I never picked up the habit of drinking alcohol, and hardly a day goes by that I am not thankful for that. All my life I have watched people’s lives go downhill because of alcohol’s addictive nature. Having my own bidness in the trades, I have had many helpers over the years, and it never failed to make me sad to see them head for the store with their pay, on friday right after work to buy a 12 pack. Then on monday they would show up for work, often late, frequently hung over. And usually broke. Drinking to excess is ubiquitous among trade workers.

My mom was an alcoholic. It caused many yelling sessions between her and my dad. (It was probably being married to him that caused her to start drinking) I learned to cook at a tender age because she would sometimes be too drunk to cook, and I was a growing boy who was always hungry. It led to an acrimonious divorce. Mom moved out, and when I went to visit her, it was sad. She had no life to speak of, except her job of being a private duty nurse for stay at home old folks, and drinking at night. One night she fell asleep smoking when I was up at the college visiting Jenny, and set her apartment on fire, ending her life. Her biggest dream for me was to see me graduate from college, but she didn’t live long enough for it. I miss you, mom. 

I had friends in high school who would go out drinking on friday nights. I went with them a couple times, but usually limited it to one beer. I was a designated driver before the term was invented. One night my buddy Don had a bottle of Bali Hai, a really cheap wine. He and I were between girlfriends, so we went up to Eden park and sat on a hill and drank the bottle and commiserated about being squeezeless. I got pretty drunk that night. The next morning, I felt like warmed over shit, vomiting with my head pounding, and swore I would never do that again. My momma didn’t raise no fool.

One night just after I started college at University of Cincinnati, while working as night manager for International House of Pancakes, my dishwasher Roy invited me to his apartment after work, and he brought out some marijuana. I had never seen it before, and none of my friends (that I knew about) were pot smokers. I was kinda nervous. In those days possession of marijuana was a felony in Ohio. And I did not want to go to jail. Even so, I smoked a joint with Roy, and driving home was a new experience.

I ran with hippies at college, and smoked pot with them every once in a while. It was ok, but I was ADHD, and it slowed me down a lot. Which was not all that bad a thing. I annoyed people less when I was high. But being high made me slack on my studies, and so, after a year and a half of classes (in Pre-Law! What was I thinking?) the dean told me that a 1.2 GPA was not cutting it, and kicked me out.

Several years later, I met Jenny, and visiting her at Wilmington College, finding the atmosphere there extremely stimulating and interesting, I decided to quit my job as a hydraulic pipe bender, and enroll in her college and try again. It was a small private school (1200 students at the time) and the intellectual atmosphere was very heady. It was expensive, but I had frugally saved my money while working, and had the first year’s tuition in my pocket when I went for the interview in the admissions office. The admissions guy, after looking at my transcript from U.C. and grimacing, spent half an hour trying to talk me out of enrolling.

Ken: (admissions guy) Well, Sam, your GPA is so low from U.C. that almost none of your class credits will transfer.

Me: (being an optimist) I understand that Ken, but I guess I will have to just start over.

Ken: With this GPA you won’t be eligible for much in the way of financial aid. Plus, we are a serious college, not a student factory like University of Cincinnati, and I am not sure you would be a good fit here. You should think this over.

Me: Will I be eligible for a work/study job?

Ken: Yes, I could offer you that, but I fear that it would be for naught. Your lack of success at U.C. demonstrates that maybe the level of classes that we offer here would be difficult for you to succeed in.

He was trying hard to talk me out of wasting my time and money. I couldn’t blame him, I sure didn’t look like a good bet for success. But I already had been coming up to visit Jenny a couple weekends a month, and had sat in on some classes, and had made friends with students, and I was pretty convinced that Ken’s outlook notwithstanding, this was just exactly the college that I needed. 

It was time for the big guns. I had looked at the college information, and knew to the penny how much matriculation, and a year’s tuition would cost. And amazingly, that was exactly how much I had stuffed in my pocket. So I stood up, worked the wad of cash money out of my tight jeans pocket, and plopped it down on the desk in front of him.

Me: Here’s the deal, Ken. I believe this college is just what I want. And I know myself pretty well, and am willing to take a chance on me, and, well, give it the old college try. So, you find a way to take my money, and I will promise that at the end of the year I will have at least a 3.0 GPA. You keep an eye on me. You won’t be sorry that you gave me this chance.

He just stared at the wad of cash money sitting there, big enough to choke a horse. I could see the gears turning in his head. I sat there giving him my best smile. All of a sudden he stood up, smiled, and stuck out his hand, and said “Welcome to Wilmington College Sam.”

It was everything I had hoped. I loved the classes. The students were on an intellectual level that I had not encountered at U.C. My work study job with the maintenance department was great. I rented a house in town and promptly moved Jenny out of her dorm and into the house. By then she had asked me to be her boyfriend. 

510 North South street. I picked that house to rent because I loved the address. And it was only $125 a month. I had enough savings left to pay the rent and bills and food for about 6 months. I was going to have to have some income after that. I was counting on being eligible for financial aid next year, so I just had to get through the gap, bring my GPA up to 3.0, and I would be gold.

A lot of my hippie friends at college smoked pot. But what was different, was that while being high, we would talk about world sized things. And about our classes. I was really interested in my classes, and studying was mostly something I did eagerly. So I did ok with classes, and did, in fact, have a 3.1 GPA by the end of my first year. 

Getting pot to smoke was difficult for everybody except for a couple guys from New York city, and one guy from Montana, and they usually only had small amounts for sale for a high price. I was studying economics. I knew that if there is a need in a society, then the person to step up and meet that need, would profit from the decision. I knew a guy in Cincinnati who sold pounds of commercial columbian pot, so I went to visit Joe. And thus started the way to pay my rent when 6 months had gone by. I sold nickel and dime ($5 and $10) bags of good pot, and word got around, and I had a regular trade in it.

It doesn’t have anything to do with marijuana, but I did study, and got a great education, and succeeded. I graduated a couple years later, with a 3.8 GPA. My mom would have been proud. And maybe Ken in the admissions office would take a chance on somebody else next time. A person who believed in him or herself. He and I became friends.

So, after we graduated, (Jenny and I were married by then) we got a job at a summer camp in Beacon New York, she as head counselor, and me as director of maintenance. Nobody at the camp smoked pot. Well, probably the kitchen staff did, but nobody admitted it and I never caught anybody doing it. The guy who drove the camp bus and our flatbed truck was from NYC, and he mentioned one day, that the place to buy pot around here was upriver in Newburgh. He gave me some sketchy directions, and said, “just go along this street under the bridge, and drive slow, and some kid will come out to you and trade money for 1/2 ounce bags of good weed.” It was a scary area like where you see people scoring heroin in the movies. I girded up my loins, drove down the street, traded money for a bag, and was headed back to camp without being shot or robbed. The place was called “Stop and Cop” and later I found that it was well known by the local pot smokers. The summer at camp was great fun.

Jenny had found a job as a 4th grade teacher in a school in Little Rock, Arkansas, so we headed south from New York with a uhaul trailer holding our worldly goods behind my pickup truck. I would find a job when I got there.

Little Rock is smack dab in the heart of the Bible Belt, and pot smokers are deep underground. So, we just didn’t smoke any pot for a year or so.

That is what is better about pot as compared to alcohol. If you don’t have any pot, you just don’t smoke any. If you don’t have any alcohol, then you better go get some quick.

I got a job as bookkeeper for a paint company in downtown Little Rock. The guys that I worked for were really hard core rednecks. If you lived in North Little Rock or anywhere north of there, you were a yankee, and they didn’t like no yankees. You know the difference between a yankee and a damn yankee? A yankee is somebody from up north who must be lost, because he had no bidness down here, and should go back home. And a damn yankee was one who moved in and wouldn’t leave.

They didn’t like them dirty hippies neither. Need to hold em down, and cut they hair, and give em a bath. I just kept my head down, and did a good job, smiled a lot, let them make fun of me, and after a while my yankee status was less of an issue. 

At the end of the year, they always had a big fishin outing. Everybody would drag their bass boats down to a big lake, and fish and drink beer and shoot off their guns, for a 3 day weekend, bring the wife, grill some burgers, yahoo good drunk fun, y’all! Go Razorbacks! Jenny and I went. 

Those of you who knew Jenny, know that she would rather kneel on rice in the corner for 6 hours, and do 20 Hail Mary’s and 16 Our Fathers and an act of contrition every day for a month, before hanging out with drunken gun shooting rednecks. But because she loved me, she went with me. And that is what it means to really love someone. 

Hahahaha. I make me laugh.

So the lake was gorgeous, and we fished and drank some beer, and after dark, Jenny and I walked off down a trail into the woods. It was warm and pleasant, and smelled good like the woods always smell. Night birds were calling. Loons hooting on the lake. I was holding the warm hand of my paramour. We had a nice peaceful walk. As we looped around on the way back to the cabin where everybody was staying, I caught a whiff of pot smoke. I slowed us down, and eased forward, and there on the trail was the assistant manager of the paint company, smoking a doobie. 

He was the redneckest of all the rednecks at work. Jeans and cowboy boots and cowboy hat and a fancy pickup truck with lights on the roll bar, and big tires. His truck had two bullet holes in it because one day it wouldn’t start, and he pulled out his pistol and shot it because it pissed him off. 

BUSTED! I walked around the curve, and smiled.

Me: Hi Steve! Enjoying the evening?

Steve: Oh, uh, hi Sam, Hi Jenny. Um, you aren’t gonna narc on me to the manager are you?

Me: Heck no! Can I have a hit?

Steve: Sure

We smoked the joint with him, and stood there talking about random stuff for an hour. For a redneck, he was a pretty interesting guy. And that was my pot connection until we moved out of Little Rock. Jenny and I visited with Steve and his wife Patty, and became good friends. Pot does that. It brings random strangers together.

Several years later I got moved up the hierarchy of the lumber company I was then working for, to assistant manager, and had to move to Shreveport, Louisiana and run their yard. It was late April and Jenny only had 6 weeks of school left, and we were both ready to get out of Little Rock. 

So I accepted the job, and got on my motorcycle and rode 6 hours to Shreveport, and rented a tiny cabin in one of those little court motels, to live in until Jenny came down when school was done. It was across the river from Shreveport in Bossier City, where the titty bars and whorehouses and casinos were, to keep them out of sight from the Christians over in Shreveport. It was next to the river right by the city dump. It sounds worse than it was. The cabin was clean, and I liked living there. I was sitting on the bank of the river behind the motel courts, looking at the river one night about 2 weeks after I moved there, and a homeless looking guy walking down the bank came over and said “Hey man, you got a match?” I handed him my lighter, and he took out a joint and lit it up.

Homeless Guy: (Bob) You want some?

Me: Did Huey P. Long put up that bridge over there? Heck yeah.

Bob turned out to not be homeless. He had a home and a job, but he was… um… not very fastidious. He was a coon-ass from New Orleans. That is what cajun swamp people from Louisiana call themselves. Off work from the oil rig for 3 months. He told me where to find pot in Bossier City.

Jenny moved down from Little Rock, and we rented a cabin on the shore of Cross Lake, just outside of town, and lived an idyllic life for 6 months or so. Fishin and laying out naked on the dock, and reading books to each other on my days off. She was getting restless, and looking at taking grad courses at University of Lousiana. 

I was doing stupendously at my job, so the upper hierarchy noticed, and made me manager, along with having to move to a new lumber yard, as was their promotion policy. They promote you, and after you accept the promotion, they tell you where the yard you will be managing is. I said I would have to consult with my wife before I accepted and they looked at me like I was from outer space. Never let it be said that 84 Lumber is an egalitarian organization. Wives are a thing to be dragged along with your “career”.

By that time, I had trained 5 or 6 guys who had been promoted and moved on to other lumber yards, and I went home and called around trying to find out where the openings for managers were. Word was that they needed a manager in Lubbock Texas because the old one had been fired for drinking. And one guy told me that the manager in Austin Texas had been caught dipping in the till, and he was on his way out. 

Texas? Cowboys and rednecks? Shit. They have lumber yards in every state, why not Washington or California? Jenny and I talked and decided I should accept the promotion. She was tired of Shreveport, and did not want to teach there. So I accepted, and we moved to the better of two evils, Austin.

FInding a pot connection in Austin was easy. Everybody smoked pot here. Great music concerts on the shore of Town Lake full of hippies. Hot economy. Life was pretty good. Jenny got into grad school at University of Texas, and I managed the lumber yard.

Readers, look over at your Alexa right now, and say, Alexa, play “Up Against The Wall Redneck Mothers”. That was life in Texas.

Fast forward to the late 90’s. Jenny died of ovarian cancer, I had my journey of trying to get my life together again, and I decided to follow a life long dream, and apply to Peace Corps, and got accepted and was sent to Swaziland.

In those years, George H Bush senior was prez, and there was a no-tolerancepolicy about drugs, and the training director told us right away. Pot included. You didn’t even have to get caught. All somebody had to say was, “I heard Sam was smoking pot,” and the director would give me my plane ticket home, and 3 days to use it. So, once again, I just didn’t smoke pot. 

Training was difficult, and after 10 weeks, I was sworn into the Peace Corps taking the same oath as the President and the Marines. We had a big barbecue at the training camp, and invited all the PC volunteers in-country, and big cheeses from the govt and from the Peace Corps Swaziland. It was a big party, and I was resting from eating, sitting under a tree, and a volunteer named Max, came over to me. He had been a volunteer 8 years ago, and “went native” after his term of service, married a swazi girl, and had been living there out on a homestead in the bush ever since. He was famous. He had taught two of our sessions at training. He bent over…

Max: Sam, listen to me. I am going to walk out of the front gate, and turn right on the road. Wait for a bit, then follow me. I could tell you are a pot smoker.

And he walked out the gate. I sat there for a bit, and just as I was getting up to follow him, another volunteer went walking out the gate. That happened 4 times. Every time I got ready to get up and leave, some other volunteer would walk out the gate. When finally it seemed there were no others, I got up and left. Ahead of me were the other 4 walking along the road spaced out from each other. We walked about 500 yards down the road, then one at a time, they turned right onto a path in the bush. When I finally got there, everybody was sitting in a circle, and some had this big bag of pot, and were rolling cigar sized joints out of newspaper. We would smoke them down to about an inch long, and then they just tossed them on the ground. The newspaper is really harsh to smoke. Later I discovered pages from the bible were less harsh. (I’m going to hell for that) And in the capital city, Mbabane, they sell bugler tobacco, which comes with actual cigarette rolling papers. It was fun, my first high in Swaziland. Later we all walked one at a time back to the training camp and ate more food.

Later that evening, after everybody went home, I was sitting on the front step of my cabin, thinking about going out to my new site in a couple days. It was a scary thought, but I was ready to get on with it. My buddy Rich came over and sat down, and we shot the shit about our new schools, and about becoming a teacher. He leaned over.

Rich: Dude, you smell faintly of pot. You have any more? I have been jonesing for a joint. This 10 weeks is the longest I have gone without smoking pot since I was 16.

I was surprised. He looked like a straight gear head kind of guy. He was gonna teach metalworking at his school. Like me, he was evidently keeping a low profile.

Me: Nope, ain’t got any. It was Max’s pot I smoked. Wait! In fact, I know where some is. Come on.

We walked off out of the gate in the dark, and down the road, and I found the path into the bush. There must have been 10 or 12 inch-long butts that we had thrown on the ground earlier, and we gathered them up and got high.

Rich: I was asking around with the truck driver and the teachers, and one guy said it was easy to buy pot here. You go into Mbabane, and there is a little park there. You walk slowly up the hill. At the top are some young guys standing around a fire. They will sell you pot. The guy said, make sure you just walk slowly directly towards them.

Me: Let’s go there tomorrow.

Rich: Cool.

Next morning, we hitched into Mbabane and went to the park. Up the long hill about 100 yards, there were 4 young swazi boys standing around a small fire. We walked directly towards them, and when we were almost there, two of them scurried off and scooped their fingers through the leaves, and came up with a handful of those small match boxes that wooden matches come in. They came over to Rich and I and held them out, pushed open, and they were absolutely stuffed with pot buds. They were cheap, like 5 emalangeni per matchbox. We each bought two, and thanked the boys, and took our leave. Rich and I started calling them “the bhutis” (the brothers). After we moved to our schools, I would see Rich once in a while in the PC office, and he would say, “Let’s go visit the bhutis”, and we would.

After a year at my school, I got a new housemate in the teachers quarters house I lived in. Khumalo was an agriculture teacher. He had been sent to Elulakeni High, way out in the bush where I was, because it was such an awful school, no electric or running water, bats in every roof to eat all the malarious mosquitos that there were plenty of, and my school was where they sent teachers being punished for drinking, or smoking pot, or impregnating a student. 

Khumalo was a pot smoker, as I found out the first morning after he moved in. His radio alarm went off at 6am, just as Swazi Radio came on the air, every day playing the same opening song, the most boring rock song ever written. In siSwati. It was 15 minutes long. It made my eyes roll back, so incredibly cacophonous and monotonous was it. In the middle of it, I heard Khumalo coughing the pot smokers cough, and 2 minutes later the smell came rolling out from under his bedroom door. 

I lived with him for a year, and we never spoke of it. I never smoked pot in my house at school. I would go out in the bush, and sit on a hill where I could see all around, and smoke a joint. I loved Peace Corps and didn’t want to go home. Yet. I didn’t want to say anything to him. I didn’t know him at first, and later I just decided it was better if nobody knew I smoked pot. The bhutis in the park took care of my needs for the next 3 years.

After PC, I traveled with my buddy Mike. I had a little stash with me, but it ran out about two weeks after we crossed into Mozambique. One day I was walking on the beach while Mike was off chasing girls, and I ran into this guy on the beach. We had no common language, but soon I realized that he was trying to sell me some tourmalines he had found. I let him know I wasn’t interested. My pack was already too heavy, I wasn’t gonna carry stones too, no matter how beautiful they were. Since we couldn’t communicate; I didn’t know Portuguese or siShangani, and he didn’t know English or siSwati, or French, or Spanish, or German (I tried them all), we took to drawing pictures in the sand to communicate. We were laughing and running up and down the beach, drawing the stories of where we came from and our families and jobs, and having a great old time. We sat in the shade resting, and he tried to sell me the tourmalines again. Nope, I wasn’t buying. He looked at me for a minute, and then made the universal pot smokers sign, where you pinch your thumb and first finger together and put them to your lips, and suck air in. Then he raised his eyebrows. I nodded yes. He gave me the ok sign, and grabbed my arm and took me off the beach and up to a Mozambican homestead. He introduced me to the man and the woman who lived there, and was pulling on the strap of my day pack. I gave it to him, and he smiled at the folks and scampered off into the palm tree jungle. Off into the jungle. With my day pack. Which had my passport, travelers checks and my camera and binoculars. Oh poop. He was long gone, so I just had to trust in the universe and hope I was not just robbed.

The next hour passed so slowly I wondered if time was going backwards. I was nervous, but put on a good face, and tried to talk to the couple whose house I was in. The woman spoke some siNdebele, which is similar to siSwati, so I was able to tell them I was a teacher in Swaziland, and how old I was, and things about my family. We had a fun conversation with her translating both ways. They offered me some orange squash, the Kool-aid of Africa, and we drank some, and I worried. After we ran out of things to say, I took out my harmonica from my pocket, and played them old campfire songs. Way Down Upon The Swanee River, Red River Valley, My Darling Clementine, like that.

Finally the beach guy, Rodrigo, came back and motioned me to come with him. I said my goodbyes to my hosts, and followed him down to the beach again. He wrote 3000 in the sand. 3000 metacais, the currency of Mozambique. The exchange rate was 1200 to the dollar, so maybe $2.50 us. I gave it to him, and he handed my daypack to me. I felt the bottom, and sure enough, my stuff was still in the bottom. My pack was completely stuffed to the top with pot, maybe 2 pounds of primo buds. I was flabbergasted. We smoked a joint, and shook hands, and I took my leave and headed back to where Mike and I were camped. I probably could have sold that pot for about $1200 back in Austin. I smoked on it without making a dent in it for the next two weeks that we were in Mozambique. Heading into Zimbabwe I had to toss it off the lumber truck we were riding on when we approached the border. Zimbabwe is a very strict country that searched your luggage when you crossed the border.

I didn’t smoke any pot in ZImbabwe, or in Malawi as we traveled north over the next couple months. Didn’t encounter anybody with it. Eventually we arrived in Zanzibar, a beautiful island off the coast of Tanzania. Lots of tourism. It wasn’t long before one of the beach guys gave me the universal sign, and I was back in business. Not only was there great pot in Zanzibar, the spice island, but the beach boys also had Comorros Islands hashish, made by monks at a monastery there. Yum yum. 

The hashish was so good that I bought one of the tourist spice assortments with cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, turmeric, cloves, and assorted spices that they grow there, and took a razor blade and carefully cut open the package and secreted a chunk of hashish in it, and sent it to my buddy in New York whose house was going to be my first stop after I flew into Laguardia airport on my way back to Texas.

I left Zanzibar a couple months later and flew to The Netherlands where my good friend Marianne lived. I had a good visit with her for a couple weeks. She took me to her favorite Coffee Shop, where we got a menu that listed the types of pot that they sold along with good coffee. You order it and they open a drawer with lines of little bags, and pull out what you want. Just as I had bought some, and rolled a joint with the rolling papers that were in the table thing for holding salt and pepper and sugar, two cops walked in. My face must have gone white, because Marianne started laughing. She was chuckling when she told me to calm down, it was legal to smoke pot there.

When I flew into Laguardia my buddy was there to pick me up. We went to his house, and at dinner, I asked him if he had gotten the package I had sent him. Yes, he had, but had not opened it because he was waiting for me to show him the best way to use the spices I had sent. We opened it up, and the hashish was there where I had secreted it. Yay.

I eventually got back to Austin, and started my own bidness fixing broken things on people’s houses and doing remodeling. That was 27 years ago. I have run my little bidness in Austin all these years, and tho not wildly profitable, it has paid my bills, fed me, and allowed enough left over to pay for the philanthropy I have done with Mexican girls getting educated for the last 20 years.

I have smoked pot pretty regularly all those years. It has not affected the things that I have chosen to do with my life. It has kept me calm, and made me smile. I doubt that I would have been able to run my bidness, round up jobs, deal with employees, pay my bills, pay my taxes, and do good work on every job, if I had picked up the habit of drinking. Maybe I could have, after all, I am Sam, and can work miracles, but even so, I am happy to not have had to deal with what alcohol brings into a person’s life.

Be the owner of your life.  

Make your choices, and follow your dreams. 

Above all, always do your best.