Smoking weed in weird places

Once upon a time I was almost expelled for smoking weed in the bathroom of my high school. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette by Vincent van Gogh

No. 80: Smoking weed in weird places

In high school, I was suspended for smoking weed in the school bathroom. My friend Austin joined me. It was a coordinated smoke. We planned to leave our respective classrooms at a given time, meet in a previously specified stall, and light up. And light up we did. 

It was ridiculously stupid, but what can I say? I was in high school and bored out of my mind. That isn’t an excuse, but an attempt at an explanation. The teenage mind usually evades explanation though, so forgive me if it’s a poor one. 

The risk involved in the operation was obvious. It wasn’t only factored in, it was the very reason for going through with it. Chances were, we would get away with it. And if we didn’t, so long as we didn’t have the stuff on our persons — we made sure to incinerate all that we carried into the bathroom stall — the worst that could happen was a scolding by the principal while in an altered state of mind, or, if they were feeling extra severe, maybe a day or two of suspension. 

What wasn’t factored into my masterplan was this: There was a switchblade in my backpack. I had bought it long before from this kid named Zach. His dad was part of the Bay Area chapter of the Hells Angels, and he liked to retell stories he had overheard about knife fights in bars. So, go figure. I had forgotten all about it. It must have been coming to and from school with me for at least three years leading up to smoke-in-the-bathroom day, lost at the bottom of a pile of crumpled granola bar wrappers and college-ruled paper.

Austin was caught first. He was in art class, peacefully sketching a picture of a chair, when the teacher noticed an odd smell as she walked by his desk. She pulled him out of class and questioned him. He told all. Some minutes later, Miss K, the school’s executioner, for lack of a more accurate title, entered my multimedia class. I was gazing at a trippy music video, my face too close to the computer screen. She asked if I could please step outside with her. 

She didn’t ask questions, only said that we were going to the office and that she had been told about my little bathroom rendezvous. I denied the allegations. Had I know there was a blade in my backpack, I would have made a sprint for the neighborhoods off campus, thrown the blade in the nearest bush, and figured out the rest from there. But I didn’t know about the blade until it was being pulled out of my backpack by a police officer. 

I was majorly fucked now. Not only was the blade longer than the palm of my hand — the general rule for whether a pocket knife is legal or not — it was spring-loaded, one of those old school numbers greasers flashed before rumbles in books like The Outsiders. It was really a very beautiful device. Green vinyl handle with pearly accents. Stainless steel metal. Circular release button. But my aesthetic fantasies about pretty blades and greaser lifestyle now made me a violent and potentially deadly menace that had to be dealt with. 

The tragedy was the timing. I was only months from being done with the shenanigans of public school. My classes were easy. My grades were good. I was admitted to California State University, San Marcos in southern California. All I had to do was graduate. 

But now, graduation was on the line. 

I was suspended and sent home. Soon after, word came down that I was being considered for expulsion due to the knife. Also, there were going to be criminal charges, since spring-loaded knives were illegal in California. All those years of public school, just to be expelled right the end of them. My light-hearted foray into Smoking Weed in Weird Places had taken a turn for the worst. But here’s where things get kind of interesting. That suspension, that bathroom toke, that switchblade in my backpack, that potential expulsion, that trippy music video that I never got to finish, the whole situation actually improved just about every aspect of my life. 

But not at first. 

My suspension was pretty much like house arrest. My mom and dad were working, my brother and sister went to school everyday, and I had no where to go. Then my parents went on a vacation they’d planned long before they knew their kid was a full-on dingdong. So I was very home alone. Before they left, I remember my mom coming into my room, where I must have been moodily strumming on an acoustic guitar wondering why the world had brought so low a misunderstood, loving, and artistic soul like me. How dare the universe treat such a man in such a way!

“Don’t do anything crazy while we’re gone,” she said. 

“I won’t.”

She looked at me, communicating with her eyes the way only a mom can. 

“This is just a hard time. Things will get better.”

She was hinting at the S word. Suicide. I found it crazy that she thought I would do such a thing, and I probably responded with some thinly-veiled pissyness. But looking back, I love that she opened the door to my room and said those words. That’s motherly bravery if I’ve ever seen it. How many parents have thought their kid would never do such a thing, and then the kid does? She was just checking in and saying what most parents are too afraid to say — and all of that without ever really saying it. 

My friends Bruce and Yale would visit me as if they were attending a prisoner’s visitation hours. I’d open the garage door and come out onto the driveway to chat with them to find out what was going on in the outside world. Years later, when all this had passed, Bruce would tell me I was in bad shape whenever I emerged from the dim garage, eyes dark and squinty, somehow skinnier, wearing pajamas, head hung low. I made it seem like it was no biggie and said the administrators and the cops were assholes, to which they heartily agreed. I told them I was doing fine. But we all knew not much could be said about the expulsion question. That was something bigger and beyond whatever verbal jabs we might attempt to make at the topic. 

A few months before my actions put my entire future in the hands of a few adults, my family and I had gone on a trip to Hawaii. In the drawer of the nightstand between the two queen-sized beds in our hotel room, there was a bible and a book of Buddhist scriptures. I grabbed the Buddhist book and began to read it during our trip, but, being busy swimming with turtles and getting tumbled by waves and doing other Hawaii things, I packed it away. When it was time to go home, I had to decide whether to steal the book or put it back. I didn’t know if my parents would get charged by the hotel if I took it, so I took it without telling them and hoped for the best.

Now, in my isolation, I picked up the Buddhist book.

I learned that the present moment is the most important thing we have. 

I learned that material possessions weigh us down.

I learned that our aspirations for the future often cause us to screw up the now.

I learned about nirvana as the ultimate peace and bliss.

I learned about meditation and mantras as a way to focus the mind.

I learned about the absurdity of time.

I learned about a hundred other things I can’t precisely recall right now, but they were things that fundamentally changed my outlook on life and made me a more spiritual, aware, and critically thinking person. And suddenly all that was happening around me seemed laughable.

Because I didn’t know what would happen regarding my future, I learned to stop caring about my future altogether. That could be taken as a very bad thing, but in this case was a healthy and much-needed mindset. I saw that school, graduation, college, jobs, money, and the rest of it made up only tiny portion of life, and one that, on its own, rarely led to happiness. The book showed me that my contentment doesn’t require any of the things that I was (probably) about to lose, and that the world was a broad and expansive place filled with more cultures, ideas, places, and people than I could ever imagine, and that nobody could take those things away from me, or away from anyone. I saw that all that I needed to be happy was my life and my mind and good intentions, and I figured that even if things did pan out and I made it out of my current unfortunate circumstance, I would be better off in general for all that I had committed myself to learning from my Buddhist texts. 

The criminal charges were dropped against me — I don’t remember exactly how or why — but expulsion was still a very real possibility, and the day of my “hearing” was drawing near. The idea was, I would sit in front of a council of Important People, make my case, and discover whether or not I was expelled — a typical Jedi Council-style ordeal. At my mom’s advice, I wrote a letter to read in front of the Important People, a procedure that long-time readers of this newsletter will remember as similar to the time in middle school when I wrote a letter to Vice Principal Mr. Woy apologizing for shooting a laser pointer into a neighboring classroom. Just like middle school, I wrote the shit out of that letter. 

D-day arrived. My mom and I drove to some scary windowless building at the school district’s administrative offices. The Jedi Council was seated. My mom and I shuffled in meekly. I wore my varsity jacket decorated with patches I’d won from attending state championship swim meets. Finally, I read my letter. And I cried. Oh man I cried. I showed every bit of remorse I could muster reading that letter, and it wasn’t contrived. At that moment, it really hit me, These people could expel me for ingesting a plant and carrying a sharpened piece of metal, and despite all of the other good things I’ve done in my life, all of the effort I’ve given to my academics and athletics, despite everything besides this one mistake, they could really completely and totally fuck me. 

We left. A few days later, we got the news. I would not be expelled and could return to school immediately. By the end of it, I had been suspended for a little over two months.

Lord have mercy on the world and its people and trees and plants and animals and clouds in the sky that feeling was incredible. I will never forget it. It felt like I had died and come back to life. My vision seemed brighter, sharper, more colorful. My sense of hope, of possibility, rushed back all at once, and I felt like I could do anything, like the world was mine for the taking. Not only that, now I was armed with mind full of Buddhist teachings, which gave me a general mastery of the mind and helpful tactics like meditation and measured breathing. I felt like superman. But I reminded myself that just because I could envision a familiar future again, I shouldn’t put too much stock in it. My readings taught me about the power of the present, and if I could balance the restored promise of the future with my new frame of mind, I knew I could come close to something like superman, just without the flying part. 

I also learned a valuable lesson about my place in the world, one that I took with me in the years after and that is still part of my decision-making process. That is, the slightest fuck up could put your entire fate in the hands of others. If you don’t look out for yourself, no one will (besides, in my case, my mom, but moms can only do so much, and they won’t always be there to help). It doesn’t matter how good your intentions, how big your heart, or how crafty your mind may be. In our society and its institutions, there’s a point where you can lose all control of your life and future, and crossing that point is one of the most uncomfortable and scariest things that can happen to a person. (And now I’m thinking of slaves, of prisoners, of people on death row, of women in America since Roe was overturned.)

I don’t consider myself a Buddhist, but everywhere I go I carry with me the the ideas and tactics I learned from that book of Buddhist scriptures. As I suspected during my indefinite suspension from school, these learnings continued to serve me well, still do, and have helped me in innumerable situations and near crises. 

That book was on my mind this week when, after checking in to my hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah for work trip, I opened the drawer of the nightstand between the two queen-sized beds in my hotel room. There were two blue volumes, a bible and the book of Mormon. I closed the drawer again. I didn’t need either of those like I needed that red and gold book when I found it in Hawaii, and I’m not sure I’ll ever need a book as much as I needed that one when I saw it lying in that drawer.

And, actually, I hope I don’t — because since reading that book, it’s as if things are always looking up. Maybe that’s truly the case and my life is objectively getting better since the day I was caught smoking a bowl in the school bathroom with a knife in my backpack, but it could also be the result of a highly agile and adaptable perspective I learned to embody over four-hundred-something thin pages.

Whatever it is, it’s really, really good. ♦

---

Weekly Three

HEAR: “Romance” by Hiroshi Suzuki

READ: George Saunders addresses the ever-relevant question of artists of all types, Art vs. Commerce

VIEW: I’ve been on a Ken Burns documentary kick. I really enjoyed his film on the the environmental catastrophe that was the Dust Bowl. Here’s the trailer.