Published in the New York Press, 9/29/2007. Read the original (w/comments) here.

The problem with going to Puppy’s house was that I left smelling like a burned-out hippie who just stumbled off the last plane from Goa. It was a peculiar combination of pot, dirt, sweat, patchouli and God-knows-what else. It was a miasma that inhabited his apartment like a roommate, and it followed me all the way home to Sunset Park.

Puppy’s apartment was the entire top floor of a dilapidated brownstone. Puppy converted the living room into his bedroom, and the bedroom into his farm. The ceiling was wreathed in grow lamps and the walls covered in reflective Mylar sheeting. The plants grew from a series of interlocking troughs built a foot off the ground.

“You know hydroponics?” Puppy said. “Well this is aeroponics. They get everything they need from short bursts of nutriginated-water. They grow huge on nothing. See?” He lifted the lid on one of the troughs, revealing the tiny root structure of a mature plant.

“I hate pot,” Puppy always said. “I fuckin’ hate it. It smells like crap, and it makes me stupid and tired.”

Being a pot farmer in the middle of Brooklyn was strange enough; being a pot farmer who didn’t like pot was downright weird. It was for the nausea, Puppy explained. For years, he’d experienced intense stomach cramps. Once he’d vomited for 12 hours straight. He was a model and extreme biker before he got sick, but over the years, the muscle and fat were stripped from his bones. By the time we met, he was a beautiful face with a wasted body.

Medically, there was no explanation. Puppy called it “Cobain Syndrome,” since Kurt Cobain complained of similar symptoms before he killed himself. Puppy’s  doctors called it idiopathic gastroparesis—medical terminology for “we don’t know what the fuck is happening.” The doctor gave him morphine for the pain; the pot he grew on his own. The sicker he got, the more of a shut-in he became, and one day he turned his personal remedy into a home business.

Every time I went to Puppy’s apartment we looked for something to help with his nausea. We meditated, used magnets and electroshock bracelets, made strange teas from herbs ordered off the Internet, exchanged massages, did yoga; anything and everything we could think of. He taught me to play a didgeridoo, hoping that the harmonics would resonate with the frequency of…something.

I played along because I loved him. He was funny, sweet and brilliant—at least, he was when he wasn’t high. I hoped each time wouldn’t end like so many before, with Puppy shaking in agony and me tying off his vein and injecting morphine into him. But often it did.

Growing pot indoors made for a shorter, and less seasonally-dependent growing regimen. This meant Puppy could get two or more crops a year, at times when there was little fresh pot to be found locally in New York. One spring, right after harvesting his plants, Puppy made a surprise announcement. He was visiting his parents.

Puppy’s parents were a mystery to me. Once he’d compared them to snake-handlers, and told me they were backwoods Louisiana religious types. I knew he’d run away from home and changed his name as a teen. They kept in touch in fits and starts, always looking for that rarest piece of real estate: common ground. This was a strange development for someone who rarely even went a subway ride away from home.

The day he was to leave, I went to Puppy’s apartment to help pack. In between stuffing random clothes into a bag, he gave me things. His didgeridoo, a book I was slowly reading during my visits, a jacket of his that I loved. Packing, he said, made him realize how much crap he needed to get rid of. He’d be back in a week, and he expected me to be ready to play the didge for him when he returned.

Part of me wasn’t surprised when a week later I got a call from his business partner, saying he found Puppy dead of a morphine overdose. No note.

For months, I refused to wear his jacket. I kept it shut up in a drawer by itself, where the smell of Puppy’s apartment could linger. I opened it periodically, and Puppy came rushing back to me in a whiff.

Eventually the smell wore off and someone bought Puppy’s apartment and renovated it. But every time I pass someone smoking up on the street, I am taken back to the only farm I ever knew in Brooklyn.