The Wee Democracy

and the oscar goes to...

i only had a vague idea of who jamie's father was. he was a tall guy, mustachioed, living in fort worth, a vietnam vet, and he hung like a cloud of impending asskickery over my dad. i'd never met this guy, but i always feared that if my dad's simple asshole behavior ever really escalated to something dangerous to jamie, this guy would show up on the front doorstep and deliver a biblical smackdown. i suppose in all fairness, my dad would have deserved it pretty bad, if he didn't deserve one on general principle anyway.

he'd had cancer before, her father, and beaten it, though i remember jamie saying that he'd declared chemo a cure worse than the disease and that he'd rather eat a bullet than go through it again. i'm not sure if chemo would have done the trick the second time around, but when he died i was 18 and he was still a stranger to me.

by that time, my step mom and my dad had long gone their separate ways, so i didn't get to see them near as much, and i got the news that he'd died secondhand. we still talked on the phone, jamie and me, she coached me through asking a girl out for the first time, but things fell off a bit toward the end of my high school career. they didn't make it out to my graduation, her and her mom, but leah and i drove out to see them in FW a couple of days later.

she seemed to be taking it well, her father's death. i imagine myself in her shoes, sitting with it constantly in the back of my head, waiting and waiting, hoping it won't happen, knowing it will, and finally being relieved to be free of the burden of the uncertainty of when.

so we visited, ate dinner, and finally, after being loosened up by some wine coolers, jamie brought out her inheritance - a band-aid box semi-full of her father's now unnecessary medicinal pot, and what i can only assume was a sterile prescribed box of zig zag.

furtively, they rolled a joint and we went into jamie's room, cracked a window and sat on the bed. now, i'd never really inhaled anything up to this point. i'd been raised by my mom to believe that smoking cigarettes was tantamount to treason and she'd have no choice but to kill me if i did it. but i puffed on this thing, tried to inhale, but joints weren't, and still aren't, my thing.

so i faked it. i faked holding it in, and blew out what little smoke i could muster and about 15 minutes later pretending like it was starting to work.

"i feel it," i said.

leah raised her hand like a surfer to give me five, and said, real mellow like, "yeeaaahh".

then i went to bed. for like three years, i told anyone who asked, "yeah, i've smoked before. it was fun, i liked it, but it made me really sleepy."

i wanted to be cool - i did. i acted like i was drunk at the graduation party, and blamed it on sleep deprivation. you grow up with an alcoholic in the family, and it tends to scare you a bit into avoiding the same fate by simply avoiding the temptation altogether. that was me, avoiding everything until halfway through college, because i thought that if one drop hit my lips or one breath of smoke went into my lungs, i'd be done for. but you can't explain that to people.

but, enough time passes, and you get over your inhibitions and inexperience. you realize you're your own person and you control what you become. you start drinking a little, first beer, then wine, then margaritas, tequila, then vodka, gin and whiskey. somewhere in between there your friend makes a honey bear bong and you two sit around a crummy apartment, discussing the new hollywood, and eating a hatbox full of homemade cookies and beans straight from the can. you're driving into a gas station, and your friend gives you money to buy gas, but you spend it on a handful of prepackaged carrot cakes, and you know....you're in a much different place than your father ever was.

you may be a connoisseur now, but there was that one time you sat on a dark bed with your sister and step sister and pretended to be high to fit in.