Anna Marrian - Love Junkie: Getting high for Daddy

The first time I got high was with my father. We were at his house in Kenya, I was 16, and Id seen him all of ten times since my mother walked out on him when I was only three, leaving London for New York and another man.

Growing up, I kept a single photograph of my father and me on my nightstand, a large color image in a calico frame, taken when I was four on my first visit to London after the divorce. Hes holding me high on his hip, and my small hands are circled around his neck like a lovers. My blond hair is long, shaggy. His head is bald. Our eyes are the same piercing blue. Heads side by side, were both looking at the same spot, smiling. To my darling Anna, hed written on the corner of the picture in a black felt tip. All my love, Daddy xo, 1971.

When I was nine or ten, he took me on a road trip in a borrowed midnight-blue Mercedes, which broke down on the way. Well just have to make do, he said, digging out a brown magnetic travel backgammon set from the trunk. We sat on the roadside, and he taught me how to play while we waited for a tow. He let me win a few. Youre a natural, he said. We shared a tube of sugary fruit pastilles and watched smoke curl toward the sky from an unseen village. Out there, stranded in the middle of nowhere, the taste of sugar and citrus on my tongue, playing a game on the gravel shoulder where we werent supposed to be, the last rays of the setting sun lighting up our boardout there felt like home.

Over the years we exchanged letters, and I learned to type so mine would be like his. They arrived in light blue envelopes, PAR AVION inked across the front, a row of wildlife stamps assembled across the top edge. When one came, I would take it to my room, close the door, and read it slowly, following the smudged Courier typeface across the page, trying to locate something that might resemble my feelings for the picture in the calico frame, the memory of backgammon on the side of the road. But the letters were rarely about us. They were about his lunch with so-and-so, his improving golf handicap, his trip to the coast with the such-and-suches. Did I remember them? You met them once in London. I didnt, yet he described them all with such familiarity that I felt I should remember.

Then the letter came that would change everything. He wanted me to come visit him in Kenya, just the two of us. My mother agreed to it: an entire month, to be spent in tents on safari in the Masai Mara, at the Mombasa coast learning to scuba dive, on tour cruising from the Samburu desert to Treetops, the famous game-viewing lodge set in the Abedare National Park. The letter Id waited a short lifetime to receive.

He met me at Nairobi Airport. I recognized him right away, tan in his white polo shirt, his little white terry cloth hat protecting his bald head, his blue eyes bright and excited. Darling, so good to see you, he said, kissing me firmly on both cheeks. I smiled and wiped my damp palms on my jeans and followed him to the car. On the drive to his house, he started telling me about the plans he had for us, but then he looked in his rearview mirror, sighed, and pulled off the road quickly. A cop. My father sat for a moment saying nothing, his hands on the steering wheel. I looked at him and was about to speak when he cleared his throat, smoothed the creases in his gabardine trousers, and reached into his front pocket.

Dont worry. This is a regular occurrence. Well be through it in a minute.

We sat in silence, except for the whirring fan of the old diesel Mercedesthe only kind of car he ever droveand I watched the policeman in my side mirror. He was large and dark-skinned and moved slowly in his beige uniform, walking by my open window to peer down at me stonily. He wore mirrored shades, like something from a movie, and took his time, ambling around the front of the car to my fathers window. He said something about speeding.

Was I? my father asked. Huh, well, what can we do to make that right?

He held out a wad of green and blue bills, but the cop didnt take them. We waited in silence, listening to the tick of the cooling engine. My father shifted in his seat, looked back at the cop, who just stared, then reached between the seats where hed hidden more money and held that out, too. The cop stood there refusing to take it, my fathers tiny image reflected in his shades. My father reached one more time between the seats.

This is all Ive got, Im afraid.

The cop looked down the highway and took the bribe, then went back to his car and sat there staring straight ahead while we sped away into the hot morning dust.

We drove in silence, and I was suddenly breathtakingly nervous to be here in this foreign place with this foreign man, overwhelmed by all the differences between us. I was an anxious and gangly 16-year-old with pale skin, braces, and frizzy hairI looked something like a Q-tip. He was a self-confident and tanned showman with an easy laugh and attentive gazehe looked like a movie star. I came from Millbrook, New York, a community known for khaki pants, Members Only jackets, fox hunts, and sculpted gardens. He had given himself over to a lawless country where people walked barefoot down red clay roads and the purple horizon bled into a massive sky that wrapped around the equator.

I knew nothing about Kenya. What I would come to see was a place where chaos was order, where the dwindling population of white expats slept behind locked gates under the attentive eyes of black night watchmen. A place where frenzied flea market hawkers stalked us through sprawling shantytowns of imported American detritusrainbow bales of T-shirts, crates of thick-soled Pumas, and shelves of mismatched computer equipmentuntil a sale was made; a place where lavender hills overlooked the Rift Valley, a spot we drove to for drinks to watch the sun go down, as barefoot Masai boys draped in dyed-red cloth eyed us with curiosity and contempt. It was a place where my father belonged in a way that I had never belonged anywhere. A place I wanted to know.

A week into my visit, I was lying on my fathers bed, its king-size wooden canopy suspended above a blue-flowered cover. The ceiling fan wafted overhead. Unfamiliar night sounds drifted through the open windowsscreeches, hissings, warring tree animalsbut they no longer startled me. I was starting to feel I could settle in here.

I was rolling a joint from the household pot stash, a brown box with a dozen cigar-size budsmore grass than Id ever seenhidden in the cool of the pantry, behind the Robertsons marmalade and Weetabix cereal. After feeling awkward and out of place the first few days, Id became popular at Dads daily cocktail hour by rolling joints for his artsy friends, including the wildlife Kenyan photographer Peter Beard and his clan of assorted giggling modelsso thin you worried they might tip over if you breathed too hard. But Dad always refused to tokehe said he didnt like to be spacey.

Lying on his bed inspecting my perfectly rolled spliff, I practiced the handful of Swahili words hed taught me: