The Ways of Angels

I was lying in a burned out basement
With the full moon in my eyes.
I was hoping for replacement
When the sun burst thru the sky.
There was a band playing in my head
And I felt like getting high.
I was thinking about what a
Friend had said
I was hoping it was a lie.
- From After the Gold Rush by Neil Young

Sure it’s different now. There’s the PTA meetings, soccer practices, bake sales, neighborhood clean-ups and quiet Saturday nights at home watching movies with Sheila. My work is steady and I pay into a pension, we’ve got a mortgage and there’s enough in the bank that in a couple of Summers we can take the kids to Disneyland.

Not so many years ago it was a very different world. For example there was DickWeed. His name was Richard Wiedemann but we just naturally called him DickWeed especially since he was our main marijuana supplier and was perpetually stoned. DickWeed was a philosopher although probably 90% of what he said was pure bullshit. He read all the great thinkers like Hegel, Kierkagaard and Plato but he got whatever they said jumbled up. Still, if you were high it could seem like he was making sense. Women were drawn to DickWeed which mystified the rest of us. He would change lovers every few weeks and never said a bad word about an ex — of which there were legion.

There was also Peein’ Lester, so named because he liked to pee in unusual places -- although the time he peed in the elevator in my apartment building did not go over well with anyone. Lester was more into drinking than drugs, hence the constant need to piss. Despite his proclivity to urinate in odd places he was a pretty bright guy who’d excelled in school and was on his way to Phd in Literature before he got fully sidetracked by his desire to be high. He was also a trust fund baby so he always had money and spent it freely.

Then there was Scraggly. (Real name Leonard Sharp.) Everything about him was scraggly. Especially his beard which seemed to grow in every direction at once. The hair on top of his head — and there was a lot of it despite the emergence of a bald spot — likewise shot off hither and yon and to parts unknown. Combs and brushes were an anathema to him. His clothes were unkempt (which is, by the way, a synonym for scraggly). They were — thankfully — never smelly but certainly never clean and were too baggy for his tall, slender frame. The weird thing was he would always had about half his shirt tucked in. Never completely out and never completely tucked. The man was consistent. His socks never matched, his shoes were scuffed and his fly was usually at half staff.

He called everyone “dude” whether male or female, a contemporary or older or younger. I can’t say for sure whether he ever knew anyone’s name. Scraggly talked at one speed and one speed only — fast. The speed with which he spoke coupled with how we would veer from one subject to the next without a pause and how he pretty much spoke in a stream of consciousness style made him difficult to follow. But ya know what? Everyone liked Scraggly. Scraggly dropped acid a couple of times a week. At least.

These were the three guys I primarily hung out with but there were more. The thing we all had in common was getting high. Wherever we were, whenever it was, there was always a ready supply of booze of all varieties not to mention grass and occasionally hashish and sometimes psychedelics including shrooms. Cocaine was usually available too for those, like myself, who preferred it. Of course money was needed to keep us high. Peein’ Lester had his trust fund, Scraggly actually worked backstage at rock concerts and DickWeed sold as much as he smoked always turning a profit on his bulk purchases (as he called them) of pot. Me, I was a thief. I had a strict rule about only robbing from stores and the rich. I stole cash, things to sell and booze.

Most any occasion was a time to get high. Weekends were a no-brainer but so were evenings, afternoons, mornings any time you could name. Holidays were a call to get loaded so too were hot days, inclement weather, vacations, work days, times of celebration, times of mourning and times of boredom. If we took a trip drugs and liquor were a must. So too if we stayed home. There were parties virtually every night and the only special parties were the ones hosted by someone outside of our group.

While high we would talk, watch movies, dance, fuck, play games, go for walks, drive around, go to the beach, go to the forest and listen to music. In fact, except when there was a movie on, we always had a soundtrack to our revelry. Mostly we listened to rock although sometimes soul, country or jazz would get mixed in. Sometimes we would dissect lyrics looking for meaning. We were deep thinkers, at least so far as we could be given the altered states of our sodden minds. It’s hard to remember anything we said that really meant anything despite how profound we seemed at the time. We always thought we were talking about great issues and making insights when in reality we were just so full of shit.

The one thing we had going for us was camaraderie. We loved each other like brothers. I was especially close to Peein’ Lester with whom I had a lot in common, particularly loves of both literature (not that either one of us were doing a lot of reading while we were perpetually high) and baseball. We talked of both incessantly.

There were many others who flitted in and out of group. A lot of our part timers had full time jobs or were students and were thus mostly just around on weekends and during holidays and vacations. The core of us had no time for such nonsense believing as we did that we were leading sacred lives devoted to a more fuller understanding of the world through getting high. I felt sorry for those suckers who put in 40 hour weeks or labored in classrooms. I was free and I was part of a community and who needed responsibilities?

This was while I was in my mid and late 20s. I’d already gotten a degree (dramatic arts) but while in college had developed a proclivity for parties and booze and coke. About the time I was graduating I drifted away from a career path and into friendships with Scraggly, Pissin’ Lester and DickWeed. Once I did, all thoughts about what the future might hold vanished. I was living in the here and now. The disappointment expressed by family and old friends meant nothing to me. What did they know? They bored me silly and couldn’t understand that I was having fun and aimed to continue doing so.

This was the life I lived for half a dozen years. Nothing deterred my desire to “party” and hang out. Not even when I Od’d on coke and was taken to the hospital, not even when I was pinched  shoplifting in a convenience store, not even when a friend named Karl (called Crazy Karl) fell to this death from high atop a redwood tree while tripping on acid. I was locked in.

Until I met Sheila.

I’d been with a lot of different women over the years. They came and went and I didn’t much care. One was pretty much the same as the next to me. Not Sheila though. She was Rachael Bradley’s sister. Rachael being and on again off again girlfriend of DickWeed. Sheila came to one of our parties shortly after moving to town where she had gotten a new job. She was not a big drinker and was sipping on a wine cooler when I sat next to her. We struck up a conversation and I was soon smitten. Just the fact that this new girl wasn’t a lush or a stoner was kind of appealing, especially given how cute she was and, as I soon discovered, how smart.

I’d met a lot of women but Sheila was different in ways I couldn’t completely define or understand. When I look back on it now I realize that we were simply meant for each other. She was the first girl I’d dated since college who wasn’t into getting high and on several of our dates I stayed stone cold sober the whole night. I was falling in love. She saw something in me too. As Sheila later said it was obvious to her that I wasn’t really happy being high all the time, despite my protestations to the contrary. She believed in time that I would get clean and sober and was looking forward to the man I would then become.

When I wasn’t seeing Sheila, everything was as before and I got as high as I could as often as I could. But it wasn’t the same. I enjoyed life with Sheila sober more than I did being high without her. Then one day my life changed forever when the two worlds collided. Sheila invited me to her place for a small dinner party with two of her old friends and one of the woman’s husbands. I was getting ready to leave when Shiela called and said not to rush, one of her friends would be delayed. I had half an hour to kill. I killed nearly two hours and did so with Scraggly and Pissin’ Larry snorting Coke and guzzling Scotch. So I lost track of time.

I showed up at Sheila’s apartment barely able to stand up and talking a mile a minute. Her friends were shocked. She was humiliated. Sheila literally pushed me out of her apartment, screaming at me. “I never want to see you again!” She exclaimed repeatedly.

Hangovers were standard operating procedure for me and I always knew to have a hair of the dog. But that next morning all I felt was misery and shame. I never wanted to come within a mile of liquor or drugs again. Lightning had struck. I was going to choose a woman over drugs. If she’d have me. That afternoon I went to my first AA meeting. Afterwards I wrote a long letter to Sheila detailing my sins and vowing to stay sober and begging forgiveness. Forgiveness was granted and Sheila and I were soon dating again. A year after my sobriety date — yes, it was planned — we married.

Today I’m a high school drama teacher. I have two school age kids and am in a healthy marriage. Besides all the parenting duties I happily fulfill, I also regularly attend NA and AA meetings. The life I lived a dozen years ago seems like it's from some strange movie I once saw.

Scraggly is dead. He drowned swimming while quite high. DickWeed is still getting high. I saw him a few years ago. He’s 34 but looks 60. His mind is mostly gone and so is his physical health. But Pissin’ Lester is now just Lester and I see him at least once a week at NA meetings. He’s married too and has one child. He got sober two years after me. I’m still his sponsor.

I'm happy now but it's more than that, I'm content. I think a lot about a quote from Kierkegaard that DickWeed mentioned once while we were sharing some primo weed: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” At the time I thought it was deep. Now I know what it means.