and the first year of college, I thought getting high was the thing to do. And it seemed people liked me better when I had a beer in my hand or a joint stuck in my face. Lord knows I needed all the help I could get. You see, I was a rather scrawny kid with big ears and acne. It seemed I’d always have at least one big snow-capped zit that would do everything in its power to draw attention directly to where it was perched. You know the kind? They turn the skin surrounding them a luminescent red. I hated when that happened.
Most weekends, a few of us guys would get together to have a couple beers and smoke a joint or two. We were more of the “casual user” variety. In retrospect, the way I characterized it then doesn’t matter much now. Any way you cut it, I was an abuser. I committed a crime every time I fired up a joint or sucked down a six-pack. Of course, I didn’t think of it that way. None of us did. And we were lucky enough not to get caught. Well… I guess that’s not entirely accurate. We did get caught; we just didn’t go to jail for it, although there were a couple of times we came pretty close.
For example, some of us were driving around one Friday night after a football game. Our team had won, so we were in celebration mode. Jason, one of my few good friends, drove the car behind an abandoned gas station. It wasn’t quite dark yet, so we parked under the shelter of some trees and underbrush that’d been growing unchecked between the station and a dilapidated old house. One of the guys—I don’t remember who—fired up the first joint. We’d already picked up some sodas, chips, and other things to munch on in anticipation of the festivities. So, there we sat, the five of us, laughing, joking and getting high, high, high. We lit another joint and passed it around, too. “Acapulco Gold”—the best money could buy. The car was full of smoke. It was so thick we could barely see out of the windows. The five of us were laughing and trying to make our voices sound like Smoky the Bear. “Only you can prevent forest fires!” It’s amazing how the dumbest things could be so funny.
Then, from out of nowhere, the cops showed up. Jason reached back over the front seat and attempted to snatch the joint from my hand. Instead, he knocked it to the floor between Tommy and Danny. The officers started probing the car with one of those spotlights cops have mounted outside the window frame of their squad cars. When they stopped probing, the light was shining right into our rearview mirror.
We were scuffling around like you wouldn’t believe. Tommy lurched for the joint and bumped heads with Danny, who was also trying to retrieve it. We were laughing, crying, and drooling all over the place. In spite of the trouble we knew was approaching from the rear of the car, we couldn’t stop laughing.
Tommy came up with what was left of the joint and shoved it in his mouth while it was still burning. At almost the same instant, the biggest cop I’d ever laid eyes on rapped Jason’s window with the butt of his flashlight. Until that moment, none of us had noticed, but Jason had taken the remainder of the nickel bag and was desperately trying to swallow it. He grabbed a Coke that was sitting on the dash and tried to wash it down. The cop knocked on the window again, harder this time, and Jason spit Coke all over everything. He sprayed the windshield, the dashboard, Louis—who was sitting in the passenger’s seat next to him—and the entire driver’s compartment. Tommy had tears streaming down his face and Danny was laughing uncontrollably while he massaged the knot swelling on his forehead.
Jason rolled down the window and the smoke just poured out. The officer jumped back and said, “Whoa!” while waving his hand back and forth vigorously in front of his face. Jason immediately began telling him we had a problem with the engine and that we were having some snacks, burning incense, and talking until we could get the car started again. He said we were burning incense because Tommy’s feet stank. Danny was cracking up. He was laughing so hard that his mouth was wide open, his face was wet with tears, and these muted gasps and an odd little squeaking sound kept coming out of his face.
The cop partially stuck his head inside Jason’s window. He looked at Danny in the back seat and said, “You boys wouldn’t be smokin’ any of dat ‘wacky tobacky’ back here now would ya?” His partner had snuck up on the other side of the car and was shining his flashlight right into Tommy’s eyes. Tommy was still laughing uncontrollably. Suddenly, the cop who was holding the light in Tommy’s eyes blurted, “What the hell’s so got-damn funny?” He said it so fast and loud all of us damn near jumped out of our skins. While shielding his eyes and squinting, Tommy tried to tell him we were just joking around, but he was laughing so hard he kept spitting and slobbering between syllables. Tommy and Danny almost got us into real trouble that night because they couldn’t stop that confounded laughing.
The cops made us get out of the car so they could search it. Jason had told them to go ahead when they asked because, he said, we didn’t have anything to hide. I guess the hell not; he and Tommy had eaten the only evidence. Jason must’ve still been trying to get all that grass out of his throat because he kept taking swigs from his Coke and seemed to be having a real hard time swallowing. The police didn’t find anything except a couple of seeds so they let us go.
There’s no way they believed that story, but they let us go anyway. I think they did it because we were nothing more than a carload of clean-cut, juvenile suburbanites out for a little fun and probably weren’t worth the trouble.
Uh, oh, there I go getting ahead of myself again. I’ve forgotten to introduce myself. I’m Alan… Alan Pearson. I’m happily married. I have a wife named Linda and a wonderful little girl named Laura. I currently own an E-business. It wasn’t always an E-business, but I had to change direction a couple of years ago because of the economy. Before the recession, the company was prospering; now we’re struggling to stay afloat and the future isn’t as certain as it once was. It’ll be all right, though. I’ve got a good crew and we’ll get things figured out. I’m a fairly average person, living in a fairly average community, and that’s what makes what I’m about to share with you so important.
I told you that little story as a way of demonstrating how differently things might have turned out had we not been given a break that night. In hindsight, incidents such as the one I just described don’t provide me with much to boast about. I’ve been detained on more than one occasion. Generally, the police either poured the beer on the ground or let us go after throwing our marijuana away. It was always a really small amount. We never had that much. Things like that have happened to more of us more often than any of us care to admit. The point is this: We were lucky; I was lucky, although luck probably had nothing to do with it.
I didn’t have a lot of friends when I was growing up—close friends, anyway. The guys I mentioned earlier were about it. And they didn’t cross any spectrums of gender or ethnicity. They put up with me in spite of the fact that I wasn’t good at sports and I wasn’t very “cool.” I didn’t have big muscles and, as much as it pains me to admit it, I didn’t inherit my mother’s good looks. Nor did I get any handsome qualities from my father, but then he hadn’t inherited any either. I played a little golf and a little tennis, although there was never any danger I’d become my generation’s hottest new sports sensation. I spent the better part of my college days in front of a desk, with books lying all over the place, and a thermos of coffee. I enjoyed finding solutions to particularly complicated math problems; I guess I was sort of an egghead. That’s what we called geeks back then.
I thought the invention of the personal computer was the greatest thing that ever happened. I got to work on a large computing system when I was in high school, back in the early days of computers. That was back when the processing language was FORTRAN and everything you entered was recorded on punch cards. As new technologies developed, I’d snap up the latest gadget and put it to work. I started out with a simple word processor and moved up to the more advanced machines as soon as they became available. My friends thought it was pretty cool, too. I was the first on the block to have my own home computing system.
My parents were—and still are—wonderful. They raised me to accept everyone on the same level. They’d say, “The color of a person’s
