A Common Pornography: A Memoir

Pot

Chad Crouch was my first stoner friend. He lived in a ranch house with faded green paint three blocks from our middle school. There was gravel in the front yard, so his stepdad could park on it, I guess. I sometimes went there after school.

Once he pulled a bong out of a closet and showed me how to smoke pot with it. It didn’t seem like he had this bong hidden very well in the closet, so I assumed his parents used it too. They were a whole family of stoners. Besides my stoner brother, I didn’t know much about drugs then, just that they were bad and made you want to fly through the air like Superman.

I tried to hold the smoke in like Chad showed me but it still didn’t seem to have an effect on me. Chad leaned back with half-closed eyes and said something about how high he was. He looked like a sleepy cat. I thought he was faking it.

I kept waiting for something to happen to my brain, or for my head to feel like a lost balloon, but it never happened. So I faked it a little too, just to keep him as a friend. I laughed like he laughed, at the stupidest things, so I wouldn’t be a total drag.