Prince's song lyrics expressed it simple and sassy as only he could,"tonight I'm going to party like its 1999," as this little episode starts one day prior to New Year's Eve, on December 30th, 1998. I was at my friend Nick's house, we were doing what we always did, lounging around consuming alcohol and ingesting drugs. Nick lived in an older house that sat next door to one of the oldest church's in town. The church was perched in the corner of a ninety degree bended neck of the road, across the street from one of Keller's ancient graveyards. Humongous red and green shrubs created a border between the church and Nick's house. His room was directly above the garage, but unlike typical garage apts. there was no outside entrance to his room. The bottom of the stairwell leading up to his room started in the back of the kitchen, so we could hear within ample time to hide what we were doing if we heard anyone start climbing up to check on us. We weren't technically allowed to smoke pot in his room, but we sure did anyway. We took bong hits next to an open window and in extra pre-cautious measures blew the smoke out through a flow-bee (I don't even know if thats how you spell 'flow-bee' but it's a slang term for a device constructed out of the inner cardboard tube of a paper towel roll stuffed with fabric softener sheets to help filter the marijuana fumes that was exhaled, and if you were a seasoned champion pot-head you held that shit in for so long the majority of the smoke had absorbed into your lungs anyways, leaving only a small remaining portion to exhale). Nick told us that he knew his mom and dad smoked but as far as they knew it was a secret kept by the adults. As I had advanced in my drug takin career it became more and more common to see this same dynamic. Either the parents would hide it from their kids and the kids would from their parents, all the while each was usually aware what the other was up to. To the parents it just seemed uncouth and bad parenting to bring it out into the open, and most teenagers simply believed it was weird or uncool to be smoking pot with their parents. Then you have the parents that openly smoke and drank with there kids, those were the places to be at when you were in high school when none of your friends had their own apartment yet to party in. The more the years drifted along and the more depraved my ways became, the variety of drugs I habitually took broadened to an even more fatal extent. I ended up doing drugs with all different sorts of characters, people in their sixties, rich suburban kids, white lake rats, panhandlers, wanderers, gangsters, skaters, posers, athletes, adrenalin junkies, all different races co-existing smoking crack together, midgets, environmentalists, vegans, etc ... yes, drugs can strangely break down segregation with more twisted efficiency than Martin Luther King Jr.
I slowly awoke the next morning but the lethargy clung on to me with tenacity. Since my license was suspended my Mom had to retrieve me and take me all the way to downtown for school. Since I didn't awake in time to depart with that unpleasant transportation provided by the juvenile school, I had a good amount of time to gripe about not wanting to attend that day. I had insisted since the previous night over the telephone to be allowed to skip school. My Mom wouldn't budge, and now that I really think back on it I vaguely remember that there was some form of consequence that usually involved prolonging the time you were scheduled to be done with this alternative school. This is why I believe she was so determined to make sure that I attended, for my sake, but at the time I got angry with her for all kinds of dumb shit that were always my own damn fault. However, in my defense it was New Year's Eve, dammit, and I had never in my life gone to school on New Year's Eve.
I rolled up in front of that sad dilapidated sorry school that was painted white onto the outside of this strange, fake, adobe-textured material. My Mom drawn only from her strong faith in God said something to try and encourage me, but whatever she said wasn't going to help my stupid-ass from going to juvenile detention within two hours of being dropped off for the day. I was a bit late and was immediately informed by the teacher that the class was about to participate in a spelling quiz. This added to my negative spirit right away, "what the hell, we are juniors in high school and ya'll are giving us spelling tests," I thought but verbally complained a little bit later on in the day when I was to be escorted out by Ft. Worth cops. Thats how irrational and ridiculous I can be, I will make use of side issues in order to make complaints that had nothing to do with the issue at hand. I try to, and very dysfunctional try to win an argument and make others see things my way, the correct way.
The A.D.D boy of our upstanding class of students, Aaron, had been passing out Aderol to a few of the other guys, and I felt left out. I never was a huge fan of stimulants, but I ingest almost any drug if it is free. Aaron was sitting next to me and I had him hand me a few. Somehow I clumsily dropped one and caused enough attention my direction for the teacher to head over to my desk. Apparently he believed that I had a cheat sheet and was about to catch me cheating on a damn spelling test... me! the damn spelling bee champ of eight grade! He saw one of the pills on the ground after he had sauntered over, bent over and retrieved it, saying is this crack!? "Shit, thats not crack", I thought, and said very defensively, "NO!" (its funny how I was offended at this suggestion that I would have anything to do with crack-cocaine, but a few years later I would end up smoking crack on a few occasions). A couple of pills were clutched in my hand. He had me cornered, and asked for me to open my hand. I obeyed. The teacher was racist I still believe to this day, but at the root of my problems I can look back and say that his biased attitude didn't matter because I had simply put myself in these absurdly dumb scenarios. The reason I say he was racist wasn't just because he was black, but that he was from the the bad parts of Ft Worth and had made it past all the gangs and criminally inclined peers. He was had graduated from college. He felt very empathetic towards the black kids and understandably enough that he felt this deeper connection with them. He had no sympathy for white kids from the suburbs. I remember him distinctly catching Teddy in the act of rolling up a blunt in the back of the classroom at his desk. Teddy was wisely utilizing class time by preparing himself for the walk home from school. Of course our teacher didn't call the cops on him like he was about to do to my punk ass. So there I am on New Years Eve, escorted out in hand-cuffs headed to the NewYears Eve party at the Tarrant County Juvenile Detention Center. As I was escorted out a was yelling about how ridiculous spelling tests are. That night I remember the detention hall supervisors playing the radio in the late hours for the years countdown, and that damn Prince song came on, he was singing, "We gonna' party like its 1999!"
