THIS MONKEY'S LEGEND IS BORN

As my junior year ensued, to the depths of dope depravity I pursued, and so I was desperately determined to ingest any combination of chemicals that might save my brain from the dancers in my head.  Marijuana was like magic and so I sought to inhale the minimal amounts of oxygen necessary to sustain consciousness, saving the remainder lung capacity for hitting that ganja.  I loved  drinking beers for brunch, and eating acid for dinner.  My attendance was slacking, I had the old school rouse of staying during the attendance count and then slipping out un-detected perfected, or so I thought. Those damn teachers had it out for me from the beginning, and I couldn't blame them. When I was in class I usually slept.  My reputation had been overblown into an ultra-ghetto stereo-type of a druggy.  This image was exaggerated before it was due, two years prior. My status as a burned out dope monkey grew phenomenally my freshman year, and all from a shitty wooden tobacco pipe my buddy Daniel had stolen from a smoke shop in the mall called Tobacco Lane. Daniel and I shared second period, Word Geography Class together, and the teacher, Mr. Thompson, was strict but overall pretty damn cool in hindsight. I remember he strived so hard to merely convert everyone into focusing on obtaining if nothing else in life, our high school diploma, at bare minimum. He use to have this saying, "You can smoke dope and live on a motorboat, but as long as you have your high school diploma they can never take that away from you!" (and of course I never did get my high school diploma, I was too cool for school and settled for the General Equivalence Diploma). Daniel decided un-wisely to smuggle this pipe into class to show me and a classmate, Everett.  Everett was already an expert in the fancy ways of the stoner at the fair age of fifteen, and so we sought out his advice on this particular smoking device. On this day there happened to be a substitute teaching for Mr. Thompson, it was some lady sub, I don't remember much about her except that she totally busted our monkey asses. Either she believed we were cheating on a quiz or being disruptive as we just chatted away about this pipe. Something caused us to draw her attention at this point, and so she strolled over and caught Matt with the pipe in hand holding it under his desk. She called for one of the assistant principals to come down and drag him out and detain him in his office. Next entered the sidekick, the second assistant principal, Mrs. Gilvery, she was our school's own tall, short yellow-haired, big bird lookin' female principal. She went and whispered into the sub's ear and then looked our way, and called for Daniel to come down to the office. Ten minutes later I was next! Mr. Attaway, the dude assistant principal was trying his damnedest to obtain a confession that we were planning on smoking pot, and I don't even know what this would have accomplished. Did he believe we would lead him to a huge stash of drugs, and then to a gang of fifteen year old armed drug dealers as well? It sure did seem that way in how determined he was in interrogating us. We stuck to the story that we had some pipe tobacco at home, and persisted in our explanation that this was all we had been intending to put in this pipe and smoke.  They had nothing on us really, the pipe was brand new, it never even had tobacco smoked out of it. I remember that our parent's were notified, and I ultimately just embarrassed and shocked my parents once again, but tobacco was the least of their concerns at this point in time. Over the next twelve years they would sadly develop a dramatically jaded attitude towards my dope-addled troubles. Slowly in them grew this sick tolerance,  their reactions had become ever-changing. I do know that the number one consequence of this episode from my freshman year had catapulted this image of me immediately into a different realm to all who heard this story of us getting caught at school with a pipe. A week later I learned that my classmates had convoluted this story into something extremely beyond what the truth was. The rumor going around was that I was caught with a crack-pipe on campus. This shitty status surrounded me even years after highschool and lingers in the atmosphere of my hometown even to this day. It didn't help that I added reality to this rumor.  High school shifted swiftly by as mere background in this life's revolving fixtures, eventually I would smoke crack, and I realized it didn't produce the euphoria I hungered for. The dope finale for this monkey's hedonistic craze meant heroin.