The Melting of a Snowflake

- Nature is full of genius, full of divinity, so that not a snowflake escapes it’s fashioning hand…

- How full of the creative genius is the air in which snowflakes are generated. I should hardly admire them more if stars fell and lodged on my coat… - Henry David Thoreau

- Forests, lakes and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes - every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves it’s impress upon the soul of man - Orison S. Merden

- The snowflakes that grace us at christmas time typify the artistic beauty that bestows joy on all ages, but, like an acid, evolution corrodes this inborn appreciation of beauty and falsely trains children to view themselves as mere animals no more worthy than dogs or cats… - Phyllis Schlafly

- Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things but just look at what they can do when they stick together…

- No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible - Voltaire

- One measure of how creative you are is how you respond to changes in your circumstances and environment. How flexible are you? Consider how water adapts to it’s environment: evaporation, condensation, snowflake, melting…

- Actually every one is different, they’re like snowflakes. It’s actually more of an art than a science - Alan Adler

- Lives are snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another, as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There’s not a chance you’d mistake one for another…) - Neil Gaiman

- Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvelously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne… - Alice Childress

- They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from it? - Jeanette Winterson

- (Begin doing what you want to do now, we are not living in eternity.) We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand, and melting like a snowflake… - Francis Bacon

The Melting of A Snowflake

Speeding down the coastline of Los Angeles wondering where life was taking me; cruising somewhere between the valley&Venice, without a clue how the night would end up…

I was driving to a bar in Malibu overlooking the pacific coastline to grab a couple beers with a guy I went to highschool with. Four very short years after highschool graduation, we had both found our way into the city of lost angels. Across the entire continental United States was the east coast New England quaint, conservative&historic hometown where we grew up.

After bouncing around LA for about six months, sleeping on a few different couches, one or two nights under the stars in Santa Monica, I decided to try&settle into a Hollywood bungalow. On the verge of getting kicked out for not paying rent, I began to pack up my remaining possessions back into the ‘98 Honda Accord I drove out to California in. My gas tank was running near empty, I had no place to shower&an empty stomach…yet I still found myself ready&willing to spend the remaining money I had on drugs..

.

To California, at the end of a very harsh winter on the eastern shore of Massachusetts I was unemployed&broke, becoming another twenty something college dropout still living in his parent’s basement. California became my promised land, but the Exodus was still ahead of me…

Julia, a gorgeous girl&good friend, offered her couch to me to crash on upon arriving in Los Angeles; so I said good riddance to my dead end life and said hello to the west coast. Julia was the one person I knew in Los Angeles, a city of millions but a few days before my departure somebody mentioned that an old classmate of mine, Billy Shears, was also living in LA…

Billy Shears is cunning, sly&suave. He acts somewhere between a jester, an imposter&last but not least, an artist. What I mean by acting like an artist is that he emulates&imitates his favorite musicians&movie stars, has a genuine notion in his mind that he is in fact an artist, without having any of the actual skills or abilities any type of artist should have. Billy stuck close to his childhood friends throughout most of highschool&despite being in some of the same classes&going to school together for four years, we never got to know each other very well…

Three years after highschool, about a year before I left for California, I was living in a beach house still working in my hometown, bussing tables at the local historic tavern. It was a beautiful summer night, not a cloud in the sky, stars out&full moon so my roommates, a waitress&cook who worked with me at the tavern, decided to have a bonfire at the beach right behind our house. The waitress&cook, who were dating at the time, invited two of our fellow co-workers; one of them brought their friend, Billy Shears.

It ended up being a small group at the fire so Billy&I talked for the first time in years… but nothing of note ever came out of the discussions. There always seemed to be some sort of defensive mechanism that triggered in me when we tried to have a conversation; maybe because we had similar appearances, upbringing&desires. We exchanged a cordial dialogue, the highlight being a brief discussion of the documentary ‘Zeitgeist’.

Our bonfire on the beach raged almost into sunrise, so Billy, another waitress I worked with named Rita&a few others decided to sleep over. Rita&Billy were flirting all night&passed out together on the couch, with their friends sleeping on the ground in front of them… Late in the afternoon the next day, Rita gave me a call:

- Yo.. What’s up?

- Hey John, I jus wanted to call&tell you that guy Billy is a total creep…

- Oh, alright, why do you say that, I mean, what’s changed since last night when you were all over him?

- I was drunk, okay?! I was just trying to cuddle last night&I woke up with my pants unbuttoned.. He’s a total creep

- Alright, well I’ll definitely talk to him then… I mean what happened did he try to have sex&you fell asleep? Weren’t there people sleeping on the ground right there?

- Yea, everyone was asleep but Billy&I stayed up, we were just making out&stuff, you know, but he got a little aggressive so I tried to act like I was just passin’ out but then I really did pass out&when I woke up, he was gone but my pants were unbuttoned…

Of course, Billy denied the whole thing, saying she almost forced herself on him. Rita admitted to exaggerating but still retained he was a creep. I hadn’t seen Billy since that night, over a year ago, when I walked into the bar in Malibu…

Billy was easy to spot as soon as I walked into the bar, being the one guy crazy enough to wear a red bandana rapped around his head, in Los Angeles of all places…

Billy is shorter than your average twenty something male, at about five foot six inches, in relative good shape although signs of a budding beer belly are apparent. With dark eyes&hair, olive skin&no beard but a bushy moustache, he may appear to be one of the Mario brothers at first glance. People often mistook his olive skin for Italian descent but he was in fact of Greek heritage with a large family he sticks close to.

We sat, had a few beers by the ocean side watching the crashing waves&doing some reminiscing. Recounting all the memorable times of drunk driving, going to school functions drunk, weekend parties playin’ games that force you to drink, getting drunk just so you could brag about the experience next monday, you know, all that highschool bullshit….

- Yo John, you remember when that ginger kid rapped about blowing up the school and got expelled&arrested?

- Hah yea man, he sat next to me in history when we were sophomores… weren’t you in that class?

- Yea, yea that class was pretty cool, Mr. Kite was a good teacher for our highschool’s standards.

- yeah, he was a good teacher regardless, it was cool how he gave us the first thirty minutes of class to talk about anything. I mean we used to ask that guy about everything&he was totally cool with it, kind of brilliant too, got all the distractions out of the way so we could focus on his teaching the rest of class

- Yea, no doubt, hella good teacher plus Eleanor was in our class, man, I used to stare at her knockers all the time! Yo John, what about the time when the lacrosse team got busted for hazing when they made their freshman players eat weed brownies&then beat them with dildos!

- Uhh excuse me guys, you gettin’ anything to eat, maybe more drinks?

Our waitress appeared almost at the exact same time Billy got done saying dildos…

- Nah, thanks though…. yea Billy, that was some funny shit alright…

- Yeah my bad hah, anyways Jon, what you doin’ all the way out in Hollywood?

-Well, I came out here to visit a friend of mine, she goes to UCLA, but-

- That’s awesome man, wow, cool. I came here about a year ago, decided to pack up all my shit, move out here and find work as a graphic designer

- Nice, how’s that working out?

- Not too bad, found a great apartment in Van Nuys, my dad is still paying my rent for now, but I got an interview for an internship with EA sports next week though…

- That’s awesome, you got some innovative ideas for the next madden?

- Hell yea my man! That’d be hella tight, right? You ready for another round or what?

- Tempting but I gotta drive towards LAX, this girl I know, well, one of her friends is having a party at a hotel up that way.

- Oh, alright, Yea, for sure, maybe we can do this again another time then?

- Yea, sure Billy.

I felt bad kinda ditching him like that so I gave Julia a call and she said it was fine if I brought Billy along. His eyes lit up when I asked him to come with,

- Yo man, turns out my friend Julia can get you into this party too, not sure what to expect I think it’s a graduation party, but you down to come with?

- Yea sure, wait, you know what? Let me just check somethin’ real quick….

Billy shuffled through his blackberry a few times, making faces intent on leaving the impression he may have a more pressing engagement tonight…

- Alright, just had to look up somethin’, yea I’m free, let’s hit this party up man!

The same old Billy was still there from the little I did know him but something had changed. There was a more relaxed tone in him, he’s somebody who is always stubborn&convinced about his own opinions but at the bar he seemed more free flowing&easygoing. California tends to have this effect on most people that encounter the golden state, there is just something in the air, every second you spend soaking in the California sunshine is another frozen barrier of negativity inside yourself melting away…

- Yo man, remember when a bunch of teenagers from our town went around ‘chupping’ fast food joints?

- Hah, yea Billy I do, ‘cause I was one of those teenagers…

- Get the fuck outta here! You serious, how did that shit go down??

- I dunno, we were bored after a football game one night, picked up some EZ squirt ketchup bottles, stopped by our closest McDonalds, drove straight for the pickup window and squirted the guy with ketchup when he opened the sliding window…

- Haha, shit man you ever get caught?

- Nah, we did get chased down tho, I was driving and my buddy Mikael decided to squirt ketchup, ‘chup’, two random guys on the side of the road; well these guys hopped into a dodge neon parked right next to them and this car chased us for over sixty miles until they tried to box me on a cul de sac and I sped away…

- hah unbelievable bro. Yo I heard you and some buddies during highschool, took shits in grocery bags then threw them on that dude Andrew’s lawn, is that true dude?

- Yeaaa, I was an asshole in highschool, it was funny but real stupid too

- Haha yea, but didn’t he rat you out to the cops for doin’ it?

- Yea, I got 18 months of probation and 120 hours of community service

- Then that snitchin’ bitch deserved it! So who’s this girl you know, you guys ever hookup?

- Uhh no, we’re just close friends, I met her at Bonnaroo, went to the festival the summer after we graduated highschool. One of the greatest times of my life, she was camping in the tent next to mine, we smoked some weed together one of the first couple nights then realized we had a lot in common; went to see most of the same performances, got her number before we left&we have kept in contact ever since…

- wow that’s real cool, never been to a music festival myself, been to the warped tour a few times though…yo so is Julia hot, like is she friends with a lot of wild college girls?

-Yea, she’s attractive, most of her friends are in school, guess they can be kinda wild sometimes.

- Sweet, that’s what I like to hear! I’ve been dying to meet some chill chicks out here since my girl broke up with me a couple months back, we had a long-term relationship I’m still not totally over…

- Oh that sucks man, but I’m sure they’ll be plenty of new talent for you to scout at the party tonight man.

- Sweet, it’s still kinda bittersweet though ‘cause I still hope my ex girl will make her way back into my life&maybe even move out here after she graduates highschool

- Oh, so she’s from back home… and she’s still in highschool?

- Yea man, she’s kind of a time warp, but whatever, she’s mature for her age, I mean she taught me some dirty tricks I had never even heard of…

- Hah nice man, what’s her name?

- Sadie

We had a half hour ride to the party so I busted out a joint&lit it up…

- Oh wow, you smoke weed John?

- Yea man, ever since I was 18&nothin’ compares to this Cali bud, shit is killer (coughs) you lookin’ for a toke?

- Psh nah bro, I stick to the booze…

We arrived at the hotel sometime right before midnight. Julia studies at UCLA but being a film student, she had friends from all walks of life within Los Angeles. Tonight happened to be Loyola Marymount’s graduation, some random graduate had a party at a hotel and we were about to crash it…

Julia was somehow able to get my name on the guest list and I told the bouncer, Billy was my ‘plus one’. We found ourselves in what appeared to be a private club inside this hotel, equip with a extravagant bar, semi-crowded dance floor and a DJ who seemed inclined towards the electronic/dubstep music. I scoured the sea of drunk, myriad faces for Julia to no avail, so I made my way up to the bar…

- Excuse me bartender, I’ll take any type of beer you have for under $5…

- Sorry sir, we don’t have anything for under $5

- Wow, really? Okay… thanks…

All of a sudden, Billy was to my direct right, out of nowhere&he seemed real jumpy,

- Yo John, follow me to the bathroom bro, there’s somethin I gotta show you…

Now I’ve known Billy for quite some time&he never seemed to be the type of guy who was a homosexual; but after an experience I had with a random Venice beach vagrant on a late night a couple weeks back, I did not know what to think…

The atmosphere of Venice beach is beautiful, sunny, artistic, psychotic, erotic, sensational, extravagant&psychedelic. I found myself entering an almost hypnotic type of trance, a magnetic pull of stimulation; a community/marketplace/beach/boardwalk all blending into what is known as Venice, California.

After the first few days in Los Angeles, drinking ‘til sunrise, smoking Cali buds every hour your not sleeping, Julia began to pressure me for a solid plan on just what I was doing. She had a couple roommates&despite how chill she was, the roommates were not going to be cool with me freeloading on the couch for a long time; so it became apparent just after the first week that, LA is not a place to go if your trying to hold or find a steady, traditional nine to five job.

One of Julia’s close friends was named Preston, who was also from New England. I had met him once before at a college party back on the east coast&once we hung out in Los Angeles, he offered to let me crash on his couch too.

Billy was very direct&asked me if I had ever hooked up with Julia&I was being honest when I said no; but that didn’t mean I never thought about it.

She’s smart, funny&beautiful, a real triple threat, the type of girl who is so good looking, she’s intimidating. We enjoyed the same music, movies, you name it but we make such good friends, it is just one of those relationships you never want to ruin&being the man, that responsibility always seems to fall into our hands…

Any hopes of romance were dashed almost as soon as I arrived in Los Angeles. A guy friend of hers would sneak in&out of her room during the night while I tried to sleep on the living room couch. It was disheartening but I was stubborn for expecting her to fall into my arms so easy. We didn’t even know each other all that well, we didn’t meet ‘til we were eighteen&had seen each other maybe once or twice a year for the few years we had known one another. We had different lives, we were at a point where your suppose to focus on what you want to do with your life, what career your going to pursue so who you want to be with&what type of relationship you want to pursue, is put on hold.

Her rejection was more of an obliviousness to my feelings, but it still had my heart cracking; and mind desperate&wandering. Deciding it was time to make some moves, I contemplated where I should run to, trying to overcome the young adult years of neglect from the opposite sex. It would have been easy at this point to hop back in my car, drive back east and say ‘fuck you west coast’ but something inside of me would not allow a return home so defeated.

My fantasy of waking up in Julia’s bed along side of her was snapped back into reality when I spent my first month in LA waking up on her couch. So I decided to take Preston up on his offer&began crashing on his couch in his one bedroom apartment; one block away from the Venice beach strip.

Preston was vital to my survival in Los Angeles, granted Julia gave me the original opportunity&motivation but Preston was the male role model I needed. He was a young successful freelance photographer with an apartment in the hippest part of the city, a nice car&a hot girlfriend. Anticipating Preston was a guy I could chill with everyday&learn his ways; the reality was far from that. Don’t get me wrong, it was awesome to crash on his couch for free but he was a graduate student, meaning a very busy man. Excluding the occasional intense matches of FIFA on Xbox 360 we didn’t see much of each other, keeping his job, car&girlfriend consumed most of his time.

I found myself waking up alone in a total foreign habitat. Julia was living in an apartment near her campus which had the prototypical atmosphere of any big university with a Los Angeles twist but now I was living in Venice.

Venice beach is the strangest planet in our solar system.

I was drawn into this strangeness, it enveloped my being. I found myself drifting across the boardwalk strip in the middle of the night, hopeless, desperate, in search of true human interaction or some sort of sign revealing my life’s righteous path…

Every year my hometown would have a “town fair” located behind our highschool on a couple fields a couple weeks in July. Complete with carnival games, rollercoasters, you name it, even a finale of fireworks. Well, Venice beach is like a town fair for the entire city of Los Angeles almost every single day of the year. At least a few hundred tourists flock to this beautiful beach everday…

During the day, Venice is an everlasting festival; as long as the sun is up you can purchase anything from a medicinal marijuana prescription to a ticket to the freakshow with two-headed turtles&such to a piece of wood carved using rays from the sun&a microscope into the shape of Bob Marley’s face, with the facial details&color provided by joint roaches. Beautiful woman in bikinis hangout alongside old homeless men, everyone appears to have a smile&able to coexist maybe here more than anywhere else in America…

As much as Venice is cheerful&romantic during the day, it’s just as psychotic&appaulling at night. Tough to say at which point it’s more fascinating, but there’s a certain terror felt in the dead of night there. The beautiful woman disappear&leave behind the masses of homeless, vagrants with no families&no home. Many nights suffering through insomnia I would take walks out to the beach round about midnight…

Stopping during one of these night walks to kick it with a few homeless skateboarders, a tall dark man approached looking jovial as could be. He talked with a thick accent, I believe from one of the Caribbean islands, wore a bright smile offering everyone around him sunflower seeds and giggled frequently, his name was Felix. We stood around talking, snacking for awhile then he offered to smoke some weed with me; I figured sure, why not? I had nothing better to do…

He lead me into a garage a couple blocks away from the main strip, becoming increasingly joyful, almost flirtatious, as we walked. At one point during our chat, he leaned in with a giggle and gave me a big hug, I should have ran away right then…

We sat down in the driver&passenger seats of a convertible parked inside this one car garage; Felix packed up a one hitter ( a ‘one hitter’ being a marijuana smoking device that looks like a cigarette that can only hold about one person’s hit worth of weed). He put on a CD of his own making, a compilation of simple reggae tunes; more and more it became apparent this guy had a hard on for me but herb was my kryptonite.

I tried to remain calm to keep him in a happy, distracted mood, he was a lot bigger and could have had his way with me if he pleased. “Just listen to the CD one time through, smoke a little then leave”, repeating this in my head as I tried to give Felix signs as if I was listening intently, nodding and smiling as much as possible.

He began to make subtle moves towards me but I made equally subtle counter moves to show him I was not interested, just tryin’ to smoke some weed and go our separate ways. He would grab the inside of my thigh, giggle and rub my leg until I picked up his hand and put it back on his own lap, he tried to put his arm around me and lean closer but I resisted. After a few feeble attempts of getting into my pants, he gave up but began to rub his own cock through his pants instead. At this point that was a sign of relief, as long as he wasn’t trying to touch me, that was cool.

Listening to enough dull reggaeton and tired of having Felix try to seduce me, I bolted out of that garage as quick as possible. Of course right when we got in, he had shut the garage door so I had to convince him to open it back up instead of trying to hookup with me any longer. I paid him a few bucks for the smoke up and said goodbye with a fake promise of a phonecall…

As I followed Billy into a bathroom stall, he opened the palm of his hand, revealing two pill capsules,

- John, you ever tried ecstacy before?

- Nah man, always seemed like a bitch drug to me

- Aw, no way! C’mon man, you gotta give it a try, it’s great!

- I don’t know man, heard it can leave holes in your brain, I’ve never been into any pills or amphetamines

- It’s nothin’ like any other drug, this stuff is pure man, c’mon I’m sure Julia an all her friends do it all the time, everyone loves this stuff in LA

- Alright, guess I’ll give it a go

We exited the bathroom after swallowing a capsule each, we re-emerged into the party with our eyes wide open. We went towards the bar to find Julia there,

- Hey, been looking for you everywhere! glad you could make it, most of these people graduated from Loyola Marymount today so it’s good you’re here so I don’t feel so left out!

- Yea, thanks for the invite, well at least your still in school, I’m a dropout… Anyway Julia, I want you to meet my buddy from back home, Billy Shears.

Billy said hello and began telling Julia all about his hopes&dreams to become the next great graphic designer and his future plans to design his own video game. They seemed to connect right off the bat, so I excused myself to find some alcohol…

About forty-five minutes later I was talking drunken non-sense to Preston, realizing I had lost any an all sight of both Billy&Julia, I scoured the party scene for either of their faces. Billy was short, a little pudgy but leaned towards being slim, his thick hair was messy and curly, his bangs just above his eye line. A stranger once mistook us for brothers, myself being a few inches taller, we both had similar skin tones and long hair for guys, but mine was longer, stretching past the shoulder blades.

Julia is free-spirited and loving, her aura can be intoxicating. She lights up a room with her free flowing dirty blonde hair with red streaks to match her fiery personality; she’s the type of woman that men can’t help themselves from stopping dead in their tracks as she walks by. Her curves are voluptuous but not over-sized, there wasn’t a single cell on this girl that didn’t appear sexy nor did there ever seem to be any negativity floating through her mind. She was from some Midwest state but that didn’t matter anymore, she belonged to Los Angeles now, she was part of an elite group of females who control the mind’s of men on the simplest movement, word, or laugh…

There was no sign of Billy nor Julia as I glanced around the bar and dance floor. Nothing but random blurs of drunk collegiates trying to drink away any&all inhibitions. Out of the peripherals of my eye, I spotted both of them in the corner of the room sitting very close to one another, in what appeared to be a very in depth conversation. Deciding it was a good thing for them to get to know each other&not trying to seem threatened or jealous, I leaned up against the bar and continued to talk drunken non-sense to the man to my right.

A few drinks later, the ecstacy came on strong. This feeling was brand new to me, not to mention it was no ordinary E as Billy had said earlier…

-This shit is pure MDMA, got it off this Asian gangster in Hollywood who does not fuck around. Dude had a tear drop tattoo, kinda bugged me out but his drugs are killer!

The music was now a simultaneous pulse, coinciding with my heartbeat. The alcohol was altering things, slowing my senses down too but I couldn’t say I was enjoying this ‘high’ much. Billy made his way back to the bar and started chatting my ear off about how cool Julia is and how awesome the new Madden is gonna be once he gets his hands on it. There was no sign of Julia, I had talked to her briefly just after we walked out of the bathroom, but that was it&we had been at this party for hours now. Once again I scoured what now was a faceless sea of people for her until my eyes found her smack dab in the middle of the dance floor.

She was dancing with a guy friend of hers who I suspected she had dated at one time or another. They were dancing intimately, she could even make grinding look elegant, they way she connected to this guy with such passion burned my insides; yet I was getting turned on just watching her dance from afar. Billy snapped me out of my dazed fixation,

- Yo John, I forgot to tell you, Julia took some molly too, she was kinda hesitant but once I told her you tried it, she was down.

I played it off as if that was fine but once he told me, I wished I could’ve gone back and thrown that capsule down on the urinal. The alcohol was boiling my blood, music pulsating throughout my nervous system and now I had a front row seat to watch the girl of my dreams grind up against another guy… As my mind was about to explode, my cellphone vibrated in my pocket, it was a text from a girl I had met in LA through Julia, her name is Joni.

Joni is a California girl, born&bred, not one of those ditsy valley girls but a flower child. A chick who would’ve have blended into the sixties without effort, she lived the LA lifestyle to the fullest and I love her for that. She had graduated from Loyola Marymount that day and texted me an invitation to a different grad party at her beach house, not too far away from the hotel. Weighing my options, it was without question time to blow this scene and find out what Joni was all about…

- Billy, this girl Joni jus invited me to a different party, let’s bounce, this place is getting stale, this other fiesta should be a better time.

- Sounds good bro, this Joni chick have attractive friends though? Cus I’m lookin’ to score some pussy tonite!

We swerved through LA midnight traffic from Westchester to Playa Del Rey.

- Did you even tell Julia we were leaving?

- Nah she seemed to be getting pretty intimate on the dance floor, didn’t want to interrupt anything.

Truth was, I could have given a fuck about interrupting, might’ve even gotten some sick enjoyment out of bursting their bubble; but I’ve had strong feelings for Julia ever since we parted ways after that first encounter at Bonnaroo. Within her eyes it was almost like the entire universe lit up, yet she was still one of the most down to Earth girls I’d ever come across; she was out of place compared to all the other LA girls who were just out here for the fame, glamour&gold but maybe that’s why she was right where she was supposed to be.

We pulled up to an immaculate beach house, about 100 feet from Manhattan beach, three stories of partying. Billy was in awe,

- This.. Is the place?

- Yup, Joni and somethin’ like ten other LMU students live here, it’s great, just way ‘til you see the inside…

We walked right in the front door to an extravagant celebration. The kitchen was the first room you find upon entering, bigger than most houses’ living rooms, equipped with all the average kitchen shit plus an island counter, three couches, a drum set and banging music system. There were two bedrooms on the first floor down a corridor to the left that lead to a two car garage; on the right side of the kitchen were doors to an outdoor patio with plenty of lawn furniture for the cigarette smokers.

Billy at least had an associate’s degree, I on the other hand, dropped out of college after a few semesters. We were witnessing the fun, the relief, the release of all that negative tedious bullshit any four year university will put you through; there was something eerie about it, somehow we had found our way to this party but had no other business there than to find some beautiful girls to take home; so to us this was just another average party with the exception being it was held in a million dollar beach house….

We made our way through the kitchen, sifting through herb clouds and groups of drunken graduates. Guiding Billy, we wove our way to the staircase and up towards Joni’s room.

Past a Bob Marley Get Up, Stand Up poster, we found ourselves in front of a door with a yellow submarine poster on it, I gave a few gentle knocks. After we heard a few giggles, Joni came to the door, greeted us with hugs and told us to come on in…

Joni, like Julia, is gorgeous, a stunning beauty who lit up any room. She has sunshine bright blonde hair&stunning blue eyes, as skinny&attractive as any model without any of the bitchiness that comes with that type. She shared a room with a girl named Michelle, who was an aspiring actor, from the east coast too, making her easier to connect with. Also in the room was one of her roommates from the top floor, Robert, who had just graduated that day with a medical degree&happened to always have a large stash of fine California medical grade Mary Jane. I gave my congratulations, introduced Billy, sat down&began rolling a joint…

Freshman

It was the first nice weather we’d had in months, up in the white mountains of New Hampshire. The winter was excruciating with below zero wind chill frequent and a fair share of intense snow storms. Spring was just starting to show her face, you could be outside without fear of an extremity falling off and the snow had begun to melt…

College is a place to make your dreams come true, but only if your dreams involve drugs or sex; mine involved a lot of both.

First semester went by like Usain Bolt running in the Olympics, classes were a breeze and the party life was unbelievable. Every Thursday through Saturday night a majority of campus would be getting intoxicated, venturing out to one of the frat or house parties with all the themes, drugs, drinking games, sex&violence you’d expect from a bunch of confused teenagers and twenty somethings.

Like most suburban raised white males, I spent my first eighteen years living in the same small, conservative, isolated town. Sure we drank alcohol, smoked some weed, some did pills&what not but nothing they taught in highschool prepares you for the college lifestyle. Don’t get me wrong, struggling through highschool honors&advanced placement courses made college courses almost too easy, what I’m talking about is the life lead outside of the classroom.

When your in highschool, your waking up at the ass crack of dawn, sitting, listening to lectures for six hours straight, then you might have your “extracurricular” activities like sports and/or school council or whatever then it’s time to go back home to your family, eat dinner, do your homework then maybe, juust maybe you have some time to watch televison&jerkoff before you pass out. In college I wouldn’t wake up before ten on most weekdays, smoke weed, get some food then maybe, juust maybe go to class for a couple hours. After class, if you even go, it’s time to smoke more weed, eat again, and once the sun goes down you start drinking…

Second semester came around, winter slowing the pace down; laziness took a hold of me, a growing boredom, frustration and lack of will caused a severe amount of slacking on school work. I should’ve been happier person in those times looking back, I had it all. My closest friends were like brothers, a couple would even front me ounces of marijuana to sell out of my dorm room to support my habit of blazing massive amounts of bud.

It wasn’t until the second semester of college that I lost my virginity. Highschool sucked to say the least but it wasn’t that I was a total loser back then, its just I didn’t get laid… at all. I was a mediocre jock, a mediocre student&mediocre at being a rebel, none of these fine skills will get you laid in highschool, college was different.

Girls escaping the tight grip of parents, on their own out in the world for the first time, given plenty of free time, an abundance of outlets for drugs&alcohol; all of a sudden I was surrounded by bitches down to smoke weed, get drunk&fuck (no wonder I was listening to a lot of Lil Wayne)…

Lauryn was the type of girl who was quiet and shy on the surface but loud, outgoing on the inside; and a freak when the lights go out&clothes come off. She was from Burlington, Vermont, we were in the same film study class first semester where she was always looking like a hot mess but a gorgeous one nonetheless. I never once even tried to talk to her until I ran into her up on ‘Roach Hill’.

Roach hill is named for the countless amounts of pot ash&roaches accumulated there. Behind the two largest freshman dorms on campus was a path through some woods that led up a steep slope, at the top were a few great rocks&logs to sit down on, relax&blaze. One fine afternoon, right after classes, my buddies and I decided to trek up roach hill for a smoking session to find two fine young ladies already sparking up.

They had their backs turned to us&one of them had a lower back tattoo, commonly known as a “tramp stamp”, it was a butterfly with some flowers on the sides, at least this girl had the goods to backup such a bold tat. Using our stoner charm we approached the girls to say watsup and to see if they minded if we joined in the festivities. I was shocked to discover the girl with the tattoo was Lauryn, the chick in my film study class and one of the cutest freshman girls. She seemed so quiet and conservative in class, the type you want to bring home to meet the family or takeout to an expensive restaurant; but here she was up on roach hill, showin’ off a tramp stamp, blazing bowls on a weekday afternoon; I must admit, this turned me on…

Daiv is the type of dude who did get laid in highschool and continued to get laid in college. We met at orientation, sneaking away from the group, where we were supposed to do some childish activities to “get to know each other”, so we bailed to go smoke a joint with a few girls.

The second day of college, after the whole moving in extravaganza was over, I hit up Daiv to blaze. We cruised around in his jeep and found a nice spot next to a river to smoke. Up in the White mountains there was plenty of magnificent scenery and this spot was no exception. Named Robert Frost Falls, there were a series of rapids leading down to a free-flowing river with ten story cliffs on each side. The people of New Hampshire are very much like hermits, few&far between, but amazing natural scenery is everywhere you look. Daiv&I took a seat close to the water, sparked up and never stopped admiring our new habitat. As we finished up blazing, we noticed a group of guys on top of one of the cliffs, a good 100 feet from the water, preparing to jump. They did back flips known as ‘gainers’ off these immaculate cliffs without even breaking a sweat;

- Damn John, are these fuckin’ dudes going to school here too?!’…

Everything fell into place for Daiv including who he got as a roommate. His roommate, JD, could not have been more suited to live with one of the craziest, ball busting, ambitious, exciting guys I’ve ever known. JD is a lifetime inhabitant of the live free or die state&emulated the natural spirit of the state while I knew him at school. He grew up on the Atlantic shore, close to the border of Massachusetts, meaning he was close to civilization; because once you start getting closer to Maine, most of the time, your on your own. He was the most serious about school at some points, out of the friends I had there, but he seemed to struggle harder with academics more than anyone too. He’s bright don’t get me wrong, very quick-witted but would begin dealing with esoteric ideas, getting caught up in deep philosophical questions&finer details of his life, like school papers, would lose importance. Daiv had ambition, if he had stayed at our university for four full years, he might’ve taken over everything.. But by way of selling drugs into millions or something along those lines, he was a Scarface guy in a Superbad world.

Oxycotin is a common drug, somebody you know has tried it or your friend’s sister is addicted to it, most people have at least heard of this government-created opiate. Daiv introduced me to the fine details of this drug, the black market of a drug prescribed to hundreds, if not thousands of people everyday in a hospital. For one 80 milligram pill of oxycotin, no bigger than the size of your index finger’s nail, your looking at anywhere from seventy to eighty dollars. Sure selling weed is cool, getting paid to sit around&smoke but if your trying to make money, you got to hustle pounds or start growing. This is not the case with oxycotin because your customers will do anything for your product.. Anything. I would hangout with Daiv&JD all the time&there would be students in&out of their room at all hours buying pills, blowing lines&it was all just surreal at the time. I never had any desire to even try it, I didn’t start smoking weed ‘til I was a senior in highschool but I became an overnight stoner so I didn’t need anything else at that point in my life. The buying/selling&constant usage never got real for me until Daiv took me over to his supplier’s house.

He was being cryptic all night about what we were going to do,

- Yo what’s good man, you text me something about smokin’ a blunt?

- Yea dog, you down to roll with me to Jabba’s?

- uhh, what, who’s Jabba? like the fat snake creature from Star Wars?

- Haha oh yea forgot that was an inside joke with JD, we know this guy&he’s a fatass, I mean very large in multiple areas of his body, his codename is Jabba&I’m trying to go to his hut, so you down playa?

- Why do you hangout with this guy? Sounds fuckin’ weird man…

- Nah, nah man c’mon, we’ll smoke a fat blunt, we can smoke in a house for a change instead of my jeep or out in the fuckin’ woods man

- Alright fine, come pick me up?

- Yeah, you at your across-campus piece of shit dorm room?

- Yup

On the other hand of Daiv&JD’s fine living arrangement, I was put into what is called a ‘forced’ triple where they cram three incoming freshman into an old rundown room meant for two people. It wasn’t that I didn’t get along with my roommates, I just never gave them a fair chance to be cool in my mind. Although my roommates spent most of their free time watching movies like The Big Lebowski; I never wanted to spend more time in the congested room than I had to. Almost everyday, most of my time was spent across campus where the cafeteria, quad&Daiv’s room was.

We arrived at ‘Jabba’s hut’ to a packed living room of eight or nine people, most appeared to be older than us, at least sophomores maybe juniors. Everyone was lounging on a couple couchs&a few chairs watching some random bullshit vh1 reality show.

- Hey Daiv, what’s happenin’?

- Yo whatup, where’s Brian at?

- Oh he just left to go grab the eighties, he’ll be right back, who’s your friend?

- This is John, he’s chill, is it cool if we roll up a blunt?

- Yea. Right on…

Brian turned out to be Jabba, being very evident as I saw this girth-ridden man wiggle his way through his own front door. He sat down at the nearest available seat&after a few deep breaths, he began dealing out his collection of oxycotin. Everyone in the room except for me, occupied rolling the blunt, walked over to Jabba&got any amount of pills from 1-20 depending on the amount of money they handed him. Everyone else took out their little strainers&began grinding their pills into a fine powder. At this point in a room of ten or eleven people, everyone except for me bowed their down towards the nearest coffee table, nose up. I lit up a blunt&tried to grasp what the hell was going on…

The one blessing in disguise to arise from my shifty living situation in the least appealing dorm, living cramped up with two other guys, the men’s bathroom down a flight of stairs, was meeting Wes. Being your prototypical stoner, weighing a hundred&fifty pounds and around five feet eight inches, having a friend who could handle his own in the gym was clutch. Wes handled his own&most of my weight too, benching around 225 pounds, looking the part of an upcoming football linemen or pro weightlifter, although we looked like two complete opposites as far as height&weight go, we shared three favorite hobbies: drinking heavily, smoking Buddha&scouring campus for pussy. Wes’ roommate was one of those guys who is from a town like Lynn or Wakefield that is at least thirty minutes from downtown Boston but when you ask him where he is from, his answer is just ‘Boston’. They’ll milk the accent for all it is worth and act tough like he has seen some crazy shit ‘cause he’s from the inner city; when in reality his parents have a fortune&a nice summer house on Cape Cod too.

Daiv, Wes&I smoked with Lauryn and her friend up on the hill, from there on Lauryn was the one girl on my mind. We hung out a lot after that day, doing any work for our film class together, playing basketball (where she would kick my ass..sometimes), an a helluva lot of smoking. She was seeing a senior at the time we started chillen who lived in an awesome party house&supplied her with all the alcohol she desired; but my relentlessness won out in the end.

Things heated up between us at the end of our first semester, I came up to visit her in Vermont over winter break&by the time second semester started we were hanging out together almost everyday.

I started selling weed out of my dorm room to support my blunt-a-day habit&Lauryn’s willingness to have sex had a lot to do with the amount of weed I smoked with her. She was my first lay ever but still to this day, she doesn’t have the slightest clue. When you’re a nineteen year old college student getting pussy because you sell bud, it’s not in your best interest for people to know you’re a virgin; plus Lauryn was experienced in bed&I didn’t want her thinking I was some kind of lame.

If there was any doubt in my mind this girl was a freak, the first time we had sex settled the score. We went up to my room, high as heaven’s gaze, she hopped into my bed;

- You have any good movies?

- Yea, I have plenty of them, what do you want to watch?

- I don’t know, something romantic…

I threw on in a DVD, hopped into bed next to her&before I could even press play on the remote, she was giving me head. It didn’t take long for that to get me hard, she stripped down to nothing but a bra&laid down calling for me to get on top. Meanwhile the DVD menu screen was replaying the same thirty second snippet of the theme song over&over again; I was too nervous, trying to focus on being able to last long enough to please her, I didn’t even notice until she reminded me to “maybe start the movie?”.

My first time having sex seemed to be more pleasurable to Lauryn than myself. She was really into it as I was on top, inside of her, enjoying it as much as possible but at the same time, I was just trying not to orgasm too quick. She let out a couple of moans, opened her mouth&chomped down on my collar bone in between thrusts. Damn, I thought, ‘this girl’s a biter!’ I was so determined on not having an orgasm in the first couple minutes, I never ended up even climaxing at all. After ten minutes or so, she was satisfied, rolled to her side&went to sleep…

Little did I know back then, Lauryn was the peak of my pussy-getting career at school. She was beautiful, fun to be around an a freak in bed, a little ditzy, oblivious at times but what girl isn’t?

Being a nineteen year old dip shit I couldn’t appreciate the sex to its fullest potential. Granted the main reason Lauryn was fucking me was because I sold about a quarter pound of bud a week, allowing us to smoke for free whenever we wanted; but being a huge stoner is far from a goldigger.. I guess.

Regardless of her reasons for having sex with me, she was an excellent lay&willing anytime of the day. Yet I seemed to act like the bitch of the relationship. I tried to control our fate as a couple, tried to make her my ‘girlfriend’, bring her back to my hometown to showoff instead of just enjoying a good thing while it lasted.

Looking back, being the last year of my teenage years, I still jerked off a lot even when I was with Lauryn. She satisfied my need to have a hot girl to sleep with that my friends could envy but she never gave me any real sexual satisfaction… or conversational satisfaction for that matter. Maybe it was her biting/in the closet nympho tendencies or maybe it was my obsessive compulsive controlling impulses that made us go our separate ways. Whatever it was, we didn’t workout, she had sex with another guy&because we weren’t a real couple she thought it was fine but that was it for me…

It was the first nice weather we’d had in months, up in the white mountains of New Hampshire. The winter was excruciating with below zero wind chill frequent and a fair share of intense snow storms. Spring was just starting to show her face, you could be outside without fear of an extremity falling off and snow had begun to melt…

Daiv, Wes, JD& myself hiked up to Roach Hill for our first smoke session up there for the second semester. We had rolled a blunt that looked like it could’ve been mighty Joe Young’s finger, about an eighth of bud inside.

We took our positions, forming a circle, sitting on a few logs up on the summit; designed for our smoking pleasure. It was late, round about midnight, and I was heavily intoxicated. Earlier in the night we made what is known as a ‘gin bucket’ but what constitutes a gin bucket to a bunch of college freshman and the rest of the known universe has drastic differences. A normal one might have one, maybe one&half bottles of gin, some fruit and juice all mixed together very nice, tasting sweet, not too strong; we just mixed together a few handles of cheap alcohol, various fruit juice and called it a gin bucket. Well four or five hours after having a constant cup full of this drink, I was very drunk and ready to smoke some fuckin’ weed.

Not a second after JD had put flame to the massive blunt did two flashlights shine right on our faces. We weren’t the only people around to realize it was the first nice night of spring to smoke on the hill, campus police were waiting for us. JD, being a paranoid stoner came in handy for once ( he was the type of guy to snatch a white lighter from your hands and smash it on the ground just because of it’s taboo) he noticed the police when the flashlights came on and gave the blunt a flick. JD gave no typical flick, he knew what was at stake&his quick wits were crucial. New Hampshire may say they live free or die but not when it comes to weed, they’re penalties are harsh (the typical marijuana offense will usually result in a $420 fine). JD knew these pigs couldn’t fine the one piece of evidence so he blasted the blunt as far as he could into the tree-ridden path in the woods ten or fifteen below our pow-wow. This will always be embedded in my memory as the greatest flick in all of human’s smoking blunts history. The cops spent at least a half hour searching for this elusive blunt, even calling in backup to help, to no avail.

We were all told not to move from our sitting positions on the logs as the cops tried to figure out what to do with us. At this point I was fuckin’ pissed. That gin bucket booze was boiling my blood&the one thing to ease my nerves when I’m real drunk was just flicked into the woods. When the cops told us they were still going to cite us for some bullshit, reporting us to the university, I lost my cool&became livid.

I began cursing out the pigs, exclaiming it wasn’t right for us to get in trouble for smoking a blunt they couldn’t even find.

Things escalated quick, one particular female cop fixated on my belligerent ass&the next thing I know, I’m being escorted down the hill in handcuffs, pushed into a back of a cruiser. As if I wasn’t already infuriated about being way too drunk, losing a giant blunt&getting in trouble for smoking without the high, now I was being chauffeured to the local police station.

Being broke as shit, I couldn’t afford the $35 bail&was thrown in the drunk tank for the night; My charge was disturbing the peace.

At this point, there wasn’t a chill bone left in my body&I began screaming at the top of my lungs “99 bottles of beer on the wall”. I sang this ridiculous sailor ballad at the peak of my vocal chords fives time in a row.

After screaming my voice hoarse, through the vent I overheard another inmate having a tirade over not getting a blanket; so I hopped up onto the sink to get my mouth up to my vent&attempted to communicate with my fellow inmate.

- Hey man, what’s up? You cold or something?

- Hell yea man, it’s fuckin’ April, still the fuckin’ winter to me man, it was just snowing the other day&these bitches won’t give me a goddamn blanket!

- Shit, I hear you man, those pigs threw me in here on some bullshit, wish I could help you with the blanket

- Everybody gets thrown in here on some bullshit kid, this your first time bein’ locked up?

- Yup, and it already sucks, how do you get used to this?

- You never do, you just gotta keep your thoughts straight&try to get out as soon as possible…

After this insightful conversation the alcohol began to wear off&boredom started settling in. Staring at four walls will get nauseating after a couple hours, the mentality that your trapped in fuckin’ prison sinks in with subtlety but once you realize where you are, you realize you gotta get the fuck out.

The one thing not removed from my possession was a little ATM receipt telling me there was no money in my bank account.. go figure. I rolled it up into a ball and began bouncing it off the cell walls. To my surprise this was quite entertaining, a criminal/solo version of wall ball.. with a piece of paper. The fun didn’t last too long however, a pig came in to see what I was doing&confiscated the receipt….

Awoke the next morning, after sleeping curled up in the fetal position on a cold slab of prison metal, having to be present in front of a judge. The judge gave some bullshit sentence of probation plus some fines&I was let go. It was mid-morning when I left the courthouse&had no time to even shower before my first class of the day. I went straight from being a defendant in court to my class, theatrical experience, where I was the director of a short play for our final project.

After the last class of the day, I went back to my dorm&collapsed into bed; not waking up ‘til the next morning to the sound of someone pounding on my door. It was my buddy Erik from across the hall, reminding me it was April 20^th (4/20) and time to do drugs. I let him in, still in a daze&tried to explain what had happened the night before last,

-Yo man, not sure if I’m gonna be down with the festivities today

-What do you mean? We already bought an eighth of ‘shrooms each

- I got arrested last night, my parents are gonna kill me once they find out, not to mention I might get kicked outta school

- Yea, okay… what’s your point?

- My point?! My point is my life is already in shambles so the last thing I need right now is some psychedelic mushrooms…

- Listen John, It’s 4/20, a holiday, our holiday, the only one we got; we already bought these ‘shrooms so we’re gonna munch on them. Then we’re gonna go down to Frost Falls to smoke a fat blunt. If your life is already in shambles, what more do you hafta lose?

Erik’s stoner motivational speech was all that was needed to convince me to ingest the ‘shrooms….

Next thing I know we’re headed down to the falls with JD, Wes&Daiv. We found a nice spot near an old rusted truss bridge, overlooking fast-pace river rapids; JD proceeded to spark a blunt. We smoked it down for a good half hour&that’s when the mushrooms began to kick in…

All of a sudden, I had transpired into the water, my friends were talking, laughing&all I could hear was the sound of rushing water.

Looking down from a couple hundred feet, this natural scene of incredible beauty had my undivided attention. The way the water ran roughshod over any&all obstacles without effort, at that moment nothing else mattered; my imagination was overwhelmed with such a simple picture of nature.

Not my floundering GPA, growing criminal record or anything my friends were saying five feet away from me could break my fixation.

Thousands of hours spent on video games, masturbation, partying, drinking, smoking&sex could not come close to what this river was doing for me at that moment in time. It all felt so majestic, like the river was a part of a magical landscape projecting from my mind. The sound of the streaming water splashing against boulders became omnipotent inside my head, the river was almost singing to me; it felt as though classical music was being orchestrated by the clash of rocks&H2O. This undeniable revelation has stayed with me, forever propelling my future into a river flowing with psychedelic, rebellious evolutions….

Sophomore

A year later I was attending community college in Boston, living in a rundown basement apartment a few blocks away from Fenway park with a couple highschool buddies; George and Harrison.

It was our good friend, Bishop’s birthday but we had no herb to celebrate with. Our neighbor upstairs who sold weed was dry and so were all the rest of the dealers we knew around the city; we began to grow desperate. Maybe having no weed to smoke all day for most people is not a big deal, it was to us. George, Harrison, Bishop and myself were all unemployed, lazy, twenty year olds who woke up in the morning to the average day of smoking bud, playing video games, listening to great music (George enjoyed southern rap like Three 6 Mafia, UGK; Harrison was a Tom Petty/classic rock guy&I stuck to New York style hip hop&Kanye West) eating whatever munchies we got our hands on… then smoking some more. When we couldn’t find or afford weed, any rhythm we had was thrown, leaving us in dismay ‘til we could find more bud.

George went to community college with me, going to a large southern school his freshman year, he did a lot more blazing&drinking than homework to say the least. Harrison was a talented musician, he was going into his second year at Boston University, studying music theory. Bishop was from the same small town as us but bounced around a lot through his high school years, now living in Quincy, just outside the city.

Our apartment was in a near perfect location although the interior was anything but near perfect. We were within walking distance to Fenway and several different universities but we paid for our prime spot by sacrificing a chance for a nice apartment. Our basement floor place was originally designed as a two bedroom but a door leading out to the front of the building was converted into a window; creating an additional half bedroom. George took the corner bedroom facing the back of our complex, next to the kitchen on one side, directly across was my half bedroom which was comparable in size to the average jail cell; enough room for a bureau, mattress on the ground, and desk in the corner. Harrison took the last room across from our only bathroom&his being the largest room, we also used it to watch TV, play video games, etc. Our stove top was littered with stains before we even arrived, multiple holes all over the walls, loose wires and mice were present throughout the apartment. George had to wait for weeks just to get a new door, we had no peephole and a broken intercom system. Needless to say this place was not any penthouse suite, but it was our own Brokedown Palace so to speak and being just twenty we were all excited not having to worry about parents or RA’s anymore.

Harrison resembles a youthful but chubby Neil Young with long, red hair that reminds you of Tom Petty’s. Harrison grew up as an only child with parents who cherished him. He learned to play classical piano by seven&also excelled in the classroom all through elementary&highschool. Something went wrong after highschool for Harrison, his life was not planned for him from there on. He was accepted to an exclusive music theory course at Boston University but could not foresee how much leaving his parent’s nest would diminish his happiness&ambition. After failing out of most of his classes his freshman year, he went to a shrink for depression during the summer&was able to start over the following fall.

Harrison&I never hung out during our highschool years but almost as soon as highschool was over, we were almost inseparable. Riding around in the ‘98 Accord, smoking blunts, jamming out, smoking joints was our routine for almost every day during our summer before freshman year of college. Harrison went to Bonnaroo with me that year, hard to believe he had to convince me to cough up the money for the ticket; yet it turned out to be a great moment in my life&where I happened to meet Julia.

George was a fat kid his entire life up to the age of twelve, then puberty bailed him out. Being 20 at the time we moved into our apartment, he had gained maybe fifty pounds in those eight years but grew to be over six foot four. He wore bleach blonde hair shoulder length, blue eyes&clean-shaven, George had the greatest collection of retro sports clothing of any white boy this side of the Mississippi. He got more action from women than both Harrison&I combined, which isn’t saying much but still, he was engaged to our prom queen&his highschool sweetheart, Pam, by the time we left our Boston Apartment.

Now desperate just to find a dime bag we sat on our apartment’s stoop, scouting out passers-by looking for someone that might have weed. We were getting discouraged until two ragged college guys walked by and we thought this was our shot,

- Yo watsup guys, hey, it’s uh my good friend’s birthday today and we can’t find any nugget, you wouldn’t know somebody that could hook us up, we could throw you some bills

George tried to explain our dire sitaution as quick as possible&all in one sentence…

- Wait, is Freddy around man?

One bro said to the other bro

- Nahhh dude, he got busted, remember? Hold on let me call a guy.. Wait, you know what?

The other bro swung his backpack onto his stomach&proceeded to prod through the inside, after making a snapping motion inside the bag he pulled out his hand&put something into George’s…

- Tell your friend I said happy birthday man

- Damn, thanks man, how much you want for this?

- free of charge bro, enjoy!

The bros resumed their walking, now with better karma than five minutes ago, George walked back to the stoop where the rest of us were sitting with a huge smirk on his face…

- What the hell, what did he give you?

- a giant chunk of hash…

We then smoked this hash by heating up a knife, pressing the hash between this hot knife and a cool one then sucking the smoke up through a cut out milk gallon. We got very, very high…

The community college George&I attended that year was on the opposite side of the city from our apartment; which made for interesting subway rides. Forty-five minutes each way with the entire cast&crew of Boston’s inner workforce gives you a tremendous perspective into the city’s demographics and population density.

We hopped onto the green line across from the Museum of Fine Arts and rode that all the way to park street where we switched to the orange line. The green line traveled throughout Fenway and the various colleges, such as Northeastern in the area, keeping it a relative low-key, well kept train. The orange line traveled from the outskirts of the city into it’s ghettos then through to park street so there is a great contrast in the type of people on these trains. The green line had the college kid, ready to attack a city built for his amusement, or the leisure tourist exploring the finer parts of the city&the steady middle-class working bee just trying to get to and from work in one piece. The orange line had most of the minorities, Chinese&Korean immigrants using the train just to get groceries, any other errand and/or to get to work, this was usually their only way to get around; using it as an absolute necessity. Also on the orange line were Roxbury and Dorchester ghetto dwellers and any other vagabonds picked up on the trains constant travels; needless to say the Boston community is still segregated in the 21^st century as is obvious by how their mass transit works.

Community college, in the inner-city, is an eye-opening experience; a culture shock when your from a suburb entering an urban, almost ghetto, environment. The school George and I attended was about seventy-five percent minorities, for the first time in my life, I had more than two black people in a classroom. It wasn’t just five or six either, it was my childhood classroom flipped upside down, now there was just two or three Caucasians in my classes. Despite dropping out of school forever after my semester at community college, I have never regretted attending classes there one bit. Instead of being another smart kid who did not have any motivation, I was the smartest, more like the most educated in bullshit information you learn from school, so my motivation did not matter; I already knew most of the curriculum. One fine day in my American History class, a lecture hall filled with two hundred ambitious ghetto-dwellers&myself, the finer details of just how crazy our school system is, dawned on me,

- Okay class, listen up, listen up! Now before we get into the American Revolution and all that entails, we must talk about a pivotal war that took place in the new world just before our fight for independence. This war was called the Seven Year’s war but it also went by another name, does anyone know that name?

There was an eerie silence as the professor’s last syllable echoed throughout the large auditorium. In a packed lecture of two hundred people, not one person had a clue of the answer. Then I raised my hand,

- The French&Indian War?

This historical event you learn in a wealthy white suburb school by the time you get to junior highschool; yet in this hall of hundreds, I was the only one that had even heard of this war before. That was the final straw for me, there’s a fatal flaw in our education system&after that, there was no way I could participate anymore.

We spent Halloween night that year at a college house party in Brighton, a part of the city designated toward upperclassmen college students. After the party George and I had to race to catch the last train (‘cause in Boston the T stops running at 12:30am, just when the night gets going), it was packed full of drunk college kids in ridiculous costumes. The girl next to me was wearing next to nothing, a bikini made of colorful noodles&macaroni pasted to cloth to be exact looking like a kindergartner’s first assignment gone wrong, asking me how her costume looks in front of her boyfriend. George was wearing a cat and the hat suit shouting drunken nonsense, I just wore a purple robe… yeah Hugh Hefner.

One day I hopped off the train, got back into our apartment complex and went to check if our laundry door was open; but it was always fucking locked. That day was like every other, so I shook the door handle and kicked the door in frustration. I was wearing headphones listening to Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” on my iPod so I had no idea there was a female on the other side of this door trying to talk to me. This door to our laundry room was always locked because there was a single apartment on the other end past the washer and dryer. There was a washer&dryer on the second floor that every other tenant used but because we were stuck in this basement it would’ve been nice to be able to use the machines most convenient. Well this girl who lived in this apartment on the other side of the locked door had heard me shake the doorknob then give the door a violent kick; she felt scared/paranoid enough to call the fuckin’ cops…

I walked into my apartment to the sweet smell of sensi and two stoned roommates playing NFL Blitz, yes for the N64. I dropped my school work in my room then headed straight for the bathroom to take a shit. As I proceeded to use our facilities, deeply engrossed into the latest issue of High Times (we had stolen from 7/11), there was a stiff knock at the door.

Harrison went to answer but without a peephole he was curious to know who it was first,

- Who is it?

- Boston Police

- Oh (shit), just a sec….

Harrison ran for the giant gravity bong on our kitchen table, in attemptin’ to hide it, he spilt bong water all over the front of his shirt. He stashed the grav bong under his bed, then rushed to answer the door,

- Hi officer, what’s going on?

- yea, how ya doin.. (sniffs) wow, smells funny in here, you been smokin’?

- Uhh, no sir.. Nah, I mean, I do smoke cigarettes?

- Alright well we got a call from a young lady who lives behind this door over there saying someone was trying to kick her door down with addidas shelltoes on and then proceeded to walk into this apartment.

This bitch had watched my feet underneath the door as I walked away&noticed what type of shoes I had on&witnessed me walk into our apartment…

- Oh, that wasn’t me sir, my shoes are right there so are my roommates

Harrison pointed to a corner full of random shoes as I listened intently from the bathroom, slipping my shelltoes off and placing them in the bathtub.

- Okay, well why don’t you have your roommates come out here, I’d like to see what type of shoes they own…

George went out first, explained he had been inside all day and wore new balance sneakers; I tried to stay hidden in the bathroom but the cop wanted to speak to all of us so I reluctantly emerged; the officers approached me,

- Watsup? You the one with the Addidas?

- Nah officer, I wear some old shitty Nike’s….

- Hmph… alright boys… have a nice day

City police compared to suburban police are like night to day. We lived across the hall from a new, younger Boston policeman for an entire year smoking blunts, blazin’ out of bongs, pipes, joints, you name it we smoked it right in our kitchen ten feet away from this guy’s front door. Suburban cops seek out trouble, they find a thrill breaking up high school parties or busting teenagers for smoking weed; city cops hope to make it home to their families. Suburban cops are the type of deushbags who only leave their small hometown to go to police academy then come right back to get a job at the police department; city cops are the type who saw some crazy shit in Iraq and just want a well respected job that makes ends meet.

All three of us were nineteen years old and somewhat new to Boston, so finding a good connection for alcohol was tough. We would frequently go to homeless bums that lived in the area who were more than happy to oblige for a nip but we grew tired of having to drink cheap ass vodka (‘cause that’s all liquor stores will sell bums). One of the first couple months George and Harrison grew desperate, they began stalking the local street corners for a potential buyer, finding a perfect twenty something who we recognized lived in our building.

- Yo man, any chance you could make a booze run for us, we can definitely tip you

He said he normally would love to help us out but that he had just became part of Boston PD and didn’t want to risk his job; this was, as we later found out, our next door neighbor. He was cool about didn’t say anymore or try to get us in trouble and never complained about the constant smell of Mary Jane rampant through our little basement area. Considering we were the only two apartments on the basement level (excluding the bitch who lived past our washer&dryer) this was even more of a surprise. He introduced himself once but all of us being stoned, we couldn’t remember if his name was Charlie or Chase so we just called him Chet.

Chet came to our door one morning explaining he had lost his key to the main front door so we helped him get in whenever he needed to for about a week. The next Monday, Harrison answered our door to discover a 30 rack of bud light staring him in the face, Chet was walking into his apartment simultaneously and simply stated, “well it’s not mine”….

As winter grew colder that year in the city, we became more desperate for money; we of course always tried to keep at least a bowl pack on us but paying for food began to be problem.

Out of all three roommates, I was the most broke, to a point where I started stealing groceries from the local supermarket. They made it all too easy, I had worked at Best Buy in highschool which taught me how easy shoplifting is; employees can’t touch you plus most are very oblivious to what’s going on right under their noses. I would walk in, grab a plastic basket, cycle through the isles filling it up then casually walk out the front. From there I took several back alleys for four or five blocks back to our basement.

Once I had gotten away with a couple successful heists, George and Harrison decided to join in. We all assigned different departments and took various grocery assignments, we walked away with weeks worth of food. I did the usual basket ploy, while Harrison and George used old shopping bags to put the new food in. After stealing months worth of food, the company caught on putting security personnel in the parking lot but no legal consequences ever came of it.

Taking mushrooms opened my eyes to many things I was not seeing in this vast world when I was a freshman; so I was determined to experiment with psychedelics in Boston…

Harrison’s buddy, Jeff, was able to hook us up on numerous occasions for great weed and ‘shrooms; he also sold acid but that was a step I wasn’t ready for.. Yet.

Harrison had a lot of talented friends dispersed in the city, stemming from his connects at Boston University. Jeff was a great guy, my first friend from California., coming all the way from Orange County to study psychology at BU. Jeff introduced me to a lot of great music, first time I ever heard Life After Death in it’s entirety, and books such as Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching.

The few times we tripped took me closer to music, discovering the beautiful combination of otherworldly consciousness and music. During this period I had one of the most searing inner visions I have ever experienced.

Salvia is a strange anomaly, legal yet almost lethal in certain mental aspects. My first experience with this drug was at a bonfire where a bong was being passed around with a bowl of it and I just laughed my ass off for a couple minutes straight. My best friend, Mikael, who took a hit right before me, had a horrible experience, demanding somebody call his mother to come pick him up. All I could do was laugh hysterically at him as he proceeded to plead with everyone at the bonfire to call his mom.

George, Harrison and I went to hempfest that year in the Boston Commons. This was the year before marijuana was decriminalized in Massachusetts so the police presence that day was brutal; going so far as having multiple teams of under covers arresting anyone with so much as a joint. The oppressions including having a blunt taken from me and a ban from Boston Commons by plain clothed pigs is beside the point to this story, at this hempfest we were able to acquire some high numbered extracts of salvia….

We all made ourselves comfortable in George’s room in the backside of our small, run down apartment and smoked a bowl of fine headie weed. Then the next bowl went around with some strong Salvia.

We smoked some low extract salvia later that day after hempfest, which also coincided with 4/20, but all it did was cause a headache. We threw away the rest of the bag of low extract&now were trying the higher extracts…

Harrison took the first rip and as soon as he blew out his hit, I could tell from his eyes most of the person I knew as Harrison was not in the physical present. He stood up and spun around a few times with a few giggles acting as his spinning interludes, George and I instructed him to sit down but he was intent on ignoring our request. After a few minutes we ignored him&took our hits, I exhaled and surveyed the room, scanning until my eyes met George’s; he proceeded to then instruct me to look to my left, there on his desk was a lava lamp which had the effect of blowing my mind out of my consciousness. To this day I’m still not certain where or what happened to my mind that moment as soon as I was conscious again I bolted out of the room, taking in deep, intense breaths.

From that point forward I had a strange infatuation that we were going to burn down our apartment from a gas leak&then flicking a lighter, this paranoia would not leave my mind until we left that basement….

Being Harrison’s second year he was used to the life in Boston, for George and I living in a city was a new experience. We were fortunate to have Harrison, he knew where to find the best pizza&weed&’shrooms.

The one person George knew around the city was Bishop and I knew Prudence. Prudence was from our hometown, a year younger than us and moving right down the street to study physical therapy at the all girls school, Simmons.

Prudence was a beautiful girl, somewhat nerdy, a girl who likes to hangout with the guys and very career oriented. She was the type of girl to wear glasses, dark colors and overall conservative clothing, you know typical for the average New England girl, but when she showed even a little cleavage and wore tight jeans, men would flock to her. Dark brown hair with piercing hazel eyes, she was the type to flirt and bat eyelashes all night but still leave guys cold, going home alone.

We had a fling during the summer before my senior year of highschool that was rather anticlimactic. Beside a few drunken make out sessions at various concerts, there wasn’t much action. She was real close to my good friend, Mikael and once I discovered he was madly in love with her&she refused to stop hanging out with him alone, that was the end of whatever was going on between us.

So now there we were living a block away from each other in a city of about a million, on some real Casablanca bullshit. She might’ve been my first taste of heartbreak but I wasn’t about to let that get in the way of infiltrating the local all girls college..

We hung out before the winter, watching the MLB playoffs hoping the Red Sox could repeat as world champions while living a few streets away from Fenway Park. Prudence’s friends proved to be less than promising, either too fat or too bitchy to even imagine having sex with. All though an all girls school sounds like a dream to have access to, the reality is that there’s a huge reason why these girls chose not to go to school with boys. I thought being friends with a girl who goes to school with nothing but girls would be great; and that it would get me laid but that was not the case. Prudence was a heartbreaker, a chick who has less emotional attachment than most guys&the friends she found at college were either butch or just as cold as her. One of the girls wouldn’t stop complaining about how bad Harrison’s laundry smelled&Prudence’s least attractive buddy wouldn’t stop flirting with me making it impossible to hit on Prudence. The Red Sox got eliminated by a team once known as the Devil Rays&Prudence and I went our separate ways for the winter…

Being the only pussy I knew in the city I was in constant contact with her, trying to get some action, to no avail. She was out on her own for the first time, as I had been the year before and with schools like Boston College, Northeastern and BU in the area., in her mind, I was no match for business major frat brothers.

Prudence cane to the realization she may have been wrong to ignore me but this only happened on the very last day she was in Boston….

George was visiting his girlfriend at UConn, Harrison had went home for the weekend in late spring when Prudence gave me a call to see if I would help her move some things out of her dorm room. School was over, flowers were blooming and changes were apparent.

The first harsh winter I ever experienced in the city was over, all the snow was gone&the awkward tension that plagued Prudence&I seemed to have corroded away for one day. I gave her the help, moving random shit for half hour out of the dorms, flirting all the while. Then we took a stroll down near Fenway Park. At this point I had grown bitter towards her habit of giving me the cold shoulder throughout the entire winter, but being like any other female, the more I ignored her, the more she seemed to be turned on.

We went back to my apartment after the walk and we had a long conversation sitting side by side on my bed. The entire year I had worked to get this girl into this bed but now it all felt a day late&a dollar short.

In hindsight, maybe I should’ve tried to kiss her because after all, deep down she was just another beautiful naive college girl&you only get so many opportunities to take advantage of these magnificent, beautiful bodies attached to such confused minds.

We never did have sex, I walked her back to her dorm where her brother was waiting to pick her up. That was that, looking back on that day I wonder how good the sex would’ve been&why I always seemed to let emotions get in the way of good pussy. We always knew we would make a good match but we were too much alike in the end, making better friends than lovers. At this point, I’ve chalked it up to us just being two lost souls living in a fishbowl…

Junior

After smoking marihuana (a.k.a. Ganja, herb, bud, nug, tree, weed, piff, headies, middies, indo, outdo, you know?) playing video games (preferring NFL Blitz for the N64 or NBA Jams for the Sega Genesis over any modern playstation or xbox), listening to music (massive amounts of hip hop, stealing CDs by Tupac, Outkast&The Roots all in one heist from Circuit City)&all that other good,relaxing shit instead of going to any of my college classes for an entire year in Boston; I was back living at home. Spending the summer, after my first year living in a city, as a broke unemployed beach bum was a great time; but by the next fall it was time to get a job, start making some money.

My mind had been in the gutter since getting back to my hometown, living back at my parent’s house from Boston, no job, no cares but no money to support myself with; roaming, wandering through my town, coming to terms with the fact I was an official college dropout. An uneasy feeling that took around seven months for the true meaning to settle in…

Somehow I managed to get a job at a local historic tavern, bussing tables. The manager took me over into a side room full of portraits of old white men and their stuck up wives, a chandelier&fancy silverware&table cloths&et cetera. The fact he had longer hair than I did was my main way of getting in, mine was just hitting my shoulder blades at this point while his was in a ponytail that went down his back, stretching just above his ass. In Boston, it was the first time I had not been a full time student since before kindergarten started; leaving a lot of time to think. Only taking three community college courses allowed me to focus on a real education, learning about myself. For the first time, I was going to the library, eager to read books not because it was a summer reading requirement but because I wanted to learn. During this period I studied anything&everything that interested me from existentialism to the illuminati to Rastafarians to the dead sea scrolls. I decided to stop cutting my hair during this time in my life, to be honest, I could not explain what the main reason was, whether it was religion or philosophy or the fact I spent any twenty dollar bill I had on a sack of weed instead of a haircut.

I didn’t have much enthusiasm for any sort of ‘institution’ but full time work was new to me, I had always been in school while working or just had a seasonal/summer job. This restaurant was built sometime in the 18^th century, certain spots were used to house injured revolutionary war soldiers, now it was named after an old conservative&much more reactionary compared to anything supporting revolution. The average customer was around sixty&the average employee aged around thirty-five; yet here I was a twenty year old college dropout joining their ranks.

The tips weren’t bad, despite the job being very tedious, it wasn’t anything too difficult. Cleanup tables after the customers are gone, charm the waitresses&prepare the dining room for the next day when dinner was over. Although a lot of my time there revolved around folding hundreds of fancy napkins, I was able to walkout with cash everyday, claiming $4.20 into the computer system; instead of the forty-five to sixty dollars I was walking away with.

Out of the entire staff of about fifty or so, there were about four or five people under twenty five that worked at the tavern with me. Out of them there was one cute girl, Rita. Rita went to one of those midwest large big ten schools with great athletics as a freshman but now was back living at home, going to community college for reasons I soon forgot. She was a very fascinating female, a big hip hop fan and always down to have a good time. She once told me a story how, while she was at college, she had taken some LSD and sang “Yellow Submarine” with all her friends; this story piqued a growing interest of mine to try acid.

Although Rita had a dark side, as we all do, she was a hardcore rigid republican, even to the point of getting an internship for a republican mayoral candidate. Hip hop fans and republicans had never gotten along in my mind, it was strange to see someone so beautiful&full of radiant intelligence be so blind to basic political facts.

One day there was a function at our tavern for a group of volunteers going on a trip to Africa,

- Africa needs to get their shit together…

Rita said with a resentful tone,

-What?!

- I mean they’ve been in genocide, wars&such for so long, when will they learn?

- I don’t know, maybe after we teach them? You can’t put all the blame on them…

- Sure I can, they wouldn’t be primitive&in poverty if they didn’t choose to live like that, it’s not our fault…

- Well what about slavery? Colonialism? Imperialism? In order to have all this luxury we’re afforded in America, millions are living in disgusting, painful impoverished situations…

- Excuse me, but the Africans sold their own people into slavery and I mean, colonialism isn’t always such a bad thing, it can help both countries sometimes…

This conversation continued to go back&forth until the subject was dropped because a resolution was not going to be made about the future of Africa anytime soon. We were getting into a heated debate in front of other co-workers; just outside the dining room, not the greatest platform to solve the problems of our largest continent…

Although Rita was very lovely&smart&despite fantasizing about making love to her at night on the frequent, this conversation on Africa and our differing political opinions kept us from ever getting together.

Pussy was very few&far between in Boston, living in a secluded basement, going to a community college in the ghetto isolated me from the world (a.k.a. girls). Being back in your hometown, as a twenty year old college dropout can be more promising than it sounds. My situation gave me access to beautiful highschool girls bored with guys I was like in highschool, a walking hormone; I may just want to have sex with them too but at least I knew how to make it seem like I cared about what they were talking about&they knew we’d smoke a lot of weed together too…

One girl, who was still in highschool, gave me my first blow job; but it was quite obvious this girl had plenty more experience in this department . All that could go through my mind was: She’s exotic, sexy, gorgeous… &just turning seventeen. Her name is Sadie…

During the fall of what would have been my junior year of college, instead of chasing I was bussing tables at a historic (dull) restaurant living in my parent’s basement.

One fine morning I geta call from Sadie around 10:00, she wants me to “buy her cigarettes”.

So I pick this bitch up, we ride to the local gas station, grab a pack of Newports&we went back to my house. We get into a conversation about getting arrested&all that bullshit, she seemed to get off on the whole ‘bad boy’ persona, so I began to tell her about a time just before I graduated high school, right around the time I was her age, a gun was put to my head by a police officer…

After playing beer pong&smoking weed all night with five or six guy friends, I drove two younger friends&myself back to our neighborhood; but one of them wanted a tin of chewing tobacco before he got dropped off. He was still under eighteen at the time so I had to grab the tin for him. We stopped at a local store to grab the dip, I parked my ‘98 Accord&walked into the convenient store.

The place was dark, but still lit dim in certain back areas, no one was inside but the door was still open. An alarm system panel began beeping to my right as soon as I entered so I left&drove away.

- Yo man, it’s past midnight our drunken asses should’ve known it was closed, everything in this boring-ass town closes before ten

- Oh shit, well how the fuck did you just walk in then? I saw you open the door…

- Yea the place is wide open, but half the lights are shutoff and there wasn’t a single person inside

- Well, what the hell John, drive me back there dude, I’ll go grab the tin for myself!

It was a wide open/closed convenient store, sounds confusing but that is how it was; being intoxicated, I let the sixteen year old in the back of my car convince me to drive back there.

I parked at the store next door, gave my friend a Penn State University sweatshirt&hat, so he could conceal his identity, then he went into the store.

Within two minutes a cop showed up (‘cause I had already setoff an alarm when I went inside the first time) so my buddy rushed out of the store dodging the pig, heading for my car at first but once he realized the cop was hot on his trail; he bolted for the woods across the street . The cop chasing him took a digger, rolled to his feet&pulled out his gun approaching the Accord. At this point, my friend who went into the store was long gone, running away. The pig, with gun in hand, finger on the trigger, approached my driver side window,

- Take the keys out of the fuckin’ ignition! Get out of the vehicle, hands on your hands and down on your fuckin’ knees!

He gets my other passenger&myself out of the car aiming his pistol inline with the left side of my temple. He made us lay flat on our stomachs with hands on our heads, took my keys&then continued to pursue our friend…

I tried to convince the pigs I had no idea he was robbin’ the store or who he was but this backfired when he ended up ditching the Penn State sweatshirt&hat I gave him because I was wearing the matching Penn State t-shirt. Being very drunk&stoned it took awhile to realize I just had a gun put to my head(by a man sworn to protect no less).

Sadie ate this story up while we smoked a bowl in my driveway. She was the type of young impressionable girl to be into that sort of story. We got sky high, she opened her brand new pack of cigs, smoked one, then we went into my basement. She sat down on my couch and picked up a Good Will Hunting DVD on the coffee table, she had never heard of the film. Neglecting her teenage naiveness of classic movies, I sat down next to her&went in for a kiss.

We made out for about five minutes then she began to strip, bein’ the fuckin’ amateur, I couldn’t get her bra undone so she did it herself. Sadie was a tall blonde with beautiful budding breasts that must be more of a burden than a blessing for a seventeen year old. I don’t think she was a natural blonde, but what did I care it all looks the same when your getting blown. I threw on a mix cd on the stereo before things got too hot to stop, bumpin’ some Lil Wayne&other bullshit, the television in front of us was playin’ Kangaroo Jack, (sexy I know) on mute at least.

After a nice make out session, Sadie went down&began giving dome; she had me on full tilt, ready to fuck within just a couple minutes of head so I went to take her jeans off..

Every advancement was more than okay with her until I went for the pussy, there she stopped me from ripping her pants off,

- Um, most of the time, that would be cool, but not right now..

- Okay.. Why not?

- Well, I’m kinda on my period right now…

This kinda freaked the hell outta me but she was back sucking my dick before I could process so I couldn’t complain.

It would have been easy to orgasm within a minute while this blonde beauty, future porn star had my cock in her mouth but watching Kangaroo Jack while listening to Lil Wayne had me lasting, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes until I finally came…

Sadie woke me up a different morning a few weeks later, wondering if I could get her ‘more cigarettes’ again. My stubborn ass said no, I had stayed up late into the night watching Pulp Fiction&didn’t feel like waking up. Within a week, she asked if I wanted to “bang” through a facebook message. She was beautiful, loved to have fun, smoke mad weed, almost everything I desired from my dream girl; but she was still just a teenager, in highschool, asking me to fuck from facebook. I stalled&hesitated every time I tried to text or talk to her from then on, there was a maturity barrier that made things awkward between us. I began to get fed up&impatient&then she turned into a cokehead. She found a boyfriend soon after, who was glad to give her free coke as long as he was getting blown…

As another New England winter was approaching the dullness of living at home was getting to me, it was time to take a road trip. I drove up to Umass-Amherst, where several of my good friends went to school. I arrived the night before Halloween&attended a costume party at my friend’s house. He was dressed as Raoul Duke, his roommate: the Lawyer from Fear&Loathing; while I was dressed as Austin Powers.

Zoomass slamherst is a university for some thirty thousand undergraduates so going up there just to see two specific friends doesn’t mean you won’t still see several other people you know. It was strange to see guys who were considered such losers in highschool thrive at this giant college campus with seamless blending into the sea of drunken, confused&very horny male students.

The party began with some ‘pre-gaming’ as any good drinking night should. At Amherst that means more drinking than most do in an entire night, we play some beer pong for a couple hours, then it’s time to take shots. Raoul Duke, the lawyer and myself make a toast to madness as we take our shot, if only we knew how mad the night would get…

After we’d had enough beer pong, the party began to start; college parties don’t officially begin until you have a handful of girls arrive. The Lawyer pulled me aside,

- Yo man, I got some acid, you down to trip with me tonight?

- Oh shit, I dunno, I’ve never tried it before and I’m already kinda drunk

- C’mon man it’s just gona take this night to that next level, it’s a good time guaranteed and as your attorney, I advise you take a tablet of lysergic acid.

I had done mushrooms a few times before and had a great time but L:SD was a whole different drug. Although it’s a psychedelic too, acid’s a man-made chemical unlike the all natural shrooms I had been used to. Acid can be hard to find however&psychedelics were at the tip of my curiosity, far more than any addictive drugs like coke or heroin.

Being a college dropout, I had plenty of time on my hands to study drugs&people such as Timothy Leary who made LSD sound all the more appetizing.

The lawyer lead Raoul Duke and myself into the backroom of their apartment, opened up the top drawer of his bureau&handed us a tiny square piece of paper each; no bigger than a fingernail.

- Alright it looks small but trust me, it packs a punch, now as your attorney, I advise both of you to put the tab on your tongue and hold it there until it dissolves.

About a half hour later, the party was raging with hundreds of people dressed in ridiculous Halloween costumes packed into a three bedroom apartment. We continued to drink, play random games revolving around drinking too much alcohol but the acid had not taken effect yet. By now the piece of paper had dissolved, so I found Raoul Duke in the middle of the party to ask him what was up,

- Yo how long this shit take to kick in? ‘Cause I’m pretty drunk but that’s it, nothin’ special.

- Be patient my man, it’s been about forty-five minutes. I’m gonna roll up a blunt, we’ll blaze it down then you can tell me how you feel.

Raoul Duke I knew since middle school and I had never seen him smoke a butt, but here he was in full disguise; chain smoking cigarettes with the little holder to match, Hunter S. Thompson would’ve been proud.

Less than five minutes later, the lawyer lead me out to the front stoop where he&Raoul Duke lit up a fattie…

As we passed the blunt, the acid took hold. It was the funniest of feelings, just a slight tingle throughout the entire the body at first then the high rushed to the brain.

A couple campus police officers came to the door to try&calm the raging party down but the lawyer wasn’t having any of it. Making a mockery of the entire situation he slurred drunken babble in their faces, as I was sky high cackling up behind him. They realized quick, any effort was useless&made their night rounds of ruining the fun to another party. The lawyer, Raoul Duke and I then finished up the blunt&went back inside to check on the party…

The music swept away all thought, emotion or feeling I was having. I took a seat in the living room, just kind of melting into a recliner chair; my mind sinking into the house music blasting from the stereo speakers. At this point, I was functioning as a human being at the near minimum level, eyes half open, in an LSD/blunt induced coma, when a very attractive co-ed sat down on the arm of the chair I had absorbed into. I might of stared at her because I couldn’t think outside myself, but she was gorgeous. We sat there in silence, excluding the drunken screams and very loud music, for a good 20 minutes before I mustered up the courage to ask,

- What’s your name?

- Hi! I’m Amy, what’s yours?

- John but you can call me Austin tonight..

- Hah, okay, Austin, is Dr.Evil or his cat around?

- Uhh nah, you mean Mr. Piggelsworth? we’re safe for now but you never know..

- Hah. Do you goto school here?

- Oh no, I dropped outta college last year, my friend’s live in this apartment, they told me they were havin’ a party so I decided to drive up for the night. What about you, you a student here?

- Yeaa, I’m a sophomore, living in a dorm in southwest

- Awesome, what’s your major?

- Native American Studies

- Wow, big fan of Indians myself, oh I mean Native Americans, what a great major

- haha yea, it keeps school interesting

We both stopped talking, staring deep into each other’s eyes for just a quick second before she looked off. I was curios to know if she had any idea how hard I was tripping but there was now way to interject that into the conversation.

- Listen my dorm room isn’t too far away, you wana get outta here, it’s a lot quieter there, we can get to know each other easier…

And so there I was getting lead to a sexy sophomore’s dorm room tripping on LSD for the first time, high as a motherfuckin’ kite…

Next thing I realized we were in her dorm already, she sat down on her bed&signaled me to sit down next to her. The room was very bright, not in terms of lights but the colors were radiating. This girl’s dorm room was plastered with pink&purple everywhere, fuzzy pillows, a giant beanbag chair and a vast array of clothing scattered about.

I don’t think Amy would’ve been able to convince me to leave the party with her if she wasn’t drop dead gorgeous given the fact I was tripping sack. She got straight to the point&took off her shirt before we had so much as kissed, she had amazing tits, the type that looked a little small but once she was undressed her dainty pink nipples could get any straight man hard. We made out for what seemed like an hour, I was still too distracted by the color flares popping out at me to take things to the next level. She guided my hand down her pants and I managed to pull her pants off and put a few fingers in her already wet pussy. She began to moan&pull on my cock from inside my jeans, despite the acid, I said fuck it&was ready to have sex with this beauty. Amy un-latched my belt&started to pull off my jeans… Then her roommate walked in. The roommate let out an immediate shriek like she had never seen or heard of two people trying to have sex before, and ran out of the room almost in tears. Must be the religious type I thought, Amy told me to sit tight while she went to talk to her…

My suspicion that trying to have sex on LSD, for the first time, was a horrible idea began to reveal itself as more than mere suspicion. I could over hear Amy and her roommate talking out in the hallway,

- Didn’t you see the scrunchie on the doorknob? I thought we talked about this..

- Yea I know; it’s just I mean, it’s like the third time this has happened and it’s just the second month of school. I’ve never even seen that guy before, does he even go to school here? He looks older, why did you have to come back here Amy, you know it makes me feel uncomfortable…

Amy came back into the room, alone, and jumped on top of me, starting to kiss me all over.

- Woah, woah, what happened out there, with your roommate? Is she gonna be coming back?

- Not for like an hour or so, I told her to take a walk or somethin’, she needs to respect my privacy, you know?

As she reassured me her roommate would no longer be a problem, she slipped off her shirt and panties and mounted my crotch. I swung her down onto the bed and made my way down to her pussy. She started to moan like crazy as I began to eat her out&soon enough we had both forgotten about the roommate. She told me she wanted ‘my hard dick inside her’ and I wasn’t one to disappoint a beautiful wet co-ed.

As I got up to remove my boxers, there was a hard knock on the door. We both sat in silence for a couple minutes hoping whoever it was would just go away but it was followed by an even harder knock…

- Who is it?

Amy sheepishly asked.

- Campus Police, we were told there’s an unsigned guest in this room, could you open the door please?

- Oh no, you must have the wrong dorm, it’s just me in here, trying to sleep, gotta lot of work to do in the morning…

- Well we have your roommate out here and she’s saying there’s an older male who doesn’t goto school in there, who also appears to be on a lot of drugs, could you just open the door?

I hustled to get all my clothes back on, sweating uncontrollably, my mind was racing, what to do? Where to go? How the fuck did that bitch know I was on drugs?

Amy looked at me in disbelief, I looked all around the room in a frantic state looking for some secret trap door or an amazing hiding place; but my eyes stopped at her window. I walked over to it&looked down; she was on the third floor&the jump to the ground would break a leg or two, no doubt. There was hope however, a Coca-Cola delivery truck was parked directly below her window, making the fall around two stories rather than three, my heart was beating out of my chest…

Amy said sorry&made her way to open the door for the campus police, she knew I was in trouble but could was hoping to find a way to spare herself. There was no way I could face them, answer any incriminating questions in the state I was in. I was done chasing Amy, I kicked out her window screen&as she opened the door, I jumped out her window…

The rest of that winter was brutal, harsh, depressing, unforgiving and frigid. Spending most of my time at work bussing tables or hanging out in my parent’s basement made for a very uneventful season.

Being up in the mountains for my freshman year of college was great because despite the freezing cold at least I had plenty of drinking buddies, attractive&horny college pussy and snow boarding to keep me entertained.

As a sophomore, I was living in Boston during the winter so I had an entire city to roam around, not to mention my own apartment to smoke weed in.

This winter all I had was a dog, two cats and a few good friends still stuck in town with me, to keep me from dying from an overdose of boredom&cold.

Somewhere around Thanksgiving, I became fed up with masturbation. I hadn’t had any pussy since Amy or Sadie but jerking off just wasn’t doing it for me anymore.

I’m from a beach town that is thriving in the summer but covers itself deep into isolation during the winter months. Most of my friends were off still living the college dream while I was stuck with a day job, living at home.

After not jerking off for quite some time, I began to have wet dreams once a week or so; this did not help my growing case of severe depression. Trying to be monastic in a country that runs off it’s people’s sex drive is difficult, to say the least. I was lost in the abyss of my own mind, I was never happy unless I was stoned; so, I got stoned as much as I could afford to.

I’d work the day shift at the tavern, eight a.m. to just about four p.m., giving me enough time to speed home&light a bowl at 4:20. Without music&marijuana, my heart might’ve given out that winter from shear lack of will to live anymore; but the beats, rhymes&smoke kept me going.

Spring came not a moment too soon&I moved off the island I was stuck on, to a small city nearby with a couple co-workers. We rented out the bottom floor of a house right on the water with real cheap rent, the location couldn’t have been better but the people I had surrounded myself with couldn’t have been worse.

It was a two bedroom, one for me, and one for a couple ( a waitress and chef that worked with me at the tavern). It’s hard enough to live with any couple but this was no ordinary couple. The waitress was a drug addict, nympho and the chef was an all work, no play, type of cat. At the time, any living situation seemed to be an improvement from living in my parent’s basement.

The waitress&chef would have sex at the strangest times, around three or four in the morning most of the time. The nympho/waitress would moan like she was a friggin’ pornstar, and just as fake as one too.

I met up with a friend late one night to smoke a blunt, returning home I walked into my kitchen, sometime after midnight, to the waitress ass-naked in a verbal fight with the chef… it was a house of pure insanity. Hip hop&weed were my fuel for any happiness but we had an old lady living on the floor above us, who would stomp like crazy to even the slightest bass knock from my stereo.

My friends came back from college around mid-May but I had already moved away, both in the physical&mental form. They still loved to masturbate&get drunk all the time, I had become a loner wet-dreaming stoner who saw college life for the facade it was. When we did hangout, they would try to get me drunk, I would try to get them stoned&the awkward middle ground didn’t work for anyone.

There was a small local library by my new beach house, I decided to checkout one day after work; this is when I discovered Buddhism. I had become fascinated by the Dalai Llama and the Buddhist way of life but never wrapped my head around it until I read books by His Holiness and Thich Nhat Hanh. After my first encounter with Buddhist literature I couldn’t stop, I tried to read every book on Buddhism they had in this library even reading certain titles multiple times over. Buddhism helped me in ways that are most unexplainable, teaching me the fundamental benefits of meditation and how to cope with my growing loneliness. This vast spiritual religion uncovered the budding knowledge within, cultivating inner peace&tranquility into my soul.

I spent most of the upcoming summer sitting on the beach in front of my house, smoking alone in my room listening to music, watching netflix documentaries&entrenching myself in the ways of Buddhism.

Senior

By the fall, of what would have been my senior fall semester at a four year university, I had run out of money, quit my job&moved back in with my parents. I tried to move back to Boston but jobs in the city for college dropouts with no skilled labor experience pay minimum wage; rent in a small, compact city (Boston) is through the roof.

Christmas break that following winter did not come soon enough, although I wasn’t even in school, my town gets much more alive when everyone that still is in college, comes back home for vacation.

The Lawyer and Raoul Duke, on break from Amherst, brought back some LSD. It was the day of the winter solstice, hours before a blizzard&the Lawyer and I drove over to Raoul’s house…

We dropped a tab and a half of lysergic acid each, this was just my second trip on acid&I was not prepared for the incredible high. We sat watching television in silence, awaiting with patience for the LSD to take a hold of our imaginations.

Similar to the effects felt upon entering Amy’s room, that strange night more than a year in the past, the colors of people’s clothing (in particular- females) on the television began to pop out in very vivid ways.

After a half hour of channel surfing, we all began to feel the acid&stepped outside into the blossoming winter to smoke a joint.

We walked out, into mid-morning light flurries, and lit up an herbal jazz cigarette.

Once again, not even halfway through our smoking session, the acid had grabbed our minds. The snow began to pickup, an every single one of our imagination’s was captured by the transformation into winter taking place right before our eyes.

Raoul’s backyard had a pool with a four foot fence surrounding it, beyond the fence was about thirty feet of woodlands before the next house. With the exception of a few evergreens, the trees past his yard were equipped with plenty of vast leaf-less branches preparing for today, the beginning of winter.

After we finished the joint&were sufficient in the stoned department&tripping our balls off; on the most potent drug I’ve ever ingested, none of us moved a muscle. We had become mesmerized by these trees that stood before us; the blizzard that was hours away when the Lawyer&I got to Raoul’s house, was now taking place. Snow began to fall heavier, the wind gusting&the blistering cold made it’s presence known.

The true phenomenon happening was our relationship, an esoteric connection with these trees surrounding us. For once in my life, I could tell in the clearest detail that the trees were living organisms. Everyone one of them was rotating in a circular motion, appearing almost in rhythm in their movements; bending and swaying to the harsh demands of the snow, wind , an incoming winter.

The Lawyer, as he later described, saw what he believed to be Christmas lights on the tips of the tree branches, illuminating the darkening forest. This description still reminds me of a famous story of a monk, in which he explains how it is possible to envision a flower in full blossom on a plant regardless of the season.

After a couple hours of nothing but observing this supernatural occurrence, the cold crept into us, as the snow on the ground grew taller, we headed inside.

Twenty minutes later, Raoul Duke and the Lawyer begun playing video games, one of the latest modern warfare violent/militaristic/unrealistic titles. I detested the game while I was tripping&still couldn’t get over what was taking place right outside the door, nature….

Fed up with the video games, I ventured back out into the winter solstice blizzard, alone. I could’ve spent an entire day studying these trees, it was some kind of inexpressible happening; a force of the mind creating the setting around me, revealing the true absolute power&beauty of life.

I walked outside of Raoul’s backyard’s gated area, attempting to immerse myself further into the scenery. The storm was in full effect, a foot of snow on the ground&what was once flurries was now a constant stream of steady snowflakes enveloping everything.

Leaning up against a Japanese maple tree, in deep concentration&amazement, I suddenly became dumbfounded. This is what had become of my life, no university could teach this experience, no amount of money from a well-paying job could give me this opportunity but growing up, nobody explains this to you.

After awhile I went back inside to see what Raoul and the Lawyer were up to. Now they were done with the video games, Raoul seemed panic stricken, almost nervous,

- Yo, what’s up?

- Not much maan, kinda in a bind, my dad’s gonna be comin’ home in an hour or so…

- Shit, that’s no good, can either of you get a car?

- Nah man, not sure I could drive even if I did, you know?

- Yeah I hear you, alright, well guess we gotta find someone to get us the hell outta here…

Rifting through my cell’s contact list, hitting up anyone with the possibility of picking us up, I was able to get our buddy Maxwell to agree somehow. We were in quite an explosive situation, if we stayed at Raoul’s house which all of us wanted to, his dad would come home to three guys tripping out of their minds. That would not go over too well, at all; but on the other hand, who wants to pickup three guys tripping?

An hour went by and there was no sign of Maxwell,

- Yo John, where the hell is Max?

- I dunno man, he said he’d be here soon last time I talked to him

- Well we gotta get outta here now, my dad could be home any minute!

There was a little over a foot of snow now on the ground so we agreed it’d be easier for Maxwell to pick us up at the beginning of Raoul’s neighborhood; so we started walking…

We trekked through the blizzard to the edge of the neighborhood where Maxwell arrived to pick us up. After warming up in the car, our next order of business was to obtain more marijuana. The one guy in town willing to sell us an eighth despite the extreme weather was a local rapper who sold weed on the side, his name’s Kurdt.

Kurdt hooked us up with a fat bag and we went to a secluded parking lot to roll up. Now Maxwell had no idea we were tripping, figuring he might be less inclined to come give us a ride if he knew our total situation, I had failed to mention it during our phone conversation. At this point however it became evident there was something up with the Lawyer, he was a whole different level of high than Max had ever seen before; soon it became very noticeable.

The Lawyer was tall, weighed about two hundred and twenty pounds&was an infamous drunken brawler at Umass-Amherst. The Lawyer was somewhat of an in-the-closet type of artist, very talented drawer, anything from cartoons to borderline surrealism, but kept his ability to himself most of the time; with some sudden outbursts of magnificent artwork&brilliance. He was a heavy drinker (let us not forget he attended slAmherst), also the occasional pot smoker&would try most drugs you put into the palm of his hand as well. The Lawyer is what some would call a jack-of-all trades, a delightful comedic genius&big teddy bear for the ladies, other times he’s a ferocious drunk madman; but when push came to shove, he was one of those guys you loved to have on your side.

If the Lawyer was a beer-bellied batman, Raoul Duke was his psychedelic, conversationalist robin. Raoul is skinny, short but could still drink most guys under the table, being the Lawyer’s drinking buddy will build your tolerance. He has always been fascinated with the underground world of sex, drugs and rock&roll since anyone of his friends can remember. He is the type of guy to drink, smoke, do whatever necessary to have a good time until the sun rises, talking your ear off well into the night. He’s confrontational about his opinions on just the urgent, very important matters such as professional sports, comedy films&extraterrestrials. Although he demands the most out of the people around him, he always means well.

After smoking a few joints, Max knew something was up with the Lawyer,

- Okay John, what the hell, this guy hasn’t stopped giggling since I picked you up, are you guys coked out right now or somethin’?

- Nahhh man, just feelin’ real high is all man, just real high

Mr. Duke sprang in from the back to interject, not helping to assure Max of anything, wearing sunglasses&a cowboy hat in the midst of a blizzard at night.

- Alright yeah your right, we took some acid earlier today so we’re still trippin’ pretty hard right now

- What?! Isn’t that shit fuckin’ crazy man, woah, well what’s it like, I mean..okay..decsribe it to me in three words

LSD, like most hard drugs, is very difficult to describe to someone who’s never experienced the feeling it gives you, first hand; after much deliberation, I came up with:

- Who Am I?

Going to California for the first time, I had some great expectations…

Julia flew out to the east coast one summer to visit&we were inseparable for almost two weeks. We met&first connected at Bonnaroo but those summer nights we spent together was when I knew’ I couldn’t just let this girl walk out of my life. In the three years of knowing each other there were times of serious sexual tension especially when it was just us alone; but I never acted on this incredible, overwhelming feeling of attraction that came over me whenever she was around. I’ve never had any confidence when it came to making that cliche ‘first move’ on a girl, with Julia, I feared of ruining anything we had on trying to get in her pants.

Before last summer it had been years since Bonnaroo but the electricity of our compatibility did not skip a beat. After she took off to go back to UCLA that fall, I promised her I would be getting my ass to LA that spring to see her.

So there I was, driving fresh into Los Angeles direct across the country all the way from New England. I had went over&over, rehearsing in the back of my mind what my first words to Julia would be upon seeing her again. Pulling into her drive way, she emerged from her house looking radiant&all I could mutter was a simple, “Hey, you look good”. She giggled, perhaps blushed a bit&gave me a receptive hug…

Over the next couple weeks she opened my eyes to the California ways&Los Angeles lifestyle. Amazing medical weed, delicious&fresh organic food, easy going laid back people everywhere, near perfect weather&gorgeous women all around.

A life full of east coast nightmares had become California dreaming all in a matter of what seemed a split-second. Going from another townie loser to another free spirit amongst a crowd of lost angels; Julia became my salvation. In order to prove my worth to her however, I couldn’t show her my love by living on her couch.

After spending almost two months as a couch potato in Venice with Julia’s friend Preston, he sat me down one morning,

- Hey man, you got any plans for today?

- Probably gonna go grab some sushi, maybe swing by the library for awhile, what about you, still working on that final project for graduation?

- Nahh, just finished it up last night man, came out real nice, I’ll show you it sometime but I did want to talk to you about graduation ‘cause I got some family flyin’ in from the east coast and some of them might need somewhere to crash. These last couple months have been a lot of fun but I gotta ask you to find somewhere else to crash… sorry bro, but you want to play some FIFA?

I had no hard feelings toward Preston, it was time to leave anyway; so I began scouring Craig’s list. Although I was maybe a thousand dollars away at this point from being another broke, homeless bum wandering Venice beach, I wasn’t giving up on California. I found a small, cheap apartment in north Hollywood… The place was a run down two bedroom, but it was cheap enough to afford if I could find a minimum wage job I thought; so I signed a six-month lease.

My roommate, named Lucy, was a struggling film maker by day& a crazy cat lady by night. She had three felines when I moved in, by the time I left, she was up to seven. Her fourth, she took in the night after I arrived, a one year old kitten, a stray fresh off the streets. Lucy named the cat Spencer, which neither him nor myself was very fond of, so I called him Sergeant Pepper.

Sgt. Pepper was a playful, daring, brave, courageous cat. Lucy had three female cats up to this point so they took a disliking to this new, male street-kitten as soon as he arrived. Sgt. Pepper began to follow me around, sleep on the end of my bed, try to grab my attention at all hours&remain playful without tiring for twenty four hours straight. Lucy would act dumbfounded by our bound&chalk it up to our gender being the reason, but it went much deeper than that.

Lucy was the type to spoil her cats, living off unemployment checks herself yet still feeding the cats both wet&dry food, had them drinking nothing but bottled water too. Sgt. Pepper went from a life under constant pressure to a life of luxury; off the streets into a secure, safe home. Lucy treats her cats almost like personal cuddle toys, not ever allowing them to venture out anywhere beyond the small apartment. Sheltering their lives, some of her previous cats had lived for over twenty years; this was entirely against my way of thinking but I tried to abide. Twenty years is a long lifetime for a cat, but would you rather live twenty years trapped in the same apartment all day everyday or live ten years but have the freedom to roam about where you feel?

From the first night we took Sgt. Pepper home, he was like an infant, small, frail, terrified of all his surroundings yet somehow comfortable&tranquil. He would keep me up all night for the first week or so, needing constant attention&care. Being unemployed, broke, almost friendless, in a foreign place with no girlfriend, Sgt. Pepper was the greatest thing to happen to me in awhile. Within a month, he grew a tremendous amount in a physical sense and also in becoming a warrior. I don’t fuck around with cats, they are after all just a smaller lion, the king of the fuckin’ jungle. Lucy fed him very well as I described before, and most days he would eat more meals than I would.

Sgt. Pepper’s loyalty was stemming from a beautiful deep-seeded understanding of our symbiotic relationship. He fed off my hunger and I fed off his undeniable presence; despite Lucy’s other cats disliking him with a passion he went about his business regardless.

Lucy may of known how to spoil&protect cats but I know how to kneel down very quiet, right beside Sgt. Pepper as he takes a long cat nap, put my mouth up close to one of his ears and whisper, “You’re a fuckin’ king”….

With the exception of Wilshire Boulevard& a few other broad Los Angeles streets, North Hollywood is quite isolated from the actual city. It also happens to be far away from the ocean, creating a dessert climate. NoHo is almost the anti-Venice, it’s where the low-level producers, and the others who leach off the movie-making business, go to find a cheap place to live so they can afford their beamers. Not all who lived there in my time were bloodsuckers however, living right next door to Lucy&myself&our cats was a band called The Funky Roosters…

I was able to find a job blogging for a music website that paid fifteen dollars for a well-written piece, so I asked if the Funky Rooster’s minded if I followed them around for awhile to write a review of them. The twenty to thirty days I spent with them was unbelievable but the piece on them I sent into the editor of the website got me fired. Needless to say the website was quite conservative, most of their coverage was devoted to bad emo&country bands. I thought they could use my help introducing them to music with some soul plus I needed the money; although my first couple entries got me paid, The Funky Roosters were too controversial for them& I guess so was I. This is what I wrote…

Allow me to introduce to you the latest phenomenon to conquer Hollywood. Funky Roosters is the name of the band/phenomenon that produced this happening. The Roosters are a duo, Rick&Tom, straight out of Minnesota. These two funk-soul brothers represent the definition of musical versatility, they switch off playing guitar&drums and both sing all their original vocals. Their knowledge of creating organized drumming chaos combined with incredible guitar pedal work, blends their natural funky groove together.

The first time you get a chance to meet this pair you mistake them for blood brothers for similarities in appearance&mannerism Their both around six feet tall, have dark hair&eyes with soft, almost feminine facial features. The one contrast in their outward appearances is Tom has very long curly locks down past his shoulders, while Rick keeps his hair short but still a bit wild.

If you take the time to get to know them, they’ll expose their differences while showing why they work so well together too. Rick is the more out-going, vocal leader of the group, Tom tends to be a conservative cat but can be more free-spirited.

Having the tremendous opportunity to spend almost a month with them, how found out how much creativity exists at deep levels of the human soul.

After both graduating from Colorado University, the two longtime friends decided to put every dollar, drop of blood, every sweat&tear into forming a professional funk duo. The two set out on a tour of the west coast, packing up most of their belongings, a couple thousand dollars worth of musical equipment&a collection of CDs ranging from Fela Kuti to William Shatner to The Black Keys; cruising out of the Minneapolis area in a van similar to the one from Scooby-Doo, with a less extravagant paint job.

After already traveling hundreds of miles on the journey of their lives, an apartment up in North Hollywood is where they’re inspiring trek collided with me. At the time I spent most of my time secluded in my room, watching porn, masturbating, smoking weed, playing Xbox, blurring any connection to the outside world. Being the type to stick to what I know, smoking weed is my main connection to getting an understanding of people of a similar but more towards men who might turn into friends. I offered to smoke my two new neighbors up but when both declined to take a toke, my shallowness caused a roadblock…

I soon found out for myself the true power of their musical mystery van. Regardless of if they were stoners or not, I was still interested in their music&writing about them so they agreed to let me tag along for awhile. Their chill ass van was able to demolish the roadblock my ignorance put up with ease. Being chaffeured around Venice, Santa Monica, Playa Del Rey&Hollywood

with a place to jam out, beautiful women, cold beers&herb waiting our arrival.

Walking the extraterrestial strip of Venice beach with the band, their different personalities began radiating from contrasting attractions they would focus on. Tom disappeared from a bookstore as if he had followed a homeless guy, mistaking him for the pied piper; leaving Rick&I searching the poetry section Without the slightest realization we began feeding off each other’s wisdom&one another’s love for good writing; establishing a common ground. Rick and I walked all throughout Venice until discovering Tom at a nearby coffee shop.

Having spent over an hour alone with Rick on our walk, he revealed his true colors as an intelligent musician with incredible style and personality. Overcoming adversity through legal troubles stemming from getting arrested with a tab of acid at a musical festival. At the time, he wore very long dreadlocks&believes he was the victim of profiling, but he’s white so I guess that’s impossible, right? Since then, being on strict probation, Rick has been on a mission to stay out of any hazardous situation without letting it compromise any artistic integrity. Rick has a sense paranoia when telling his side of the story of what went down at the music festival but has grown stronger from the experiences; with his head on his shoulders, he now focuses on the direction of The Funky Roosters.

A true connection with Tom was not made until we dropped some LSD together. Rick dropped us off in Venice&as the acid coursed through our veins we got eager to immerse ourselves into the beach. On our quest for midnight excitement we stopped dead in our tracks at the first palm tree we encountered while tripping. It appeared so much taller than normal, swaying in the gentle ocean breeze. Palm trees are a great metaphor for all of Hollywood, majestic in it’s beauty yet somewhat useless too.

We stumbled upon a group of twenty somethings oustide of a hostel located right in the center of Venice. One of the guys in the group was jamming on an acoustic guitar&gave his best rendition of “People Are Strange” by The Doors as we walked by. Close to the midnight hours, LAPD keeps an alarming prescence in certain spots of Venice known for their vagrants, this created a mixture of skepticity, paranoia&boredom for our trip so we retreated back to North Hollywood.

We conversated about conspiracies&2012 and other non-sense, read some of each other’s writing, listened to Hendrix&watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to close out an eye-opening acid induced experience.

Our final meeting would be at an awe-inspiring beachouse to watch The Funky Roosters jam in a garage. This last session helped me see how in their own unique ways, both Rick&Tom have left their mark in my memory. Forget the fortune and the fame if I could tour the west coast with Rick&Tom for the rest of my days, I’d do it every time.

We smoked that joint for what seemed like years, Billy, Joni, Michelle, Robert&myself up on the second story of Joni’s three-floor LA beachouse. Still feeling the ecstacy I took at the club, the music Rob was playing now soothed me, stoner hip hop giving off positive vibes. Drifting in an out of conversation, thinkin’ about how good In N Out would be; I was oblivious to the heavy amount of flirtation going on between Joni and Billy. Michelle and Mikey seemed a little dazed and confused too, maybe just graduating college had that effect on them. Although I was in a state of disillusionment, overwhelmed by amphetamines, Billy seemed to be connecting very well with Joni…

Every time before that night, Joni&I hung out it was an amazing night, filled with bong rips, good conversation and great music. Don’t know if I’ve ever met another chick who has a taste in music that compares to Joni, her aura was intoxicating. Although we had become somewhat intimate, we had made out just once, nothing more, at my Hollywood apartment. We had been chillen on my couch watchin’ a movie for a couple hours before I mustered the courage to move in for the kiss. A few minutes after I had her sweet tongue down my throat, Lucy, my roommate, barged into the apartment from a night on the town, very drunk. Joni took this as time to leave&left me to fantasize about her blazing blue eyes, long, smooth blonde hair, tight ass and slender physique all night.

Billy had hit it off earlier at the hotel party with Julia, now he was at it again with Joni. She flat out ignored me all night an appeared to be at the whim of every utterance of Billy. While I got into a conversation with Martin&Michelle about Tupac’s tattoos, Billy&Joni slipped out of the room together…

I was so confused, it was all in front of me at the beginning of the night where did I go wrong? Was it the ecstacy? The alcohol? The weed? The bitches? Billy? was it me? Or is this the type of shit that always goes down in the city of lost angels, fuckin’ California…

After exhausting every possible resource in California, it was time to retreat back home. Feeling ashamed and a little defeated yet fortunate for being able to fly back all in one piece&not in a casket. At this point, I was malnourished, feeling at a loss for having such promise in front of me during my stay in California yet it all had somehow vanished; as if it were all just a mirage in the desert…

My flight back home coincided with America’s so-called ‘independence day’. I decided this would be a decent way to avoid too much crowding, fly on a holiday that’s worthless to me, but cherished by the patriotic masses.

What came as an unexpected bonus were the fireworks.

Mid-flight looking over the broad American landscape, I witnessed hundreds of bright, colorful explosions from thirty thousand feet in the sky…

When you look up at a firework from the ground it seems to be as high as the moon. Looking down from a plane, the shallowness of our existence can find a vivid picture from the minimal height our extravagant explosive bursts obtain. On the otherside, it speaks volume just how far we’ve come with our flying mechanical birds, devised in the dreams of 17^th century philosophers, your now able to watch television&internet porn 30,000 feet in the air. It wasn’t easy decision to abandon all the hopes&dreams of living Vincent Chase’s lifestyle&almost retreating back to my parent’s house but the splendid display of fireworks gave me faith I had made the right decision.

The homecoming was bittersweet.

Old friends were happy to see me again, good friends wondered why the hell I came back. Truth is I didn’t want to go back, I was in love Julia&Los Angeles&California&It’s weed&weather; but my opponent became lady liberty herself&it was her trials I wasn’t ready for.. Yet.

Being back home was tough, no model/actress LA pussy everywhere you turned, no medical grade, fresh, high-potent blends of indica&sativa Cali buds. It wasn’t being broke at home that depressed me ‘cause I was broke in Los Angeles&it didn’t bother me as bad. After all, what good is money? you can’t smoke it or fuck it…

The simple, sublime joys of summertime kept my imagination alive. Floating down the local creek with beers&spliffs, throwing an illuminated frisbee under the stars, playing intense amounts of beer pong&smoking joint roaches ‘til the sun rose…

When I awoke from a month long summer daze, I was in my very comfortable, soft queen-size bed upstairs in my parent’s house awakening from a long mid-day drunken nap…

I walked downstairs to find my sister’s beautiful blonde friend, the same one I had made out with a year ago, adjusting herself in a mirror.

- Oh, hey Martha, watsup?

- Not much, helping your sister babysit your brother while the parental units get wasted, what are you doin’ tonite?

- I don’t know, just kinda wokeup

- Yeaa, we tried to wake you up for dinner, we got some pizza but you didn’t respond even when we tried shaking you…

- Oh yea, hah, early morning drinking on the beach will do that to you…

She giggled at this remark, maybe thinking I didn’t seriously get wasted sometimes as soon as I woke up, but that was the extent of my life…

I had gone to Los Angeles for Julia, plain&simple, but what I did not foresee was the effect California would have on my psyche, an everlasting feeling. California has a certain way of penetrating you, striking the core of your soul, giving you that feeling of freedom or liberation, what some call manifest destiny.

Meeting people, beautiful sunshine girls like Joni&Michelle, seeing the transformation of Billy Shears, Venice beach, Hollywood, Santa Monica, the weather&cannabis, Los Angeles is almost it’s own country. Julia had become enveloped by this lifestyle in her four years of school, I had a six month crash course in it…Take an aimless stroll down the Venice strip, at night, ‘round ‘bout midnight, and discover for yourself the creatures that appear in this darkness, shadows reveal themselves…

As I shook off my daze, my cellphone was vibrating…

- Hello?

- Hey John, it’s Martin… George’s little brother.

- Oh, what’s going on man?

- Not much bro, jus hoping you could go to the packie for me and pickup some booze?

Martin was seventeen at the time&soon to be a highschool senior. Maybe it was the pity I felt for him, knowing how long&tedious the highschool years can be plus the fact I was still a little drunk from the morning…

- Yea sure, why not? You want to pick me up?

- Thanks! Yea man, be there in five minutes…

A half hour later I was climbing into the passenger seat of Martin’s truck.

- So what’s George up to these days, how come my old roomie couldn’t make a run for you?

- Oh, you know him, out with the girlfriend, I think. I don’t know, he’s always with her, sleeps at her place most nights too…

Although I felt bitter Martin couldn’t get booze from his own brother instead of hasslin’ me, I also was envious of George. Him&his girlfriend, Pam, had been dating since they met in Boston, the year we lived together&have continued to have a great relationship years after.

I grabbed Martin some cake-flavored Vodka upon his request. Being seventeen didn’t stop Martin from getting more pussy in a weekend than I get in six months. This vodka that tastes like cake must be a main tool of his ability to get highschool girls to undress, I thought to myself. Martin wasn’t fat but a little overweight, always wearing baggy clothes didn’t help his case much. He was a fun guy to be around, like his older brother&wise beyond his years. Being five years younger than George&I didn’t stop Martin from drinking&smoking with us before he was even in highschool. By this time, entering his senior year, he was a head honcho at school. Having a big brother to show you the ropes is a tremendous advantage, especially earlier on in life through highschool&into college.

As a token (pun intended) of his appreciation, Martin offered to smoke a blunt with me…

- I don’t know man, I was already real messed up this morning, although an L sounds appetizing, I got no buds to throw down, I’m broke as joke…

- No worries man, think of it as a tip for your services, plus I’ve got plenty of tree. I started slangin’ a bit while you were in LA…

We parked at a local conservation land, in other words somewhere you can park your car in the middle of nowhere, common throughout our quaint New England town. Martin handed me two big buds of weed, not the grounded up mary jane, I mean the dense nuggets that look like christmas trees, the form of marijuana before man puts his hand all over it&crumbles the flower from stem.

Now for those of you who are not familiar with the process of rolling a blunt, I will describe the details. Your two ingredients are a cigar, dutchmasters&game are preferrable but swishers, white owls, backwoods or phillies will also do the job; and of course, herb, at least a half gram but a real blunt should have a gram or more. Marijuana when bought from your local dealer will either be in what are called ‘popcorn’ nugs, larger buds that sometimes look like a christmas tree flavored lollipop or the weed will be ‘shake’, which means it is already broken up like you see tobacco. In order to get your herb to pack nice&tight into the blunt you must break down all your buds into shake, making it easier to sprinkle into your cigar wrap. When you purchase a cigar at your local convenient store it may seem inconspicuous, looking like a normal blunt you would light up&enjoy, but don’t allow outward appearance to fool you. Most single blunts sold theses days are designed to cut open, refill with marijuana, seal back up&spark it. Some come with a leaf, either green or brown, wrapped around the outside of the cigar, you must lick this leaf all the way up&down then it should slide off with ease. Almost every cigar has a center crease in which you can guide your fingernails down&split. You then dump out what is referred to as the ‘guts’, the tobacco filling. Where the guts/tobacco once was, you now fill with your grinded up buds, roll it back up like a map or scroll, stick the leaf back on&there you have a blunt ready to smoke…

Not a second before nor a second later, but just as I put the finishing touches on the blunt, there were flashing blue lights behind Martin’s car… Being in positions worse than this one, I stayed calm, putting the blunt and the little bud leftover into my boxers.

Martin seemed very anxious&nervous as the cop approached the driver’s side window,

- License&Registration… what are you boys doing parked here so late?

- Just waiting.. meet a friend here.. Sir

- Okay.. ( takes a long pause&sniffs around) well, you boys been smokin’? the smell of marihuana is very pungent in your vehicle.. based on my training&experience in the field, I can identify the scent clear as day.

This, of course, was police bullshit rhetoric 101. This square of a detective had maybe never even smoked weed, let alone knew anything about it; but the law states his “training” is a good enough excuse to do whatever he wants;

- Now before I strip search this car&find all your drugs, why don’t you hand them over now and save us all some trouble?

I would’ve told this pig to fuck off and go find himself a warrant, but the question wasn’t directed at me. You could see the sweat forming at the top of Martin’s forehead as he scrambled to find his bag of ganja in the center console. A minute later, Martin pulled out what looked like around a quarter of an ounce&handed it over,

- Here you go sir, that’s what I got on me, it’s not an ounce…

The total not being over an ounce was crucial because of the recent decriminalizing of marijuana in Massachusetts, any possession under an ounce was just a fine; like getting a parking ticket instead of getting arrested.

- Okay, I’m going to run your data now, Martin, sit tight…

I was hoping he would’ve been satisfied with the hundred dollar bag of beautiful ganja we had given up but, like most pigs, he was greedy for more… What we didn’t know at the time, one of Martin’s ‘customers’ had been caught smoking by the local police a few days earlier. Upon being threatened with being suspended or expelled for blazing on school property, he gave Martin’s name as his source for his pot.

Within a couple minutes of the pig telling us he was going to ‘run data’, his backup arrived on the scene& in a flash there was policemen on either side of the vehicle,

- Alright Martin, out of the vehicle…

They began a thorough search of his person, finding a pipe, digital scale&another bag of weed, around a half ounce in this one. They frisked him with violence&degradation, sliding their hands up into his genitals with fury&recklessness. I sat bewildered in the passenger seat, in a daze as to how I had even wound up in this predicament in the first place.

No longer than a month ago, I was in Los Angeles, where marijuana dispensaries litter almost every other street corner, one of it’s biggest industries but now I was being treated like a full blown criminal. I though to myself, ‘there is no way in hell these pigs are performing a search like that on me’.

- Okay, now you, John Gristan it is, right?

- Yup, that’s my full christian name alright

I retorted as I hopped out of the car, preparing to confront these devils of injustice…

- Alright Mr. Gristan, hands on your head,

- Do you guys have a warrant?

I asked in an intentional non-confrontational manner,

- Shut up you fuckin’ punk! What the fuck did I just say, hands on your goddamn head, now!

The officer shoved me into Martin’s car, as I bounced back off the car, he began to repeat himself,

- I said hands on your fuckin’ head dipshit!

He then proceeded to push me a second time into the car, as he went to grab me, I blocked his hands in a pure defensive move,

- He’s resisting!

As his partner ran over to assist with the assault, the officer grabbed me by the shirt, ripping it all the way down the front, spun me around twice, picked me up a few inches off the ground then threw me face first into the dirt. The right temple of my forehead, right shoulder-blade and right hip were all being grinded into rock&miscellaneous other sharp objects as this two hundred twenty pound pig laid on top of me with a fellow pig assisting with the abuse. As the officer dug his knee into my back, his partner threw on handcuffs so tight the nerves in my wrists wouldn’t feel right for months afterwards.

- What the fuck am I being arrested for?

- Who the fuck said you were being arrested?! Now sit down&Shut the fuck up

After they were finished assaulting me&I was in handcuffs on the ground, they proceed to search my pockets. All they found, to their surprise, was an iPod, cellphone&wallet; I was still face-first on the ground making it easy for me to conceal the blunt&weed I had in my boxers… They sat Martin&I down&proceeded to search every crevice of Martin’s car.

- Yo why couldn’t you just listen to them, John? They were goin’ to let us go man, why’d you resist?

- Shit, I don’t know, maybe you’re right but I can’t just let someone search me without probable cause, sorry man didn’t mean to get you in trouble…

Being young&naive, Martin blamed me for the cops behavior and he was right in some ways. My personal experiences had taught me never to let pigs degrade you, no matter the cost or circumstance.

After ripping apart Martin’s car, the pigs found one bottle of cake flavored vodka, three digital scales, two pipes and four ounces of fine herb. We were both arrested on charges of criminal possession of Marijuana with intent to distribute. What their findings did not include was the fat blunt and leftover nugget still chilling in my boxers. A half hour later, Martin&I were in holding cells across from each other at the local police station. Martin was frantic, distraught over how his parents would react.

- Do think they’re gonna fuck us man? I can’t stay in jail overnight, my parents are gona tear me a new asshole

- We’ll be alright man, jus gota keep cool, we’ll be out of here in an hour tops

This not being my first time in prison, I knew the main thing was to keep the mind from breaking down, even an hour in a prison cell can do serious psychological damage. I sat up in a standard meditative position, inspecting the inside of the cell I came across fascinating graffiti. Etched into random parts of the metal slab I was sitting on was: The Beatles, R.I.P. ODB, B.I.G., and 4:20. This reassured me that I was in jail for a reason, a higher purpose you might say, as much as it sounds crazy, this is where I belonged. Martin was taken to booking first, fingerprinted, mug-shot snapped, then released to his parents.

After waiting four or seven hours ( hard to tell time in lockup) to draw out my ‘sentence’, the pigs were ready to book me. Pigs assume when you resist their authority you’re an automatic guilty of some crime. When the pigs threw me to the ground to find nothing in my pockets, it took the officers aback. All the weed&paraphernalia in the car was Martin’s; but I was the twenty something long-haired hippie influencing a teenager; in their eyes I was the main criminal.

Getting arrested snapped me back to reality, it was a wake up call. When the cops threw me to the ground without regard&slapped the ‘cuffs on me, I knew there was nothing within my power I could do to stop them; all I could do was enjoy the ride.

In the midst of finger printing, I was able to have an intelligent conversation with the pig who assaulted me about his three children&how, in his opinion, he thought marijuana should be legal. When this was all said&done, he said I was free to use the bathroom in the corner of the room; still having beer-shits running through me from earlier that day, I rushed to the toilet. As I went to sit my ass on the cold, hard toilet seat, I noticed a long brown stick-like thing dangling from my nut-sack&no it was not a shit; it was the blunt I rolled in Martin’s car. It had survived throughout this process, still in my possession; so I wiped my ass, pulled up my pants, stuck the blunt in my pocket&walked out of the bathroom as casual as possible. The bail bondsman showed up a few minutes later, after a total near six hours in police custody I was released on $42.00 bail with a court hearing at eight the next morning.

When I arrived home, my mother was in her normal state: drunk. She began throwing a hissy-fit as soon as I walked in the door,

- Where the hell have you been?! I’ve been calling you all night, I needed a ride home from the bar, and what happened to your shirt?!

- I just got arrested ma, they cops ripped my shirt in half, threw me to the ground-

- Wow, you’re officially useless now, you know that? First you drop out of college, can’t keep a steady job, blow all your money on drugs and now you’ve brought shame to your entire family! Everyone in town is going to hear you got arrested, how do you think that reflects on me??

I had endured the physical abuse from pigs, laughing their assault off almost the second it was over. I had endured the mental abuse of sitting in a prison cell for hours but what I didn’t expect was the abuse from my mother, it broke down my spirit. She continued to berate&insult me in her typical drunken fashion until my soul felt like an empty basin of despair&loneliness. I attempted to stand tall to her degradation but it was all too overwhelming. I slunk down into a corner and began to ball my fuckin’ eyes out, crying uncontrollably.I sat there, wailing until my mother was disgusted enough&just gave up. She went to bed, trying to forget she ever had me as her son. My cat was the only one to make an attempt to console me, jumping into my lap&licking the tears streaming down my face. At this point he felt like my one friend in the world, my own mother was trying to convince me that I was less than a nobody; a space-less void sent down to Earth to cast misery&shame upon my family. I must admit she was convincing, I mean, who was I? Everything I had been doing for the past four years seemed like a farce, as if it could all be erased as easy as it happened.

After coming to the realization that my mother was a drunkard&full of shit, I wiped away the tears, took some deep breaths&lifted myself off the floor. That’s when I remembered I still had a blunt to smoke. I grabbed my iPod, Dr Dre headphones& a lighter, walking out the front door of the house to a beautiful summer night. Barefoot, in jeans&a plain white t-shirt, I began walking down the middle of the street in my quiet suburban neighborhood; without another soul in sight. I stopped about a hundred feet away from where I started, took out the blunt that had been through so much more than your average L&sparked it up.

I threw on a Bob Marley playlist as I took the first few puffs, staring into the cloud-less starry night sky. As “Get Up, Stand Up” rang through my ears, I continued smoking&walking.

I’m free now, I said to myself&that’s all that matters…