Chapter 1: Schwag

South of the busy airport runways of LAX and West of the dangerous streets of Long Beach sat a middle class paradise affectionately nick named the South Bay. Tucked in the middle of it all was my hometown Redondo Beach.

It felt like one of L.A.’s best kept secrets, affordable homes and apartments in a clean and safe neighborhood, within walking distance of the ocean.

Neither of my parents were from California. My mother was Italian from Chicago, Illinois and my father was an immigrant from a Northern English town called Fleetwood.

My mom claims she left Chicago to escape her family who were heavily involved with organized crime aka The Mafia. My father moved to California to play professional soccer in the 1980s. My parents met while living in the same apartment building.

Technically I am the first of my father’s family born in the United States. I am a British Italian hybrid. The results of combining pasty white British skin with spicy Sicilian blood and raising the product in California.

Imagine long brown surfer style hair popping out above the ears like wings on either side of some skateboard brand hat. Hazel eyes that look green when I am happy and brown when I am sad. Add in the sprout of tiny hair under my lip, my signature soul patch.

I would like to think this story isn’t about me though. I would like to think it is about weed.

I can still remember the first time I smoked weed. Or at least the first time I attempted to smoke weed. It was my Freshmen year in high school. My best friend and neighbor Griffin had managed to buy a small bag of weed from his older brother’s friend at school.

Griffin was a bit taller than me with broad shoulders and a buzz cut. He had brown hair he had bleached bright blond, a big nose and chin, and brown eyes. He considered himself a bit of a lady’s man while simultaneously pining and whining about girl troubles regularly.

Griffin and I had met in Middle School. At the time we had the same mushroom/ bowl cut hair style and people often mistook us for brothers. We were neighbors so we always walked home the same way after school. I think that confused our classmates.

Griffin always invited me over to his house after school to play video games or go skateboarding. Griffin’s mother worked as a nurse at the local hospital and was rarely home during the day. His house was often our party house Freshmen year.

“You ever smoke weed before?” Griffin asked me one day after school.

“Of course!” I lied.

“Ya me too!” Griffin lied as well.

“I got this from my brother’s friend. He called it Schwag! I think that means it’s the good stuff.” He added.

It was not. In fact Schwag was actually a slang term created to describe the lowest quality of weed. It was typically very dry. Smelled like hay and contained undesirable extras like seeds and stems. Neither of us really knew or cared about quality.

We took a piece of white paper from his computer printer, poured the weed on the paper, and rolled it into a crude and loose joint. Then we went outside to the alley behind his house despite the fact no one was home inside. We wanted to make sure we did not get caught.

We crouched down behind a dumpster in the alley where no one would see us and attempted to light the joint with one of those giant barbecue lighters. The ones with the child safety that is a pain in the ass.

You have to hold down the button and click the trigger at the same time. Those things really are child proof. It took one of us to hold down the safety button and the other to pull the trigger before we were able to get it to light.

The printer paper burned up wrong and caught on fire. Griffin burned his fingers and dropped the joint on the floor. The weed that didn’t burn, ended up down the alley and in the wind. Neither of us got high despite our best effort to suck in the smoke from the paper fire. I don’t think we even pretended like we felt something. It was an outright failure.

The two of us watched our dreams of getting high blow down the alley out of sight with the breeze.

The first time I got legitimately high was actually several months and several attempts later. I had tried a real joint rolled with the right type of papers, but I guess I did not hold it in right or inhale properly. I had tried a pipe, but it was harsh and burned my throat before I could even get the smoke in my lungs.

It was not until my first time hitting a bong that I met the love of my life and truly experienced the joys of cannabis. It was something about using a bong that helped me learn how to properly inhale.

Griffin had gone off and hung out with his older brother’s friends and got high properly without me. He came back telling me stories of how great it was.

“I finally figured it out dude, we were doing it wrong the whole time! Next time Mike comes over with his bong, we will show you how to properly get faded.” Griffin promised.

Griffin made the mistake of asking someone else at school to sell him weed instead of his older brother’s friends. The guy was named Benjamin Alvarado. He was half Mexican and half White.

Griffin met with Benjamin after school and gave him $20. Griffin was supposed to wait in the school parking lot while Benjamin grabbed the weed from the backseat of his friend’s car. Unfortunately Benjamin took off with the money leaving Griffin waiting for nothing.

The next day when Griffin confronted Benjamin at school, Benjamin straight up told Griffin he wasn’t getting the money back. This led to the age old school yard tradition of Mortal Kombat.

Under the advice of his older brother, Griffin challenged Benjamin to a fist fight in an alley behind a hospital not far from the school. This is where all after school fights took place. Benjamin accepted.

Word spread around the campus quickly. The afternoon the fight took place the alley was filled with an audience of blood thirsty underage students seeking after school entertainment.

Griffin’s brother and his friends had offered to act as Griffin’s back up. As his best friend I too swore my loyalty. If one of Benjamin’s friends jumped into the fight I promised Griffin I would be two steps behind them.

The best made plans sometimes go to shit. Griffin’s brother and his friends were late. We tried to stall for time but with the chance of Police showing up a constant possibility the fight went on without them.

Luckily Griffin dominated the fight early on. He connected the first few punches skimming Benjamin on the side of the head and under his eye with a one two combo. Benjamin took a wild swing in retaliation, missing Griffin and leaving himself completely open. Griffin took the opportunity to hit Benjamin square in the jaw. The crowd let out a collective “oooo”.

Griffin knocked Benjamin onto the ground in what was turning out to clearly be a one-sided fight. Benjamin’s cousins decided they had seen and enough and jumped into the fight.

Benjamin’s cousin sucker punched Griffin from behind and then grabbed him by the arms and held him back. Another of Benjamin’s support started taking open shots at Griffin punching him in the face. The fight momentum had completed a full 180.

I knew it was very likely that we were dangerously out numbered but I had given Griffin my word that I had his back.

I grabbed my skateboard and jumped into action instinctively. I swung my board and smashed the guy punching Griffin in the back of the head. He went down like a sack of bricks holding his head. I aimed my board towards the other guys next.

“Get the fuck off of him!” I screamed at the guy holding Griffin.

The guy holding Griffin let go and backed up.

Suddenly everything went black. I woke up about a minute later in a bush with an awful head ache. The fight was over. This is what I was told had happened.

One of Benjamin’s older friends had jumped in the fight immediately after I had hit the other guy with my skateboard. He was double my size, with a large head and giant forearms. He looked half Mexican and half gorilla. He came up behind me, grabbed me by the sides of my head, then slammed my head down into his knee and threw me into the nearby bush. I dropped my board and I was out cold.

Griffin’s brother and his friends showed up right after that. They charged in with almost a dozen upperclassmen. One guy was swinging a studded spike belt. Someone shoved the guy who had drop kneed me in face away. They had the numbers now and ended the fight without anymore major violence.

One of the random audience members had taken the opportunity to steal my skateboard while I was unconscious.

Griffin’s brother’s friend got it back for me while I sat on the floor in a daze. I could hear him debating with the thief in the background vagely:

“Come on man, he was just backing up his homie! Why are you trying to steal his board?”

After the majority of the crowd had dispersed Griffin’s brother and his friends escorted us back to Griffin’s house. Griffin’s brother’s friend Mike brought over his bong.

“I know you!” Mike said pointing at me after taking a long look.

“You’re King Arthur!” he concluded after a moment of thought.

Mike was a Senior in high school while we were just Freshmen but Mike and I actually had a bit of a history. We had both attended the same elementary school. We had both auditioned to be in the school play, “The Sword in the Stone”.

I got the lead role of Arthur. I got to pull the sword from the stone in front of the whole school. Mike played the older “adult” version of myself, King Arthur, at the end of the play. I would not say we looked alike too much, but we both had brown hair and hazel eyes. Mike recognized me from the play right away. He even started calling me “King Arthur”.

Griffin and Mike loaded me up a bowl and gave me the instructions on how to use a bong. I started off slow, barely hitting it, and they told me to inhale harder. Mike lit the bowl for me with a Bic brand lighter. No barbeque lighters this time.

I inhaled as much as I could to fill the bong with smoke. The water made the smoke cooler and easier to handle than a pipe or a joint. I looked down at the bong filled with smoke and thought to myself so far so good.

If you are not familiar with hitting a bong. Typically, your initial inhale fills the chamber with smoke. You barely get any smoke in your lungs until you pull the bowl piece out, removing the smoke source and allowing air to flow through. This forces the smoke out the top of the bong and into your mouth and lungs.

Mike pulled the bowl piece out forcing all the smoke into my lungs immediately. I coughed and choked as I exhaled it out.

I had a small coughing fit for about five minutes.

When I regained my normal breathing and composure, I looked up at everyone in the room with eyes redder than the devil’s ass. I could not help but smile ear to ear.

“He’s faded!” they said laughing.

We sat in Griffin’s living room on his mother’s new leather couch watching the movie “Next Friday”. The movie felt extra funny. We were laughing at every scene.

I was blown away by the fact they were smoking weed in the movie. It was like I had never noticed it before. I thought it was so cool.

"Are they allowed to do that?"

"The weed must be fake!"

When the main characters sat and smoked together, I imagined we were there smoking with them. Mike did his best impressions of one of the movie characters; Pinky the music store owner. He walked around the room like a flamboyant pimp, swatting invisible flies and fixing an imaginary Jeri curl.

It was terrible. We all laughed until our sides hurt.

After Mike left, Griffin’s brother went to work. Griffin and I raided his family’s refrigerator and ate all the snacks and cereal that were saved for his younger brothers. When the two of them came home from Hockey practice they were not too happy to see us eating their Lucky Charms. Or myself wearing the free clover shaped watch that came as a prize in the bottom of the cereal box.

I spent the rest of the school year looking over my shoulder and avoiding the guy who knocked me out. He occasionally gave me intimidating looks in the school hallways. His friends laughed and called me “Mighty Mouse”. Looking back I think they just enjoyed scaring me and weren’t actually after me. I was still scared at the time.

For everyone my own age, I had a mixed reputation as the skater who hits people with his skateboard.

For Sophomore year Griffin was getting sent to some fancy military academy in Texas. At the end of the summer, he would be leaving so, Griffin and I made it our personal mission to smoke weed everyday of our summer break.

Despite not having a ton of money we somehow pulled it off by putting together cash our parents gave us for lunch and allowance. Some days we got smoked out (given free weed) by Griffin's older brother. Other days we managed to meet up with other stoner friends from school.

When Griffin left for military school, there was no tearful goodbye. I just assumed he would be back in a year, and we would pick up where we left off.

Chapter 2: Ganja Gamer