The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(94)

Of equal importance to me, Granddad was really impressed by Cheryl. Before he flew back to Kansas, he took me aside and said, “Seems to me a feller like you’d probably oughta go ’head and wind up marryin’ a girl like that.”


MY GROOMSMEN WERE three of my Cordova Street buddies, Noel, John, and Bob, plus Anson, Donny, and Charlie Martin Smith. Our matching rented tuxedos were the apotheosis of mid-1970s men’s fashion: wide-lapeled and powder blue, with ruffled tux shirts in the same color. All us guys sincerely thought that we looked incredibly cool. At least Cheryl looked timelessly beautiful in her traditional white wedding dress with a flowing train.

The only reason Henry wasn’t officially in the wedding party was because he was away on location, filming a TV movie. He implored the production to let him hop on a plane to attend the ceremony. He arrived early, with a George Harrison mustache and hair down to his collar, and we put him to work as an additional usher. The network’s machinations and favoritism had done nothing to strain our friendship.

Andy Griffith and Don Knotts also came, which moved me no end. I no longer saw much of them, but, like the de facto family that they were, they showed up when it mattered. So, too, did People magazine, which dispatched a reporter and a photographer to the church. They must have been baffled by our completely unglamorous affair, but to their credit, they were respectful.

The getaway car was driven by my best man, sixteen-year-old Clint. He was charged with driving the very grown-up new vehicle that Cheryl and I had bought together, a boxy maroon Volvo 240 station wagon. My groomsmen decked it out with the traditional accoutrements: streamers, tin cans dragging from the back, and a JUST MARRIED placard.

I was a little worried about being driven by Clint that day—he couldn’t stop giggling and burned rubber the whole way. Fortunately, it was a short drive and we all got there fine. But I suspect he was high.





CLINT


Yes, I was high. I took a couple of pipe-loads before the festivities kicked off, and as far as I was concerned, I was going to be perfectly fine behind the wheel. By age sixteen, I had fully integrated marijuana into my life. I was smoking weed morning, noon, and night. It was so damned accessible through my classmates who were dealers—one played on the Burroughs football team and another was the most popular guy in auto shop. I could score a four-finger bag of Colombian for thirty or forty bucks, and that would hold me for a couple of weeks.

Ron, living as he did in Glendale, was oblivious to how much I was smoking. But Dad was starting to get the picture. I had gotten into trouble a couple of years earlier when I helped myself to a couple of cigarettes from a pack that Mom had left lying around. I didn’t particularly like them, but my curiosity had gotten the better of me. Dad smelled the smoke on my clothes and lost it. He didn’t want me to experience the same health issues as Mom. I got the hardest spanking of my life.

Dad could still get away with that when I was thirteen or fourteen, but by my midteens, I wasn’t going to take it. It’s just sort of hardwired into a boy’s DNA, that at a certain age, he feels like he’s ready—or even eager—to tangle with his old man. So, when he challenged me about my pot-smoking one day, around the time that Ron and Cheryl got married, I challenged him right back.

It started with him telling me that he could smell it on me. He called me a dopehead. He said the word dope with disgust. He was from that generation that had no problem with alcohol but believed marijuana to be morally beyond the pale. I made the case that this was hypocritical—I saw no categorical difference between booze and pot. With no small measure of bravado, I said, “You should try it, Pop. You might actually enjoy it.”

Dad was too tough to act shocked. He gave as good as he got. “You know, maybe I will. Maybe I will try it!”

So I went upstairs to get my bong. “Come on, Pop,” I said when I came back down, “let me see you do it. Do a bong-load. You’re gonna love it.”

I was provoking him but I was also sincere: I thought that if he just took a hit, he would enjoy it and see the error of his ways. I miscalculated.

I had never seen him so angry. “Dope won’t get you anywhere. Get that out of my sight!” he said. “I don’t want that shit in my house.”

I didn’t quite sense that his fists were balling up in preparation to give me a pummeling, but this was definitely an escalation. If I hung around, there was a chance that things could get ugly. So I just bolted. I ran out the door and spent a few hours at a friend’s house, allowing time for the tension to defuse.

When I returned, the bong was still there—he hadn’t smashed it up like a southern sheriff demolishing a moonshiner’s still. He chose to remain my loving, supportive dad. But now I knew that he knew.


AT THIS STAGE of my life, weed wasn’t getting in the way of things at school. To the contrary, I was a pitcher on the varsity baseball team and a dedicated correspondent and photographer for the Burroughs High newspaper, The Smoke Signal.




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RON

Burroughs’s sports teams were all called the Indians, and the Smoke Signal was an extension of that. This was a good three decades before schools, leagues, and other institutions began to realize how offensive these culturally exploitative names were. The girls in the cheerleading and twirling corps, Cheryl among them, were known as the Injunettes. Some of them wore feathered headdresses. That name is no longer in use, and the community is currently debating whether or not to retire the Indians name.