Coyote's Den

After my mom divorced my stepfather, I guess I was maybe fourteen, my mom's friend Michelle, and her son Curtis, who I'd been friends with for a while came to live with us. I was pretty ecstatic... Curtis was about one of the coolest people I'd ever know, and one of my best friends as a kid.

Well... we were both like the same age - I think I might have been a year older than Curtis, but he was way more mature. This is not saying much, as we were both teenage boys, and didn't hit puberty until I was sixteen. Curtis hit puberty at like eleven... in spades. He was over six feet tall by the time he was twelve, and was like 6'6" when he was thirteen. He looked like he was eighteen.

I think in a zillion ways, we were like night and day. He was tall and athletic, and easy-going, and funny, and had a million friends. I was short, fat, nerdy, and neurotic. I was anti-drug, anti-smoking, anti-alcohol, and didn't really do anything fun. Curtis liked the Beatles, and smoked marijuana. I don't know how the hell we got along so well, but it worked.

Anyway... despite my anti-drug position (as a kid, I thought Marijuana was a drug), and despite the fact that Florida weed all smelled like burning garbage when you lit it up, Curtis talked me into engaging in an illicit project - growing a pot plant. He appealed to my love of science and my dislike for authority. That was a surefire thing. I was in.

This would have to be completely covert, of course. I don't think his mom was particularly psycho about pot, but she didn't approve of him smoking it. My mother, and I assure you this is an understatement, would have gone through the stratosphere. No... she would have gone into space, grabbed a nickel-iron meteorite, and come back down to earth and beat us to death with it.

In other words, we had to grow this pot plant.

Of course, we didn't have any seeds. You'd think that the skunk-ass weed available in South Florida at the time would have been all seeds, but no... of course not. Probably the people he got it from (friends who grew and traded their own, never dealers), took all the seeds out.

So... we bought birdseed. And lots of it. At the time, you could sometimes find birdseed that had hemp seeds in it. It wasn't supposed to, and even when it did, the birdseed was supposed to be cooked before packaging in order to kill any hemp seeds present, but I figured that if we picked out enough of them, we might get a live one.

So... we spent hours one day, sifting through all this birdseed, until we had maybe forty or fifty hemp seeds. I'm surprised the back yard didn't look like it was paved with chia pet after we were done tossing all the excess normal seeds.

We planted all the seeds in various flowerpots, watching and watering carefully. Out of all those seeds, sure enough, two actually sprouted. They weren't terribly healthy, and one of the seedlings wilted and died almost immediately. We transferred the survivor carefully out of the pots into a miniature hydroponic culture set that I had... it had come with some "learn about science" kit that someone had given me for Christmas or my birthday. With careful care, proper space-age nutrients, and with a grow light I had lying around for some of the other non-illicit plants I used to grow (I was a nerd - I cultivated Peruvian violets for a couple of years), our little plant began to actually live.

Curtis named the plant "Herbie," and when he was big enough to recognize as a pot plant, we transferred him into some enriched sandy soil in a little pot ( a pot-pot?) We built a pile of fake boxes taped together, so that it looked like a pile of storage boxes, but the whole pile was hollow, and hid Herbie and the grow-light behind this contraption into Curtis's closet.

When Herbie was about a foot tall, he was covered with pretty purplish-red hairs. He was a gorgeous, if slightly spindly little plant. When Curtis saw the red hairs, he declared that Herbie was obviously a high-quality Sinsemilla plant, and was overjoyed. Truth-be-told, Herbie was probably industrial hemp, and we'd have had to make a joint the size of a pine tree in order to get high off of it.

It was at this point in Herbie's existence that Curtis's mom discovered our little project. I think she walked in to his partly-open bedroom to ask her son a question, and caught him fussing over the plant. The jig was up. Michelle was annoyed enough that we were growing a pot plant... but was extra, super upset because if my mother had been the one to discover this little endeavor, she'd have gone psycho-death-machine on all three of us. I remember Michelle saying "Marijuana is illegal!" maybe once, and "Do you know what would happen if Joanne found out?" about seventy times.

So, to make her point, Michelle ripped Herbie out of his dirt, stuffed him into the commode, and flushed him until he was gone.

I'm guessing she wasn't thinking too clearly. Herbie wasn't gone, of course. He was in the pipe, and he may have looked fragile, but let's face it folks, the main reason people cultivated hemp wasn't necessarily to get high - it's because hemp contains really tough and durable fibers. So... Herbie plugged up the plumbing, but good. He laughed at the plunger. He resisted all the advances made by our toilet snake. He laughed in the face of Drano.

So... now, we had a stopped-up toilet. A really, really stopped-up toilet. It was about 3PM, and my mother would be home around 5PM. She'd respond to the plumbing being stopped up (again - another story) with nearly as much delight as a pot plant. The thought of her discovering both problems at the same time was something we didn't think carried a high chance of survival for the three of us.

So... Michelle called Roto-rooter, and somehow convinced them it was a dire emergency. They had a guy out to our house in maybe a half hour. Of course, they probably had our address memorized, and possibly kept a truck on standby for us. During the course of a single year, our septic tank had exploded when yard chemicals leaked into it, the pipes had been clogged variously by a can of hair spray accidentally flushed down it, a motor-oil-soaked rag, a pair of children's underwear flushed by one of Michelle's friends, and some gravel from a fishtank.

So... we're anxiously watching the clock, while the Roto-rooter guy works, hoping and praying that we can have it all fixed and have him out of there before my mother gets home.

Tick... tick.... (gurgle sploosh) tock, tock.

So... just as my mother pulls into the driveway, the Roto-rooter guy announces "I think I've got it! It'll just be a minute!"

We're now really biting fingernails. My mom comes in the front door, and wants to know why Roto-rooter is there. I stop to distract her, while Michelle deals with the plumber. While I'm talking to her, I can see, behind my mother, that the Roto-rooter man is holding up the bedraggled, but still clearly-recognizable remains of Herbie, and is saying "Geez, lady, looks like some kind of weird plant. Did someone flush this, or do you think you have stuff growing through your pipes or something?"

My mother turns around, just then, and looks straight at Herbie. There is no sense of recognition in her eyes at all.

Michelle assured my mother that none of us knew what had happened, and that it looked like maybe we had damaged pipes, and that stuff was growing into them. She explained that she'd taken care of the Roto-rooter call, and would pay to have the pipes checked, so that my mother wouldn't have to deal with all that hassle, in light of the previous plumbing problems. The whole time, Mr. Roto Rooter is holding up this filthy pot plant and looking perplexed.

Amazingly, my mother went along with all this, and did not appear to be suspicious at all. We escaped alive.

That was the end of my foray into illegal drug cultivation as a kid. To my knowledge, Curtis left it up to the professionals after that as well.