Clemency from my Grandmother

An epic high school disaster and the merciful consequences.

The passing of my grandmother is dredging up all these memories....

So here is the most epic bust of my HS years, concluding with my grandmother’s verdict on my misdeeds.

Background: We beg in the Sharpstown/Alief of Houston in 1985. I was a freshman at Strake — kind of considered odd because my family still lived smack-dab in the middle of town. The term “Museum District” did not yet exist.

Cast of characters (Act I)

Tony: A year ahead of us, he had a license and access to an old station wagon.

Steve: My best buddy at the time and to some extent to this day. We bonded in football practice when, after I blindsided him on a kickoff play, instead of pussing out, he said "Wow, man, I can really see stars!" Clearly this was a dude worthy of respect. And we both loved the Beatles.

Joe and John: Junior high buddies of Steve. Joe attended a now-defunct Catholic HS that was full of stoners; John got a football / baseball scholarship to Kinkaid. By the time this event took place, they'd both been busted by their parents for weed and maybe also for burglary? I can't quite remember when they got popped for the burglary.

And so, the Dazed and Confused story:

The plan was we'd pile into Tony's stay-wag and head down to Galveston for the weekend. After scrimping and saving and pooling our resources, we’d acquired three cases of cheap beer and a half ounce of ditch weed. We arranged for some girls to slip out of their window (slumber party) after midnight knowing they had to be back home by around 7 the next morning.

While we were waiting for midnight to roll around, we went to our HS party spot and got into the weed and beer. I think it might have been the most stoned I'd ever been up to that point, and maybe even since, and then here comes the po-pos. They threw on that bright white light and I remember thinking the cop car looked 25 feet tall. My legs were shaking while they were interrogating us -- classic good cop / bad cop routine. Tall older Mexican cop was the cool one, redneck runt partner was the asshole.

"Where's y'all's dope? I smell me some dope!" he said. He didn't look very hard, as our sack was carelessly concealed under a t-shirt on the back seat. 

Mexican cop found the beer...And then called us to huddle up and told us to get the fuck down to Galveston. Just don't let him catch us again on his patrol.

HOLY SHIT. He didn't even make us pour out the beer.

So we mostly followed his orders but we had to get the girls first. We did and we all made it down to Galveston.

I don't remember much about that night. I do know that I did not get laid or even make out with any of the girls. I also know that Steve did not either. I don't think anybody did.

Oh well, it was still only Saturday, and while those girls were gone, who knew what the rest of the weekend would bring?

Well, nothing but trouble…..

Tony the girls in then the stay-wag around dawn and took them back to Houston, and then, the idiot went to his own house to take a dad-blamed shower. That rash and vain act did us all in: While he was in there, his mom went out to the car and found a roach or two and a few empties, so she ordered him back to Galveston with instructions to pick us all up and bring us to her house. Pronto. Tout Suite. Chop-chop. Schnell.

That was one long-ass trip back to Houston — think the Oilers’s plane trip after that disaster in Buffalo. Because they were already known stoners, the rest of us agreed that Joe and John would take the rap for the weed. By "us", I mean all of us who were not Joe and John. Back in Sharpstown, Tony's mom forced us to call our own parental units in front of her and confess all. Joe and John had the bright idea of dialing some random number and faking the whole thing and Tony's mom pretended to have been fooled. After we all left she called their parents for real and added that crime of deceit to their already considerable stack of charges. (And nobody bought the idea that only John and Joe inhaled.)

What a fiasco. I'd had dreams of losing my virginity on the beach, and accomplished exactly nothing towards that goal, but we had escaped the cops, only to be absolutely destroyed by a mom.

When I got home, I was summoned to my grandmother’s bedside. Years later I’d see films and docudramas about Queen Elizabeth I, and when some hapless courtier of hers would be summoned to the throne to try to talk his way out of some high crime of misdemeanor, I could well relate. When in such situations, had I worn a hat, it would have been in hand.

Below, approximately where we were and how I looked the time. The “surrender cobra” was not yet a thing, but here I was.

Only in her case, there was no throne — just a high old Victorian bed. She be ringed by our mixed pack of mutts and English bulldogs and have her knitting in her lap. But the look of regal disdain was the same.

The weed part really troubled her, partially because of the idea that it was believed to be a gateway drug that would soon and inevitably lead me to succumbing to heroin addiction, like my mother. And also she was was simply a product of her times — a white lady from Depression Era-Beaumont. And so she said: "When I was your age the only people who smoked that stuff were Mexicans and jazzmen." 

Okay — “jazzmen” did not have the racial connotation you might think. In her youth, she’d been pretty hep. She was a socialist. Her favorite class at UT was one on sexuality taught by a disciple of Kinsey. As a teenybopper, she once snagged Frank Sinatra’s autograph. And she knew that it was just as likely for guys like Ol’ Blue Eyes, Bing Crosby, and fellow white Beaumonter Harry James to partake of the reefer as it was for Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington.

And she dearly loved Mexicans and Mexican-descended Texans and Latinos in general -- in college she tried really hard to land a San Antonio Canarian-descended aristocrat, any San Antonio Canarian-descended aristocrat, but she couldn't quite win one over. In an epic case of sour grapes, she told me they were the most arrogant people in Texas. For his part my grandfather would bristle whenever she would talk about them, for she tended toward enthusiastic gushing, music coming to her voice, as also with the Cuban boys she fancied during her one year at LSU -- back in those days Beaumont girls went there as often as UT because it was more convenient. And well-off Cubans sent their sons to Baton Rouge to study sugar science -- it was the Texas A&M of that particular crop for the whole Caribbean basin at the time.

“They cheated at intramural soccer,” my grandfather groused one time, after one of her overly sentimental reminiscences.

She attended bilingual mariachi mass at St Joseph's in Houston off and on for 50 years....But I guess she was just speaking her truth there. This all probably seems overly defensive, but I knew her very well, and her heart was pure when it came to race and ethnicity. The fact that her descendants are now a rainbow coalition, and how she judged us all not by the color of our skins but the quality of our characters, is testament to that fact.

Anyway, I’d gone in dreading a sentence of death by drawing and quartering, but emerged with a mere grounding for the entire summer. Which in practice lasted a week or two.