Confessions of a Teenage Stoner

I freely admit that I was a stoner and drinker in high school. I also have to admit that I had more fun than I probably should have. These are some of the stories. At least the ones that I can remember.

There was an old roller rink in my tiny little town. It was the second oldest rink still in operation at the time. This was where mostly all the teenagers hung out on Friday and Saturday nights. Well, most of us eventually made it there that is.
There was a condemned dance hall up the hill. The ceiling was falling in and there were gaping holes in the floor. We sometimes partied here. Of course, we knew that we were trespassing, but the owners didn’t seem to care.

Moving on there was an old ski lodge which then housed people that didn’t fit into society or would have been homeless without it. All of the tenants were men, and I didn’t think about it until years later that all of us girls were really lucky that no one took advantage of us.

Right beside the lodge was the original ski lift building where people would board the chairs to be taken to the top of the one truly short slope. Yep, we’d party there as well.

Now that you’ve got the lay of the land, so to speak, it’s time for the stories.

One night we were at the dance hall and I’m still not sure why but one of my friends decided he was going to climb up onto the roof. As messed up as the rest of us were we kind of forgot that he was doing this.

We had the music playing. We had boom boxes back then that played cassette tapes. Yeah, I’m old.
Anyway, the boys had a big metal trash can filled with beer on ice, one of my friends had her bottle of wine, and my best friend and I had our gallon of Jack Daniels. She and I would go through one on Friday night and another on Saturday.
Of course, pipes were being passed around. It always seemed like we had an endless supply of weed.
Suddenly we heard wood splitting. We looked up and our friends from the roof was falling towards the floor. Nobody moved, we all just yelled his name.

I wish I could say that the floor stopped his descent but well, it didn’t happen because the floorboards were rotten too.
All we could see was a gaping hole in the floor. Knowing he couldn’t go any further we all gathered around the hole and looked down.

Even though it was nighttime we could see him on the ground of the sub-basement. He was curled up, his legs bent up to his chest laughing hysterically. “Give me a minute,” he said while he kept laughing. “I’ll be back up in a few.”

He seemed like he was all right, so we went back to our partying, which he did eventually make it back to.

Another night at the dance hall the party was going full swing when someone came running inside and informed us that the police were on their way. Somehow he heard this when he was at the roller rink and figured he run up the hill and warn us.

Someone grabbed the boom box; others grabbed the trash cans with the beer. We all retreated to the back of the dance hall, which didn’t have a wall and looked down. I’m not good at judging distance but the ground looked pretty far away.
A couple people jumped down and grabbed the trash cans and the boom box while the rest of us jumped to the ground as well. Evidently things look a lot farther away when your under the influence of weed and alcohol.

Once we were all safely on the ground we headed to the top of the ski slope. We really must have been a sight to see. We made it to the bottom of the slope and headed straight to the ski lodge where we knew we wouldn’t be found.

After hanging out there for a while and finishing what we were drinking and our weed, we went to the roller rink. The owner looked at us as we came through the door. “Have you guys been drinking,” he asked, trying to sound stern. We all shook our heads. “Yeah right,” he grumbled. “I ought to tell your parents.”

There was one night, I’m really not sure where the party started but as we were climbing the hill to the roller rink a friend of mine was sitting in his truck in the parking lot. As I walked by the truck he yelled out the window for me to join him so went to the side, opened the passenger door, and slid in beside him.

He was packing a pipe. “I got some really good shit tonight,” he told me. “Top of the line Jamaican Gold.” He handed me the pipe telling me lady’s first. We smoked for around fifteen minutes, and I wasn’t feeling any effect at all.

“I don’t know where you got this from,” I told him. “But honestly I think you got fucked over.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Let’s go in and skate a while maybe it will hit us then.”
At this point I stepped out onto the running board of his truck and fell flat on my face onto the hood of the car that was parked beside us.

Somehow I made it into the rink. I’m not sure where he ended up. Fairly sure I wasn’t going to be able to skate I sat on the folding table under the DJ booth.

I was just chilling and listening to the music when I realized that I could turn the music on and off inside of my mind. I don’t know how long I sat there completely mesmerized.

Just so you know I have a lazy eye. The pupil is always pointing to the outside corner. I’m telling you this because at some point one of my friends skated over to check on me.

When I looked up at her she said, “Holy shit!” She grabbed my arm, pulling me onto the floor of the rink and we headed into the bathroom. Once there she turned me to face the mirror and told me to look at my face.

I stared for a minute or two before saying, “What the fuck am I supposed to be looking at?”

“Look at your eyes!”

I leaned closer to the mirror and stared at myself. I suddenly saw what she wanted me to see. My eyes were both looking forward.

It’s probably needless for me to say but this was better than turning the music on and off in my head.

A couple days later, in school someone came up to me and told me that one of my friends that was in his science class actually told the teacher about a person that he knew, whose eyes were crooked, got high and her eyes went straight. He wanted to know how that could happen.

I thought about strangling him the next time I saw him. I had the same teacher during another period, and I was the only person in the school with a crooked eye.

We went to the ski lift one night. There was at least eight of us sitting on buckets around the center of the building inside. As usual we were all completely messed up.

It seemed like one minute we were all sitting around talking and the next minute it was just one of my friends and me. Totally confused we sat looking at each other.

Slowly the others came walking into the lift. One by one they walked around until they were surrounding us. I couldn’t look away from my friend and he couldn’t break eye contact with me. I felt like I was going to lose my mind if I looked at anyone else.

I don’t know how long the rest of the group stood staring at us, but they proceeded to exit the building, again one at a time, moving very slowly.

The spell was suddenly broken, and he and I started laughing. When everyone came back in, laughing as hard as he and I were they all sat down, and the drinking and smoking continued.

Our group mainly consisted of five of us. However, there were always other people showing up. Usually everything went well and there weren’t any problems. Usually.

One of my friends was very athletic. Another girl that had shown up wouldn’t stop challenging her to run up to the top of the ski slope and back down. My friend did her best to ignore the constant taunting and just relax and enjoy getting drunk.
Time passed and the other girl evidently couldn’t handle her alcohol as well as my friend. She put forth one last challenge and my friend stood up saying, “Okay bitch, let’s go.” We all watched as they both took off running up the slope. About ten minutes passed before my friend returned alone.

She sat back down took our bottle from me and took a deep drink. I asked her where the girl was, and she shrugged her shoulders and told me that the girl had fallen down somewhere on the slope.

This is a terrible thing to admit but by the time we all went home we had forgotten that the race ever happened. I’m glad to say, however, that the girl was in school on Monday, but we never found out how long she was on the slope, and she never joined one of our parties again.

This leaves me with one last story to tell.

My group and I were hanging out at my apartment one afternoon. This day we weren’t drinking but of course we were getting high.

I had a cockatiel at the time and one of my friends was sitting in the chair beside the bird’s cage. Every time he would take a hit off the pipe he would exhale by blowing the smoke onto the bird.

We quit smoking around an hour before my mom was getting off work. My friend was putting the weed and pipe into his pocket when we heard a soft thump.

We looked around just glancing past the cage. Then we realized that the cockatiel wasn’t on his perch. My friend looked into the cage and started laughing. He had gotten the bird so high that it had fallen off of it’s perch and was laying glazed eyed on the bottom of its cage.

My friend couldn’t stop laughing but I was in a state of absolute panic. What was I going to tell my mother if the bird didn’t recover before she got home?

The only thing I could think to do was take the bird out of the cage and try to get him to sober up enough to at least stay on his perch.

By this time my friend has gathered his senses and started to panic along with me.

I held the bird and stroked his feathers. I took my fingers and splattered water onto him. Thankfully between the water and the physical stimulation the bird started to come around. With about ten minutes left I put him back in his cage and prayed that he would be able to stay on the perch. He was. It took the bird around five more minutes to become somewhat active. At that point he jumped onto his food dish and started eating.

We were safe and evidently weed will give a bird a case of munchies too.

So, there you are. I’m sure that my friends and I had many more adventures, but they’ve faded from memory as I’ve gotten older. Only these remain.

For those of you who don’t have children, I have a piece of advice. If you have any stories like these don’t tell them any of them.

Like my children they will eventually grow up and be tempted to try drugs and drinking. Though this may be a normal part of being a teenager for most kids, if you tell them the things that you did and they start experimenting for themselves, they will remind you of your actions as a teenager if you try to scold them for doing exactly what you did.