After I got kicked out of the private school, I returned to the school I’d attended before, with the program for fucked up kids.
Although I didn’t attend class much. I skipped most days, sleeping in, showing up late, if at all. I was more interested in getting high. The few times I’d go were to sell weed or coke.
And when I would go, I’d snort coke in the bathroom, or smoke weed in the woods behind school.
When I’d first attended the school, I was a skinny young freshman, wasn’t exactly imposing.
(Back in my freshman year, I’d had a strange tick. I’d worn a Phoenix Suns hat the first day of school, one I’d found on a bench at a restaurant. I didn’t even like or care about the team. But I liked the hat, its royal purple color and flaming sun logo, and I wore the hat every day to school, never coming to school without it.
I’d wear it in gym class. I’d wear it in rain, heat, or cold. I just felt like I had to wear
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent it… A girl in my class once said to another girl, “He wears that hat every day,” and my teacher asked me if I wore the hat in “the shower.” I didn’t. I just wore it to school. Every day. But when I returned to that school, I never wore it. I’d shaved my head down to the skin. It suited my “hardcore” image of the time. I occasionally wore an L.A. Raiders skullcap, however not as compulsively as the first hat.)
Returning to the school, the program, I was an elder statesman, running things.
The head dealer for the school. Though my reign at the top of the school’s drug pyramid wouldn’t be enduring…
The crew I ran with had been busted by our school’s rent-a-pig security guards, outside of the school, on the football field. They’d been ditching first period to smoke a fat joint of the skunk. I’d have probably been with them too, if I wasn’t also ditching first period, as usual. To sleep in. 7:00 a.m. was far too early for me then…
As stated, I wasn’t with them when they were caught skunk in hand, but when I showed up to school later, the security guards, met me at the school’s front door, knowing I’d probably have drugs too, since I was usually with those dudes. Of course, one of the guys caught could have snitched, too. I’m not sure.
However the school knew, they knew, and a whole pack of pissed off, balding, middle-aged rent-a-pigs burst out from behind the entryway’s sliding blue doors and with their big bellies flopping, they circled me, baring their coffee stained fangs.
They certainly would find drugs on my person. But not much. Because recently, my friend Cam had been snitched on, his house raided. Paranoid I might be next, I’d cleared out most of my stash from my house, was leaving my supplies at a girl I’d been banging’s house…
It had scared the shit out of me, what happen to Cam…
More about that...
Cam, who I’d mentioned before, the first of us to drive, the dude with the VW
Beetle, had blossomed into a successful suburban drug trader, an illicit entrepreneur. He started off selling small Ziploc baggies of weed to friends and
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent classmates and moved up to selling freezer bags, ounces and keys of coke, weed, and sheets of LSD, to lower-level dealers.
He’d dropped out of high school and had made enough cash to rent himself a townhouse near the local community college, and it became the party house.
Fuckup central.
The house began as mostly just stoners on couches and loveseats, beanbags in the living room doing bong hits, but as we sank deeper into coke, and Cam started moving more weight, the people, like the drugs, got more hardcore.
Like the police officer (who I mentioned before) Cam bought most of his coke and weed from, who’d come by with these increasingly scary, heavily-tatted, roughneck street types, and they’d sell variegated contraband to us and others, usually in the kitchen.
But the worst guy to turn up had to be Ben, who’d moved into one of the bedrooms. I don’t know who brought him in, or where he came from. No one I knew, aside from Cam, knew him; no one had gone to school with him. And I never asked Cam where Ben had come from or how they knew each other. It was sort of like one day, Ben just appeared, materialized like an apparition.
He looked the part, too, like a ghost, a phantasm; he looked dead. Ben was ghastly pale, pale as cocaine. Dude looked like a walking corpse, although unlike most of us, who were skinny, he was obese, huge, yet strangely agile, quick, like a sumo wrestler.
But he was no Asian. I think he was of Irish or Scottish heritage because he had fire red hair and a perpetually puffy reddish fish face full of acne. He always wore plain black shirts too small for his big belly and these tight black jeans that rode up high and showed his ankles. Like a big, white, goth Urkel.
(Although when he’d go to work, he’d wear well-tailored, solid black three-piece suits that’d be perfectly starched and creased. He must have taken the clothes to the drycleaners…)
I think he was strung out on coke before he moved in but worsened the longer he stayed. He’d snort thick, finger-size lines, too, Tony Montana, Scarface train rails.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Not only was he constantly amped, a snorting fiend, and discomfiting aesthetically, Ben also had a noticeable presence to him. One that sent a chill over the stoners. Whenever he’d enter the living room during bong hit sessions, everyone would just get quiet and uncomfortable. Like the temperature in the room would drop ten degrees.
Maybe it was because of his work. Ben was in the funeral services industry, was an embalmer, and if you went into his room, it was like entering death.
There were satanic, death and black metal posters all over the walls. Venom.
Cannibal Corpse. Cradle of Filth. Anal Cunt.
He’d sit in front of his TV, which was always on, watching videos of horror movies, snuff films, documentaries about mass killings, serial killers, car accidents, natural disasters, “Faces of Death” videos, and plane crashes.
He kept the AC blasted, fucking frigid cold. His room, too, was consistently kept dark, the windows taped over with heavy black garbage bags. Ben once said something to me about hating the sun. That he believed he could eliminate time by covering the windows. That he’d read about it in a Philip K. Dick novel, and that he refused to wear a watch because it made him feel like time was chasing after him, cutting into his hand…
I was one of the few to brave going into Ben’s room. First off, because I’ve always appreciated eccentric, weird people, being that way, slightly, myself. And because he’d offered me free coke. In addition, I shared his affinity for sci fi/horror books and films.
Aside from me and Cam, none of the other folks in the house, living there or just crashing there, dared to venture into his chamber of darkness. Nor did they like him.
But, at least at first, they’d never mention anything to Cam about their disdain for Ben. Probably because they bought their substances from Cam and Cam and Ben were (for some unknown reason) tight as glue. Cam would always call Ben “his boy” and vaguely mention something about “all the shit he did for me.”
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Ben didn’t leave the townhouse much, except for work, so we were all surprised when he brought home a girl, Stella, who lived with him in the house, from the day she arrived.
Stella was petite, with a small head, and short bowl haircut of sandy brown hair that hung like a halfmoon over her roundish face. Her big green bug eyes almost jumped off her skull and she had bad teeth. But she was blessed with a surprisingly supple, curvaceous body. Her skin had looked almost a wolf gray type color when I first saw her, but she got paler and whiter the longer she stayed in the house. Probably, because like Ben, she rarely went outside.
She’d often slink around the house wearing only a t-shirt, and most everyone caught passing glimpses of her hairy snatch.
And, as Ben got more and more strung out on coke, hardly ever leaving his room, even for work, Stella started to fuck everyone. All the stoners, me, the cop, the roughneck street thugs. Even Cam, though he tried to pass it off saying how he was drunk and she’d left her shirt on the whole time and it “only was a couple minutes.”
Stella, well, she was one weird, weird chick. Maybe she liked Ben because she was into death. Really into death. That’s all she talked about. Death. What happens when you die, ghosts, murders, psychic mediums, reincarnation.
She said she only liked to listen to artists who’d died because their music was more profound that way.
Hendrix, The Doors. She wouldn’t even listen to anything new, saying how she’d wait until the artist died, because then “you could truly understand them...”
The cop brought a particularly strange fellow over one day, a short stocky Mexican guy with a lazy eye, speech impediment and a twitchy arm. The Mexican guy wore well-ironed khakis, a plain white t-shirt, and a black knit cap that covered most of his eyelids. I remember he called everyone “foo” and sold us bags of PCP and meth.
Once the meth and PCP made their rounds, shit really hit the fan at the house.
Ben began to emerge from his room a lot more and had somehow come into possession of a baby pig. The animal would shit everywhere, and Ben and Stella
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent would often walk around the house, cradling the little oinking pig like a baby, singing lullabies to it.
Ben would frequently interrupt our bong circle. He’d be in tears, brandishing a machete, threatening to kill himself or to cut off one of his fingers for one reason or another, although he was talked down pretty easily by sympathy and bong hits.
I think he’d just wanted someone to talk to.
Cam, and the stoners who lived on the house’s living room couches, eventually got sick of Ben, though, his pig shitting all over, the stink of the shit, and especially we’d had enough of Ben’s crazy outbursts and threats of self-harm. A council convened and unanimously decreed he be kicked out of the house; even Cam voted him out, had had enough of the suicide threats and stinky pig shits.
Ben whimpered and cried like a bitch after being given his eviction orders. He threatened to kill himself and ran upstairs way faster than a man of his size should be able to. Then he slammed his door and locked himself in his room. We thought he’d kill himself, for real, but no one cared that much because everyone had tired of his drama. Stella didn’t even knock on the door, or go try to console him, or intervene on his behalf. Instead she spent the night getting fucked by a couple different dudes.
The next day, Ben left, willingly, taking his pig and everything, packed up his stuff in his old wood-paneled beater and peeled out. He’d left stone-faced, without incident, probably barreling off to wherever the fuck his creepy ass had come from.
A couple weeks later, vice cops and a SWAT team raided, machine guns drawn, and ransacked the townhouse, took everyone to jail. Stella broke down crying and snitched on everyone.
Cam spent a couple days in the county jail, where he wound up punching out a toothless crackhead who’d tried to scare Cam into trading Cam’s fresh Nikes for the bum’s ratty old shoes.
Cam took the fall for the drugs found in the house, the felony distribution charges. Everyone else there was charged with lesser “constructive” possession charges. After being released on bail, Cam spent $15,000 in cash to hire a hotshot lawyer and got off with only probation, fines, and community service.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent The lawyer was able to get some evidence thrown out on a technicality but had told Cam his case was tough and would’ve been easier if Cam’d raped a 10-year-old girl. For real. That was, verbatim, what the lawyer said.
Cam was convinced that Ben snitched him out. Especially since the cops told him there’d been an informant who’d stated that Cam “loved” selling LSD to schoolkids. That he sought out children to sell to drugs to. That he’d hang around playgrounds, in a trench coat, full of drugs, like a drug-dealing bogeyman. That Cam’d lurk outside elementary schools, waiting for kids to come along so he could sell the kids acid and maybe molest them too.
Cam believed that was exactly the bullshit Ben would make up, and Cam drunkenly talked of hiring someone to shoot Ben, the “fat piece of shit,” outside his workplace, the funeral home.
Later Cam claimed he paid off an ex-hooker with HIV (who he’d met at an NA meeting) to fuck Ben without a condom. But again, this was over several beers and might have been drunk talk. Cam had his demons.
And Cam’s demons worsened, continued to claw away at him. After his legal issues were resolved, he had a botched dental operation that resulted in his jaw having chronic, debilitating pain. He tried unsuccessfully to sue the dentist.
Then for a time he said he’d thought of wearing a bulletproof vest and storming into the dentist’s office with an M-16, shooting everyone. Or maybe at least picketing out front of the dentist’s office with a big sign, telling everyone in the world what the dentist did to him.
Cam had moved back into his parents’ house. He’d gotten strung out on crack, was smoking it daily, and he was living down in his parents’ basement, playing video games most of the time.
I’d gone by there to visit him, see how he was. My bros and I had been growing increasingly concerned about him, seeing as he was smoking massive amounts of crack. A lot of people had quit talking to him anyway, after his house got raided and since he’d quit selling drugs.
Stepping down the winding staircase, into that dark basement to see him, I found him looking like shit. He’d lost a ton of weight. He was skinny, pale, and paranoid,
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent thinking the cops might be back at any time. He’d also been complaining of that dentist. Complaining about the pain in his jaw, how he’d lost his sense of taste and couldn’t sleep. He’d also again talked of how he was thinking of shooting the dentist and everyone in the office.
He’d gotten armed too. Not only did he have an M-16, he had several handguns, one of which he was holding and cleaning as we talked.
Not paying attention to what he was doing, he accidently squeezed the gun’s trigger, and it fired, a bullet whizzing by my head, only a foot or so away, leaving a cloud of smoke and a bullet hole in his basement room’s wood-paneled wall.
The sound was deafening too, the gunshot. My ears rang like never before. I could barely hear anything. For a second, I thought the gunshot came from outside. It could have Ben, the cops, another drug dealer, I didn’t know, but I ducked down, covered my head, then glanced up at Cam, who was holding the gun with a shocked look on his face.
It then dawned on me. This dude damn near shot me.
Cam broke into tears, apologizing, saying he’d understand if I never wanted to talk with him again. He said how if he’d shot me, he’d have shot himself immediately afterwards.
My ears ringing, I’d been drinking, and had taken valium, so I was too fucked up and stunned to process what had happened, for a minute or two, but I instantly forgave the guy. He’d been a true friend to me, had helped me when I needed help, had given me a place to stay when my mom was screaming at me, upset that I wasn’t a normal human being, and I had nowhere else to go.
It was an accident. I realized that. And coming that close to death was a wake up call for me. I decided to cool out on the hard drugs, find a better path. The gunshot, the reality and thunderclap of it, its destructive power, augured to where my life was headed, and it wasn’t the path I wanted…
It was a watershed moment for him, too, that incident, in that right after, he quit smoking crack. Things continued to go downhill for him, though. His girlfriend of many years dumped him. He struggled to find work. He became increasingly depressed and stopped returning friends’ phone calls.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Eventually, he disappeared to a beach house he’d inherited from an uncle, up in the Panhandle, which, uncoincidentally, I think, was too far for any of his bros to easily visit. Like me, a few of his other friends would go by his parents’ house to check on him after he’d stopped returning calls, but once he’d moved to the Panhandle, hardly anyone saw him anymore…
(I lost touch with Cam for almost two decades, but received a strange email from him, saying how I was his best friend, and that he loved me, and he left me a number to call. When I called, he was distraught. I could hear him wiping away tears. His voice was straining, and he was saying he’d turned 40, was still living in his parents’ house, and that he’d developed diabetes, that he’d almost died after fainting in a pharmacy, that his leg might need to be amputated.) ((He also spoke of his sister. He said his sister, who was once an extremely attractive girl, a knockout blond, had blown up, gained over 100 pounds, and that he suspected her of poisoning his food.))
(((There wasn’t much I could say to him, other than lending a sympathetic ear, and suggesting, politely, that he explore options of another place to live, a
“professional” to talk with. I told him I’d meet him for a beer.))) ((((However, he didn’t answer my follow-up call and didn’t return my ensuing calls or texts. I don’t know what happened to him, but he fit the cautionary tale of the drug user in high school who winds up at 40 something living in his parents’
basement, taking bong hits.))))
(((((A teacher in high school, Mr. Maroni, the MacGyver lookalike, once pulled me aside, warned me about smoking weed, winding up a stoner loser, said he had a friend like that. I brushed it off, with typical teenage bravado, arrogance, but, in retrospect, he was sort of right. Though in Cam’s case, I’m not certain how much of his issues were due to drugs and how much related to mental illness. I’d bet, though, they were interrelated…)))))
Back to high school, after Cam’s house was raided, I worried I might be next.
(I was almost there that night of the police raid, and if it hadn’t been for a weed buyer calling me and me deciding at the last minute not to go over to Cam’s house, I’d have been there when the cops showed up.)
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent ((I’ll never forget waking up the next morning, seeing like over 100 messages on my pager from a friend. Fortunately, at the time of the raid, he’d been out buying cigarettes, and as he was walking back, he witnessed the cavalcade of police vehicles streaming in and armed cops in ski masks jumping out, brandishing automatic weapons and storming the house. When I called him back, talked to him the next morning, I was shocked to learn what happened, of course, but relieved, for him, that he’d walked off, left the scene unmolested, and I was thankful he’d paged me like 100 times to let me know what happened and warn me not to show up there…))
However, although I’d lucked out, not been there that night, I suspected that if Ben told on Cam, he’d probably told on me too (even though I wasn’t on the committee that ousted him from the house). Still, I thought I might be next, so I emptied out my supplies, contraband, sold off everything, and only held a small amount of the chronic for personal use.
And fortunately, too, at this point, I’d laid off the coke, and didn’t have any other hard drugs, wasn’t doing any of those, or holding any…
Back to that day at school, I remember arriving to school, still groggy because it was too early in the morning, even though I’d ditched 1st period, as usual, so I could sleep in. Like I said before, when I walked towards the front door of the school, several security guards bumrushed me, poured out from the doors, and swarmed around me like buzzing hornets and escorted me to the principal’s office.
Once there, I refused to be searched, feigning ignorance about the whole thing, but then the fucking cops showed up, claiming “probable cause.” I was told by the cops that this was due to those friends who’d been caught smoking a joint on the football field and that the police suspected I was also involved in the school’s drug trade.
The cops weren’t relenting, were going to search me, one way or another, and I knew my back was to the wall. I knew, too, after watching Perry Mason, and Court TV, that if I gave up my weed I’d get a lesser sentence. I wasn’t going to tell them where I got it, though.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent So I surrendered, fished from my L.A. Raiders starter jacket a dime-bag of kind bud, and a pager.
The cops then went to search my car and found an old hunting knife I’d gotten as a gift from a friend. I’d forgotten I’d even had it.
The cops, security guards, and soon enough the school principal, the ape with his receding hairline, simian skull, dick breath and ill-fitting gray suit, were all truly incensed about that hunting knife. Usually when they found a knife on a kid, they’d zap a xerox copy of it for evidence, but the knife was too big to copy, and so they had to make TWO copies of it. They pointedly enlightened me of this.
One of the security guards, a pudgy old fellow with a walrus mustache, sloped forehead, and u-shaped balding ring of gray hair, told me dramatically that it’s a good thing I wasn’t angry or I might have stabbed someone with that knife. His scowling, contorted facial expression and narrowed eyes conveyed a potent mixture of anger and condemnation.
However, the funny thing was, and I smirkingly told them this, that the knife was an antique. That it was rickety, and the blade was so dull it could barely cut butter. Inspecting the knife, touching the blade, the walrus face security guard, of course, realized this, and was unable to hide a most disappointed expression.
I was then led out of the school in handcuffs.
(Crazy enough, right before I got busted, I’d been going to class more, except for first period, which was too early for me, and I had stopped snorting coke, doing hard drugs, after Cam’s house being raided and him almost shooting me, as well as possibly having a cocaine overdose- I’d been on a three- or four-day coke binge, had looked at myself in the mirror and saw my nostrils caked in white crystals. Then my nose began to bleed, and I collapsed to the floor of my bathroom, crawled to my bedroom, and passed out. Slept for over 48 hours. I believe I was in a coma, possibly, but I can’t say for sure.) We, my football field smoking friends and me, were brought to police headquarters, and booked, fingerprinted, and placed, alone, in a set of what looked like stereotypical police interrogation rooms, where we were handcuffed to tables. The cops had taken our shoes because they claimed we could maybe
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent use the shoes to commit suicide, choke ourselves with the laces. It was hard to imagine making an effective noose from shoelaces but who knows…
Later my mom picked me up from the police headquarters. Enraged, cheeks quivering and screaming invective at me, again imploring me to be a “normal human being,” she said I was grounded forever, but she had to go to work later, and I went out anyway, smoked weed that night with a friend.
I was suspended from school, pending an expulsion hearing, and only a week after my first arrest, I awoke, at five a.m., to my doorknob rattling and frantically turning like it was possessed by a poltergeist.
Then there was banging on the door. An accusatory voice bellowed that it was
“the police and we’ll kick down the door if you don’t open it.” I’d been sleeping in my stepsister’s old room, and the door was locked.
At first, I didn’t believe it was the cops. I thought it might be a rival drug dealer, a robber, or thugs. But I could hear walkie-talkies, and so I knew it likely was actual law enforcement out there. And, of course, I’d rocked to the classic Ice-T song, “6
‘N the Mornin’,” so I knew that this was the normal time they’d show up for housecalls.
I opened the door, raised my arms in the air, and they stormed in, with guns drawn. It was the fucking ATF, the cops and Feds and a SWAT team.
Seeing a half-naked, pathetic teen must have been a major letdown for those adrenaline junkies. When they saw how pathetic I was, they let up, too, and grumbled, had a real look of disappointment.
Seems the coppers had been tipped off that I was part of a gang, because one of my friends was friends with a gangbanger, and that gangbanger had been in big trouble and turned State, supplied the cops a ton of names. Somehow this deserved a search warrant. And somehow the cops and a judge were stupid enough to believe a kid in the suburbs, selling small amounts of coke and weed, was in a street gang.
They were rather disappointed not to find much of anything, except a bong, seeds and stems. They tore apart my rooms, flipping over everything, flinging clothes, ripping up papers, tearing pages out of my books, and generally leaving the rooms
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent looking like a tornado had hit. However, the idiots didn’t find my secret stash spot that did have a nice little baggie of sticky buds. I’m surprised they didn’t bring any drug-sniffing pig dogs.
Not finding anything didn’t preclude them from making the experience as dramatic as possible.
When they entered my bedroom, they saw a BB gun, and believed it to be a real gun. One cop yelling out, “He has an AK in here! He was gonna blow us all away!”
To which I chuckled, assured them it was an air gun, and upon closer inspection, he realized it was, and his mustached lip curled in disillusionment.
Another cop, checking a storage area near my bedroom, asked if he would “find any dead bodies.” To which I again laughed. They found camping supplies and an old bike.
The police found nothing as nefarious as they’d expected. But still, a trio of mustache faces herded me into my kitchen and accused me of involvement in everything from gang activities to the JonBenet killing. They’d berated me and threatened that I’d spend the “rest of my life” in jail. Although after their fruitless, albeit dramatic, line of questioning, they discovered quickly that they’d been wasting their time, and I wasn’t worth much more than minor drug charges.
Fuck, am I lucky, though, I’d gotten off the powder. That shit can incur far worse penalties than weed seeds, stems, and used bongs. Makes me grateful Cam was smoking crack and almost shot me...
I was again brought to the same police station, had my shoes taken, was fingerprinted, and then placed in the same interrogation room and handcuffed to the same table. I again was released and smoked weed later that night.
A couple months later, I avoided trial by pleading “no contest” in either case and got probation and community service.
I can’t imagine how much taxpayer money was wasted on raiding the house of a non-violent drug user, drug seller.
Not like I’m the first. It’s another example in a tragically long line of innocent people not allowed control over their bodies, told which drugs (tobacco, alcohol,
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent prescriptions) they’re able to use and which ones they aren’t. Fascism, as far as I’m concerned.
The cops could have easily sent a car by my house, had a cop or two question me.
There was no use at all for such a spectacle. There was no use or purpose to terrify me, my mother, or to destroy my property, trashing my rooms, tearing apart my books like they did.
Plus, before that, after my first arrest, before it even, I’d cleaned up, was only smoking weed, drinking occasionally, was going to school again.
Not that I believe that teens should do drugs, any drugs, even weed. Looking back on it, I wish I didn’t do it. I wish I had been on the straight and narrow. Done better in school. Maybe I’d have had a better life later. Maybe not. Like with the abortion, it’s a big “what if…” and I wonder what could have been, where another path could have led…
But really, save for smoking weed, even after my second arrest, I cleaned up, did no hard drugs. And why? Because I didn’t want to anymore. I’d had my fill. That’s, at the end of the day, the best, most effective way for anyone to quit anything.
Because they want to quit. Intrinsically.
I’m fortunate, too, in a sense, that I got my hard-drug-phase out of my system when I was young. As an older person, with an older body and older person responsibilities, like a job, kids, a mortgage, taxes and all that, getting fucked on coke or meth or PCP, having your house raided by the cops, that’s got far worse consequences…
Besides community service (spent working in a soup kitchen, scrubbing toilets) I was also expelled from the program for fuckups, elevated to a “Level Five” school, a place for extreme fuckups. And that school was extremely fucked up.