A Lesson in First Impressions
by Bryce Martin

Al Gore was one pot-smokin' cat.

Might be still.

After not living in Tennessee for very long, I began to see quite a bit of Al Gore Jr. on television and in the newspapers, and some guy named Clinton from Arkansas. I soon realized that I had heard of the senior Gore but knew little about him.

The Jr. had spent some time in Nashville, and he had been a reporter for The Tennessean. This and any little thing you'd care to know about him surfaced in the following days and months under the scrutiny of a national press troubled by deadlines and riding the waves of a presidential election.

Watching Gore as I did from time to time, I was taken back to my California sunny days in the 1960s. Those were years in which I worked with, lived around, and generally found myself among a certain type of people to an extent much more than I would have chosen if I had the ability to do so.

They were pot smokers, and as such came out of the same orange gelatin mold. Not before becoming potheads, but after. They all looked and acted the same, the heavy users did, and certain telltale Under the Influence tics and patterns hung around even during cessations when their bodies had remained potless. And it wasn't hard to distinguish the heavy users. They looked and played the part.

It was the eyes more than anything else, and the hesitancy, the little look like, "Oh, my God, where am I and what am I doing." It wasn't that apparent. More in the line of subtle.

And they were so-, so-, so-very-so adamant in telling anyone who would listen just how totally harmless pot was. That was comical considering that each one of them might as well have worn a T-shirt that read I Smoke Dozens Of Joints Every Single Day. Get a haircut, shower and put on a suit. If the person did all that, and had not smoked a joint in several days, it wouldn't have mattered as far as recognizing them as potheads. That residue of personality altered by the pot usage would have been a dead giveaway.

When you worked with potheads with the telltale traits, and who even acknowledged their strong usership of said weed, and you pulled double work shifts with them when they were complaining about being out of weed, and when they were never out of your sight or presence, you could still tell.

I recalled that look, those mannerisms when I watched Al Gore Jr.

I kept it to myself. I mean, boy, was I getting some wrong signals. Here was a guy, a junior in every aspect of that title, monied, and with his life so planned out by his father that he would have been perfect to a T. He was too vanilla, too milktoast, too boxer shorts corny and square to have ever even considered smoking pot.

Then, long after I had gotten over how poorly my alert triggering system had performed in assessing the speech and mannerisms of Gore Jr., I found out I was correct.

Holy of holies. What I saw was what I saw.

A former co-worker of Gore Jr.'s at The Tennessean told how no excess was too great when it came to Gore Jr.'s habit of toking weed.

Other workers at the daily newspaper said it was common knowledge inside the newsroom at the time.

I am not making any social comments, not about the culture of the 1960s, not about marijuana, not even about Al Gore Jr.

I am telling anyone who cares, trust your instincts. Especially the first ones.



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