Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(11)

I was in.



Let’s backtrack in time, back before the audition. Maybe a couple months earlier.

I’d come to this new high school and fallen into a pattern of smoking dope and skipping class and smoking more dope, all the while trying to find friends. Just another kid caught up in this American craziness. At Highland Park I tried acid once when my parents weren’t home, and I was high for about ten hours. Paranoia stalked me the whole time. I told my sister, and she sat with me for a while. Her face turned into a skull, then into a witch’s face. I grew scared, threatened to throw myself into the pool, and never dropped acid again. But I still scored pot anytime I wanted.

There wasn’t much to hold any of us together. Culture? That was changing. Morals? What were they? This was 1971. Religion? My family stopped going to church when I was a little kid, and we weren’t raised with any sort of faith, nothing to provide an anchor. As a family—as a nation—these were tough times. Most days, I was floating on the open sea. Every evening, images of the Vietnam War splashed across our TV screens. It was the first war shown on television, and every night that screen showed only bad news. Since the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, America had been involved in the war in a serious way, and it continued to kill plenty of Americans each day of each week of each month of each year. My folks were scared the war was never going to end. They figured due to the constant bevy of Ds and Fs on my report cards, I’d be drafted within three years and sent to Khe Sanh.

I’d lived in Highland Park years earlier, before all the moves across the city, back and forth to here and there and God knows where else. The last time I’d lived near Highland Park I’d had a couple of friends, but they didn’t want anything to do with me anymore, and I didn’t know why. Kids don’t talk about these things. So I needed to find new friends. As a sophomore, then, I was a bit of a loner in a new high school, lost and wandering and having trouble connecting with new friends. The only thing that ever remotely worked for me was rock and roll. Music at Highland Park High School ushered me into the Zeppelin crowd. We formed our own band, and then I had two pretty good friends in high school. Two guys who shared the love of music.

Every so often during afternoons at Highland Park, I actually shuffled off to a few anti-war “moratoriums,” as they were called. Students wore black armbands and noodled away on guitars and crooned Peter, Paul and Mary songs. All over our country at universities and high school campuses these protests were happening. I didn’t go to these moratoriums because I actually protested anything. I went because if you told your teachers you were at one of these protests, then it was okay to cut classes. Plus, there were girls there.

High school proved a struggle for me every day. Ravines bordered Highland Park High School. One Thursday I ditched my second-to-last class and climbed down into one of the ravines, hid under the bridge that spanned it, and sparked up a joint. Inhaled it down. Sparked up another. When I came back for my last class, my eyes were bloodshot and my heart rate racing. I felt a strong urge to eat a bag of potato chips.

The next day after school, I went back to the ravine with my two bandmates in tow. Somehow the three of us had laid hold of three bottles of Boone’s Farm apple wine, and we drank a bottle of wine each while simultaneously puffing away on joints. We had a gig scheduled in half an hour, and this was what rock and rollers did, man. The mighty Half Day Road was performing at the high school dance, and we had to get loaded before we rocked.

My bandmates and I finished our wine, smoked the last of our pot. We wobbled up to the school and headed up onstage. Grabbed our instruments. I yelled, “Hello Highland Park!” and our drummer started banging away on his kit. The bass player jumped in with me and my guitar, and we blasted away on our instruments for a while with the room still good and blurry. The tube top girls in the front row danced with their arms toward the stage. But something wasn’t right. I glanced at my bass player, and he glanced at me, and we both started cracking up. We were halfway through our first tune, and it hit us that we weren’t playing the same song. We had no idea what our drummer was playing. It might have been a third, completely different song altogether. He never told us.

We laughed about that one for days. A couple of weeks later Mrs. Barbara Patterson met us in the hallway, and I started inhabiting Pepé the Shark. Something genuinely began to change in me.

Play practice was after school every day for five weeks, and you couldn’t go to play practice unless you’d been at school during the day. So for the first time in a long while, I started going to classes regularly. I found myself meeting a whole new crowd of folks, theater kids. I discovered they were smart. Cooler than I’d first thought. Funny. Passionate. Driven toward acting with the same drive I’d always poured into music. I noticed that since starting play practice, I was smoking far fewer doobies.

But my old life still pulled at me. Two weeks into rehearsals, somebody threw a huge party. Not a theater kid. Just a kid whose parents were out of town. By the time I rolled in, fifty or sixty teens were already drinking, smoking, dancing, making out in the stairwell. I had a dime bag and pulled a couple of other kids into the laundry room with me because it’s good to share. We all lit up my joints, and I recognized four of the kids but not the fifth. He was a strong-looking dude, maybe nineteen. Must be somebody’s older brother, I thought, but the fact that I didn’t know him didn’t concern me, because, Hey, he’s at the party—somebody must know him. Right? He said he was a dogcatcher for the city, and he smoked pot right along with us, or at least it looked like he was smoking. We puffed away, and all told stupid jokes and laughed, and I didn’t watch him too closely as the high set in. He brought the joint up to his face again. Puffed. I guessed. Everything was cool, particularly when the dude glanced around the circle and said, “Hey, where can I buy some pot for myself?”