Tea and Cigarettes

I hadn’t met him the day I interviewed for the room. He greeted me at the door and introduced himself as Doron. He had a British accent, though he said he was a Kiwi. He was attractive, with a flock of thick black hair pushed back to reveal a slight widow's peak and eyes of mottled, tortoise-shell green. He was not short, but shorter than me. He naturally stood with shoulders back and his chest pushed forward, which, for some reason, always reminded me of Robert Downey Jr. There was an arrogance to the way he spoke, and the way he would trace you with his eyes. He radiated a sort of mischievous-energy which made you want to follow him. And I liked him instantly.

As I awkwardly struggled my way through the front door and down the hallway, hands full of shopping bags and the last few miscellaneous items, he led me through the house. In the kitchen, he oversaw as I unpacked food items and placed them on the counter. I liked that he hadn’t offered to help and that without much chat, had asked my age (I’ve always despised polite pleasantries). I told him I was “26” and he told me he was 29. Later I would realize that I hadn’t quite gotten my ears around his accent yet and he had actually said he was “39.”

Doron looked good for 29.

My mum had gone to Costco and bought a few things for me to donate to the new share house, 24 rolls of toilet paper, 2 kilograms of coffee and for some reason – 4 liters of fucking salsa.

 “We share food which is cool…” He said as I looked inside the fridge in vain for somewhere to put the comically oversized jar.

“Yeah, I’m from a big family so… it’s more comfortable for me to share shit.” I said, before deciding to roll the dice with a little humor.

“Accept for this of course…” I said holding up the 4-liter salsa.

“this is all for me.”

He didn’t smile or appear to read the sarcasm. Instead, as though he had been looking for an opportunity, he said deadpan;

“yeah and that jug in the door… don’t drink that unless you want to throw up, trip for days… and possibly die.”

I looked at what appeared to be home-made Ribena sitting in an antique gallon glass bottle in the door, and then back at Doron.

“Ok. Good to know.” I said without a follow-up question, figuring everyone wants to move into a place with a few mysteries to be solved.

I 100% would have tried that homemade Ribena if he hadn’t said anything though. Say what you will about hippies, they know how to cook, and that delicious purple-durple seemed to be calling my name.

I remember a few weeks after I moved in I was sitting at the kitchen table doing homework when a thin, hippy dude I’d never seen before walked in the front door, made his way to the fridge, took out the big glass bottle and poured a careful shot worth of the purple liquid into an old plastic water bottle before leaving without a word.

A few weeks later Doron invited me to have dinner with him and a friend. They were making pasta at home and I was busy with an assignment so I appreciated and accepted the invitation. The guy was your standard tweaky, hippy type. He wore two thin scarves, had sinewy arms and short sun-bleached hair. He seemed sort of nervous. Doron and I drank wine and chatted almost like his friend wasn’t there.

“Want to do DMT tonight?” Doron asked as I drained my glass of red.

“I really do need to finish this assignment. Maybe another night?” I answered honestly.

“Fair enough. Want to help me then?” he said with a cheeky smile.

“Sure.”

Doron got up and disappeared into his bedroom. I smiled at the tweaky stranger, who sat staring at the space where Doron had been, wringing his hands. He had barely touched his spaghetti.

Doron returned with a glass pipe and some brown resin in one of those tiny jam jars people steal from hotel buffet breakfast tables.

He walked over to the record player and put on some trippy, trance music that I figured would have to sound better under the influence.

He loaded the pipe and lit it for his friend who had made his way over to the couch. The moment the tweaker inhaled the effect was instant. Doron lay him down and stood back. The guy started writhing on the couch, smiling and moaning in loud ecstasy. Doron lit a cigarette and handed it to me. We smoked in the house – something we and our housemates certainly never did and watched the guy on the couch in silence. It was exactly like watching someone have sex with an invisible lover. 10 minutes it was over. The guy was relaxed, elated and most notably visibly cured of his tweakiness.

I went back to my room to finish my assignment and decided I didn’t want Doron to see me like that.

I didn’t know much about DMT. I had never done it myself. My stoner friend Lachlan had because Lachlan will do anything. He described it as “10 minutes in Legoland which feels like hours”. You have a super intense trip with vivid hallucinations which usually involves things appearing to compartmentalize, break apart and move around – like blocks – thus Legoland.

Doron would ‘brew’ DMT in our backyard. I remember once seeing hundreds of what looked like filthy gum leaves lining our spa bath for several days. We all had to shower over them. I assumed they were Doron’s and he wanted to clean them but didn’t want to waste any water (we're in a drought you know). He explained later that he had been forced to gather the leaves suddenly, taking off in the middle of the night – He knew the location of a particular tree – which is the best in the world (according to him) for DMT production – it’s a rare, old-growth Australian native and its location is a closely guarded secret. News had spread that some undesirables had heard about the location of the tree and Doron had set out in the night to gather all the fallen leaves before his rivals could.

“You see you can’t pick the leaves – it upsets the tree – and makes the DMT not chill – you have to ask the plant for its fallen leaves – be a gentleman about it.”

Whether these other people knew about this rule and would struggle their way into the bush, find this mythical tree - see the floor had been swept of fallen leaves – be like “oh no! well no drugs for us then” and then turn around defeated and go home – I don’t know. But that’s the story I got.

According to Doron, DMT enables you to “connect emotionally with the life force of all living things” and over time this develops into (sort of) ‘communicating’ with plants.

I didn’t really get it.

Although, I do have a distinct memory from around that time, of catching myself alone in the kitchen, cutting a carrot, staring at the vegetable thinking about what Doron had said and feeling a sudden, sharp stab of panic.

Sometimes it was a mystery how Doron, under the weight of his thoughts, managed to do anything at all.

Doron would come to tell me that he was, in fact, the leader of the Psychedelic Society of Australia. He said that he had been motivated to move to Australia because he had read that our strange and unique flora meant we had more DMT producing plants than anywhere else in the world.

Doron would also brew Ayahuasca. He claimed to be the only person in the country who had been trained on how to make it. Like the DMT he would cook it in a big, black witches’ cauldron, set above a logwood pyre in our suburban backyard.

I remember I had been sick and in bed for a day –I had a fever, my eyes were puffy, something that always happens when I’m sick. My hair was long and straightened and I dressed in only an oversized T-shirt. I got up and wandered through the house and into the backyard, following the sound of voices.

Doron sat with his back to the house, stirring his boiling cauldron which smelled richly of the leaves and sticks which I could see orbiting the surface of the liquid. He was listening to his digital radio. A man was discussing how aliens had interfered with early humans and the evidence was obvious if you looked for it. I shuffled forward in a daze and circled around to get a better look at what Doron was doing. He had a black scarf knotted over his nose and mouth and wore yellow-tinted oversized 70’s drug-star sunglasses.  It was a make-shift fume mask. He looked at me and screamed and I looked at him and did likewise.

He obviously had thought no one was home.

“fuck me!” he yelled.

“you look like the girl from 'The Ring',” he said as the scarf fell from over his mouth.

I laughed, “yeah I always do when I’m sick.”

“scared the shit out of me” he shook his head and stared back into his soupy potpourri.

“what you doing?” I asked rubbing my eyes.

“Cooking Ayahuasca,” he said – pulling the scarf back up over his mouth.

“has that got something to do with the sticks you got sent in the mail?” I yawned.

“may-bee.” He muffled through the scarf, looking up at me to show his eyebrows raised high over the brim of his sunglasses.

I don’t think I’d ever really heard of Ayahuasca before Doron told me about it. Maybe I’d seen a Vice Media short on it. You couldn’t really get it outside of deepest, darkest Peru, which is where Doron – who I pictured on his arrival to look much like Paddington Bear – had learned to make it.  He told me that he had been living in London and had a successful advertising career, a marriage which was failing and like everyone else in the city at the time a debilitating cocaine addiction. He had apparently been bumming across Europe in his early 20’s when he met a 15-year-old model from an Eastern European Country I can’t remember and had fallen desperately in obsession with her. He followed her around for a couple years partying like a rockstar before the two of them settled in London, married and Doron realized he needed a job. I assume he has no idea how he wound up in advertising – one of those kids of hippy stock, who think they are Communists and want more than anything to have an artistic talent, who make their way into advertising because it masquerades as creative, so they can prove to themselves that, if they wanted to, they too could make stupid amounts of money.

Doron told me that he was in a bad way, living alone, hating the job, his friends, the city – snorting coke and getting drunk every day. When he met a stranger at a bar, an older gentleman who told him that he needed to go to a small village in the Peruvian rainforest and trip on a drug they made there called Ayahuasca. The stranger said that he had been a junky, homeless, suicidal, near death and now he was cured. Doron packed a bag and headed to South America. When he arrived to the location that the stranger had scribbled on a napkin at the bar, he was met by a small tribe of locals, who led him silently deep into the rainforest to a clearing where there was fire surrounded by a couple other foreigners -  Doron said they were likely drug addicts or long-term-depressed. No one spoke. They were met by a medicine man who chanted and blessed them and boiled a pot of what appeared to be scratchy leaves and debris. After a long while, he poured a small amount of the liquid into a tankard and poured it into each of the foreigner’s mouths, chanting and talking unintelligently the entire time. No one knew what was happening or what to expect. Almost instantly they all started violently vomiting. Doron’s stomach cramped in painful stabs, he crawled along the forest floor retching. The medicine man and the tribe members followed him, trying to force him to drink more of the liquid. He did. He trusted them completely. He had given himself over to whatever might happen even before he arrived. As he dragged himself along the ground, vomiting, screaming in agony, the fire cracked, the chanting grew all around him, he was sure he was going to die. And would have welcomed it. As he began to vividly hallucinate he was led to a small shelter deep in the trees. A tent roof against the rain with a cot bed raised a few centimeters off the dirt. There he was left alone in the dark to trip for over 40 hours. He saw and experienced the most intense trip of his life, a lifetime of pain and memories of monsters and madness. A few times a tribesman came to leave him water and a bowl of sliced plantains but otherwise he was alone with himself. He had no idea which of the animal encounters actually happened.

“How long do you do that for?” I asked in amazement.

“You can’t take it every day, but every other day you can repeat the process as needed, generally people are there for three to seven days –”

“how long did you do it for?”

“just over three months.”

Doron.

He was there long enough to earn their trust and learn the secret of how it was made. You needed a stick from a type of native plant called ‘deadwood’ without which the toxin from the Ayahuasca plant will just kill you but that’s as much as I ever gathered from the process. I once looked back through Doron’s Facebook photos to see what he had looked like as an advertising coke-head. I remember flicking back between a picture of a fat, pale, middle-aged, sad nerd and to the next picture of a fit, beautiful, happy young man on top of a mountain. I flicked the pictures back and forth.

I never asked Doron how to brew Ayahuasca or DMT. But he did teach me how to make tea.

You see, my mom was born and raised in Chicago and my dad in Naples (Italy). We were coffee people.  I was born in Australia, and it wasn’t until I moved into this share house that I realized I really didn’t know many of the customs of the Anglo-Australian majority. I’d never really eaten butter, or the cheese that came in a single, solid, yellow brick, or porridge, or Vegemite or tea. 

My housemates loved tea. The old place had no heating. The entire back section of the house; kitchen, laundry, and lounge were most certainly a budget DIY extension by our landlord from years prior. It was little more than a plaster-walled-in carport. It had no insulation and walls which failed to meet, leaving gaps to let the wind in. For months I would wake to the sight of my breath lingering in the air. So I followed my housemates lead and decided to start drinking more tea. To make tea, you shuffle into the kitchen, boil the kettle, but a bag in a mug, pour the boiling water into the mug and shuffle away, letting it get more and more bitter as it gets colder and colder – much like me.

Apparently, I was wrong.

“Thanks for the tea,” Doron called from the couch. I was attempting the ‘shuffle away’ back to my room part of the tea-making process and froze, the mug in my hand steamed like a prop from a ‘spooky house’.

“What tea?” I asked, genuinely confused.

“You didn’t offer.”

For a rebel who didn’t seem to care for polite pleasantries, I was taken aback.

“I didn’t know that was a thing,” I said, feeling my face flush.

“Yeah sure” He quaffed in disbelief. The level to which I appeared to have offended him was something I had never seen in him before. I suddenly felt like I was being reprimanded, told off by an elder.

“This is probably the second time in my life I’ve made tea – it is a mug of brown water Doron – I didn’t know there were rules.” 

“You never make a cup of tea without offering one – it’s rude.”

He went on.

“Especially as you were making it right in front of me – it’s like how you always offer a tea when someone visits your home…”

I had a flash of all the times he and my housemates had done just this, offered me or a guest a tea – it had seemed so … old fashioned? Yet… when they handed it to me, I felt something. A connection, a warmth. I was welcome and comforted.

“well… Do you want me to make you one.” I offered, still unsure how to progress or escape.

“No. I’ll make my own.” He snapped.

I hurried away feeling chastised.

I stared at the mug which steamed like a geyser in the freezing conditions of my bedroom. It seemed so out of character for Doron. Until it suddenly didn’t. Tea it seemed was more about the ritual than the actual drink. There were rules, but they were there for a reason. It was the act of preparing, sharing, warming and comforting – it was about connecting with people – feeling something.  

Which was actually so Doron.

Doron had a beautiful girlfriend named Stephanie, who was a couple years older than me. I only saw her a few times, presumably she had a warmer house to hang out in. One day, out of the blue, Doron told me that he was currently practicing a type of tantric sex in which he wouldn’t allow himself to climax. He said that when a man comes he releases energy into the woman and the woman takes the energy from the man, sucks it up, soaks it in. Even for Doron, it sounded like real' crazy-shit. I’d been smoking weed that afternoon and had to try hard not laugh.

“Why don’t you want to share your energy with Steph?” I asked as a gentile pry, mining for more quotable nonsense.

He laughed as though I were being naive.

“what? And wander around in weakened state?!” he chortled.

I only include this memory because I always felt as though it said something about important about Doron, but I’ve never quite been able to figure out what.

I remember that somehow it became a known fact amongst my housemates that I had never really flirted with anyone or had sex with a ‘random’ before. One evening, Alissa, another housemate was quizzing me on my whereabouts the night before when Doron wondered in to get the goss’. I explained that I had walked up to a guy I knew from Uni’ at a bar and said;

“I find you attractive. I don’t find many people attractive so I think we should at least try and have a conversation or something.” and that I had then decided a few minutes later when we had both agreed that the bar was a bore and the rain too intense to go searching for another.

“I’m going to come over to your house, I’m not gonna sleep with you but I want to see if you’re worth feeling anything for so we should hang out.”

Doron and Alissa thought it was great –one of the only times the two of them agreed on anything. They hassled me to message the dude to meet me at a local bar for a drink.

I was in the shower when the dude messaged back; ‘on my way’ (I guess I hadn’t stipulated a time).

Doron saw the message, and replied ‘easy-there tiger.’ Something I would never say. I went on the date, and didn’t realize he had sent the message for months. I love imagining Doron seeing the dude’s message, looking at the bathroom door, hearing the shower, panicking and deciding on a flirty reply.

Doron and I had tried and failed a few times to organize something to do ‘outside the house’ finally, about three months after I moved in he called me and invited me to join him and a few of his friends ‘for martini’s’.  I rode my bike about 20 minutes and met them just as they were finishing dinner – It turned out to be a wake. No one told me directly but I came to realize that it was the one-year anniversary of a suicide. Someone they had all loved dearly.  Seven of them had decided to take his widow out for the night, eat at his favorite restaurant, drink cocktails, take a bunch of Ecstasy and go out dancing. I had never met any of them before, I didn’t know anyone other than Doron. I wasn’t on or offered any pills and I never figured out if Doron had asked anyone before inviting me to join.

The group were all friendly – I thought the night was a pretty wonderful idea. It was a night of 90’s hip hop, tears, laughter and lots of meaningful compliments. I had a great time. I don’t remember speaking to Doron, with the exception of at one point, in the lights of the dingy night club, I leaned down to grab my jacket next to where Doron was sitting and chatting to someone when he said to me;

“You know you’re beautiful right?”

I don’t remember saying anything in reply, I probably just smiled and offered him a cigarette. They were all super high.

 About a week or two later Doron came home on a Friday and told us he’d found another house - somewhere with Steph and was moving out.  He packed his shit and was gone by Sunday.

**

One thing I’ve noticed in life is that you always see people one last time, usually years later, by surprise and well out of the context in which you knew them.

With Doron, it was two years later. I had returned from living in Europe. I’d studied, partied, loved and lost and returned with no idea what I wanted to do with my life again. It was summer and I’d taken a job as a waitress at a ‘cool’ restaurant on the South Side of the city where I was living with my sister who was in the middle of divorcing her husband of 8 months.

Doron walked in with his wife Steph and a classy set of parents. I didn’t know Steph had come from money. She looked about 7 months pregnant. Doron was talking to her dad about getting a car – 

“a Range Rover or a Jeep? Something new, something for kids and camping.”

I asked one of the other waiters to swap tables with me so I didn’t have to serve them. Pretty standard, no one likes serving people they know – unless they’re crooked.

I said ‘hey,’  he and Steph were courteous, then we ignored each other as best we could, so he could enjoy himself and I could get through it.

An hour or so later I slipped out, into the alley beside the restaurant, sat on a milk crate and lit a cigarette. A few moments later Doron appeared, bent down, took the cigarette and had a drag.

He said; “I don’t’ smoke anymore,” and handed it back;

“yeah me either,” I said, eyes fixed to a bluestone at my feet.  

He disappeared back inside and was gone by the time I returned.

It’s the strangest thing but, I don’t know if he really did meet me in the alley, or if I just imagined it.

Doron likely paid and left without another word.