Mary and I were a good (if erratic) team. Across eighteen years of marriage we took small but (for us) life-affirming domestic risks. We bought, remodeled, and sold houses, hopped from town to town, changed jobs and careers, not content or able to stay put or sink roots. Before we married, Mary got laid off from a job in finance and made a major career pivot to start over in the film industry, as a freelancer. In my midthirties, with a wife and two young kids, I’d quit my newspaper job to write books. The boys had seen me and Mary work for ourselves since they were toddlers. We both apparently thrived on the chaos that came with empowered independence.
During my years as a stay-at-home writer, I’d sometimes think back on my dad’s stabs at self-employment, including the engineering company he started (called, interestingly, Innerspace) and a stint selling real estate. Similarly, Jeff had long been his own boss, running his own construction company, his own plowing company. Were all of us allergic to teams and rules and hierarchy? Resistant to being managed?
Then there was Mary’s dad, who’d been a dentist with his own practice, who’d invested in real estate, whose success had allowed him to retire in his early fifties—another “lone wolf” in the gene pool, as Mary put it. “The men in our families? Obedience is not in their vocabulary,” she once said, though we both knew she spoke the same language.
Yet we balanced each other out. If one of us threatened to veer too far—“Let’s move to Ireland!”—the other (usually Mary) reined it in: “Whoa! Um, no.” Then again, “balance” sometimes meant pendulous shifts in our family mood. Mary was hopeful and optimistic. She really wanted to believe some of the boys’ stories—like the homemade water-bottle bong we found behind the recycling bins, and Leo’s response: “Maybe a neighbor put it there?”—while my first assumption was usually “bullshit!” I was a cynic, a skeptic, an Irish-blooded screamer, quick to anger and quick to tears. I wrestled with sleeplessness, anxiety, financial stresses, and booze.
It’s not like we were street buskers or carnies, but in our own ways Mary and I—as kids, and now as adults—had been persistent challengers of convention, endorsers of rule bending, pursuers of a life in motion. Lately, though, it felt like we were beginning to reap what we’d sown, paying tithes to the Church of Independence. At a work retreat, when asked to share something personal, Mary told the group: “I’m stressed-out all the time because I’ve got two . . . rebellious . . . boys at home.” And the others nodded in sympathy.
By seeking freedom in our lives, had we sent a message to our kids that they deserved it, too? The same message our dads had conveyed to us?
Then again, we sometimes caught a whiff of some discomfort with the lifestyle they’d been born into. One night at the kitchen table (before I’d started working for Amazon), Sean had grilled Mary with a series of unexpected questions: “Are we doing okay? Can we pay our rent? Are we saving for college? How much money do you guys make?”
The main question that dogs every married couple is: Are we going to make it? For work I once interviewed the author Andre Dubus III, who described a period when he and his wife, after twenty-five years of marriage, watched friends’ relationships crumble. They’d cling to each other at night, as if on a life raft—“We’re okay, aren’t we, honey?”
That’s why, when we finally moved into our new life raft of a Seattle home, just before Christmas, Mary and I simultaneously sighed a giant aaaahhh. . . .
With Leo a freshman, and Sean a sophomore, we now craved stability, a solid home base for the boys’ high school years. I was so relieved to have finally rooted us. I was a 9-to-5-er. I wore a company badge, clipped to my front pocket. I’d become a semilegit grown-up. Though I continued to write in the mornings and whenever I could find an hour or two (and would publish my Robert Ripley biography the next summer), I was a late-bloomed corporate employee, with a 401k and, optimistically, a small college fund.
I still felt occasional stabs of sadness that I was no longer the guy I’d wanted to be since childhood—full-time author—but I’d grown comfortable with and even proud of the new lifestyle. It felt adventurous in a new way, and necessary. Because the plan for the next few years was: one house, one school, no drama.
A few nights after moving in, Mary and I gave friends a tour of the house, a 1920s bungalow on a small lot, a half mile from Puget Sound. Our mismatched furniture and eclectic tchotchkes seemed to have found the right vessel. Mary’s mom’s oil paintings, my jars of moonshine, Mary’s Led Zeppelin action figures, the framed pictures of the boys skating, toddler-era ceramic sculptures beside a creepy clown carving and all those books—my books, friends’ books, books by authors I’d interviewed and admired—it all kinda worked.
We then walked to a nearby Italian restaurant, and over cocktails and calamari someone inevitably asked, “How are the boys?” Our friends’ kids were excellent students in private schools, all girls, so the question was always a tricky one to address. Sometimes I’d feint: “Fine, good. How ’bout your kids?” Sometimes I’d come clean, sheepishly describing some skating-related incident. Other times I’d attempt to cover up my embarrassment with a “boys will be boys” story, which was the tack I took tonight.
While walking to the restaurant, as if scripted for maximum shame, Nate’s father had called to tell me about spying on Nate and Sean as they tried to roll a joint in his backyard the night before. Instead of breaking up the scene, he watched them fumble with the rolling paper and meager nuggets of pot. They passed around a lumpy spliff that began to fall apart before they could smoke it down. “I mean, I could’ve rolled a better joint,” Clark said, laughing and almost relieved that they appeared to be amateurs.
I told our dinner mates about it, and they obligingly chuckled. Our friends were kind, reassuring. “They’re good kids,” one of them said.
It’s something I’d heard from other friends and family: “They’re good kids. Don’t worry. They’ll be fine.” I truly believed they were good. I wanted to believe they’d be fine.
That night in bed, Mary and I awoke to the overpowering smell of pot curling up from the basement family room. Two floors below our bedroom, that room would all too quickly become their playroom, their hiding place, their late night smoke shack.
One Sunday afternoon I was in the basement watching football when Sean came down carrying a case of Coke.
He clearly wasn’t expecting me to be there, and he seemed nervous.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked, pointing to the Coke, which he hugged tightly to his chest.
“Oh, um, Max’s dad gave it to us,” he said. But instead of putting it in the basement fridge, he took it to his room.
We rarely drank soda in our house. The boys didn’t like it, and neither did Mary and I. A case of Coke made no sense.
The next day I found the box tucked beside the furnace, a towel stuffed into the opening. Inside was a sculpted, rainbow-colored glass bong that could’ve passed for a Chihuly flower vase. My first instinct was to smash it. But honestly, it seemed too pretty. As I mulled over the appropriate parental response—confront Sean, throw it out, ignore it, smoke it—I started looking around the family room, wondering what else might be hidden. It didn’t take long. In a cabinet I found a plastic spice jar, repurposed for a different kind of herb.
It killed me that they’d decorated the jar (formerly labeled MARJORAM) with a “Sk8 the St8s” sticker.
More than a year past our fathers-and-sons road trip, I’d clearly misread some of the terms and conditions of the evolving skate life.
I walked past our back door at the exact right/wrong moment to see Sean reach beneath the back porch to stash something.
“What’s that?” I asked, stepping outside to catch him in the act.
Pause. Stare. Showdown . . .
“Well, what do you think?” he finally said.
“Drugs?”
“Why do you have to call it drugs?” he asked, using air quotes.
“Well, what is it?”
“It’s just pot.”
Washington State voters didn’t help our cause.
In late 2012, we joined Colorado as the nation’s kush-friendliest state. Initiative 502 would enact all sorts of concessions to cannabis, to be phased in over the coming year. It was as if my friends and neighbors had conspired to decriminalize, say, arson. I felt betrayed, and pissed. While I was happy to have both boys in the same school, less than a mile from our home, it was there—the school I’d soon picture as an open-air pot market with optional academics—that my kids’ skater lifestyle took a sharp turn into Stonerville.
The legalization momentum coincided with a new phase in our house, the start of a cat-and-mouse game that would dominate our high school experience.
Incriminating evidence practically fell into my lap. In a sock drawer my hand bumps something hard: a glass pipe rolled inside two pairs of socks. Skimming through Leo’s Christmas camera: shots of a hoodied skate friend puffing on a blunt in the front seat of someone’s car. Same camera: a glass pipe balanced atop a weed-filled spice jar beside a lighter, displayed on our kitchen counter. Stuffed under Sean’s bed: the nylon camera bag I’d been looking for, soiled by flakes of herb and crumpled rolling papers.
“But pot is legal,” the boys would say, when confronted with the evidence.
“Not yet it’s not, and not for you,” I’d counter, reminding them of the details: like booze, pot would be legal for adults, but not teenage boys.
They’d roll their eyes. Whatever, Dad.
They began leaving the basement windows open, the whiff of voter-endorsed smoke lingering. I drafted a “Rules of the House” list, the first of which was: “No drugs or drug paraphernalia in the house.” They both hated the D word. In their minds, pot was a plant not a drug.
The other rules were an attempt to set benchmarks for grades (“anything less than a C is unacceptable”), attendance (“don’t skip class and don’t be late”), curfews, chores, and jobs (“find one, keep it, take it seriously”). But really . . . all the rules tied back to rule number one. Violations were punishable by groundings designed to hurt them where it mattered most, by keeping them off their boards. Despite their indignant howls, I made them sign the document.
When I told a writer friend how my teens had suddenly become pot devotees—a bag of Lays “Baked!” potato chips displayed on Sean’s bookshelf, a poster of Bob Marley in midtoke on Leo’s wall—she laughed . . .
“Oh . . . I like your kids already,” she said.
But what did her reaction really mean? Why did my fellow Gen Xers have such fond memories of their own teen stoner years? Was it nostalgia for marijuana’s simpler DIY days? I mean, the only paraphernalia my friends and I ever possessed was rolling papers and maybe a pipe. The rest was all homemade—shampoo-bottle bongs or makeshift bowls made of a pin-holed beer can or a gouged-out apple and some aluminum foil. But now? Pot had gone high-tech and high concept, and the good stuff was ten times stronger than the shit I smoked in the ’80s. Legalization had created a fetishization for get-stoned devices, a validation of the smoke-and-skate lifestyle.
All of which made enforcing our house rules a constant battle of feints and half-truths.
Looking for schoolwork in Sean’s backpack one afternoon I found a silver grinder (for shredding buds into easy-to-roll shreds), a tamper (for packing bowls), a fancy butane lighter, rolling papers, and a package of Phillies Blunts. It confirmed my escalating suspicions that he was no longer an amateur. Further confirmation: the cardboard toilet paper tubes we started finding in the basement, stuffed with dryer sheets—homemade filtration systems, to collect their exhaled plumes.
I placed the evidence from Sean’s backpack on the kitchen table, and waited.
When he got home and gave me a hug, I sniffed audibly, then stood back and held out my hands in a WTF pose. He reeked like Bob Marley.
“I was skating,” Sean said.
As in: what did you expect?