“Nothing to see here, man!” the senior had said, chortling as I passed by. I couldn’t help but snicker a bit myself. Foran was something else.
Without a strong headmaster to crack the whip, I was reinstated as class clown. Creating disturbances in class, playing daily pranks—those became the fastest ways for me to make new friends…with all the wrong people.
One of my favorite acts was to run down the hallways between classes with my arms full of books, pretending to be clumsy and inept. The halls were always loaded with students, which made it a great opportunity for a show.
As I ran down the corridor, my friends would all take notice, most already knowing what was about to happen.
“Look out, look out,” I would yell. “I’ve got to get to class!” Then I would pretend to trip over something and throw books and papers everywhere. Everyone would burst out laughing. What made it even funnier was that, without fail, a teacher would always rush to me in shock, assuming it was a terrible accident and that I must be hurt.
I enjoyed the attention. I always wanted to go bigger than anyone else, most of the time to cause a spectacle, but often for the feeling of acceptance I got from people’s reactions. In some ways, this type of activity was a precursor to some of my darker behaviors down the road.
But before the drugs, it was only pranks.
“I’m fucking crying, man,” my buddy Kenny said to me as we walked away from another time where I’d just fallen with all my books. “That shit gets me every time!” Other kids passed by with tears rolling down their cheeks from laughing so hard.
“I actually hurt my elbow on that one bro, not gonna lie,” I said, clutching my arm.
Before moving to Foran High, I’d been introduced to Kenny Howe in middle school. He was a tall, muscular Irish kid who was another product of a broken family from when he was young. He was shy and reserved at first, but once we got to know each other better, I learned of a deep-seated anger in Kenny that became an uncontrollable rage when unleashed. He always had my back and was one of my closest friends.
“We’re all going to Kenny’s house today after school to get high,” Jeff said to me one day in class. “Wanna come?”
I’d never smoked weed before but knew I wanted to try it. It seemed like every sixteen-year-old I knew had already tried it by that point. Kenny had started smoking weed with his older brother long before I met him. Jeff often went over to Kenny’s house after school, and they would smoke out on his brother’s bong or from poorly rolled joints of mid-grade marijuana.
After my basketball injury, I knew from direct experience the numbing escape that drugs could provide. A curiosity had been incited in me, and I wanted to see what weed was all about.
“Yeah, that’s cool with me,” I said to Jeff. “Let’s do it.”
As the school day drew to a close, I tried to get in the right frame of mind to get high for the first time. I’d heard stories about how some people had a rough time getting into the vibe and flow with their first experience with marijuana.
Kenny’s room was in the attic of his parents’ home. He had sloppily decorated it with black lights, lava lamps, psychedelic posters of mushroom people smoking bongs, and old Pink Floyd memorabilia. There were holes in the walls from roughhousing, and the carpet reeked of spilled bong water. There was resin on the end table and cigarette burns on the carpet. He’d turned his room into his own little haven to smoke and forget all the problems of teenage life.
I sat on Kenny’s mattress, which hung halfway off the edge of a hand-me-down metal frame. The fitted sheet had slipped off the top corner, exposing a stained, ripped mattress. I watched as he lit a white paper joint and took a hit. He coughed several times and then passed it to Jeff, who did the same. Fitting tunes wafted through the room—Sublime’s Second-Hand Smoke album.
“Here ya go, man,” Jeff said with purpose as he handed me the spliff.
I grabbed the joint with my thumb and index finger, put it to my lips, and inhaled. I held the hit in my lungs for ten seconds, like I’d seen my buddies do, and then slowly let it out. I then hit it again. The thick smoke filled my lungs, and I began to choke uncontrollably. I passed the joint back to Kenny and grabbed a bottle of Gatorade that was next to the bed. Trying not to cough as I drank, I chugged the red liquid straight down.
Soon, I began to feel weightless…and very uneasy. I felt as though I couldn’t control my body, which triggered terrible anxiety in me. This would be the first of many times that I realized weed just wasn’t my drug. It spiked my anxiety and forced me to wade through thoughts I usually kept locked away in the back of my mind.
I sat on the edge of Kenny’s bed, paralyzed with racing thoughts, paranoia, and anxiety. Jeff decided to choose that moment to be funny. He grabbed Kenny’s authentic-looking BB gun and pointed it at me.
“We brought you here today to kill you,” he said ominously. Kenny nodded slowly as he looked me dead in the eyes.
“Sorry it has to be like this, man,” Jeff whispered. He lifted the gun and pointed it at my head.
This was my first time high, paired with what I thought was a real pistol pointed at my head. It was too much. I took off running and almost fell down the back stairs. I turned back to see Jeff and Kenny rolling on the ground in laughter.
Those types of things always took place at the Howe house. Kenny’s single mom worked long hours to support her family, and we were young and ignorant enough to take full advantage of this freedom.
As the year went on, Jeff, Kenny, and I began to spend more time at Kenny’s house. Our friend Alex soon joined us, and we became a posse of four.
Many days, we ditched school halfway through instead of waiting for it to end. We would put up the hoods on our sweatshirts and make a run for it, dashing out of school while avoiding the cameras and security guards.
We were filled with naive excitement and the hubris of youth. Everything seemed fun and exciting. We were entering a time of experimentation, drawn to the allure of the unknown that is often typical of teenagers.
We listened to Eminem’s first albums on repeat as he made his rise to superstardom. He rapped about a broken home and being misunderstood—something we all related to. His music also spoke about sex, drug abuse, and violence. He did it in a way that seemed cool, and his stories just amplified our curiosity for new things.
Slowly but surely, my appetite for marijuana grew, along with that of my friends. We started out buying a couple grams of weed for 30 bucks, and it would last a whole day and night. It came from random dealers who sold us pot on the school bus or outside the lunchroom. Soon, we started buying eighths (3.5 grams) and smoking it all in one sitting.
As my friends and I began buying more weed, the transactions started to take place outside of school, which meant interacting with strangers from different walks of life. Random people stopped by Kenny’s room day or night to drop off the weed. We didn’t know much about these people, who they were or where they came from.
I started to develop an interest in the prices, weight, and money associated with the dealing side of weed. While everyone else was concerned with getting the weed and immediately putting it in a pipe or bong, I liked weighing it on the digital scale and observing the THC crystals of the bud. I was interested in discussing the strains and what made the OG Haze a better buy than the Jack Herer, for example.