My Lips Are Sealed

God knows I’ve made enough mistakes in my youth that I could expound on them ad nauseum. However, after much deliberation, I decided that reviving a post from the past might work best for the following challenge:

What memory or story from your youth would you never share with your own children and why? And if there’s nothing from your history that you wouldn’t have them know, why is that?

What I’m offering up is a true story that both embarrasses me and amuses me endlessly but I’m not sure I could, in good conscience, tell it to my children until they are adults, mainly because I wouldn’t want to make light of or trivialize my stupidity or all the bad things that could have happened to me but didn’t.

Soooo… I give you “Don’t Take the Pot” back for an encore from the 2006 archives of IzzyMom.
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Don’t take the pot.

Yup. You heard me. This message is directed to all you kids out there that are sneaking the computer and going through your mom’s blogroll

Okay, okay. I was just being funny and imitating my parents there. What I really mean to say is don’t SMOKE the pot.

Why? Why, you ask?

Well, because you might decide, at the wise old age of 14 or maybe 15, that when your friend calls you on a Saturday and tells you she got a joint from that stoner guy who rides your bus, that it would be a smashing idea to go to the gazebo by the lake and get high.

So you lie to your parents and say you need to get something from the drug store and instead you get on your yellow 3 spd bike (with the dorky baskets on the back that are better suited to towing people than carrying stuff) and you swing by your friend’s house to pick her up. You guys take turns towing each other to the gazebo only to find there are people there feeding ducks.

Puh! Hopeless dork losers that they are, you leave them to their duck-feeding while you and your friend try to think of a place where two unbelievably cool teenage girls sporting feathered hair and black eyeliner and wearing those little nylon Dolfin shorts (you know, like Richard Simmons and the Hooters girls wear) can go burn one without being too terribly conspicuous.

You end up deciding that the little tunnel of bushes behind the Publix Supermarket will afford you the privacy needed to get baked. While puffing away, some stock boys from Publix follow their noses to your hideout and you guys have to share with them. They are kind of cute and you decide this is for the best since you’re already way too stoned. Being a novice pot smoker, you always let this happen. You never quit while you’re ahead. Dumbass.

As the stock boys depart, high as kites, talking about what kind of food they plan on swiping from the store, you and your friend finally exit the bushes, too, and you get on your bike.

Realizing your condition, you wisely decide to walk the bike instead. As you guys get closer to home, it starts to rain and your friend casually announces that she has to leave now to go to her aunt’s house with her mom.

Whoa, whoa, wait a second. Your brain, in it’s compromised state, is about to catch on fire because it’s working extra hard to process this bit of confusing and bad, VERY BAD, information.

“You’re leaving me? Like this? You can’t. I’m sooo stoned and I can NOT go home like this. I need someone to hang with until I can go home.”

But in the blink of bloodshot eye she’s gone and you are alone, in the rain, high.

Hmmmm. What to do. What to do.

And then you have a brainstorm. You will go to the house of the people for whom you babysit.

Yeah. They’re pretty cool. He’s a cop and keeps weed in a Tupperware in the bathroom cabinet. And they’re swingers. Remember those Polaroids you found? Ewww. Don’t think about that part. Doesn’t matter. They’re nice people. They are. C’mon.

And before you know it, you’re ringing the bell. Mr. Erlich (Officer Erlich) opens the door and you ask if his wife is home. He smiles and kindly welcomes you in while explaining that Karen and the boys are out but will be home soon. He’s just watching a movie and you’re welcome to hang out and wait. Trying your hardest not not let him see how gross and pasty your mouth is (because then he would know for sure that his teenaged babysitter was totally high) you decide to grab a pillow, lay on the floor and watch the movie. This is an awesome plan, you think to yourself as Mr. Erlich brings you an orange soda. Yes, indeedy!

As you open your eyes, you hear a little voice saying “Mommy, Daddy, she’s getting up!” You look up and there they are. The whole Erlich family looking down, smiling widely at you like you just did something hilariously funny.

Oh wait. You did. You fell dead asleep on their floor for 2 hours.

Grinning sheepishly and silently praising the sweet baybay Jesus that you’re not high any more, you apologize profusely and get the hell out of there.

If memory serves you correctly, the Erlichs never ask you to babysit again. You don’t care, though, because you’re really embarrassed (and they never had any good food to eat anyway.)

But still. You know you did something really dumb and you’re pretty sure the Erlichs knew. How could they not? And you hope to God they don’t ever tell your parents. Your dad & stepmom wouldn’t understand. They weren’t young enough to indulge in the Summer of Love and all that cool hippie stuff. They called it taking pot, for pete’s sake.

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Ahhhhh, to have the luxury of being young & stupid…

My parents never did find out about that Saturday afternoon, thankfully. They would have been very disappointed in me. I was the kind of kid that did bad stuff but got good grades and was generally very responsible. The kind of kid that fools all adults…

I smoked pot many more times after that but I finally had to throw in the towel and admit that I was not a good pot taker. I couldn’t drive (well, I could. But only at speeds under 20 mph). I couldn’t go into a store or do anything remotely normal. I could just eat A LOT, read the same line in a book over and over and then fall asleep. I wasn’t much fun.

These days, however, I have hard time sleeping unless I’m dead tired and taking the pot seems like maybe not such a bad idea.

But the eating. The unabated crap-eating…

Arghhhhh…

Maybe not.

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To read more posts based on this Flashback Friday topic, visit these fine blogs:

Her Bad Mother

Mrs. Flinger

Mamalogues

The Bean Blog

Posts from the Playground

And hey — if you want to play along on your own blog and do this week’s Friday Flashback, let me know and I’ll link you here.