The summer of my 14th year, as I was going into 9th grade, a boy in my neighborhood, one year my senior and superior to me in the athletic skills I respected most, began to hang out with a group of high school stoners. Understand, my only connection to self medication at this point in my life was a father I had to help to bed many nights. “Joe” would still show up at the neighborhood basketball court to play pick up games, but it was now less frequently, and with bloodshot eyes and a funny unfamiliar odor.
One August day I saw Joe out my window walking north on a now familiar trip to the unknown destination he had been disappearing to. I eagerly ran outside and asked if I could go with him, curious to learn more about his new situation. “You want to party, “ he asked. Sure, I responded, wholly ignorant as to what the phrase entailed. We walked up the road a bit and headed to a stretch of one of the many wooded areas still so plentiful in the Potomac, Md. of the early 70’s. After a few minutes on a worn path we came upon a group of older boys, only one of whom I knew, a football teammate of Jeff and I the year before. Not only would it be my introduction to pot, but also The Jimi Hendrix Experience, who wailed from a beat up cassette recorder.
There were several plastic sandwich bags out containing unmistakable green buds, and that strange smell dominated the air, but I had no idea what the blue plastic cylinder was. I had assumed any pot smoking would be done passing a joint, but Brian, the guy I knew from football, was busy filling a little wood bowl with cannabis. He then placed it on the stem and brought the bong’s opening to his mouth, sucking as he used a lighter to light the pot. I found the whole ritual to be remarkable and hoped they’d let me try. He struggled to hold what seemed like a factory’s worth of smoke in his lungs and then smoothly blew it out. I was fascinated. “Give it a shot,” he said, winking at me. Years later he was killed on his motorcycle by a drunk driver, but right then, at that moment, he seemed the coolest guy in the world to me. “Just suck it in, but whatever you do, don’t cough into the bong or bong water will spout everywhere. I started sucking in and only succeeded for a couple of seconds before my lungs seemed on fire. I remembered his warning and just barely twisted my mouth away before wretching to everyone’s laughter.
But there it was; I had taken my first of many bong hits and survived. Truthfully, those were the days of harsh and crappy Mexican weed; the transforming Columbian – of which my first experience with is adequate fodder for another story – would not hit the area until two summers later, so I honestly never really got too whacked out. But the love affair had started and things would never be the same.
Since we now shared what then seemed such an identity-defining vice, I began to hang around a lot more with Joe. He was in high school and I was still in jr. high; this meant I was usually younger than everyone else, and, since he had always been a bully, I took abuse. I really didn’t care, though; as Henry Hill ruminated in Goodfellas, everybody has to take a beating. At Cabin John Junior High back in the day, an affinity for reefer forced a restructuring of one’s social network. Accordingly, I moved to shift cliques from the black kids, who had always made me feel like an outsider, but accommodated me nonetheless, to the “freaks”, who wanted nothing to do with me since they had often been targeted for ridicule by my now former mates.
Really, I had strayed into social no man’s land and would have a pretty rough year, getting it from all sides. (Not until the next year, when another feeder middle school provided me with peers of the jock/stoner hybrid variety that fit me much better, would I recover my bearings.) It would impact me more than I would ever admit, forcibly assigning me an outside-looking-in perspective that I’ve not been able to shed. Any possibility of going through life as a “joiner” ended in the fall of 74’. But, alienation or not, there was no turning back, pot was now the thing, Jimi and Robert Plant replacing Gladys Knight and The Temptations as my cultural touchstones.
I suppose I’ve always had a business acumen, and since selling pot afforded gravitas simply consuming it did not, I was glad to become a jr. high distributor of the product Joe was procuring from his high school connections later that school year. Remember, this was before the good stuff had reached the Md. suburbs. The Mexican we settled for cost $15 an ounce on the street. To put that in perspective, the good stuff at one of today’s emporiums starts at $500 per ounce. Joe was up to a pound per acquisition, of which he would pass me on “a quarter” for $40. If I sold six “dimes” at $10 a pop, I could make a tidy $20 profit while treating myself to an ounce for my personal stash… not bad at all. Later, I would team up with a hard-working neighborhood friend, whose paper route afforded him more working capital than my shoddy and seasonal lawn mowing. He went to a private school and was content to be a silent partner, allowing me to take all the risks for half the proceeds. I guess some kids have more business smarts than others!
I knew nothing of Joe’s suppliers past first names he would mention with the emphasized familiarity of someone trying to impress, and a certainty they were upper classmen at Churchill High School. So one day when he said he was going to meet one “just to party,” I enthusiastically volunteered to accompany him, excited to be taking my connections to the next level. The rendezvous was held in the empty announcer’s tower at Churchill’s sacred football field. We got there first and sat in the dark, ominously inappropriate space and began to pass a pipe. When the older boy showed up with a friend my stomach tightened; they were definitely seniors, an age chasm one is awed by as a teen, and were long haired hippie freaks to be sure, both dark and brooding to my eyes. They were fairly dismissive of Jeff, and didn’t really recognize my existence. Regardless, we “partied” for about a half an hour without incident and I was amped heading home, certain my bona fides as a head to be respected had just increased. I never was in the company of either of those older boys again.
However, about a year later one of them, after going AWOL from the Marines, made his way back to the Potomac area and robbed a bank. After a high speed car chase with police, he roared into an open area now home to a town house community across from Montgomery Mall. Calmly he got out of his car, shouldered his rifle, and waited. When two Montgomery County police officers arrived on the scene, he killed them both. He remains in prison to this day, his petitions for forloughs routinely denied.
I suppose, in the near impossible event I get nominated to the Supreme Court, or run for high office, it will be hotly debated along partisan lines whether this memoir, trivialized or villianized depending on motive, should disqualify my ambitions. Maybe, maybe not. Yet and still, one truth is certain; few things I did as a confused and angst-ridden 14-year old should be as detrimental to my ascendance as outright lying about it more than 40 years later. We are how we have lived, abrupt and conscientious efforts to revise our history clarify frailties far more significant than teenage experiences can possibly convey. Reject. BC