up in my system. Far out!” This stuff really worked. A full-fledged hallucination achieved with only natural ingredients available at your corner grocery. This formula could revolutionize the drug trade. No more arrests. No more guns. Just miles of banana plantations making millions of people nauseous while hallucinating. Maybe I could start selling it in nickel bags.
    To be honest, I was a little disappointed with my vision. I had hoped to see mind-expanding prismatic colors. But I was still happy that my summer of long, hard work perfecting the natural high had finally paid off. I looked again, and as my eyes slowly focused, the figure looked a bit like my father. But he was much thinner, so it couldn’t have been my father. The thought occurred to me that maybe this was not a hallucination but actually my father, teleporting in from his presently unknown location—an occurrence that wouldn’t have surprised me in the least. I shakily got out of bed to go and touch the hallucination/teleportation.
    I was sweating and so weak from months of not eating properly and smoking my aspirin-banana combo that I collapsed. My hallucination caught me. It was my father standing there. He held me for a minute while I recovered, then said, “Get some food and meet me in the backyard. I want to show you something. Hurry before it gets dark.”
    I went into the kitchen, which had gone to hell in Pop’s absence. Mom and I had been happily eating sirloin steaks, canned Le Sueur peas, and instant mashed potatoes from a box. In the freezer I found a carton of Sealtest ice cream, the kind that contained three neatly divided sections of strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. I quickly forced a couple of spoonfuls of chocolate ice cream down