Eva and June really took a liking to Sylvester. Both would flirt with him, but June was more experienced and eventually won out for Sylvester’s affections. They had quite the relationship and were rather physically involved.
This really hurt Eva’s feelings. He was her first love, and she took it really hard. She was still a virgin, and I think perhaps she seemed a little too chaste to him. Sylvester did like her though, but I’m not really sure in what way: I just know that there was some kind of attraction there. At any rate, it took Eva a long time to get over him, as she liked him a great deal. Poor girl.
Sylvester was also enrolled in Vo-Tech, though he took welding and stayed in Louisburg. Sometimes he would drive, and I’d ride back to Bolivar with him. A lot of times we did not exactly go to class, however.
He drove an old white Chevy truck, though I don’t know what year. For being the son of a professional mechanic, I had little interest in automobiles. Anyway, it was a nice truck, and we would usually try to make it to Vo-Tech, though we spent many, many afternoons gallivanting in the countryside while our peers were slaving away in class. We were addicted to freedom.
He usually did not have too much gas money, and the truck devoured it, so we couldn’t go too far. Sometimes we’d go over to June’s place, or we’d go to mine since Mom and Dad were at work. Often we’d go to the park. We got high whenever possible.
When we did not have any, I’d sit back and say, “Man, I wish we had some smoke!” I was the worst of the two of us, but I did not exactly have to twist his arm. We’d rack our brains to try and figure out who we knew that would smoke us out, or sell us a joint. We did not score that often, though we certainly tried hard enough. When we did, we lived it up. It made for some thoroughly enjoyable lazy, sunny summer days.
One day on my school bus, a younger guy by the name of Shane had a little over a joint’s worth of smoke in the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes. He was somewhat gullible, and I overheard him talking about it, so I asked him about it. I knew he got high and that he was a bit of a jock, so I started telling him about a number of football games I had heard about what he was doing behind the bleachers.
His guilty conscious worked overtime on him, and his face told me I’d hit a nerve. He was a bit of a prep and couldn’t risk tainting his image. I asked him what he would think if his folks and the wealthy family they worked for would think. He wanted to know how I knew.
I evaded his question, implying mysteriously instead that if I knew, did not he think other people could too? He was getting flustered and starting to panic. He told me he’d thrown it out in the grass before he’d gotten on the bus. Since I knew he had it, I told him that was the most ludicrous thing I’d ever heard and pointed out several reasons why. Poor guy.
To make a long story short, I could have ripped him off completely, but I felt bad, so I bought it on credit for a couple of bucks I did not have and the promise to make a few phone calls to assure his reputation and secrets remained intact. After I got home, I waited for a bit and then looked up his number and called his house. He supposedly wasn’t available, so I stated my name and left a message with his younger sister that, “It was all taken care of,” and that “he’ll know what I mean.”
I had made a simple homemade pipe out of an eight-inch piece of tubing about an inch in diameter. I scrubbed the inside and boiled it to get all the rust out. Then I put about an inch or so of it in the vice in my dad’s tool shed and squeezed it flat and bent the flattened part at a 45° angle to the rest of the pipe. Then I put the squashed part back in the vice and squeezed the sides open to a diamond-shaped bowl on the end of the pipe. I used his grinder to touch it up, and it was folded flat enough it did not need a screen. At the time, I did not even know about screens.
I told Sylvester about it and did not have to twist his arm very hard. For some odd reason, he drove his truck to school the next day, and neither one of us were present during roll call. (Hmm.) We drove back over to my house and huddled in the hay shed. I pulled out my pipe and told him about it as I packed the weed. I offered Sylvester the first hit, and he took a big one, making a sour face. When I asked him if it was really that good, he told me it tasted funny. He asked, “Are you sure you got all the rust out of the inside?”
At first I insisted I knew I had, saying, “It must just be the weed.”
He persisted, and I admitted, “I suppose it’s possible,” and laughed. Then I shrugged, grinned at him and said, “Hmm,” as if to ask what he was going to do about it.
He looked at me, grinned, shrugged, and said “Oh well,” and we continued toking on our Robin Hoodwinked weed.
I was pretty skeptical as to whether it was going to work or not, as we’d had some when we’d gone to Cave Hole smoking with a friend named Gary the week before and did not get off. I don’t know if it was bunk, or what. Maybe there just wasn’t enough to go all the way around. We ended up making some newspaper kites and had a pretty good time, but still . . . .
I wasn’t feeling skeptical for long. As the old saying goes, “The harder you cough, the harder you get off.” I took another hit and started coughing violently. Finally I managed to sputter, “Uhh, Dude? I think its working.”
The next hit, a minute or two after his coughing subsided, he looked at me with watery eyes and said, “Uhh . . . I think you’re right.” and we both just busted up, practically crying we were laughing so hard.
We had a difficult time finishing it, it was so potent. It was either premo grade, laced, or, more than likely, we just had a ridiculously low tolerance. Whatever the case, we agreed it was some of the best bud we’d ever smoked.
After a few minutes and a few more hits, we regained our composure enough to walk down the driveway. We were higher than kites and ambling slowly, “perma-grins” firmly in place. We were practically hallucinating and complaining that our jaws hurt from laughing so much.
Soon we reached the yard, but we did not go inside just yet as we had to go through the ritual of smoking several cigarettes. He made the comment that he couldn’t taste the smoke and that it reminded him of toothpaste going into his mouth. He spoke in a grave tone, gesturing with his hands, and I couldn’t help it. I totally lost it. I assured him I wasn’t laughing at him and busted up some more, causing him to get all cracked up.
Mom and Dad had a manure spreader temporarily parked in the front yard, and we talked about it for some time and then discussed the absurdity of our discussion about a manure spreader and kept laughing our butts off. The height of the high lasted for about four hours, and we were a little lethargic the rest of the day the way good weed always affected us. We were suffering from bad cottonmouth, and I’m certain the rusty pipe did not help.
We wound down pigging out on munchies with him draped in the armchair, listening to me play some off the wall riffs to old records and some rave music I’d taped off the radio. I’m not even sure they matched, but it tripped both of us out. He liked chilling with me when I played guitar, though he wasn’t very musically inclined. This was especially true when after his best buddy had conned good smoke, and he was supposed to be in school.
But, for myself, being the ever gung-ho musician, I kept turning him on to other types of music. His typical taste before I met him included a lot of metal in the vein of Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Ozzy Osborne and so on, but his all time favorite band was The Scorpions. Don’t get me wrong, I liked his music too, but I also turned him on to techno, rave, dance, or whatever else you choose to call it and a number of related styles. One band in particular I remember that he liked was Shotgun Messiah, more of a pop metal band than anything else, along the lines of Faster Pussycat.
Remember the clothespins I used to keep the cigarette smell off my fingers? One day I get a call, right? The caller said, “You don’t know me, but I met you at a party, and you were getting wasted off all those joints. I was wondering if it was cool to come over.”
I was a little startled by the conversation, but curious and naïve enough to be trusting, so I said:
“Uh . . . I guess so. Mom and Dad are gone and won’t be back for a while. They’re not cool. But Man, I don’t have any smoke.”
He said, “That’s all right. I’ll be over in a few.”
Soon the grandson of the farmer from whom we bought the house drove up. He was the one who had called, and he hadn’t met me at a party, but had seen me outside sneaking around with clothespins and thought I was smoking pot. Since he’d grown up there, he asked if I’d show him the place, and he was amazed at all the changes, as we’d worked hard to pick the place up.
I invited him into my room and proudly played my guitar for him, but he actually wasn’t into rock much. I was secretly hoping he was holding out on me and he did not disappoint me. After talking for a bit, stringing me out, he pulled out a corncob pipe and smoked me out.
I brought my portable clock radio outside since we couldn’t smoke inside and popped in the Pink Floyd album The Wall, endeavoring to compromise his disdain for rock. I don’t think he liked it that well, but he seemed to be genuinely enjoying my company. After a while he left and I put on the Judas Priest album Turbo as I’d really felt that one at a party I’d recently been to, and for that matter, I went to a lot of them because someone almost always had smoke, and I had no money.
Actually, it was the song Turbo Lover that had particularly set me off. At the party, I could feel its mesmerizing, flanging synthesizers pulsating over my entire body like ocean waves. If you have ever heard the song, no doubt you know what I mean, though it may not have struck you in quite the same way. After all, at the party it was loud, and I was wasted: the moment when the entire world is e-LECT-tri-fied! It is in that moment that you know your mind is totally blown and you’re such a fool, but you just can’t quite bring yourself to care. If you have ever partied very hard, you surely know the feeling. WHEEEEEEE!
Sitting on the front porch that afternoon, there were something like fifty layers of gloss over my eyeballs, and I was so stoned I could literally see the guitar solos. They were neon blue lines snaking across the sky in the rapid-fire fury they were being played at. It was pretty wild.
About that time, three of my folks’ ugly Muscovy ducks, a drake and his two female companions, came walking up the sidewalk, bobbing their heads and hissing softly as is their peculiar nature. I marveled at them. They were so cool, and they were—well, just alive. I was like the little kid to whom everything is amazing.
Then I looked over and was awestruck by the sheer beauty of the orange daylilies growing in the side yard. They contrasted so perfectly with the brilliant blue sky. I knew that orange and blue were opposite primary colors on the color spectrum. I felt so spiritual. I marveled at God’s awesome creation and use of colors. Everything was filled with life and meaning.
His grandson stopped by a few more times after that and tried getting me a job at the dairy barn where he worked. I also rode around with him to the park one day in search of smoke, but he soon went his own way. He was quite a bit older than I was anyway, and I never had any smoke to pay back the favor.
I remember the first time I tried speed. Someone on the Vo-Tech bus had given me about ten mini-thins (a.k.a. cross tops, white-crosses, or diet pills.) I had about ten of them and gave Sylvester half of them. I think he only took one.
I gingerly took one, and it did not seem to do much, so I took another. By the time I got back to class I’d taken all five of them. They were just starting to kick in when I got to school, and I felt so strange climbing those flights of stairs in the old Bolivar High School building, my scalp feeling like it was going to crawl right off my head. I kind of liked it.
It was not unusual for me to buy a few of them, skip Vo-Tech, and go to the park with Sylvester, get high and take some. It made for some interesting days, coming back speeding and stoned. I was the more experimental and adventurous, often outsmoking him. He usually avoided the mini-thins, taking only one, or maybe two, when, and if, he decided to join me.
Dunnegan Memorial Park had a Witch’s Hat, sort of a cross between a merry-go-round and a maypole. It had long iron bars stretching from its wooden seating surface to the top of the iron pole it revolved around. We’d get high and play on that thing. Sometimes we’d lie back on it after it slowed down and close our eyes, its wobbling motion creating an effect that felt similar to floating on the ocean as it slowly turned. It was a trip.
There were many days that he and I would go back to class and then decide we did not want to be there. We’d say to one another, “Do you feel like skipping today?”
“I don’t know, Man. Do you?”
“Yeah, Man. Let’s do!”
And so we would, hugging tightly to the wall until we got to the side of the building and then slipping through the houses at the side to disappear into the neighborhood beyond. We never got busted, although after a period of time, we were called into the office because they had noticed that we kept mysteriously vaporizing into thin air.
The principal was pretty diplomatic about it, and we were cooperative. As we were leaving, I just had to ask him, “I have a question for you. Just out of curiosity, did anyone ever see us sneak off?” I can only imagine what was going through his mind.
He very levelly replied, “No, we just noticed that the two of you seem to come back to class and then vanish the next hour an awful lot.” After that, when we skipped, we just stopped going back to class.
Our folks took it pretty well. His parents were pretty cool anyway, and they told him they were upset that he hadn’t told them that he was going to skip. They told him, “We’d rather have you do it in front of us. If you want to skip, let us know. We’ll let you.”
I don’t know if it was this incident, or the one where I got busted calling in and trying to impersonate my dad’s voice, that my folks finally realized just how often I was cutting class. I never got into big trouble about it. I guess I was so openly rebellious, they knew a lecture wouldn’t do me any good anyway. In some ways, I think they thought it was a little humorous even, especially after I successfully graduated.
Since June graduated two years ahead of us, she would often show up. She’d get bored and come out and hang out with Sylvester and me, or give us a ride home after school. Sometimes she’d bring us a joint or a couple of cans of beer.
Then there were the days she provided the getaway car. We’d climb off the Vo-Tech bus, hop in and disappear around the corner. The bus driver would just shake his head and smile and tease us about it the next day. Something tells me it brought back some of his old memories. :)
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