Sach packed his bowl, snorted somewhere in the chasm between mirth and disappointment. He missed the street weed days, the ritual of cleaning seeds out, finding the odd stem that wasn’t even from a marijuana plant, like some clown threw in an oak twig to make weight.
The dispensaries took the adventure out of it.
He remembered his dad teaching him to clean street weed when he was about 11.
He heard the sounds of The Beach Boys in his head, remembered his dad blasting The Beach Boys…and Creedence maybe…, yeah, Creedence the day his stoned dad fucked his stepmom on the sofa, right out in the open, how he was so young he thought his dad might be hurting Marilyn, and how the sofa knocked over his aquarium, and it smashed , and all his Bettas and his Neon Tetra died, and his stepmom held him, naked, and they bought him a pizza to cheer him up, and his stepmom paid the pizza delivery guy naked because his dad thought it would be funny.
Sach hit the bowl, the adventure free bowl, and remembered being 15, buying weed from that same guy, Joey Brezny, the pizza delivery guy and thinking how weird it was that they both had seen his stepmom’s tits, but they weren’t talking about it, they were standing in the field behind the China Delicious, talking about how egg rolls were way better when you were stoned, as Sach gave Joey 30 singles, rubber banded together. And he could remember that the Neon Tetra was named Pete Rose. Sach was sad that he never got to look at Pete Rose stoned, never got another aquarium and all the people at the dispensary had name tags but never talked about egg rolls.
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At 1224 consecutive stories I’m struggling to keep this thing afloat. If you pay any attention to Substack Notes you know that there is a backlash against the subscription model that the platform was founded on.
If you’d like to see this endeavor continue, please consider pledging your support at buymeacoffee.com/JimmyDoom or better yet, Venmo James-Graham-80, where I don’t have extra sets of hands taking percentages out.
I’m sorry that it’s like this. I believed in the Substack model and have been their most prolific fiction writer by FAR.
Thanks,
Jimmy
Never read anything of yours I wasn’t glad to have read. This one also makes me glad for my parents who had their adventures but also kept some
Secrets. I miss them. You woulda liked them.
A mix of poignant, sad and reckless that somehow comes together like a song..beautifully done, J.