But it's hard to imagine a person who wasn't high, weighing all the options and deciding, you know the think I need to do right now at 8:00 AM on a work day? Smash in my own car window.Īnd I know, as rock bottom stories go, this is nothing special. It is one solution to the problem at hand. This image of my dad in his suit, early morning, rooting around in the underbrush for a rock to throw through his own car window, I found it so shocking. By the time I left for college, it had gone far beyond a thing he did at nights with friends to a thing he did routinely, during the day, while he'd walk the several blocks to a meeting with one of his firm's largest clients. But it was probably around the time I was leaving middle school and entering high school. My dad doesn't remember the first time he smoked weed at work. He handed me a dime-bag and said, this is for your father. One afternoon, I answered the door and found a friend of my dad's, turtleneck, sunglasses, what I remember as a Burt Reynolds mustache. I remember joints passed around when my parents' friends came over, rolling papers on the end table next to the couch. It became something he did socially, getting high with friends, listening to Jefferson Airplane on the brand new FM station in town.Īnd this part I knew. When did it start? When did it get serious? And for my dad, it started in the '60s. I realized, in other words, I had a lot of questions for my dad.įirst, of course, I wanted the details. I had a lot of questions for people who got high all day, questions about what they thought of themselves, what they thought of their families, what they were getting out of being high. And he's been clean for almost 15 years.īut then, here at the radio show, someone suggested doing a show called "I was so high," and I realized something. My dad's cancer and recovery was a pivotal time for our family.
When we pressed him about it, that's when he told us about the pot. My father had quit smoking cigarettes way back in the '80s. Even towards the end, when the doctors were pretty convinced the news was good, he insisted on it, which didn't make any sense. Back then, I didn't even know you could say that about cancer.īut that whole week, my dad was convinced he had a different diagnosis, lung cancer. And it ended with a diagnosis of lymphoma, a particular form of lymphoma that we had learned that week to root for, because it's actually curable. It started with the discovery that the pain in my dad's back wasn't just a pinched nerve.
And I found out because my dad got cancer. I only found out that my dad was getting high at work every day long after the fact, when I was in my 30s. But in retrospect, who knows? One of the head executives toking up in the stairwell every day, how could he hide that? On the other hand, there's this. Richard says that, at the time, he thought he was hiding his habit.