It Sort Of Stuck

When I was in middle school I shared a carpool with my best friend Alex.  His dad was the Chief of the Volunteer Firefighter unit in Kearney and would take us to school in the mornings.  My mom would pick us up in the afternoons and bring us home.  This arrangement worked like clockwork.  Every morning I was late because both my mom and I hated mornings, and in the afternoons she was always on time because she and my dad owned their own business.  Both Alex and I had older sisters that were around the same age, so nothing was really secret between our families.  When my mom told me that I was adopted when I was eighteen, she also told me that my sister and Alex's older sister both knew, since it would have been hard to explain the presence of a baby without the presence of a pregnancy.  There were no secrets, tendency for tardiness or otherwise.  Our families just knew each other inside and out, because that's the way it was.

One slushy winter morning I piled in to the maroon minivan that had synthetic wood paneling on the sides.  A Chrysler, if my soaked memory serves me.  I was fourteen?  Thirteen?  Somewhere in there.  My birthday is in April so I have always been on the young side for my grade.  Starter jackets were the fashion trend.  Specifically, NFL football teams.  I was a New York Jets fan, predominantly because my tee-ball team had been the Mets, and at that age I had thought professional athletes played all sports.  Jets, Mets, they're close enough to confuse an athletically ignorant six year old, and it sort of stuck.  So I piled into the van in my Jets Starter jacket as I had for so many days prior when Alex's dad Ken turned around and said "You smell like marijuana."  Reminder: I'm a middle school student in Nebraska.  I know that booze, drugs, and sex were a problem for early teenagers in other states and cities in the 90s but Kearney, Nebraska was not one of these cities.  At that age I understood pot in theory, but had zero first-hand knowledge of the stuff.  And now I'm sitting in the middle row of a maroon Chrysler minivan with synthetic wood paneling, at 7:30am, being accused of spending enough time around dank smoke to smell like it.  Because of my older sister I was a foul-mouthed little child, but even so "What the fuck?" is the only thought that persists even through to today.

The foreshadowing involved here is breath-taking.  Around the age of sixteen, after Alex had gone the way of the high school theater crowd and we mostly stopped talking, I discovered what marijuana actually was and fell head over heels in love.  Sixteen through eighteen were just smoky hazes as I didn't have much to do beside smoke pot and, well, that's pretty much all I had to do. But we're not talking about older, high school Bret, we're talking about fourteen year old Bret sitting in that minivan, thinking "What the fuck?!?"   I didn't answer Ken.  He had turned and looked back from his driver's seat when he said it, and he just stared at me.  I sat there, look of shock and surprise, words stuck in my throat at the colossal What-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about-ness of the whole situation.  After a few eternal seconds he simply turned around, put the van in drive, and took us to school.

The whole experience sticks in my mind with no particular punctuation added.  There are some things in my history, in everybody's history, that you can point to and say "Yeah, that's why I don't like spiders, because my uncle got bit that one time and almost died."  This was not that.  I didn't start smoking pot because I forever wondered after that day "What is it like to be high?"  But it happened, and I remember it, and now I've told all of you about it.