High Times in the Circulation Room

The writing prompt for the week is "A Memorable High School Job."

Well, you asked for it!

Back in high school, I was not a boring dweebosaurus like I am now. I looked pretty innocent, but I was a real wild child. I shook it loose and I smoked it up and I drank alone and I drank with friends. I never met a jay I didn't like or a beer I could put down. 

In those wild daze of yore, I worked at the local newspaper in the circulation room. I worked with a few fellow teenage stoners, a big gay guy of around 40 who looked like Harvey Fierstein, a couple of hippie dudes in their 30's (one of whom, in retrospect, was a bit of a perv--I was seventeen and he hit on me a couple of times, but he was respectful when I turned him down) and a really, really nerdy fellow who was 28, lived with his mom, and looked a lot like Rick Moranis. 

Now, a job in the newspaper circulation room may sound pretty tame, but once the work was done it was time to cut loose. Usually this involved beer and pot, but one night it involved acid. The older guys did not drop the acid but me and my fellow young dumbasses did--before the work was done, mind. And then things started to get stooooopid in spades.

First, Danny saw the rat. Jeff and I couldn't see the rat yet, but then Danny introduced us, and we saw him. We also saw a couple of friendly neon beetles. I could see and taste the music. Things really ruled for a while. And then the trip turned kinda bad and I felt like my tongue was trying to crawl down my throat. I ran outside and tried to pull my tongue out of my mouth. Chris, my supervisor, who was one of the guys in his 30's, came out to ask if I was all right. I said I was--I was trying to pretend I wasn't tripping straight out of my head. Yeah--as if he hadn't noticed.

Ed, the nerdy fellow, was completely unnerved by all of this. He tried to tell Chris that he should fire the lot of us. Chris said no, he thought we'd probably learned our lesson. Then he admonished us to never, ever do anything so stupid again and to go the fuck home and sleep it off. A good enough idea, except guess who was driving.

It was Faycin at the wheel, and I will never know how I got home without getting busted or wrapping my car around a telephone pole that night. The poinsettias were growing so pretty on the lawn of the junior high and I pointed this out to Jeff and Danny, who had no problem at all riding with someone who was tripping. Somehow I had the presence of mind to drive right at the speed limit and after I drove to the south end of town to drop Danny and Jeff off (luckily our town wasn't very big, probably only about 10 miles across from north to south) I drove my own dumb ass home.

Where I proceeded to call this dude I'd had a crush on since the beginning of the year and tell him I was in love with him.

Yeah...

Come Monday, I found Dude and told him to please disregard any stupid things I may have said while my brain was tripping the light fantastic across the Universe. I told him I had been straight out of my head and sure I loved him, but I meant as a friend, not romantically.

As I have mentioned before, I am a bad liar, and I knew he didn't believe me even though he said he did. He was two years younger than I was and at the end of the school year he invited me over to his house to give me a graduation present, which turned out to be a grope-fest. Unfortunately, doing this ruined our friendship. I ended up heartbroken because I've never been the type to go for casual hook-ups, and he was certainly too young for anything serious. Ah well...so it goes.

Many years later my father asked me if I regretted the crazy stuff I did in high school. I said that I really didn't because it doesn't do any good to dwell on regrets and to be honest, I had a damn good time. But I realized I couldn't keep doing things that way. 

These days I don't even drink beer and I hate the idea of doing mind-altering substances. But I will never forget those crazy days. They bring a grin to my face and make me shake my head that I survived it all!