It started small, just a few thumb-size tags penned in cartoony bubble font on textbooks and skate decks, practice versions in notebooks and on printer paper. As they tested different styles and colors we’d find the words Acres and Aztec on the back of shopping lists, homework assignments, in the margins of our Seattle Times and New York Times. Then they began experimenting with domestic defacement, using black Sharpies to inscribe their desks, dressers, closet doors, and other bedroom surfaces.
“Acres” was Leo’s tag, sometimes written “Acre$,” named for our Happy Acres home back in North Carolina—a reflection of Leo’s pride in his funky, hillbilly past. Sean’s tag (which has been changed here to “Aztec”) was born of a school report he wrote on ancient Mexican culture, a portion of which extolled the virtues of one particular tribe known for being major stoners, toking Jimson weed, ingesting peyote or ’shrooms.
Acres and Aztec. Freedom and fun. Bounty and bliss. I doubt my kids assigned much symbolism to their tags. But that’s how I viewed them, as reflections of their respective mojos. In time, these two words bloomed across surfaces like a fungus, hundreds of Acres and Aztec tags crawling along bedroom walls and furniture. In the absence of other art-making endeavors, I actually didn’t mind the domestic tagging and probably implicitly endorsed it. As a former teen wall painter, I recognized the intent, if not the art.
And it seemed harmless enough, to let them decorate their own rooms, just as I had. As Mary and I often did, we rationalized: Maybe they’ll become artists? They did take a few art classes, pottery and drawing, though anytime we encouraged a deeper exploration—art history, or maybe join Seattle’s public art program—they’d roll their eyes and explain with disdain that they cared about graffiti, not street art and certainly not art-art. Graffiti was something to be lived, not learned in a classroom.
On the lookout for common ground, I’d snap pictures of graffiti and text it to the boys. I’d bring home books from work, on Banksy and street art, and once tried to get them to watch a TED talk by a French graffiti artist, but they scoffed, as if I’d suggested a family math test.
I’d also clip rap and hip-hop reviews from newspapers and magazines until Leo told me: “I don’t listen to the kind of music they write about in the New York Times, Dad.”
During a Friday night happy hour with Mary, I found myself whining—about the graffiti infestation, the ever-present pot smells, the bass-heavy music that thrummed up from our basement, all that foul-mouthed stoner rap: Action Bronson, Andre Nickatina, Riff Raff, Chief Keef. Mary stopped my rant and scolded, “You really hate them, don’t you?”
She was kind of teasing, but her point: I was becoming harder on them. Which I suppose was a cliché. Like dads across time, I’d begun to seriously question my sons’ musical taste, their style of dress, their commitment to school, their sanity. And instead of compartmentalizing—I’m glad you’re doing this, but I wish you’d do less of that—I started lumping my complaints together: the mediocre grades, the skipped classes, the stupid weed, the out-of-bounds skating, the rip-a-bong rap, the late nights, and now the graffiti.
But my message lacked nuance. If I criticized one piece—stop smoking!—it was as if I was criticizing their entire way of life. I was becoming a “bad dog!” machine—the bad cop that my dad feared he’d been at that stage—always reminding my kids of their shortcomings. The effect was a downer, for me, for Mary, for them.
Me: “If you keep making bad decisions, it becomes a habit, and suddenly your decisions all suck and—”
Sean, interrupting: “Yeah, I know, and then I’ll be homeless.”
Me: “Worse than that. You’ll be unhappy.”
Leo: “Dad, when you talk to us like this it makes me feel like you don’t like us.”
Me, indignant: “I . . . I love you guys! And I like you. But I can’t pretend I like what you’re doing.”
I could feel my critiques and admonishments making them sad (Sean) or angry (Leo), but I seemed incapable of finding the right language, of putting a positive spin on things (like Mary), of encouraging and inspiring like a good coach, unable to hide my disappointment and my worry. I felt a distance growing between us. And it scared me.
One weekend, after one of my Friday night, please-don’t-smoke arguments—“It’s your kryptonite!”—Leo dialed up some drama . . .
“I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry I’m a disappointment. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. This is who I am! And I know what I’m doing. Nothing you say or do is going to change that.”
Later that night, he texted: “Sorry for overreacting.” And an hour after that, the words I craved: “I love you!”
I texted back: “You’re hardly a disappointment.” Then: “But my job is to help you be your best—and pot does not help with that.”
No reply.
My father and I weren’t close during my teen years. And probably for similar reasons: bad son/disappointed dad.
In our new house in the country, I lived far from my school friends. I had my motorcycle and still occasionally hitchhiked, but I wasn’t driving yet and spent lots of time at home. Sometimes I’d watch old movies with Maura, or one of her favorites, like The Boy Who Could Fly. Often I’d hike in the woods or hang in my room alone, playing guitar and writing shitty songs, bad poetry, and short stories. I smoked some pot. Hash, too. Not much. Usually just a pinch burned through a homemade bowl or minibong.
Unlike the search-and-destroy missions I waged on my kids’ rooms, my parents gave me plenty of space. I doubt they smelled me smoking—I was cautious, not blatant. Or maybe they didn’t feel the need to spy. Or maybe they just didn’t care. Also, I’m sure my jazz-listening dad (WBGO Newark) was happy to avoid the music I blasted in my room—Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Clash, the Who, Neil Young, Genesis, and, primarily, the Grateful Dead—especially when the album-themed wall paintings began.
At the tip of our A-frame, my bedroom ceiling pinched in on me. I’d get a little stoned and paint music-themed murals, covering the angled walls with oil-painted album covers: the Dead (American Beauty, Blues for Allah, Europe ’72), the Who (Tommy), even Journey (Captured).
When I later asked my dad about that, he remembered “some character, probably from the rock world. I think he was dressed in a zoot suit . . .” That would’ve been the dancing dude from the back of Shakedown Street, which I’d modified by replacing his snapping fingers with a fuck-you gesture, which Phil made me repaint.
A full third of a century past the events of my high school days, Phil and I finally talked by phone one Sunday afternoon about my pot smoking and Jeff’s (thankfully temporary) fondness for cocaine. My father observed: “I worried mostly about drinking, not dope. In retrospect, I guess we did give you too much space. I was pretty naive.”
Walking home from a Ballard bus stop one afternoon, while crossing an intersection I looked up to see the red-white-and-blue oval logo of a “Sk8 the St8s” sticker that someone had slapped onto the post of a street sign. It made me smile, thinking back on that wacky road trip two years earlier.
I took an iPhone pic and kept walking. A hundred yards later, another one, atop a yellow fire hydrant. Another picture. Two blocks later, one more sticker, covering up the NO on a NO PARKING sign. I texted the photos to Mary—“Sk8 the St8s trifecta!”
Had they been there all along, and I’d just walked by? Or were the boys still carrying stickers around, looking for places to leave their mark? In time, I’d find “Sk8 the Sk8s” stickers on bus stop benches, stop signs, mailboxes, and bike racks. I once looked up to see one right in front of me on the back of a bus seat.
Those stickers reminded me of how hopeful I’d been before our road trip, but how little I’d actually learned since. Like not seeing graffiti in our future.
Stickering, it turned out, was just a warm-up, an introduction to public defacement. Though I’d hoped that it would stay in the basement, our weird family secret, their tagging moved out into the open. As it was always meant to, I suppose.
While walking the dog one evening past the Nordic Heritage Museum I spotted a football-size “Aztec” spray-painted onto a garage bin. Beneath that, a sideways “Acre$.” I stood there for a minute, seething as Mickey tugged on the leash. I was relieved they’d at least picked a discreet spot on a dumpster. At the time, I told myself: at least their law breaking wasn’t too blatant. Later, I told them both: “Knock it off!”
Then came the stages of escalation. They’d come home with paint-spattered hands and shoes. I’d find spray cans in their backpacks. While running or walking the dog, I scanned neighborhood surfaces, looking for evidence on playground equipment or park benches.
Perhaps inevitably, I received a call one day from the Seattle Police Department’s Graffiti Unit. My first thought: a unit just for graffiti?
The officer said Sean had been spotted spraying graffiti on a utility shed beside some railroad tracks. Someone had followed Sean home, called the cops, gave them our address. An officer eventually came to the house and talked to Sean, who admitted to the deed, even though he and Leo frequently insisted that graffiti wasn’t a crime. Like street skating, they viewed it as a public expression of their creativity and freedom.
The Seattle Police Department disagreed.
The officer explained to me by phone that graffiti was a gateway crime, and he suggested we keep a close eye on our boys. “They’re looking for attention,” he told me, poking right at my soft spot, stoking my fear that we were headed down a dark path—whose trailhead I’d led us to.
One night, walking Mickey around that same Nordic Museum, past the now-painted-over Aztec and Acres tags, I saw three hooded figures near the playground, standing beneath ribbons of smoke. Mickey began tugging, and as we approached the cloud-enshrouded trio I realized it was Sean, Leo, and Willem, each pinching his own joint. In my day, I kvetched in my head, joints were for sharing, not one apiece. As I neared the boys I threw Mickey’s leash at Leo and left, pissed and incapable of saying a useful word.
Truth is: they weren’t causing trouble. They were teen boys sharing tokes. Three joints was more than I’d have liked but still not that different from what I’d done at their age.
“Oh, I like your kids,” my writer friend would have said.
“You hate them,” my wife might’ve said.
But . . . which was it? I loved them desperately. But as Leo hinted: Did I love them but not like them?
Or was it the pot I really hated? In high school, I’d appreciated the three-beer, two-hit buzz but never craved the white-noise drone that came from getting fully baked. And after college I came to actively dislike being stoned, the aroma evoking a confluence of emotions—I hate you, I miss you. Age tweaked my tolerance. The last time I’d gotten truly stoned had been a decade earlier, back in North Carolina on assignment for Outside magazine, fly-fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains. Reid had joined me, and two hits off his pipe turned me full-on zombie. Everything shut down. I couldn’t speak. As David Carr once described it: “like driving through life with the parking brake on.”
I couldn’t understand why my sons would want to feel so dopey all the time. I was also miffed by the unwillingness to hide it, the gleefully defiant in-your-face-ness of it. If I never saw any of it, I wonder if things might’ve been different. But I’d find shit tucked behind Harry Potter books, in the Sonics lunch box, in the cartoon-covered minisuitcase Sean got as a toddler, in the glass jars we gave them as piggy banks one Christmas. Under their beds, in the attic, in the workshop, under the front porch. My house rules had become a house joke. I’d toss shit out, battle the “you stole my stuff” accusations, but the weed and its assorted delivery systems always came back.
“Like weeds,” Mary once quipped.
Then I crossed a line and began snooping on their phones. In the mornings while they slept, I’d unlock their iPhones with the four-digit PINs I’d swiped, and find photos of dime bags, bowls, and blunts. I’d read suspicious-sounding texts from names I didn’t recognize. I once sneakily mentioned one of those names to Sean.
“How do you know that name?” he asked.
“Saw it on your screen—a missed call,” I lied. Then: “Who is he, your dealer?”
Sean looked like he wanted to play dumb, but his anger got the best of him, and he yelled, “He’s just a kid I buy pot from!”
And Leo, becoming more argumentative and lawyerly by the day, would regularly accuse me of exaggerating, hyperbolizing, and cynically assuming the worst. He would challenge me: “Do you really think we’re out there getting drunk and stoned all day every day?” (Um, yeah.) “Cuz we’re not. We’re just hanging with our friends!”
I had no way of knowing the truth, but he was right that I imagined pot as an accompaniment to everything they did.
During after-work drinks with a few colleagues one of them asked about my kids. I wanted to say “They’re great.” And probably should have. Instead, I played the woe-is-me dad thing, which I should have been sharing with a therapist: “They’re experimenting a lot these days . . . with herb.” A coworker accurately pointed out that anytime I talked about my kids, usually the second thing out of my mouth was pot. Had it become my obsession? Had fixating on my kids’ pot-smoking hobby become my hobby?
With Sean asleep on the couch, I grabbed his phone, hacked in, scrolled through his texts, piecing together the night’s fun. Then I went into his room, sniffing and snooping like a bloodhound. Neatly arranged inside the Sonics lunchbox I found a glass bowl, rolling papers, shredder, tamper, matches, lighter, and two little bags of moss-green weed—a veritable pot-smoker’s fun kit. “Shit, shit, SHIT,” I yelled, as Sean slept on and Mickey ran and hid.
I wanted to drag him off the couch, scream at him, spank him. Instead, I laid it all out on our dining-room table and took drug-bust photos. Late the next morning, when he awoke and saw what I’d found, Sean started his indignant “violating my privacy” argument, but I cut him off, reminding him of the Rules of the House.
Sean said if I kept stalking and harassing him he’d end up like his friend who always whined “I hate my dad.”
“Is that what you want?” he asked. “You’ve changed lately, man . . . You’re not the same.”
I never imagined feeling worse as a dad than I did after Sean’s accident. I never thought parenting could get harder than waiting for CT scans to make sure my boy didn’t have brain damage on top of a shattered leg. At the time, I’d prayed, “Please, Lord, get him through this—just keep my son alive.” In darker moments, I’d wonder if I was doomed to pay a price for that deal. I also wondered if Sean’s very survival was a source of my fatherly incompetence. Since he didn’t die, had I overcompensated in letting him just live? After all, this was a kid who thought he saw God, who’d developed a singular tenet for himself: “Why did God give us lives? To have fun.”
“Sean, listen . . . each choice you make, each decision, it all adds up,” I said, knowing that years of lecturing and yelling rarely made a dent. But I felt desperate to wrest back some control, to regain some authority as the dad, so I kept going . . . “And when you string together a bunch of bad decisions? Pretty soon you’re headed down a bad road.”
“But, Dad, it’s my road. My life,” he said. “Why can’t you just leave me alone and let me live my own life?”
“You call this living?” I said. “Staying out all night and sleeping all day?”
“I’m a teenager! Ninety-nine percent of teenagers sleep until noon . . . Smart kids. Kids who’ll grow up to be millionaires.”
I felt the conversation slipping away.
What he wanted from me was acceptance: of the pot smoking, the graffiti, all of it. He wanted me to let him be the person he wanted to be.
“I know what I’m doing, Fudge-luff—even when it’s wrong,” he said, then summed up the biggest parental challenge of all: “You have to trust me.”
Sean later texted an apology: “Sorry about this morning. I was grumpy and tired. I love you. But you have to trust me.”
At dinner, I grabbed him in a bear hug, squeezed him, buried his face in my neck. Mary and Leo cleaned the table as Sean and I walked out back to talk. He said he was worried that I put too much pressure on myself, wished I could just relax, be happier, or at least less mad. He hated seeing me beat myself up for things my sons were doing or not doing.
“That should be on me, not you,” he said.
Late that night, I found a note in my bedside drawer. He’d typed and printed it that morning, after our fight. It was a full page long, single spaced, longer than most of his school essays. Some of it was woeful (and sadly accurate)—“you are never satisfied with anything I do”—but the lines that brought me to tears came at the end . . .
I have been in a very sad/angry state lately and I think it’s time for us to stop butting heads and for you to trust me and my intelligence to get me through life safely. Just relax and don’t worry . . . I’m going to find a niche eventually and my life will be fine. I got things under control. I love you dad.