Banana Reveries

Dear George,

I see in the paper that the number of people in their late 50’s who smoke marijuana has gone up 350% since 2002.  That’s because those aging baby boomers are returning to habits they developed in their youth.  Katja and I, a decade older, basically missed out on the whole counterculture drug revolution.  When we graduated from Antioch College in 1960, I don’t think a single student on campus had ever tried marijuana.  There simply was no system of distribution on college campuses at that pristine time.  A few years later, Antioch had become the drug capital of southwestern Ohio, but we had already moved on to the serious grind of graduate school in Ann Arbor.  We kept reading in the local newspaper about marijuana arrests of  Michigan undergrads, but we didn’t know anybody in town who had tried pot, and, while curious about these new mind-altering substances, we lacked the connections to do anything about it.  Then one day I saw a story in the Ann Arbor News which reported that one could get high by smoking banana peels.  That was interesting.  Maybe this was our chance to experiment with drugs.   The reporter even  gave instructions.  I showed it to Katja, but the notion had no appeal to her at all.  I pointed out that smoking bananas was perfectly legal, as well as relatively cheap, and I proposed that we try it.  Katja raised her eyebrows and made a funny face, but she did drive over with me to the supermarket on Packard St.  As I paid for my purchase of 17 bananas, I asked the cashier if they’d been selling a lot.  She said they actually had, though she didn’t know why.  I smiled knowingly.  Then we stopped at the Blue Front magazine store at the corner of Packard and State where I purchased some Zig Zag cigarette papers.  I felt self-conscious doing this since there was only one obvious reason for such a  purchase.  I looked around carefully for NARCs before I asked the clerk for the item.

 

Back home, I checked the recipe again.  It said you only use the peel of the banana and throw away the fruit itself.  As virtually penniless grad students, three bunches of bananas did cost something, so I ate the seventeen bananas for my lunch.  Seventeen is quite a few – you should try it some time.  Then I scraped the stringy fleshy part off the inside of the banana peel, threw it away, put the cleaned out peels on a pizza tray in the oven, and cooked them on low heat for two hours.  Finally I crumbled up the dried out peels into tiny pieces and rolled a bunch of cigarettes.  Despite her reluctance, I got Katja to share the first one with me.  She’d been smoking Black Russian cigarettes with her friend Murielle, but she’d never really learned how to inhale, and the banana peel cigarette made her choke.  She exclaimed that it tasted awful.  I smoked the rest of the cigarettes, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs.  They did taste pretty bad.  I was already feeling sick from eating seventeen bananas, and smoking the peels only made me sicker.  I didn’t know exactly how to tell if I were high, but I was pretty sure that this was not it.  After an hour of unsuccessful effort, I went to bed and stayed there for the rest of the day

 

Later, disgusted with the experiment and our waste of money, I re-read the newspaper blurb.  I was shocked to find out that I’d made a big mistake in preparing the banana peels.  The article said to scrape the innards off the peels, throw the peels away, and bake the innards.  Instead I’d thrown the innards away and baked the peels.  I’d done the whole thing backwards!  That’s why I didn’t get high, I thought to myself.  I considered starting over again, but Katja was discouraging, and I didn’t want to spend the money for more bananas.  I finally concluded we’d had our shot, and destiny had decided that we weren’t ready for a radical life style change.  That was the end of our venture into hallucinogenic drugs.

 

Now it’s 45 years later.  Out of curiosity, I did a Google search on “smoking banana peels,” not knowing whether there would be any historical trace of this brief fad or not.  Much to my surprise, I got 106,000 hits.  I didn’t read all of them because the first ten explained that smoking banana peels was a hoax perpetrated on naïve and gullible youth in the 1960’s and 70’s.  If kids had had any experience of getting high, the Internet accounts said, it was probably due to indigestion from eating a lot of bananas.  That made me feel better.  I was relieved to learn that it didn’t matter whether I had smoked the dried out banana peels or their innards.  I guess I’d had an authentic banana high experience after all.

 

Love,

Dave 

G-Mail Comments:

-Amy R (3-15): This is so great.

-Linda C (3-15): dave, I love this story, however ruth and susan and I did not miss that age and would/could have a lot of explaining to do, which unfortunately I told all under a light anesthetic to my colonoscopy doctor. (and later the colonoscopy doc had a lawsuit against him which I dismissed immediately).

-JML (3-13): great story dad. I seem to remember some elements of this story from my youth but not the whole deal.  a follow up story that i'd like to see might include some of your tennis playing adventures with george.  again, I remember some elements of that but not the whole deal. great blog today. thanks, j**