the misadventures of smoking pot

i used to be a pothead. i used to love smoking pot. now, i don't smoke at all. i officially called it quits at age 28. but even for years before that (6-7 if i had to guess), my pot smoking habit dwindled and became smaller and smaller as i noticed i just wasn't enjoying the high like i used to.

i remember when i first started smoking pot. that shit was fun. it was dangerous too... not the pot itself... just the act of smoking it. i lived at home with my parents. so i had to hide it from them. i did most of my smoking outdoors so i had to hide it from cops. i had to hide it from friends' parents. it was like an unspoken pact. we're all gonna smoke a shit load of this stuff together and in unison pretend that we never touch the stuff in front of parents, teachers, and other authority figures.

and that was fun for years. just having to find pot was an adventure. when i first started smoking, it was the era of beepers and payphones. no one had a cell. we had to page dealers and wait for callbacks and use numerical codes. we had to walk far distances to meet up with dealers. sometimes dealers lived with their parents and we had to put on an act like we weren't there to make a weed transaction. sometimes dealers were hanging out somewhere far away. i didn't know a lot of dealers. if one of them happened to be far away... like a bus trip or something... it was time to make a bus trip. shit wasn't easy. but looking back, it was always an adventure.

then there was the actual act of smoking it. the biggest challenge was finding a place, usually outdoors, to do it. every now and then we knew someone cool or old enough who smoked pot openly at their place, but most of the time it was an outdoors adventure. this lead to me having knowledge of every cool place in north bergen... every park and odd back alley, train tracks and cliffs, and under that bridge where all those homeless people lived.

sometimes we'd try and play it off and walk down the street and keep it moving. to my memory, this actually had a 100% success rate. i've never been busted for smoking pot while walking down a street somewhere. it's funny to look back on that and think how the most obvious, non private way was probably the most effective.

then there were cars. we'd roll in crews. sometimes there'd be 2-3 cars all hiding out somewhere that we'd think was safe. hotboxing was always fun. we'd roll the windows up and keep them up till the smoking was finished and we were all suffocating in a thick cloud of marijuana smoke. and then, usually when the driver had enough, the windows would get rolled down, we'd air out, and then be on our way.... most likely to get munchies.

and munchies were awesome. we'd roll to diners or convenience store parking lots and just rot. it's almost as if that was the main event. we'd all get stoned out of  our minds and then find some place to sit and chill for hours. and i can't complain. i grew up around great scenery. we were always close to the hudson river and the new york city skyline. there was always something cool or stupid to do.... like steal golf balls from the driving range or race around town.

one time we were racing on kennedy blvd. there were two cars.... joe's and lucas's. we just finished hotboxing. we're doing 70 down kennedy and all of the sudden we hear and see cop sirens coming up behind us to pull over joe's car (the car i happened to be in). we pulled the car over into a quick chek parking lot where a crew of cops started to give us the business. the car reeked of pot. we were doomed. they searched the car and they searched us all... one by one they went through all our shit while the rest of us sat on a curb and watched. the cops made fun of us the whole time. finally, when they found about a dimebag's worth of pot, they turned to the line of us sitting on the curb and one cop says, "ok, who's is this?"

and in maybe the most clutch moment, my friend chet says, "mine." he didn't have to do it. i don't even think it was his, i think it was shared among us all. but he took the blame and if anyone else felt like me, we just sat and watched and felt awful that our friend was gonna take the fall for five of us. the cop asked chet to put his hands out. he then took the pot and threw it in chet's hands. he looked him straight in the eyes and said....

"eat it. eat the weed."

and chet, outdoing his own clutchness, didn't say a word. in one swift moment he lifted the weed to his mouth and ate it. the cops said we were lucky they were so nice, told us to stop fucking around and then they left (interesting side note, my other friend lucas, peeled off in his car just as the cops were about done with us. he broke a snapple bottle with his car as he did it. so it seemed really dramatic. the cops hopped into their two cars and pulled him over about three blocks away. he received several tickets. poor bastard got it worst than anyone that night).

but that was then. as time went on, people started to move out and get apartments. everyone got cell phones. getting pot became easy. smoking it was even easier. soon we weren't on the run from the law anymore. nothing was dangerous. we weren't exploring new ground or having ridiculous late night conversations in random parking lots. all of the sudden we were ordering pizzas and watching tv. and all of the sudden pot got boring.

and it makes me wonder if i was ever in it for the pot in the first place. looking back, seems like i was in it for an adventure.... for the right to say i'm having a really good time. i look back, and even though it wasn't perfect (cuz it wasn't... there were long waits that went no where, nights that we never found pot at all, times when we got bad shit, winters when we froze our asses off... i've had money stolen from me on a few occasions), when i wrap the whole thing up into one major experience, it was fucking awesome and fun and i'm so glad i got to live through it.

now, i don't miss pot. i don't miss being high. what i do miss is walking and driving around aimlessly. i miss having to come up with creative ways to pass the time. i miss the lack of responsibilities that allowed us all so much time to go out and be young, adventurous, and more times than not, stupid. i cherish the memories. that was some good shit. and because of that, i might never have a bad word to say about pot.