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crotchrotwedgy

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            Cigarettes and alcohol were common place in my house growing up.  My first known experience with real drugs was when I was a child.  My father would smoke weed in the basement when his friends were over; as far as I know this made it fine for me to indulge in them myself.  My father had his own cigarette rolling machine.  It was a large square platform, about 2ft square with raised edges to keep his cigarettes in place.  I don’t know what it was made out of but I remember it being very heavy.  The machine itself was a red metal body, about 1ft square, that rounded off at the edges to create a sort of square bump about and inch or so tall, was fixed in the middle.  On one corner was a small rectangular slot, big enough to put a cigarette paper in sideways and lay tobacco on top of it.  The opening pointed along one side to a large lever, slightly resembling a bicycle crank, with a round black knob on end instead of a peddle.  When the crank was turned, it wound close a small metal door over the rectangular slot and roll a cigarette that would slide out of a whole that was at the end of a line inside the machine, that led from the lever, to the slot, and then out of a whole in the side with a small cupped shank that held the cigarette in place until it was either pulled off or the level was brought back to it’s original position.  When the lever went back it would pull the shank back inside and release the cigarette, and the small metal door would reopen, allowing another paper to be stuffed into the slot.

            My father would sit for hours, just rolling cigarettes.  I would observe him and try to roll them myself when he was away.  I would pull the tobacco out of the can of Kite and place it on the paper in the slot, pull the lever and watch as the rolled cigarette came out of the side.  Sometimes I would not stuff the machine right and the paper and the tobacco would be pushed out of the machine completely ripped apart.  It took quite a bit of practice but I was able to perfect the process just as my father did.

            My older brother started to smoke at around the age of ten.  I was seven at the time and we would sneak into the backyard to smoke in the corner.  I remember coughing and not liking it at first, but not to long after that I was smoking everyday.  My knowledge of the cigarette machine made it easy for me to make cigarettes so that my father would never know that they were missing.  I, my brother and our friends got caught smoking a few times.  My father spanked us, and yelled a lot, but it didn’t seem to matter.  The only thing it taught us was to be more careful not to get caught.

            Me and my friends would smoke on the way home from school and then smell each other to see if we smelled like smoke.  If we did we would try to find ways to cover up the smell.  I once went in my house before my mom got home form work and my dad woke up, to make a glass of milk with a raw egg in it, because for some reason we thought that by drinking it, it would absorb the smell.  It didn’t work, but most of our parents were smokers, so I think that the smell just went unnoticed.

            I also began stealing from lots of stores, CDs, toys and cigarettes were the most common items.  Camelot Music in the mall made it easy to steal tapes and CDs.  The racks along the outside walls had drawers underneath them, where products that were not always marked with sensor strips yet.  I would bend down and act like I’m looking at a CD in the bottom of the rack and slip my hand into the drawer and stick one in my pocket. 

Once I made it out of the store with my friends after having stolen some CDs.  We were chilling in the center court of the mall when some employees from Camelot came up and said that they had suspicion that we may have stolen something.  They wanted us to walk through the sensors to make sure we didn’t have anything on us.  We all walked through the sensors and when I walked through I went as far as I could to look like it would trip it off.  I kept the CDs in my pocket and turned around with them on the outside in an attempt to keep it from alarming.  I sure did brag about how I got away with that for along time after.

Phar-Mor, a grocery store a few miles from my house, made it very easy to steal cigarettes.  Through the sliding glass doors, past the check out isles on the left, there were large wire racks for customers to grab magazines before the checked out.  Next to them was a large square wood and plastic rack, with hundreds of packs of cigarettes on all four sides.  This was obviously before cigarettes were locked up behind the customer service counter.  My routine was to walk into the store, grab a magazine and fold it so that the left and right sides touched and created a pocket.  I would then go past the cigarette rack and surreptitiously slide two or three packs of cigarettes into the magazine.  I would then walk around the store acting like I was shopping until I could pocket them when no one was looking.  To become less conspicuous I would normally buy something small after I had put the magazine back in its’ rightful place.  Then I would walk back through the sliding glass doors, and be on my way.

This afforded me the opportunity to become a very heavy smoker very quickly.  I would several packs of cigarettes a week, and by the time I was ten, was smoking about a pack a day.  When I was eleven I delivered news papers around my neighborhood.  Every morning I would walk my route with my Radio Flyer full of papers smoking a cigarette.  One morning I was on my way to the elderly home I delivered to first.  I had a cigarette on the way.  By the time I walked the two blocks distance to get there, I could barely breathe.  I became light headed, and had to sit down on the wooden bench outside of the entrance for almost a half hour before I went in.

Sometime that year, my brother brought home some weed while my parents were gone.  He had the joint already rolled and my friend Ryan and I smoked it in the basement with my brother.  Smoking weed came easy considering the amount of cigarettes that I smoked.  The difference came with the strength of the hit.  The first hit of marijuana was like sticking a hand warmer down my throat.  On top of the warmth, it scratched at the back of my throat the way that soda does if you try to chug it too fast.  My mind began to slow down, and we went upstairs to watch a movie in the living room.

I sat down on my dad’s recliner and Ryan sat on the other while my brother took the couch.  We popped in the movie Cliffhanger with Sylvester Stallone.  Ryan and I just sat there staring at the movie, feeling glued to our seats, but still completely enthralled with what was happening.  In the beginning of the movie, a female character is suspended from a cable between two mountain peeks.  On her way across her harness begins to break.  I watched in suspense as attempts to save her failed and she fell screaming to her death.  After she fell, I stared for a moment at the screen, and began laughing uncontrollably.  I had to have been the saddest part of the movie, yet I couldn’t help myself.

I starting smoking weed if it was presented to me, but it was uncommon for me to search it out.  The feeling of being high on marijuana didn’t seem like what I was looking for.  It left me feeling drained of energy, but my mind would just wonder into random directions of thought, which half of could not be understood.  After a while it lost its’ potency to me, and I didn’t have the drive to smoke stronger or higher quantities.  I would smoke a blunt and watch as friends started acting like they were high.  I would squint my eyes, lower my voice and add a little rasp, and just laugh or get serious depending on how the other were acting. 

Ryan and I got high at my house once, and walked over to his house.  We laid down in his front yard and fell asleep under an oak tree.  I woke up a little bit later and glanced over at Ryan.  Coincidentally he was waking up right when I looked at him.  His eyes cracked open, then squinted shut again.  Then his eyes opened large in confusion.  He swung his right arm at me to make sure I was awake.  His voice nervous and exited, said “Dude...ah a dude?!”  I asked “what?” and he relaxed his head into the grass, and bewilderedly croaked “your house disappeared.”  I looked at him like he was on drugs.  I said “we just walked over here from my house.  You don’t remember?” and he just shrugged a little and said “no.”  We then proceeded to laugh our asses off in the front yard.