After High School I went off to Brooklyn College.  Brooklyn College has a nice campus but there’s no dorms or anywhere to stay.  Most of the people that go there live at home.  My family didn’t live near Brooklyn College so I had to find a place to stay.

The place I found was in Midwood, an Jewish Orthodox neighborhood close to the campus.  It was pretty much a flop house on the top floor of house.  There were a few different rooms and 1 bathroom.  During the couple years that I spent there I shared the place with a guy named Arnie who had a room down the hall.  We shared the bathroom.  The place was pretty nasty.

Arnie was living there because he had just gotten out of jail.  He was somehow related to the people that owned the house and they let him stay there for $80 a week.  He was an OK guy I guess.  He told me a lot of crazy stories about how he used to trip out on acid and drive his IROC up and down Coney Island.  He was a pretty big alcoholic and I remember doing shots of warm absolute with him chased by Mountain Dew.  That was disgusting.

His room was also disgusting because he had a cat in there and it smelled like he never changed the litterbox.  He had a girlfriend that would come by and they would sometimes invite me to watch the Yankees with them.  I enjoyed it because I was young and didn’t have many friends around there at the time.

Anyway, one time Arnie and I were talking and he asked me “Would you ever piss on a chick?”.

“What the hell? No man that is nasty” I replied.

“Yeah it’s pretty gross right?” he said.  “I would never do it either. Unless she really wanted me too.  I mean, she would really have to beg”.

“Actually,” he continued “there was this chick over here the other night.  Man she was crazy!  She kept begging and begging for me to piss on her!”

“Oh man that’s nasty.  What did you do?” I asked.

“Yo man… I did it! I pissed on her!” he said.

“What? Wow man you’re crazy! Wow!” I said. “How was it?”

“Well, I just put her in the bathtub and pissed all over her.  It didn’t do much for me but she loved it.  She couldn’t get enough of that piss man, it was something else”

And with that he was off to his room to drink himself in to a stupor.  I shut the door and realized this all went down in the bathroom that we both shared.  Nasty bastard.  Thanks a lot Arnie.

I’m not 100% sure it was PCP but I think it was.

It was High School, the summer between 11th and 12th grade.  My friend Zach and I decided we would spend a couple days down in NYC at his sister’s apartment while she was out of town.  We drove down there in his car on a beautiful summer day with the windows down and sunroof open.

When we got to the city we went record shopping for a while and then got something to eat.  Then we decided we should get some weed.  It was easy to buy over at west 4th street so we went over there and got approached right away by some dude.  I ended up buying some crap wrapped up in one of those brown paper towels that looked like it was from a school bathroom.

The stuff inside the paper didn’t look like weed at all.  It looked kind of like plastic and smelled like gasoline.  There is no way we were going to smoke that shit so we bought another bag of weed from a different guy and went back to the apartment to smoke that stuff.  We got high and listened to music and had a good time.

Fast forward a few weeks and we’re back upstate New York and we’re trying to get high.  Problem is, it’s much harder to find weed in upstate New York than it is in Greenwich Village.  That’s when I remembered the stuff in the paper towel.

“Yo man we should smoke that stuff we got in the city the other week”

“What? That shit doesn’t even look like weed”

“Naaaah man I’m sure it’s weed it’s probably just old”

It was a really nice summer night and we took that crap and rolled a joint out of it and went around the corner to smoke it.  We got so fuckin high, it was crazy.  We were sitting outside this little medical clinic where there was a nice grass lawn and some woods nearby.  My friend Zach couldn’t stop laughing.  I was trying to get him to shut the hell up when I realized how high I was.  I forgot about him and looked at the trees.  I swear to god I thought that there were hundreds of ducks and geese up in the trees.

That night I had really bad nightmares of being in the water and snakes biting me.  When I woke up the next morning I felt like shit and I could hear my heart beating.  I could actually hear my heart beating inside my chest and making squishy sounds like every time it beat.  I thought I was about to die.

I did my best to keep it together and went downstairs and had breakfast with my parents.  I told them I wasn’t feeling well and that I was going to the doctor.  Of course they thought that was strange, especially since I demanded on driving myself there.

I remember walking in the door of the doctors office and telling them I was having chest pains.  I was trying to act casual like it was no big deal.

“I’d like to see a doctor”

“OK, what are your symptoms?

“Chest pains”

“Are you ok?? Is this an emergency?”

“Nah nah, it’s cool.  It’s probably nothing.”

So I waited to see the doctor and he checked me out.  He hooked me up to some machines and told me that I didn’t have a heart attack.  I was so relieved.  Up to this point I figured I was really fucked up and was going to die.  He took some x-rays and when he came back in the room he told me I had a partial pneumothorax. What?  I had collapsed part of my lung.  A small part.  Near my heart.  That’s why I could hear my heart beat, there was air in the moving around every time my heart beat.  He told me I was going to be ok.

I was so damn happy to hear that. OK! Thanks a lot Doc, seeya!  Not so fast.  He brought me in to his office and asked me if I had done any drugs.  He seemed like a cool guy so I admitted that I had smoked some weed the night before.  Ah yes, that must have been it.

He made me tell my parents the whole story and we had to go to the hospital to get checked out more.  My parents weren’t mad at all and the doctors were cracking jokes asking me if it was good stuff.   There was some talk of giving me a chest tube but that wasn’t necessary I guess.  They gave me some painkillers and told me to take it easy for a few weeks and the lung would fix itself.

So that was that!  I was back in action.  In retrospect that probably wasn’t weed at all.  Probably PCP.  Never going to do that shit again.  The lesson of this story:  If you don’t know what it is don’t smoke it.

This is a another story from High School.  We were in 12th grade and it was Springtime and my friend Herb and I didn’t feel like staying in school that day so we went to his house around 1pm to watch some daytime TV.  I think we were watching the movie “Airplane” on TV because I vaguely remember the scene where the shit hit’s the fan (literally).

Around 3pm we figured we’d head back to school to see what our friends were doing.  That’s when the day started to get interesting.

When we got outside his house we saw a dead squirrel on the ground.  Not sure how it died but it looked like it had been there for a couple days.  This was quite a find and not something you see everyday.  “What can we do with this thing?”  we asked ourselves.  We knew that it had potential but we weren’t sure exactly sure what to do with it.

We pondered this for about 10 seconds and then the same light bulb went off over both our heads.  Put it in Kristina’s car!

Kristina was a Polish girl that we used to hang out with.  She was not very bright and pretty annoying and drove a Peugeot that she thought was awesome.  I have another story about me and Herb racing that thing but I’ll save that one for another time.

We put the squirrel in a shoe box and set off for school where Kristina’s Peugeot was sitting the parking lot.  We were delighted with ourselves and plan until we hit our first snag: the doors were locked.  Shit!  We’ve come this far, we must find a way to persevere!

The sunroof!  The sunroof had a little wind deflector that went over it for a few inches.  It was the perfect place for a dead squirrel.  We got a stick and shoved the carcass in between the sunroof and the plastic wind deflector.  Satisfied with our work we went back to Herb’s house to watch more TV.  A job well done.

Man was she fucking pissed.  She pulled up in front of Herb’s house about an hour later with her friend Jeniffer and Jennifer’s little sister.  I don’t know how they knew it was us.

They were in a rage!  The worst was Jennifer who was Puerto Rican and yelling at both of us like she was going to fight us or something.  Apparently the three of them were riding down the street in that Peugeot and decided to open the sunroof so they could enjoy the beautiful afternoon.  They got a big surprise when that squirrel dropped down in to the car!  I guess they almost crashed the car but somehow Kristina was able to regain control of the vehicle.  They were also worried about catching diseases from it.  Wah Wah Wah.

Ah the memories.  That was a great day that I will always remember.

Him and I never saw eye-to-eye and he had discussions with my parents on a few different occassions.  Anyway, for some reason or another I was sitting in “in house suspension”  which at the time was a desk located in the High School office right outside the Principals door.  It was one of those desk/chair combos and directly behind the chair was a mini-refrigerator where the secretaries and office staff kept their lunch and yogurt and whatever else.

So I’m sitting there half asleep with my head on the desk trying to block out the secretaries answering phones.  It was about 10am and I guess Mr. Lash was getting hungry and wanted a snack.  He comes out of his office and goes over to the mini-fridge behind me and bends down behind me and starts rumaging around inside looking for his yogurt.

Right then I let out a big stinky fart right on his head.  I didn’t plan it or anything, it just came out.  He straightened up and just looked at me.  Didn’t say a word.  Just stared at me for about 5 seconds and turned around and went back in his office and shut the door.

That was pretty cool and I told all my friends about it.  I don’t think they believed me though.