In the woodlot woods, we stood, destined to be forgotten.
“Yo, hand me that bowl, motherfucker,” someone mumbled in a cartoon voice.
The bowl was handed off after a last deep drag from the kid with the greaser cut and the duck’s ass. The smoke from his exhale bathed his pimples in backlit moon glow and he almost coughed but was better than that. He choked it back down with the subtle grace of a young guy who had taken many thousands of deep and thoughtful hits before.
There was no light but cul-de-sac bleed.
There was no fire because this was the suburbs and the local cops would have French-kissed each other with reckless abandon if they’d been given the chance to chase after stoner kids on another boring Friday night.
There was no music for the same reason.
There was only the muffled rush of the cars out on the highway.
There was six of us in all (maybe five, maybe seven, time adds and erases), high school stoners like a coven of witches, using the night as cover, keeping the moon as a friend. Long-haired in concert shirts and denim jackets, we chain smoked Marlboro reds, maybe sipped from a few cans of Busch Light stolen from my stepdad’s stash.
Somewhere out there the varsity football team was playing an arch-rival under the lights in front of a lot of people. But we didn’t care. The crickets were loud and we found that astonishing. Far off in the distance, we could make out the softest glow of light rising from the mall parking lot.
“I can see the mall,” someone said as the bowl was passed. There was the flick of a Bic and the cherry lit up like a portal in the side of a dark forbidden mountain. Then it dimmed and someone mumbled, “I’m so baked.”
“We should record the crickets and play the cassette in the garage when we play poker,” someone else volunteered.
An ambulance cried way off in the distance.
“I wonder who is in that ambulance?,” someone said.
“I hope it’s Mr. Ribble,” someone else responded.
We all snickered, our bodies flush with the warming embers of hardcore solidarity. Mr. Ribble was a gym teacher at our high school. He was also a militant eater of cat shit. A dog barked far away and it spun the siren sound sideways into the rocker panels of the cars out on the highway so that coalesced into this sort of exalted symphony. Now that it’s all so long ago, I can’t help sometimes but to think that if we had thought to record it all: it could have been the start of an album that could have changed the world.
But of course, none of that happened.
In the late 1980s I turned, unconditionally, into a full-blown American stoner. It wasn’t intentional or anything. I mean, these kinds of things rarely are. No one wakes up some Monday morning in ninth grade and decides that it’s probably a good day to kick off a solid decade of bong hits. The smoothest transitions are the organic ones. One day you wear a Skynyrd shirt to school and then the next day things start rolling. You attract the attention of certain types. You become intrigued by certain lifestyle choices. You end up in certain curious social circles/ perhaps find yourself the de facto leader of a tribe of like-minded suburban kids whose intelligence and creativity feel stifled by the creeping steady torture of their boilerplate existence.
After reading a charming recent New York Times opinion piece by the novelist Erin Somers titled Cannabis Has Become Upscale Chic. I Miss the Old Red-Eyed Stoners, it dawned on me that she was entirely right. It became suddenly obvious what I have to do. I have to battle for my legacy now before it drifts away like the thick pot fog at the Mann Music Center in Philly that summer night, long ago, when my brother, Dave, and I sat on the high ground of the general admission hill and saw The Allman Brothers transcend reality.
Before everything me and my fellow late-’80s / early-’90s stoners accomplished dies in vain, there must be a reckoning. We stood for something back then. We weren’t allowed to smoke weed. We did it because we weren’t allowed.
We risked so much back then so that generations to come might salute us someday. We gambled everything to duck down in the front seat of our friend’s massive Buick battleship so we could fill the car with dense haze. Then, without trepidation, we showed fortitude and personal strength as we headed into the mall. And on that field of battle, we fought. We fought for rock/roll by buying Replacements cassettes instead of Janet Jackson or whatever bullshit the world was trying to trick people with. And we fought for the American flag, so that stoners from the wilds of Maine to the boulevards of L.A. could wake up each morning and know that they were free people in a free land.
We rose up behind our parents backs.
We walked right by our teachers and we reeked of weed and cigs.
Faced with the law and order of the masses everywhere we turned, we hurled ourselves into the blistering chaos of everyday chaos so that you people today might live outside the lines. Thanks to us, there is still a chance for each of you to outrun this mad society hellbent on smashing your original quirk into some kind of worthless invisible “respectable” citizen.
But still, I look around me now and I wonder.
What good did it all do?
Nowadays elementary school teachers and heart surgeons and politicians can stop on their way home from work to buy legal gummies in a bougie dispensary. It all seems so counterfeit, like a swindle. And I know it isn’t at all profound, but I can’t help myself. I miss Judas Priest back patches on tattered denim jackets. I miss holding a one-hitter in my hand outside the cafeteria. I miss our long hair, the way it tumbled down onto our shoulders with the Jesus flow and the Skynyrd style.
I miss being young.
Where the hell did it go?
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
