The most challenging aspect of being a 12-year-old cannabis aficionado in the 1978 Midwest was finding someone to buy you weed.
Luckily—or so I thought in the autumn of 1978–I had a guy, a friend of my delinquent blonde buddy from first grade. The two had been part of the circle at my inaugural smokeout. Seventh grade, in front of the downtown library.
All autumn, after Adams Jr High let out the three of us got high.
Tim delivered the Sandusky Register newspaper to subscribers in his working-class Eastside neighborhood, not so far from the ferry to the amusement park Cedar Point. In windbreakers, Tim and my delinquent blonde buddy from first grade and I would walk with Tim while he did his route.
Against a backdrop with buckeyes and falling brown leaves, I began to learn the shady craft that is being cool so people don’t know you’re high.
In addition to delivery, Tim would collect subscription payments. Random subscribers would hand Tim a little more cash than seemed right for a tip. He was slipping them a baggie full of dry greenery—Ohio weed, undoubtedly mid-af. It took a while to notice.
Ingenious gig from an analog era.
For a small window of prepubescence, I had all of the pot that a boy could want. My math training never fully recovered, but my consciousness was otherwise changed for the better: Music skyrocketed in importance. My sense of humor changed.
All but instantaneously, I kicked religion.
A little while into the paper-route shenanigans, my family moved to the other side of our Lake Erie town, away from Tim’s brilliant operation. And cannabis became a lot harder to obtain because I was, ya know, 12.
And I didn’t have the Register connection anymore.
By the time Mary …
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Author: Donnell Alexander / High Times
