My Misspent Youth or The Happy Trees

It was early spring; I was 13 at the time and in middle school. Our neighbors on one side of my parent’s house had moved in a year or two before and had stayed mostly to themselves. They were what you might term “interesting people” if you were talking amongst friends about them and trying to be nice. You also might call them “piece of shit white trash” if you didn’t really give a fuck. I am of the latter persuasion therefore I will name them dub T#1 and dub T#2. For clarity, I’ll say that dub T#1 is the husband/boyfriend/gentlemen lover and dub T#2 is the wife/ogre/thing. To be honest I have no idea what the status of there relationship was and I can’t remember their names if I ever knew them in the first place. I’ll probably just refer to #1 and #2 as “them” through out the rest of the story anyway, so naming them was probably an effort in futility. All I knew was that they had no kids and that’s all I cared about. Some people should be sterilized, and these two definitely qualified. Just the visual writing this story conjures of her makes me cringe, much less the image of someone actually humping that beast. Feel free to shiver now if you must. Their house was an ugly, off-color rancher with a sagging roof sitting at the entrance of my court.

That court’s ability to attract white trash is legendary. Most people feel at least a twinge of sadness when their parents sell the childhood home they grew up in or associate growing up in. Me, on the other hand, I was happy as hell that I would never have to go back to that house, even to visit. I’m in the neighborhood sometimes and I won’t even drive into the court. I’ll elaborate on other stories from the court later in an ongoing series called “Court Chronicles”.

It was that time of spring where everyone was out planting and gardening and seeding. The first really warm weekend of the year. Of course we didn’t see our neighbors because catching a glimpse of either of them, not that you wanted to, was like trying to catch the wind. A couple of days after that weekend I was in the backyard either throwing the lacrosse ball against the shed or shooting my bb gun or whatever, what I was doing is inconsequential, and I noticed a couple of plants about the size and shape of a small cherry tomato plant growing under the back bedroom window right next to their house. I knew what cherry tomato plants looked like because my mom would grow them on the back deck in big red pots. I decided not to investigate. I generally tried to not to go into their yard to avoid the chance of any contact with them.

Ryan and I once killed a rabbit in the woods behind my house. I ended up skinning and gutting the thing in our backyard to be put in the freezer for later consumption. As an aside, I don’t think that we ever did eat that rabbit and it may still be sitting in the freezer. Apparently, a hideous watchful eye had been presiding unbeknownst over my activities in the backyard and later approached my mother about the killing of her pet rabbit. That’s right; the “women” thought that she had a wild rabbit as a pet. Dub T#2 only had 20 cats living in the basement of the house, why not throw in a pet rabbit? Can you say witch? Either way, mom knew that I had killed and gutted a rabbit, was fine with it, and summarily brushed the comments aside. She later found me and told of the incident and we both laughed at the expense of that crazy bitch.

A few weeks go by and I’m in the backyard again and I notice the plants that once looked like small cherry tomato plant are now bigger and much leafier. I decided this was odd and convince myself that further investigation was necessary despite the consequences. Approaching the plants, which were about head high at the time, I began examining a multi-fingered veiny leaf attached to a thin branch protruding from an only slightly thicker green trunk. A wave of realization passed over me as I first came to grips with the ramification of what I had found. I reached out and touched a leaf. Amazing.

You may be thinking, “How does this kid in a podunk town know what a marijuana plant actually looks like?” First, let me retort with this; it was the early 90’s, if you didn’t know what a pot leaf looked like, your parents probably didn’t own a TV. Just another reason to thank TV for everything useful I’ve ever learned. Second, although the county that I lived in was cow-town county, Eldersburg was your typical all American community; houses on top of houses for as far as you could see, schools, malls, strip malls and a movie theater. And, as everyone knows, where there’s a typical American community, there are drugs. I had friends in middle school that did drugs. Drugs were around and they were cool. Hell, for that matter they still are cool. That’s staying power right there my friends. Third, if drug traffic had a hierarchy, Carroll County would have been queen to Baltimore City’s king. More heroin was run through that county then possibly anywhere else in Maryland. Podunk counties are great for running drugs.

The plants growing in the neighbor’s backyard were to be harvested, processed and sold in Baltimore City but I didn’t know that at the time. I needed confirmation of the discovery I had made. So, like any good teenage kid, went and got my friend Ryan and showed him the stash. He went to public school, so he would be able to identify any drug within a 50 ft radius by scent alone. I let him look at it anyway, just to be sure. He gave the confirmation I was looking for and now it was just a decision on what to do with my new knowledge. Your going to want to give me a swift kick to the crouch for what I did next, and trust me, I want to give my form self a stern punch to the crouchal region as well. I took a couple leaves and went and showed my mother. I had no idea of the gold mine on which I had stumbled. The synapses in brain just didn’t fire the way they should have back then. I still had a sense of morality and a delusional thought that drugs were bad. In my own defense, as it turns out, it wouldn’t have matter whether I showed those leaves to my mom or not but I’ll explain that in a bit. My mom’s reaction actually was a little unexpected, she was surprised and feinted ignorance on what a pot leaf looked like. Mom, being a child of the 60’s knew exactly what a pot leaf looked like, but not wanting to blow the “I’ve never done drugs” ruse had to play the fool. The other astonishing thing about my mom’s reaction was that she did nothing with the knowledge I had presented. I figured that she would have narced on the neighbors in record time but that was not the case and the pot continued to grow. And grow the pot did. Over the next couple of months, the plants had reached the roof of the house and pressed on. This was precisely the reason why it didn’t matter whether I had told. You could see the plants from the road in front of the house. Maybe these weren’t the brightest people after all. Finally, and I can’t vouch for the timing of this, my mom called the cops on them. I don’t know if it was the sight of pot trees every time she pulled into the driveway from work or what prompted her to finally pull the trigger. The police came with saws and cut down the pot and hauled it off along with our neighbors and that was the end of that. Ugly neighbors to jail, suburban life back to normal and my encounter with 20 ft high pot trees never to happen again. The moral of the story is, grab a little reefer for yourself before the neighbors get turned in by your mom and cops haul off the crop. Learn from my mistakes people.