CHAPTER 2
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Junior High Days.
During the summer going into my junior high experience, a movie came out that would rock the foundation of movies forever…..Star Wars. I spent most of my summer sitting in the movie theatre from the time that they opened until they closed, watching this movie. For that summer I escaped my pathetic existence and reviled in the vastness of the stars for 90 minutes at a time. Total number of times I saw Star Wars that summer? I stopped counting at 150, and yet I will still sit down with my kids and watch it today.
When I started the seventh grade, I was introduced to a new set of humiliations called ninth graders. Apparently their whole purpose in life was to make life a living hell for seventh graders. Being a small lad, I was constantly put into wall lockers, only to miss class until the janitor opened up the locker after hearing my screaming and pounding. Most of these guys thought that they were hot shit, and it made my stomach churn every time I saw them. The necessary evils you have to face while going to junior high are sometimes your best source of comedy. One time a ninth grader told me, “Your momma is so fat, when she wears high heels she strikes oil.” To which I responded, “At least I have a mother and father and not a mother and twenty nine suspects.” The ass beating that ensued was worth the dumbfounded look on his and his buddies’ faces, priceless.
It was then that I had my first cigarette, after school with one of my friends that had stolen a pack of Lucky Strikes from his old man. The head rush that happened when I took my first drag, made everything look like a flash back in a bad B-movie. I remember thinking to myself that I looked grown up; here twenty five years later I still wish that I could quit that disgusting habit.
By the second semester of school, I was invited to my first junior high party and had my first joint and beer. I was over at a friend’s house to play a new game called ‘Dungeons & Dragons’; yes I was a geek to the core. One of the guys that showed up had a twelve pack of Budweiser and a handful of rolled joints and without saying a word handed me a beer and a joint saying ‘Light it up’. I cracked open the beer, gulping it down half way then preceded to light the joint. I took a big hit and began to cough my little fool head off. The rush that washed over me was like nothing I had experienced before, and as I sat down on the couch all I could think about was how much I liked the feeling. Now I had seen and smelt pot, because my mom would smoke it in her bedroom, and I had snuck the occasional sip of beer from my old man but somehow this was different. This brought me more out of what seemed to be my shell, and soon I was the drunken life of the party. I was spending the night at my friends’ house and my parents didn’t know that his parents were gone for the weekend, so I was pretty much free to get as fucked up as I wanted. Well that plan didn’t go as well as I imagined.
I woke up the next morning with what seemed to be someone banging on a drum behind the back of my eyeballs and a taste in my mouth that can be only described as licking the floor of a bar. I laid smack dab in the middle of my friend’s living room, face down and wondering where the hell everyone was. Something was stuck on my forehead, with a blurry effort I grabbed it and peeled it off. As my hung over eyes tried to focus on the words Butter Finger, I could not remember if I ate it or wore it. I looked inside the wrapper and there was something written inside of it. It was a note that read:
‘Dude you got fucked up last night, and passed out. If you wake up before I do see if you can fix the towel rack in the bathroom that you broke last night, my parents are going to be pissed!’
Apparently I used the towel rack in the bathroom to hold myself up while I was peeing, and from what my friend said, it broke under the stress that I was putting on it and I fell head first into the wall behind the toilet. Good news is that I didn’t miss the toilet, or got any on myself. I eventually got up and made an attempt to fix the towel bar, when my friend came in and asked me how I felt. I think the look I gave him was response enough and I asked him what the hell happened last night, fearing the worst. What he told me was not as bad as I feared. I had played about two hours of the game before I had disappeared to the bathroom and had passed out in there. They dragged me as far as the middle of the living room before giving up.
Relieved that I hadn’t totally made an ass of myself, I finished up fixing the towel bar and left his house, walking through the fields that separated our houses. Those fields are not there anymore, they have long since been plowed under by housing tracks and strip malls. When I got home my mom was sitting at the kitchen table and looked up from her coffee and said that I looked like shit. Yeah mom and I feel like shit too. Funny the conversation didn’t go any farther than that. I spent the rest of the day lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and listening to dog bark next door; picturing a mafia execution of the mutt.
Eventually be the end of the year, a friend would turn me on to a thing called ‘cross-tops’; for those of you that don’t know what that is, it is pills with X’s on them that were made of speed; and I began to sell them to kids at school. That lasted about a month before I was caught selling at school and was suspended. That went over like a one legged man in an ass kicking contest at home, where my dad made sure that the ass beating that I received would be remembered. I would hear it every day for the next week of my suspension on how much of an idiot I was, and that worse than the ass beating. I learned my lesson, ‘Never sell drugs on school campus, sell them before and after school off campus and that would never happen again’. Yeah right.
During the summer in between seventh and eighth grade, several friends and I started work on an abandoned tree fort, which was in a very old, very tall cottonwood tree. The bottom level of the fort started at 25 feet off the ground and rose up from there three stories. We made a pact that summer to use it to get girls, almost by holding them hostage once they got up there because getting them up there and getting them stoned they usually didn’t want to try to climb down. The whole inside of the tree fort was upholstered with padding and carpet remnants that we had collected from a near housing track work site, it looked like the inside of one of those 1970’s van’s without the complementary water bed. It was a teenage nirvana, smelling like teen spirit way before Nirvana came out with their song.
As the eighth grade year rolled around, I began to see less and less of my dad because he was constantly working out of town. My mother had started her own upholstery shop in what used to be our garage, and growing pot in our backyard; in our old kennel that my dad built two years before. The dogs now ran around the backyard that my father had fenced in, and it was my job to feed/water the dogs and water my mom’s plants. Soon began my education in growing pot, skills that would be helpful later in life.
to be continued....
Why you little criminal you... can't wait for part two! Well done, once again!
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