Jimsom Weed
by Jason Tougaw
My mom and her friend Voly, eighteen to her sixteen, got a recipe for jimson weed tea from this guru beach bum named Al. “He just got out of the loony bin,” Voly whispered to Cathy. My mom has always hung out with guys more than girls. She just gets along with them.
“The stuff is all over, just off the beach,” Al said. “You see it poking out of people’s fences. This tea is gonna blow your minds.”
Three hours later, the tea drunk, Cathy’s in her room in her house on 19th Street, hiding. Her friends call the house the mausoleum, because it’s a tall stucco rectangle that isn’t even tiny bit beachy. A yellow circus truck pulls into the driveway, a grinning clown as big as a car painted on its side. Thirty men with machine guns rush out of the car and surround the Mausoleum, climbing its sides like ants. “Cathy, open up,” Doug says, knocking. “Cathy, Voly’s mom called. Let me in. I’m coming in.”
The room appears empty. Doug pokes around and spots Cathy in the closet, all wrapped around herself, a fetus, her head swallowed by the dangling bottoms of blouses and skirts and pants. “Cathy, get out of there. Voly’s in the hospital.”
“Voly, get in here,” she says to him. “They’re almost here. Get in here. They’re on the walls, right outside the window. I don’t know what they’re waiting for. Voly, I mean it.”
“Cathy, I am not Voly,” he says. “Midge,” he calls downstairs. “You gotta see this.”
“Voly,” is all Cathy says.
“Cathy, listen to me,” Midge says, “Voly is not here. He’s in the hospital, getting his stomach pumped. We know about the gypsum weed.”
“Cathy, how are you feeling?”
“How do you think? They’re gonna kill us.”
“Should we go to the hospital?” Midge asks Doug.
“Nah, just let her sweat it out.” Doug walks to the closet. “Listen, Hon, take your head out of those clothes and talk to me.”
She decides to trust him, for a second. She pokes her head out and reaches an arm toward him. As her finger grazes his leg—poof, he disintegrates—leaving just a pile of dust on the floor. The circus militia finally storms through the windows. They stand around the room with their guns and make Cathy stay in the closet, a gun to her head, for several hours.
Seeing that Cathy hasn’t moved, and that she seems to be sweating it out, Midge and Doug go to bed. Just after four in the morning, they hear a slam, a screech, and the sound of a body stumbling. When they get to her room, Cathy’s outside, on the tiny third-floor terrace, trying to climb off it. “Cathy, get in here. Now,” Midge says.
“They’re almost here,” Cathy says, in tears. “They’re going to kill Bruce.”
“Who?”
“Bruce is one of the circus guys. He helped me. He made sure they didn’t shoot me. The cops are coming to kill him. We’ve gotta get out.”
Doug pulls Cathy inside, puts her on the bed, and talks. Eventually she sleeps. At 7:30 am, Midge pokes in. “Cathy, you’re going to school. Get up.”
“Okay,” she says.
Ten minutes later, checking on the status of things, Midge finds Cathy in her brother Craig’s closet. “I can’t find any of my clothes,” she says.
“Jesus Christ,” she says, to Doug, who’s too far away to hear. “Look at her. This child cannot go to school.” Cathy spends the day at home, with resigned Midge. Her first bout of paranoia fades, but the experience stays with her, close to consciousness, for the rest of her life.
An outtake from The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism
Thank you. I appreciate this.
Interesting back story of the plant:
In the United States, the plant is called “jimsonweed”, or more rarely “Jamestown weed”; it got this name from the town of Jamestown, Virginia, where British soldiers consumed it while attempting to suppress Bacon’s Rebellion. They spent 11 days in altered mental states:
The James-Town Weed (which resembles the Thorny Apple of Peru, and I take to be the plant so call’d) is supposed to be one of the greatest coolers in the world. This being an early plant, was gather’d very young for a boil’d salad, by some of the soldiers sent thither to quell the rebellion of Bacon (1676); and some of them ate plentifully of it, the effect of which was a very pleasant comedy, for they turned natural fools upon it for several days: one would blow up a feather in the air; another would dart straws at it with much fury; and another, stark naked, was sitting up in a corner like a monkey, grinning and making mows [grimaces] at them; a fourth would fondly kiss and paw his companions, and sneer in their faces with a countenance more antic than any in a Dutch droll.
In this frantic condition they were confined, lest they should, in their folly, destroy themselves—though it was observed that all their actions were full of innocence and good nature. Indeed, they were not very cleanly; for they would have wallowed in their own excrements, if they had not been prevented. A thousand such simple tricks they played, and after eleven days returned themselves again, not remembering anything that had passed.
— Robert Beverley, Jr., The History and Present State of Virginia, Book II: Of the Natural Product and Conveniencies in Its Unimprov’d State, Before the English Went Thither, 1705[44]