My Neighbor, Mark Harold

I wrote this story in honor of a big brother figure of mine who fell into the "War on Drugs" trap.

• Short story

								
When I was a kid growing up in Lakewood, California, my neighbor to the north of us was the Harold family.  The father owned a jewelry shop in Belmont Shore, near Long Beach.  And the mother was a stay-at-home type.  They had two kids: one of them a female named Sally, and the other a male named Mark.

Mark was about six years my senior, so we didn’t have a lot in common, but he was always cordial to me.  We moved next door to them when I was 5 years old.  At that time, I wasn’t hanging out with Mark.  But by the time I got to around the age of 10, I started talking to Mark more.  And since Mark was an artist-type kid and was sort of a loner, he adopted me as a little brother.

Mark showed me his MAD magazines, which were stacked almost to the ceiling in groups, like they were city skyscrapers.  He allowed me to check them out without question.  This made me feel special because he wouldn’t even allow his mother or sister to touch them.

His room was filled with all sorts of colorful artwork and rock posters: Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Queen, and KISS were some of them.  This was the late 1970s, after all.

Mark played his guitar while I peered through all of those classic magazines.  And don’t worry, this isn’t going to a weird place; until we get to the part where his parents became weird, and I blame that solely on Ronald Reagan and his “Just Say No” campaign that turned every parent into a Stasi drug patrol agent, meticulously scouring through their children’s underwear and sock drawers for signs of a crazed druggie in their midst.  

It was a typical smoggy day in Los Angeles the day I received the news about Mark: my parents told me that Mark’s mother found, gasp, “marijuana in his sock drawer.”  Yeah, marijuana.  As Mark’s parent’s generation was “educated” by the likes of Harry Anslinger and his promotion of the propaganda film “Reefer Madness."

As it went: "Its first effect is sudden violent, uncontrollable laughter, then comes dangerous hallucinations—space expands, time slows down, almost stands still... fixed ideas come next, conjuring up monstrous extravagances, followed by emotional disturbances, the total inability to direct thoughts, the loss of all power to resist physical emotions, leading finally to acts of shocking violence... ending often in incurable insanity.”

Now, my parents were a few years younger than Mark’s, but that didn’t mean they weren’t also poisoned by the propaganda about marijuana.  And they weren’t wrong for advising me to stay away from the drug, as I was still a kid.  But the level of fear that attached itself to it was also ludicrous.  And that was the beginning of Mark’s downward spiral into harder drug use.  No, not simply because “marijuana is a ‘gateway’ drug," but rather, as what happened next became the connection Mark received, and from a seemingly unlikely source called a “rehabilitation center.”

Again, before Mark was caught with the Evil Weed, he was doing fine.  His grades weren’t slipping—he was an A-B student.  And he wasn’t hanging out with dangerous people, as again, he was sort of a loner and kept to himself.  Mark liked to write, and I’m sure cannabis helped in that regard.  Many writers consume alcohol for their muse, but others use other avenues, and marijuana was Mark’s road to travel for inspiration.

And off went Mark to rehab.  As a ten-year-old kid, the whole thing seemed so drastic.  But what did I know?  I hadn’t even hit puberty yet.  And all I could take from that incident is what my parents and teachers told me.  Even some of my friends acted like our parents when I gave them the news.  The words “loser” and “druggie” came out of their mouths.  Hey, I began to believe it.  And thought like them and that Mark was headed down some dark road if not for his parent’s intervention to help him get off the hippy lettuce so he could become a “decent member of society.”

The irony of all of it still hits me like a long bong rip from a three-foot Graffix bong.
That’s because when Mark came out of rehab, at first, he seemed okay.  Although he didn’t seem the same.  It was like something was missing.  Like, part of his soul was ripped from him.  Yeah, I know: some people reading this may seem like I’m in denial about what happened and how Mark turned out, but I get to differ.  And that’s because when Mark went into rehab, he met other people who used harder drugs.  And they connected inside that rehab facility.  They even stayed in touch once back home.

And this is what led to Mark’s ultimate downfall.  Mark remained sober for a few months, but then the demons started to stir, and before I knew it, Mark seemed different, but not like before, when he was content; this time Mark seemed more agitated and squirrelly.  His words came out faster.  His eyes, his pupils, looked like tiny dots.  And he was constantly cleaning his room, when before, he was sort of a slob.

And sure, some may say that Mark was already headed down that slippery road to harder drugs, as that has been the claim for decades—a claim made by people who weren’t necessarily experts in this area of society, but instead their motives were always more insidious than caring about people’s lives and individualistic journeys to achieve something loftier than merely being enslaved into a 9-to-5 job that may or may not prove fruitful to them as artists.

When actually, the “gateway drug” is oxygen, as once you take your first hit, you automatically need another hit to survive.  Then comes running around in circles in your front yard until you fall down, as your head spins until it doesn’t, and then you had to do it all over again because it felt so different than your common reality gave you.  Then you climb onto the local park’s merry-go-round and have your friends spin it faster and faster until you almost puke from the centrifugal force it provided.  

Flying as high as you could on the park swings, then catapulting yourself into the air as your heart raced, landing on the crusty sand below, each kid marking their landing spot to see who flew farther.  Then amusement parks and roller coasters and the high that gave us.  Oh, and let’s not forget soda and sugar from all the candy we consumed and how that would affect our behavior, like we wore training wheels for future tweaker adventures.

Then came both tobacco and alcohol.  And sure, those two items aren’t legal for anyone under the age of twenty-one, but as we all know, that barrier was easily thwarted if you were savvy enough to get around that obstacle.  And most kids don’t start using marijuana as their first drug of choice, because most of our parents didn’t smoke marijuana, and if they did, it wasn’t ubiquitous like both alcohol and tobacco; most secular American households had some form of booze and tobacco products hanging around kitchen cabinets and other areas of the house; access made it easier for kids to experiment.

My first major drug experience came from cigarettes.  Neither of my parents smoked, but some of their friends did.  And in the 1970s, when we visited Las Vegas, as my parents attended either bowling league or softball tournaments, on every Vegas strip corner there were scantily clad females handing out packs of cigarettes—two free packs to anyone who wanted them.  An obvious promotion for the brands they gave out.  My parents would take them and bring them home and put them in the junk drawer every American had growing up in their kitchen's, and there they’d sit until my parents would host a New Year’s Eve party or some other event.

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