By the age of eighteen I had consumed an ungodly amount of drugs. It not as if I left the house on a daily basis with an implicit desire to seek out and experience strange and exciting new kicks. The fact of the matter is that drugs most often found their way to me. Granted I did by choice immerse myself in situations where drugs seemed to be the common currency.

            While harder drugs and hallucinogens were save for the most special occasions. My daily stock and trade was marijuana. I often wonder how without jobs we managed to satiate our near unquenchable desire for grass. When cash was low however we had our methods. During our time at the Cattle Club we devised a hideous and effective little con for the procurement of marijuana. On a night when we found ourselves lacking in incendiaries we would head out to the back patio to find our mark. Grass smokers are painfully easy to spot. The most effective way to keep your dope smoking covert is to keep it entirely out in the open. No square would expect a doper to have the audacity to just stand there smoking grass. Would he? In the desperation to make it appear as if they’re not up the anything most folks may as well raise a bright red flag emblazoned with the words ‘We’re smoking dope over here!’. Huddled together in small groups, heads alternately bent down with faces awash in amber flickering light it’s as if they’re begging to be caught.

            Once we had a confirmed visual ID phase two of the plan would go into effect. We would casually walk back into the club leaving the dopers secure in the belief that we were clueless of their actions. Within moment of our departure two of The Cattle Clubs finest would purposefully descend upon them. Being the incredibly friendly bouncers that they were captured pot heads were often let go with a stern warning. However, they never left with their grass. That was ours, a well earned payment for helping to maintain law and order.

            When my father wasn’t dealing with live stock invading our house he was often busied with the logistics of home surgery. It seemed as if my Dad always had some kind of strange growth popping up on his neck or back. Being the man that he was he rarely chose to spend the money to have it handled properly. I would be in my room reading or playing video games on my Commodore 64 when the call would come in.

            “Jaz! Come here. I need your help!”

            I learned to dread the horrible phrase “I need your help”. Those four words most often meant that I would spend the rest of the day watching while my Dad swore at a broken lawnmower that would never work again or I would be asked to perform some gross and nauseating task that no child should ever be subject to.  I would begrudgingly walk into the bathroom to find him standing there with a flashlight, a couple of mirrors and some towels.

            “You see this thing here!?” he would say pointing to the back of his neck.

            There just under flesh would be some strange growth at least the size of an eraser. He would calmly explain that I, his only son would have to remove it for him because no matter how he angled the mirrors he just could see it properly. His request was always followed by a great amount of reluctance on my part. After which I would finally break down and take the dirty and dull X-acto knife that he had been trying to force into my hand. He would bend his head down over the sink and hand me a rag.

            “Just cut that fucking thing out of there!”

            Perhaps it was because I was never provided with the proper tools but I was always amazed at how resilient human flesh is to slicing. After a few tenuous passes he would insist that it didn’t hurt and that I needed to push harder. I would force the tip of the blade into his flesh cutting a deep gouge into his neck. At which point a white or yellowish mass would breach the crimson gash crowing as if his neck were giving birth to a cartilaginous blob. He’d slap a band aid over the hole in his neck and spend the next half hour to an hour inspecting whatever it was I had removed from his body.

            “Would you look at this fucking thing!” he would say as he pushed it toward my mothers face for closer inspection.

            “Throw that thing a-way!”  She would demand thoroughly disgusted.

            But he never did. All the odd pieces of gristle and viscera that came out of his body ended up in a mason jar that he kept in his truck. Perhaps he kept it there to show off to his co workers.

            “My boy cut this out of me last night!”

            “No anesthetic. No stitches. No nothin’!”

I’m sure they would the would turn and tell him to get that disgusting shit out of their faces because they were trying to eat and that he was just as bizarre as the day is long.

On the day they were handing out parents I must have bee characteristically late. Not by a lot, just by my standard five to ten minutes. Perhaps I had forgotten my smokes and had to race back to the house to get them. Maybe I was rushing around the house desperately trying to find my keys. Regardless of the circumstances judging by the parents I ended up with I was obviously late. Not late enough to end up in the back of the line where there was nothing left but child molesters and parents who’s affinity for corporal punishment would frequently leave their children with an inability to sit comfortably for days at a time. I certainly hadn’t gotten there early enough to reserve a place at the front of the line where perfect parent were distributed. I had obviously landed directly in the middle where the parental stock and trade ranged from eccentric and bizarre to downright insane. My parents exhibited all of these traits at one time or another and when they weren’t behaving strangely themselves strange would invariably come to them.

            One of my earliest memories would undoubtedly feel right at home in the pages of a David Lynch film script. It was early one morning and I was sprawled out on the living room floor with a bowl of frosted flakes completely engrossed in Saturday morning cartoons. It was a comfortable summer morning and all the doors and windows had been opened to allow a crisp breeze to wind through the house. My father sat on the couch behind me allowing him self a rare moment to relax and enjoy the paper while my mother busied herself in the kitchen. I chuckled to myself as Wyle E Coyote managed to fowl up yet another fool proof plan. Just as I hand lifted the bowl to my lips to drink down the last of the cool sugary milk my mother let out a blood curdling scream from the back bedroom. Within seconds my father and I were up and racing toward the back bedroom. What was happening? Had she caught a prowler digging through her underwear drawer? On a Saturday morning no less. Was there a masked man in the back yard brandishing high powered weaponry? As we rounded the corner and rushed into the bedroom the scenario laid out before us was far more unthinkable than any I had previously considered. My mother was standing in the corner of the bedroom with her hands over her face and there standing on top of my parent king size bed was a full sized horse. I haven’t the faintest idea about how it got in the house let alone how it got on top of the bed. Yet there it stood balancing on top of the bed, obviously just as frightened as my mother and equally dumbfounded as my father and I. Once he had recovered from a paralyzing bout of riotous laughter my father led the horse out of the house and back to the pasture from which it had come. For months afterward my mother would complain endlessly about her bedroom stinking of horse. Invariably my father would inform her that if she hadn’t wanted her bedroom to smell like horse she shouldn’t have let one stand on her bed.

So here it is. The new website. Its a little rough right now. It will probably be changing for a while til I get it all nailed down. Put it on your favorites and check back in frequently.