My Life: How I found out my Dad did drugs and a tale of LSD

That One Guy
Aug 9, 2017 · 16 min read
This is Me in Matt’s Basement bedroom circa 2000

I can remember finding out my father smoked weed. I was in third grade. This was in the days when parents could still legally leave there kids home alone and not have to fear incarceration or public shame if some accident were to occur. My buddies Dennis and Josh were over and we had just finished watching Juice. After the movie ended I remember Josh saying something along the lines of “you know your Dad smokes weed”. I felt ashamed and that quickly turned to anger and I remember wanting to hurt that little boy. I say little boy but both Josh and Dennis were older than I was. Dennis was a year older and Josh two. I didn’t know much about drugs but what I did know came from the DARE and McGruff, the crime dog. I knew they were bad but not much else. I knew people who did drugs were supposed to be bad as well and my father wasn’t bad. Something didn’t jive. I knew my father smoked. There were always ashtrays with KOOLS in them along with random rolled cigarettes but I never thought of my father as a bad guy before. I didn’t believe it and I was mad. But Josh knew better. Both him an Dennis had older brothers. Josh’s brother was a tall Mexican that wore a Starter LA Lakers Hat. He may have been a Latin King but I was in third grade and not much of that really mattered. He was always nice to me. I don’t remember what happened after that but I know I did feel shame towards my father. It was like something had changed, yet at the same time nothing had changed. I was forced to grow up a little that day and yet my ideas were based not on who my father was but on what I had been taught. It is hard to not feel angry towards the states educational system. Instead of viewing my father for what he was, a recovered alcoholic that used weed as a release; coping mechanism. Much like some use alcohol or Xanax, but for my father alcohol wasn’t an option. He was an angry drunk and had put himself into a rehab program when I was one. I later heard stories of how his body reacted when he withdrew. Muscles cramping and limbs contorting to the point he looked like a living T-Rex. It takes a strong person to find their faults and an even strong one to change them.

Packing a bowl.

It wasn’t until I was in eighth grade that I started to see my fathers drug use as a good thing. I smoked pot for the first time in seventh grade and was smoking on the weekends by eighth and daily by freshman year. The first time I smoked was with Mike. He’s now a detective, but back in the day he had serious anger and drug issues. I would attribute to the death of his mother. He is the same guy that drunkenly jumped a four lane state highway in his pickup truck, crashed into a few trees and claimed his car a stolen only to get off clean and clear. He now has a wife and four kids and is a real stand up guy. They say you don’t get high your first time. I definitely did not. The first time I got high was with Ryan. We used to have sleep overs a lot. I don’t think kids now a days have as many sleep overs. We were into skateboarding and guitars, SUBLIME in particular. We would skate all day the play guitar in his basement until his parents went to bed. We went outside his garage by a white swinging chair and smoked a little metal bowl. I remember going back inside and being super buzzed. I still remember his sister coming home, she wore a Penguins hockey jersey. I only remember this because she was so damn hot. I had a serious crush on her but she was 3 years older. She wasn’t a girl next door hot, she was an actual model. She did a show “So You Think You Can Model”, and even had a shoot some years later with Kobe Bryant. Poor girl ended up getting into some serious drugs and dying at a very young age. I still am friends with Ryan and can’t help but thinking about her when we get together. She used to buy us Camel Wides and drove a Dodge Shadow. The same car Ryan would take out when we were fourteen. I have a lot of memories with Ryan but most are before High School. Like how the FBI raided his house after we were phishing credit cards and buying massive amounts of streaming porn. This was in the wild west days of the internet, the days of AOL and Leisure Suit Larry. By High School we went our different ways. We had some of the same friends but most were different. He went to a lot of Raves and I didn’t.

Stoned on my 16th birthday

It was through our mutual friends that I got into other drugs. By this point I was smoking cigarettes and weed on a daily basis. I would walk over to Matt’s house in the morning to catch the bus. I would either stop by the abandoned house and chill on the deck and get high there or, if I had enough I would grab Matt and we would go behind the bushes by the bus stop and smoke there. The bus driver totally knew. She would make jokes about it and the way we smelled when we’d get on the bus in the morning. Looking back that was probably inappropriate but she was still a kickass bus driver. It was sophomore year when shit started to hit the fan. This was the year we started going to Matt’s Dad’s house during school. We would ride the bus to school, then walk two blocks to his Dad’s house. His Dad sold carpet and shared an upstairs apartment with a fellow drunk. I think he just liked being able to spend time with his kids whether the time was quality or not. Matt’s brother Brandon also hung around his Dads house during this time since his mother had kicked him out. He was older though and had graduated already. His girlfriend was this slime blonde we all called Tay-tay. A candy girl with the necklaces and bracelets to match. Brandon always got really cute girls. We would drink and smoke and play fuckish foolery all day then catch the bus back home. This is the same year I met Jenny, Tommy’s sister and my hookup on Acid. Jenny’s boyfriend was a guy named Forest and he’s was a Sailor gone AWOL. It was a summer day and we both took a green gel tab. After ingestion we went to Rink Side, a local arcade which proved to be the worst possible place to trip as one could imagine. I remember all the lights, and the show they put on. But it was the people that started to put me over the edge. Rink Side was the place to be and everyone from school was there and a kid on acid was quite the anomaly. Everyone wanted to talk and it felt like everyone knew, which they did. But this led to paranoia, “the cops are onto us” I remember saying. I could have said it or maybe just thought it but thinking back it seems completely absurd either way. I split from Forest and went with Matt and Dan to Denny’s. Denny’s was where all misfits would congregate. There was one guy, I remember him as a man but in reality he was just a kid, a few years older then I was. His name was Rob but everyone called him Bobert. A few months prior he could have been seen walking table to table asking the patrons if they had seen his crack rock. Not as a joke, no bullshit, he was looking for the crack rock he lost. We meet up with a few others and I remember Ryan saying, “you know what tripping is? It’s your brain bleeding”. Under normal circumstances I would have been mentally capable of dismissing such fuckery but this was not one of those times. I have always been a sensitive guy and as my self esteem decreased I physically sank lower and lower in the booth until my head was barley visible above the table. We caught a ride back to Matt’s house where I promptly went to lie down. At some point that night I blurted out, “we got to go back to Mexico”! Both hooligans began to laugh. They had no idea what I was talking about but still to this day I remember what I saw in my minds eye. It was a dream like state that only really existed while my eyes were closed. It was Kukulkan, the snake like God of Mayan tales. I saw him and he spoke to me.

This was only the first of many trips we took that summer. By the time we met Ken I was well versed in the drugs. Special K, Acid, Shrooms, Ecstasy, and coke were the most used at that time. I would run into Ken a few years later working for a moving company. He took me for a ride in his Subaru WRX. As fate would have it, Ken crashed that car and became paralyzed from the neck down a few months later. Dan, Matt and I were always low on cash and would usually swing by Serpent Safari and fill our pockets with coins from the wishing fountain to buy smokes. It just so happened that the Hindu at the quick stop in mall would sell me cigs. I had a bull shit “fake ID”, I say bullshit because I had taken my underage drinking ticket and falsified the birth date. Very low quality but it looked good. I held it above boiling water so the humidity would help me remove the transfer ink, then I just used a dull pencil to match the color and changed the date. But we need more money to get Acid and Ketamine. It just so happened that Ken was looking for a pair of rollerblades and I had just the pair. I sold him the blades for 3 hits of acid and 3 bags of K. One for each of us. This wasn’t blotter acid. This was straight from the bottle. The bottle was an eye drop like bottle. I held open my mouth and he shot a drop or two in my mouth. This was a very scientific process. Before it kicked in my pager went off. I had a green, see through pager. It was my house number and when I called back my mother told me that she wanted me to come home.

Looking back this was extremely out of the ordinary. I generally could come and go as I pleased with very little push back. My mother was for the most part very resistant to any ideas that her son was a druggie no matter what my father told her. My father almost always knew and to this day I feel remorse for causing issues in their relationship. My father would try to tell her when I was fucked up and she would, instead of confronting me, get mad at him for insinuating her son would do such things.

I told my friends what had just happened and like true friends that laughed at my expense. It was starting to set in that I would soon be tripping balls at home. I said good bye and walked the half mile between houses and through back yards to my home. When I got home the acid was starting to take affect and I knew I had to check in with my parents before shit got really weird. I walked upstairs and said hello and my father gave me the “I see you” look, which was this thing he did when he knew I was fucked up. It later would become “our thing”, we would later do it to each other. He separated his index and middle finger and brought them to his eyes and then pointed them at me. Not the most creative but it sent a clear message. I gave them the quick, expedited version of my day, made some Spaghetti’Os and retreated to the basement couch. I tried to eat but at one point it seemed as though I was drifting into the bowl and then back out. To prevent nausea I just put the food down. I tried laying down and closing my eyes. Wild thoughts raced, visions of chariots and god like figures filled a storyboard in my mind. Thats the thing with acid, shit really gets real once your eyes close. I laid on the couch for two hours before throwing in the towel. I had been down this road before and knew there was no chance of sleeping. The best I could hope for was to ride the wave undisturbed until morning. Then it hit me. I would write a note, saying it was 5am and I was going fishing. I grew up fishing, but never in my life did I wake up at 5 am, especially in High School, to go fishing. I creeped as quietly as I could. It is funny how you can walk about your house and not notice a thing but once you start to focus on stealth how loud even breathing becomes. And when your tripping balls, trying to grab a six foot fishing pole from the garage, and then walk back through the house and out the backdoor you might as well be a battalion. Atlas that is what I thought. So there I was 2am, fishing pole in hand standing on the back porch which over looked the High School and the busy road and what do I see in the parking lot but a fucking cop car. I froze. I tried assessing the situation but my current state made it difficult. Sometimes when under hallucinogens I could find myself having long drawn out conversations, or self talks. Does he see me? I don’t know. Is the car moving? Nope. What do I say if he comes over here? Hey officer, just getting ready for fishing tomorrow. And then continuing down the rabbit hole until something brings me back. When I finally made my way out of those thoughts I found myself still staring at the cop across the street. I decided I had to move and so I walked to the boat on the side of the house and when I looked back the cop was still in the same spot. I decided he didn’t see me and I could then make my way across the cul de sac and disappear between the hedges that separated the homes in the barbie style suburban neighborhood I lived. After making my way through the first set of homes I lit up a square. We used to call cigarettes squares. I smoked Marlboro Lights at the time. I walked through the desolate neighborhood trying to stay out of sight with thoughts of urban combat and what if’s parading my brain. It was a general rule that head lights were cops after 2am in our area. Luckily I didn’t see any and was coming up to the townhouses where Matt lived. Matt’s mother, Mrs. P was a wonderful women that knew what was going on. She was one of the first people to tell my mother I smoked which she denied even as Mrs. P told her she was literally watching us smoke on her patio. Luckily she was not home this night though. Mrs.P was a Flight Attendant and would sometimes have to fly in-between cities stay overnight. I had a great relationship with Mrs. P. I was a play on Eddie Haskell. Like an overplay so we both understood that I was full of shit, but a full of shit that was personable and hard to stay mad at. While approaching his row house I could hear activity and light coming from the three quarter closed garage door. As I got closer I could hear Dan, Matt, Brandon, and Ken. I peaked my head under the garage and a cheer of laughter came rushing back. I made my way under the door and into the garage when I saw Matt looking at me very puzzled. We were all under LSD so this wasn’t all that weird but then he said, “where’s your shirt”? It was then that I realized that while formulating my plan, concocting the letter, having a stare down with an unwavering cop, and trekking across the neighborhood that I had done so with a fishing pole and no fucking shirt.

Shark fishing the week before I was kickout of school and rehab.

Matt ran downstairs and got me a white tee. We all sat, the older two on one wall and the three of us on the other. We laughed and we smoked. Bowl after cigarette after bowl. The upside to dropping with your drug dealer. At one point the laughter grew silent as we watched Ken grab a three inch purple bud from his backpack and proceed to push it into his mouth. Chewing the bud and then washing it down with a giant glass of Tang. Laughter erupted from everyone except Ken who was obviously on a different fucking planet at this point. It was around this time that two others popped up from the darkness. Mark and Bobert came literally out of nowhere with a wild tale of their travels. They were also tripping and had walked from a town eight miles away. They told of a battle they had with a skunk. Who knows what actually happened. If I had to guess I would saw that they saw a skunk and they proceeded to run away. But the tale they told was much more entertaining. We smoked some more and went inside to kill the three bags of K I purchased earlier. The funny thing about K is the effect it has and the effect it has while on acid. I don’t know about mixing it with shrooms, I never had the chance. When taken by itself K gives you almost a choppy vision feeling along with the urge to not move. Almost like an extreme urge to stay still. You can move if you have to, but if not provoked one stays still. We called it a K hole. The choppy vision is harder to describe but it was almost like there was a series of vertical lines drawn through your sight and then they were staggered slightly. It was only there until you tried to focus on it. But when we took it on acid it was almost like your vision had the same lines but everything was now on an angle. Imagine looking at a TV with the staggered lines and then turning the TV to a 45 degree angle. Not the best analogy but I hope it gives somewhat of a picture of what we were about to go through.

We sat down on the couches. They were aqua -green in color and the cushions were the largest of any couch I had of have ever since sat on. I opened up my mini envelope of fun and poured the powder on the table. Opened my wallet and took my school ID from the sleeve and cut a nice size line. So did Matt and Dan. I want to say we counted to three but I think that is romanticizing the experience more the it really was. We sat there for what must have been 15 minutes or more. Stuck in a K hole. And then it happened.

At damn near 4 am there was a knock on the door. No one else was moving. It took me a minute but being the adventurous soul I thought I would get it. I walked down the hall which hung this red and clear mirror which I would eventually own a copy of myself though a girlfriend. As I write this, it lies in a tree in my front yard. A “decorative touch” my wife calls it. I looked at myself in passing and quickly though how big my eyes were. I loved this look. I loved how crazy I looked with big ass pupils. In later years the Japanese would adopt this look into there anime. But for me, it sparked feelings of happiness. Happiness I only found in drugs at this time. Drugs like acid, ecstasy, shrooms. Interestingly though is that the enlarging of pupils happens when around those we love.

While going to the door I imagined a candy girl. Remember, I am still completely fucked up and not thinking super clearly, and maybe just hoping for a female to arrive. This was a super retarded thought. It was 4am and I was thinking a raver girl was showing up. This wouldn’t have been totally out of the question given the current company but still kind of retarded. I opened the door and standing in front of me is a bald white male with very pronounced square like facial features. Like a bald neanderthal. I don’t know what exactly happened but I was told lated that I sprinted away from the door, jumped over the couch and hide from what I thought was the cops. I found out later the guy was just an older gentleman scoring some drugs from Ken. I would love to hear his side of this story. I could imagine opening a door to a house full of tripping fools, one of which just performed two Olympic sports, the Sprint ending in the Fosbury Flop over the couch. The night came to an end as the drugs wore off and the sun began to rise. It was this point that I really enjoyed. I really liked the ride, but the introspective ending to the wild ride is what it was all about for me. I had more in depth realizations during these early mornings then any other time before or since. These were personal thoughts though, some I may share and some I might not. Thoughts about what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong with my life. I made my way home wearing Matt’s white tee, which sat just a little too high so if I raised my hands my belly would show, and fishing pole in hand. I told my parents I caught two bass and then proceeded to go to bed.

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