by Seth Rogen
Me: What?
Saul Moscovitch: I can’t take it home.
Me: Why not?!
Saul Moscovitch: Because my parents are up my fucking ass ever since I got caught shoplifting that Smashing Pumpkins CD from HMV. They go through my shit all the time. I’m under a fucking microscope, dude! They’ll fucking find it.
Me: If you’re “under a microscope,” why’d you buy a foot-long bong?
Saul Moscovitch: Because I wanted our first experience to be fucking awesome! Fucking sue me!
Me: Well, we are NOT going back into the school, HIGH, with a stinky bong we just smoked out of!
Saul Moscovitch: You got any better ideas?
Me: Throw the bong away!
Saul Moscovitch: Fuck that! This shit cost seventeen dollars! I had to bus downtown to get it. Some dude was getting his cheek pierced in front of me while I was paying. It was fucking gross!
Me: Fine, fine, fine. Let’s just be fucking cool and quick.
We walked the three blocks back to school in a manner that was neither fucking cool nor quick. It was a disaster.
I vividly remember Corber—who is now a rabbi—doing the Macarena in the middle of the road as drivers leaned on their horns, trying to vacate this stoned child from traffic. I stopped them at the border of the school’s property.
Me: We are NOT going in there!
Saul Moscovitch: Why not?!
Me: We’re gonna get fucking expelled.
Saul Moscovitch: No we’re not. We’re just gonna go in there and put it back in my locker.
Me: What if someone sees us?
Saul Moscovitch: They’ll assume we’re there for some after-school thing.
Me: What if a teacher asks us why we’re there?
Saul Moscovitch: We’ll just say we’re there for photography.
Me: What if it’s Ms. Correia? She TEACHES photography, dude! Then what?!
Saul Moscovitch: Then we’ll say we’re painting sets with stagecraft! Fuck! Chill the fuck out. Don’t be a narc.
Me: Don’t you dare call me a fucking “narc”!
Saul Moscovitch: Then don’t fucking act like one!
I didn’t know much. But I knew goddamn fucking well I didn’t want to be a narc. I had no idea what a narc was specifically, but it seemed derogatory as a motherfucker for someone who was (is) desperately trying to be cool.
Me: Fine. Fuck. But be cool and quick. Corber, NO Macarenas. Glanzberg, don’t encourage him.
The halls seemed twice as tall as normal. We floated past the auditorium and rounded the corner toward Moscovitch’s locker. He opened it, slid open his backpack, and tucked the bong inside the pocket of a snow jacket he had hanging in there. The deed was done. Almost.
“What are you guys doing here?”
We turned to see Mr. Kefalis, which is Greek for “big head,” which was hilarious because he had a giant bald head. He was a “cool” teacher, but he would’ve expelled our asses in a second for having a freshly used foot-long bong in school, mostly because it would be clear we were indeed too stupid for high school if we were doing shit like that. He was a narc.
Saul Moscovitch: Huh?
Mr. Kefalis: What are you guys doing here? School ended forty-five minutes ago.
We looked at each other. We’d practiced for this. It was time.
Josh Corber: Photography.
Mr. Kefalis: Where are your cameras?
Holy fuck. This was an intense interrogation. I prayed someone would be able to come up with something.
Steven Glanzberg: In the darkroom.
Mr. Kefalis: …Okay.
It was the perfect heist, in a world where the ideal version of a heist was sneaking into school to deposit illegal goods because you had previously been caught stealing a Smashing Pumpkins CD. But either way, we did it. We went to 7-Eleven and got big-ass Slurpees, a tradition that would eventually render me what my doctor calls “pre-diabetic.” (But aren’t we all?) We wandered around Kerrisdale, and eventually I went home.
As my mom drove me to karate class that night, the weed was wearing off, and I remember thinking, I would very much like to try that again. And try it again I did. Pretty much every Friday after school, we would scrounge together whatever money we had and buy a gram of weed.
During the school year, weed was easy to come by. But during summer, shit got much trickier. The dealers wouldn’t hang out behind 7-Eleven, because there was no set time when they knew a hundred kids would be there. (This was before cellphones; even pagers were kind of an extravagance.) But Vancouver always had one reliable way to get weed:
Wreck Beach.
The summer after eighth grade had just begun, and I was in a world of shit already. The last day of school, I had bought two ounces of magic mushrooms with the goal of eating them for the first time and selling them to others who would like to eat them for the first time. Don Watkins had an older brother who could get two ounces for a hundred bucks, which I planned to divide up and sell to my friends for ten bucks an eighth, which would essentially give me a free eighth and twenty bucks for my trouble, which everyone deemed acceptable.
We were fucking psyched. During final period, we got our yearbooks, and when the bell rang, everyone rushed into the halls and onto the field to sign each other’s shit. “HAGS” (Have A Good Summer) was a popular, if not obligatory, one. But if you were friends with people, the notes got more specific, and if you were me, the notes were specifically a bunch of motherfuckers writing about how psyched they were to do the shrooms I just obtained. ALSO if you were me, you were not the most proactive thinker, so this wouldn’t even bump you as it was happening.
I divvied up the shrooms and sold one ounce to Josh Corber and three other dudes I wasn’t good friends with. When I got home, I put the second ounce under my bed, tossed my yearbook ON my bed, and took the bus to meet some friends who were smoking weed at one of their grandmas’ houses while she was on a cruise. She had one of those chairs that ran up the side of the staircase, and we would take turns riding it while we were baked.
My parents generally didn’t snoop through my shit, and flipping through your son’s first high school yearbook honestly doesn’t seem like an invasion of privacy. I also totally understand that if you were flipping through that yearbook and saw, like, a dozen and a half references to the sale and consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms, you would then search your kid’s room. You would also probably be dumbstruck by how easily you found what you were looking for—an ounce of mushrooms sitting under the bed. Wow, my son is stupid, you would think. And you would not be wrong.
That night I came home, and I was in trouble—but not as much as I could have been, due to an odd ally in the form of the Vancouver Police Department.
My parents aren’t really drug people, and when they found the shrooms, they were shocked by the quantity. It was a completely full Ziploc bag, essentially the size of a small throw pillow made entirely of fungal hallucinogens. Worried, they called the police to ask about them, because there was no Google and I guess this was their best option—although it seems like some more narc-ass shit to me. But the police told my parents that mushrooms were particularly abundant this time of year and that they were wildly inexpensive, even free a lot of the time. This REALLY calmed my parents down. When they sat me down and told me what the cops had said, I jumped all over it.
“Yeah, it’s not a big deal; they were free. Someone gave them to me. I didn’t do them. I just shoved them under the bed.”
“Who gave them to you?”
This was one of those “quick math” situations: Who do I know well enough that he’s been around often enough that my parents would know him and would believe he’d gift me a bunch of shrooms but I also dislike enough that I can never really hang out with him again casu
ally because my parents will fucking hate him from here on out? Oddly, the truth worked.
“Don Watkins.”
“Hmmm…Yeah. I never liked that guy.”
Truth be told, I didn’t, either. He said anti-Semitic things all the time, so fuck him.
I still got in trouble. Every time I went out, I had to go with a pocket full of quarters, and I had to call my parents from a pay phone every hour on the hour. Which is why the thought of going to Wreck Beach to score weed was scary. It was a forty-five-minute bus ride, which made my phone calls tricky, and once you got there, it was a walk down a five-hundred-step staircase to the beach, which was inhabited by hippies who had been selling weed there since the late seventies. Also, it’s a nude beach.
I was terrified.
Me: Have any of you guys been there?
Saul Moscovitch: Nope. But who cares?
Saul was basically fearless.
Me: Do…we have to get naked?
Steven Glanzberg: I don’t know. How would they enforce that?
Me: A sign?
Steven Glanzberg: I mean, I don’t think they can make you get naked.
Me: What if we’re seen as, like, pariahs because we’re not naked, and nobody wants to sell us weed because we’re clothed, and we went all the way there for nothing!
I was spinning out.
Saul Moscovitch: Who fucking knows, man? All I know is I wanna smoke weed all summer, and this is the only way I can think of to get it.
We had pooled around fifty bucks. We all had different ways of scrounging cash. In Canada, it was slightly easier because of the one- and two-dollar coins, or “loonies” and “two-nies,” which are not doing Canada any favors when it comes to being taken seriously. Every house has little bowls of change scattered around, but in Canada, those bowls could accumulate a decent amount of money. After a few weeks, you could have twenty bucks in change.
I turned to Saul and was like, “Yo, in all honesty, would you get naked for the weed?”
He thought about it. “Yeah, man. I would—would you?”
Me: …Yeah. I think I would.
Saul Moscovitch: Cool.
Me: How do you think it works? Do you think they have cubbies or something where we can put our clothes?
Saul Moscovitch: I don’t know. I imagine they’d have hooks or racks or something.
Me: If we’re naked, where do we put the weed once we buy it?
Saul Moscovitch: I don’t know, man! Let’s just go!
I called my mom for my hourly check-in, and then we hopped on the bus toward the University of British Columbia, which is right near the beach. We hopped off, I checked in again from a nearby pay phone, and we began the trek down the forested stairs toward the ocean.
I really hope I don’t have to take my pants off and have everyone see my dick and my balls and stuff, I remember thinking over and over and over again. We passed a few hippies walking back up the stairs from the beach. Oh, man, why can’t one of these hippies on the stairs sell us weed? That way there would be NO WAY I’d have to have my penis exposed.
We kept marching until we reached the end of the path, which spilled out onto a beautiful beach. And there we were. Three tweens in skater shorts and Stüssy shirts on a beach with dozens of middle-aged naked people. We stood out like clothed thumbs.
Nudists are weird. My friend went to a nudist colony and came back with a newfound appreciation for clothes. One thing he learned at the colony was that you have to carry around a towel to sit on. Why? So you don’t get poop from your sweaty butt on things! Well, fuck me. Let’s just wear pants, cool?
“Skunk?!” some guy yelled at us. “You wanna buy some skunk?” It’s not a word we had ever used for weed, but we knew what he meant. We went over to a tall, leathery dude who was completely naked except for a fanny pack, which was covering the top two-thirds of his penis, leaving the other third of penis and his testicles dangling below.
Me: Uh…yeah. Hey, sir. We’d like some skunk. We have fifty bucks.
Penis Hippie: Oh shit. More than I thought, okay.
He unzipped his fanny pack and used the lid like a little tabletop, his balls and penis base acting as the legs.
Penis Hippie: Gonna have to combine bags.
He dumped the contents from a few little baggies into one bigger bag, and I was transfixed by his dexterity on this improvised surface and his overall comfort while being naked. I was jealous. My balls had barely seen actual sunlight; they were generally confined to Costco underwear. His looked like those old-timey brown leather baseballs. They seemed like you could strike a match off them. If he did shave them, he did it with a straight razor, no cream. This dude’s balls had seen things mine could only dream of. Also, I wondered if this was EXTRA illegal because he was naked and we were fourteen. I can only imagine it wouldn’t help his case.
Penis Hippie: Look good to you?
Saul Moscovitch: Yep! It all looks perfect. We’ll take it.
As we walked through the Endowment Lands, the forest surrounding UBC, I had two thoughts:
That was totally and a hundred percent worth it, because this is great skunk.
It would be so funny if the nude beach was called the Endowment Lands instead of Wreck Beach.
As ninth grade rolled around, we wanted more weed. Like, a lot of it. And by we, I specifically mean me and my friend Brian Baumshtick. Me and Baumshtick didn’t come from families with money, as many of our classmates did, and we thought the best way to get some cash was to buy a huge amount of weed at a cheap price, break it up into small portions, and then sell those portions at a profit—a.k.a., become drug dealers. We were telling other kids we were in the market for a bunch of weed, and that’s when Billy Yang stepped up.
His father was a hairdresser from Hong Kong and his mother was a British flight attendant and he transferred into our school. I honestly was not that nice to him and we didn’t get along that well, but when he came to us saying that he knew these dudes from another school who wanted to unload sixty grams of weed, we were psyched.
Billy Yang: Sixty grams for three hundred bucks.
Me: What?! How?!
Billy Yang: Yeah. They wanna get rid of it.
Brian Baumshtick: What school do these guys go to?
Billy Yang: Somewhere east.
Me: Where do we meet them?
Billy Yang: This weekend, the Crescent.
Me: Perfect.
My parents were out of town, and Danya agreed to drive me and Baumshtick to the Crescent, which is one of Vancouver’s richest areas. It’s a circular park surrounded by a bunch of mansions. Odd place for a drug deal. It made us a bit scared. Baumshtick came to my house before we left.
Brian Baumshtick: We should bring weapons.
Me: What?! I don’t know about that.
Brian Baumshtick: We totally should! We don’t know these guys!
Me: Fine.
I looked around my room and spotted a small souvenir baseball bat that I had gotten from a Seattle Mariners game a few years earlier. “Take this.”
“Perfect.” Baumshtick swung it around.
I chose my weapon, a pair of wooden nunchucks my dad had gotten me at a flea market. “I’ll use these.”
We stuffed our weapons in the kangaroo pouches of our hoodies and hopped in the GMC Jimmy, which is a car that was only sold in Canada. My sister pulled up and the dudes were already there. Three big guys who looked about eighteen or nineteen. When you’re fourteen, that’s fucking terrifying. One of them may have had the beginning of a goatee, which might as well have been a bandolier filled with the severed ears of his enemies. We walked up to the guys while my sister idled nearby.
Scary Dude: Yo. You the dudes who’s gonna buy this shit?<
br />
Me: Uh…yeah. We sure are.
Scary Dude: You wanna sample it first?
Whoa. Curveball. I’d never been asked if I wanted to sample drugs before. It seemed so professional. I remembered watching Bad Lieutenant a few weeks earlier. (We heard there was a lot of nudity, so we rented it. There is, in fact, a lot of nudity. Most of that nudity is of Harvey Keitel, who sports one of the greatest bushes in movie history in that film.) In it, the Bad Lieutenant is always sampling cocaine, rubbing some on his gums to see if it does whatever cocaine is supposed to do when you rub it on your gums. It all of a sudden made me feel quite cool. Even though, as long as it was in fact weed, we were gonna buy it no matter what.
Me: Uh…yeah. Sure. We’ll sample it.
They pulled out a joint, which they lit and then handed it over to me and Baumshtick. None of them smoked it, which at the time didn’t seem that odd. It wasn’t until I got more high than I’d ever been that it started to maybe add up a bit. Perhaps, I thought, this weed is laced with something. Maybe PCP? Like in the movie Friday. Which was really my only context for this kind of thing.
One of the dudes suddenly changed the tone. “Yo, there’s too much heat in this park; we should move this somewhere else.”
Me: You can just give it to us.
Scary Dude: Nah, we’ll meet at the school down the road; it’s more isolated there.
They picked the fucking park in the first place, but whatever, we were weed blind and too high to be thinking straight.
Me: Okay.
My sister drove us and dropped us off in front of an elementary school.
Scary Dude: Come back here. Around this corner. Nobody will see.
There was absolutely nobody around in the first place, but again, we weren’t thinking straight, and even if we were, who knows if we would have done anything different, because we were, at this point in our lives, quite stupid.