the babysitters were stoned

by Jason Allen

THE GUEST SPEAKER in my second-grade class stood in the front of the room beside our teacher and gave him a vigorous handshake. Then the stranger faced us and clapped his hands together with a loud smack, which I imagined he’d done to wake us up. I’d been slumped with my elbows spread wide across my desk and my chin resting on my forearms but sat up straighter at the clap. The short man with a thick mustache and shaggy hair focused his gaze on the middle row and made eye contact with me.

“Hey, kids,” he said, a little louder than he needed to. “My name is Wally Baker, and I’m here to talk with you about alcohol and drugs.”

At this point in the 80s, Nancy Reagan had been on TV on a regular basis, sitting beside her president husband in some ornate wing of the White House, telling millions of American kids that we should all Just Say No. I didn’t understand yet that the dried plants in our attic or the funky-smelling cigarettes Pop smoked when Uncle Jeff came to visit were illegal. Drugs in general still occupied a gray space in my mind. I never would have guessed that my father “did drugs,” nor did I realize that drugs could grow in our yard just like lettuce or any other plant. And when it came to the scarier drugs that Mr. Baker mentioned, the really bad ones like heroin or meth or cocaine, the abstraction only increased. I’d never seen anyone load a syringe or inject something into their arm, I’d never seen anyone bend down with their nose poised over a line of powder. Second graders weren’t showing up at school with crack cocaine or heroin or their parents’ prescription pills as snacky treats in their lunchboxes, either. But thanks to our guest speaker and the First Lady’s ad campaign, I would know what to do if any of my three-foot-tall classmates took a sudden turn to the dark side and tried to push their dope on me. I’d run away, right? And I’d tell an adult right away—right?

“If there’s one thing I hope you all remember, it’s this,” Mr. Baker said. “It’s that dope is for dopes. And none of you want to be a dope, do you?” He let his rhetorical question linger, eyeballing us all from his vantage point at the podium until he seemed satisfied that we would answer correctly if he called out any one of us and put us on the spot. I shook my head slightly. No, of course I didn’t want to be a dope. I did like the word dope though, but I knew I should keep that thought to myself.

For the next few minutes of the lecture, Mr. Baker’s voice petered out to a whisper in the faraway background while I floated inside a daydream, one of those beachside fantasies where I walked hand-in-hand with Michelle Donelan, who, in my mind, was by far the prettiest girl in my class. One row over and two seats ahead of me, Michelle wore a T-shirt and shorts and sat with her right leg butterflied out to the side, so her bare knee jutted into the aisle between the middle columns of desks. I tried not to stare at her, even when she was facing the other direction, even when it was so easy to mask the true focus of my attention by sporadically looking at the man in the front of the class and feigning interest in his message from time to time with a slight nod, as he continued talking about the dangers of alcohol and drugs.

Ah, Michelle. Beautiful Michelle. She was it for me, and no other girl could compare.

I mean, all I had to do was think of her name and rivers of warmth would travel the length of my arms and legs, and a pair of invisible calming hands would begin untying the network of knots in my stomach. Sometimes, though—as would happen today—the desire to live within the daydream pulled me in so completely that I lost all sense of the classroom and a whole new world opened up, a whole new reality inside which Michelle and I were boyfriend and girlfriend. Imagination was always my favorite form of escape, and the basis of my love for books and movies and TV shows, the fertilizer for my love of writing. I wished I could stay in that bizarre, cinematic playground of the mind all day long.

Unfortunately, the guest speaker kept raising his voice to emphasize key words like dope or a certain point he was trying to hammer home about dope, so my hand-in-hand movie with Michelle as my co-star never had much of a chance to launch.

Half of Mr. Baker’s short-sleeved shirt had come untucked while he’d been trudging back and forth in front of the blackboard during the opening minutes of his talk. Some of the kids behind me started muttering comments about his weird energy and sloppy appearance. One of them pointed out the obvious cigarette pack bulging from his pants pocket and questioned, for those of us in the back half of the room to ponder, “Isn’t tobacco a drug?” Another kid commented on the way his R’s came out sounding like W’s, similar to Porky Pig. When the guest paused his lecture, and our teacher took his cue to pull down a projection screen and to turn off the overhead lights, the room took on a new hush.

The odd speaker then flipped a switch on the side of the bulky projector. A ticking sound followed, and a shaft of light full of floating dust particles beamed across the room.

At some point during the slide show, Mr. Baker stood next to the image of an accident scene. A smashed car and demolished guardrail filled the frame, and he emphasized that this wreckage was the result of teenagers drinking and driving. The next slide featured a variety of liquor and beer and wine bottles. Mr. Baker shuffled back and forth and gestured with his hands while he passionately spoke about how too many Americans drank a lot more alcohol than they should, and about how dangerous it was for anyone at any age to drink alcohol and drive a car. I thought of Pop and the rusty floor of his Jeep and the spilled beer pouring out to the road beneath my sneakers during our recent trips together to the bar, where the bartenders and patrons showered me with attention and celebrated me as their pint-size happy hour mascot. Heat rushed to my cheeks as I realized that people like Mr. Baker or my teacher would judge my father harshly for drinking as much as he did, and even more for driving with an open beer bottle beside him.

The next slide was a close-up photo of a pot plant, which had the same spiky leaves and heavy buds I’d seen Pop tending to on the edge of the woods near our chicken coop. With the room still lit only by the projector beam, Mr. Baker asked if any of us could identify this particular plant. After a pause when no one else reacted, I raised my hand.

“I don’t know what the name is,” I said, “but my dad has four or five of those plants in our back yard, and about ten dry ones hanging in our attic.”

Mr. Baker grinned at our teacher. Then he looked at me, with half his face illuminated by the projector beam, and said, “I’m sure you’re mistaken about that.”

“No, he does,” I said. I was annoyed that he didn’t believe me and also embarrassed because Michelle and some of the others had turned in their seats to look back at me.

Mr. Baker smiled and suggested the plants I’d seen on our property could have been oregano, because oregano can look very similar to the ones he’d just asked about, especially when it was dried out. That didn’t sound right to me, but I didn’t want to draw any more attention, so I bit my lip. He returned to the image on the screen and used the pointer to zero in on the serrated edges of the leaves. “These are marijuana plants,” he said. “People also sometimes refer to these plants as pot or weed or reefer.” I’d heard at least two of those words when Pop talked to the other working guys sitting beside him at the bar. Mr. Baker looked directly at me. “I’m sure your dad isn’t growing these, because they’re illegal.”

I felt stupid. I felt like a freak on the fringe of the class. My face heated up so much I began to sweat along my neck and forehead. I wished I could crawl out of the room undetected and hide in the boys’ room for the rest of the day. Mr. Baker continued speaking about the dangers of smoking marijuana, adding that it was especially harmful for kids, that it would kill our brain cells, and that it was a gateway drug, whatever that meant.

It had never hit me quite as acutely as it did right then—the awareness that our family was so different from everyone else’s in our town, and in about every way imaginable. Now that I was forced to think about it, we were most likely the only family in the whole town with a crop of reefer plants.

I left school that day with an overwhelming worry that Pop was going to be arrested. I imagined the cops pulling into the driveway with their lights flashing after my teacher or the guest speaker tipped them off about the illegal drug plants on our property. Worst of all, it would be all my fault. For those next few hours before he returned from work, I was caught in the wrong sort of daydream, envisioning Pop being led from the house with his wrists in handcuffs, looking back at me over his shoulder, the arresting officer telling my father—right before shoving him into the squad car—that I’d been the one who ratted him out.

Later that year, on a hot summer day, Uncle Jeff made one of his rare appearances at our house. Mom chose to let Pop babysit my younger brother, Jess and me that afternoon, while she took our recently adopted rescue dog, Link, out back to his kennel. She planned to spend as long as possible in her favorite escape zone, working in her garden. I knew she didn’t like Pop’s older brother much, and honestly, I wasn’t sure if I did, either.

Uncle Jeff wasn’t easy to be around. He fidgeted all the time and laughed at his own offensive jokes and snarky remarks. Anything he asked me always seemed to be a trick question, and whatever I answered, he’d laugh in a way that made me think he was laughing at me. Plus, he was loud and always buzzed from drinking and at least halfway stoned. Just before she trekked back to the garden, I overheard Mom talking softly to Pop in the kitchen, while Jeff sniped at the baseball players on TV and waited with five-year-old Jess and me in the living room for his next can of beer. She couldn’t believe he was still drinking after “all that.” At the time I didn’t understand what that was referring to, but my guess now is she meant his latest stint in the hospital.

Aside from his few visits to our house, most of my limited memories of my uncle involved us visiting him at the hospital, though I was never clear exactly why he’d been admitted or whether he ever fully recovered. Pop always kept it vague. I remember Pop bringing Jess and me to a hospital way up Long Island near the City one time. During the drive, Pop told us that Uncle Jeff had some chronic health issues—which I think had been true to a certain extent, but as a kid I had no idea that most, or all, of my uncle’s maladies were directly related to a lifetime of heavy drinking. Something to do with Jeff’s kidneys at one point, or his pancreas, or another organ whose function I didn’t understand. Although I’m not sure who said it, whether it had been Pop or Mom or maybe even Grandpa Roy, I remember someone telling me when I was a teenager that Jeff had faked symptoms during at least one hospital stay so he could have a room with clean sheets and free cable TV. In that case, the staff had kicked him out after they caught him drinking beer and smoking weed in the private bathroom. Not to say he was well at the time, not by any means, but he wasn’t the right sort of sick to justify keeping him in that wing of the hospital. Not back then, anyway.

Even though I didn’t like Jeff much, my brother and I loved baseball, and when the Yankees played the Red Sox on a weekend afternoon and Pop didn’t have to work, we had a rare chance to bond with him, even if he ignored us most of the time. Jeff was a hardcore Yankees fan, which annoyed Pop to no end because they’d both grown up mostly on Cape Cod, and he couldn’t understand why his older brother would betray his roots and cheer on Boston’s arch-enemy simply because he’d been living in New York for years. You stayed loyal to the team you grew up cheering on—that was the rule.

After a few innings of the game, Jeff leaned toward Pop and spoke much quieter so Jess and I couldn’t hear. Pop shook his head and then muttered a response while nodding toward us.

Then Jeff faced us, his eyes extra wide. “Hey,” he said, “you guys ever climb trees?”

Jess turned to me and we smiled. Was he kidding? Of course we climbed trees.

Our uncle grinned and slid two crisp one-dollar bills from his wallet, pulling at them from both ends to make a snapping sound, then waved them like a hypnotist with a pocket watch as he said he’d give us each one dollar if we could climb halfway up the tree in the front yard.

“Once you get up there,” he said with more excitement, “I want you to signal me and your dad through the front window by shaking the branches really hard and yelling that the Yankees are the best. When we see the tree shake and we hear you, we’ll come outside and clap for a job well done.” He snapped the bills taut between his hands once more. “How’s that sound?”

Pop leaned back in his stuffed chair with a screech at the joints, flashing a smile.

“You don’t have to say the Yankees are the best,” he said. “Instead, you can say they suck.”

Jeff faced Pop and flicked the base of his chin with the back of his hand, a gesture I didn’t understand except that I knew it wasn’t nice.

My brother and I looked at each other and shrugged in agreement, figuring we might as well make a buck from our crazy uncle, even if the task itself didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Besides, we didn’t get any allowance, so a dollar apiece served the same function for us as a carrot for a donkey.

Jess and I bolted outside and slammed the screen door with a smack. I figured I’d go first. Hugging the tree trunk with my arms and legs, I inched up until I could reach the first good branch. Jess was scootching up right behind me, and by the time I got up there, he clutched the trunk like a monkey. I reached down, grabbed him by the hand, and helped pull him to the wide crook of the branch where we could both sit and catch our breath. We weren’t that high off the ground yet—maybe five or six feet—so we worked our way up over a few more branches until we made it about twice as high. By then we were both scraped up from the tree bark and out of breath again, and through the front window I could see Jeff and Pop passing a cigarette to one another.

Jess and I shook the branches hard enough that clusters of leaves bashed together while we yelled, “Yankees suck! Yankees suck! Yankees suck!”

They didn’t seem to hear us, so we yelled louder and shook the branches even harder, jumping on the one we were perched on, which made it a challenge to keep our balance. After a minute of this, they still weren’t getting up from the couch or the recliner. I squinted at their faces through the glass. I saw them laughing.

Their lack of response annoyed me. It seemed as though they’d already forgotten the deal. Jess was so little, about to start kindergarten at the time, so I could tell he was glad enough just to be up in the tree with me. I told him we should get down so we could go to the door and tell them to come outside. After all, they were supposed to clap for us before Jeff would hand over the money. Jess made a face like—whatever—and then we got even more scraped up along our ankles and inner thighs shimmying down the trunk.

When I opened the screen door, Pop was passing a wrinkled, greasy-looking little cigarette butt to Jeff. The smoke in the living room smelled weird. I covered my mouth and nose with the base of my shirt. Jeff’s eyes had grown redder than they’d been a few minutes earlier, and his wide smile unsettled me.

“You guys give up on climbing?” he asked.

My hands clamped onto my hip bones and I exhaled extra loud.

“We were just up there, shouting and shaking the branches. Didn’t you hear us?”

“All right,” he said. “Climb on back up that tree and yell louder this time, and then we’ll come running.” He pinched the stinky little cigarette between his thumb and pointer finger, his lips open only a slit as he took a puff, then another, coughing and seeming to laugh through the smoky exhale as he passed it back to Pop.

The smoke really stunk, so I guided Jess to the door and told him we might as well climb the tree again. Within the next couple minutes, we repeated the tiring bark-hugging process, adding more scratches and scrapes on our arms and legs, straining until we reached the branch we’d stopped at the first time. We yelled even louder than before, shook our branch and the ones above us so the leaves bashed together again in a flurry. I saw Pop and Jeff through the window just as clearly as before while we thrashed around and screamed from right outside the front door. I knew they heard us—I mean, they had to since we were screaming by then, and yet they still weren’t getting up. They were ignoring us for sure, which wouldn’t have been the worst realization if not for the sight of them laughing as they passed the greasy cigarette one final time.

I cursed Uncle Jeff under my breath, knowing now that the whole point had been to get rid of us, and worse, we weren’t getting a dollar. I placed my hand on Jess’s arm.

“We might as well stop yelling, since they aren’t coming out anyway.”

As soon as Jess went quiet, I heard Link barking from the kennel in the back yard. About a month earlier, without warning, Pop had brought this lovable but hyperactive black mutt home from a shelter and announced that he’d chosen Link from the rest of the dogs because he’d had an especially rough life. He’d named him Link because of the thick braided scar around his neck and throat where someone had put a chain-link collar on him as a puppy and neglected to take it off when he grew bigger, so it had needed to be surgically removed. Kind of the same idea as the branch in our front yard that had started to grow around a rope that we tied there for a tire swing a year or two earlier. Poor Link had been choking every day as he got bigger. The skin of his neck had been swallowing the chain, digesting it until it slowly became a part of him.

When Link got riled up—as he had that afternoon, thanks to Jeff wrestling with him in the living room—he wouldn’t calm down for a long time, which was why Mom had brought him out to the big kennel with chicken wire walls that Pop built a couple weeks ago. Link was the craziest and most energetic dog I’d ever been around. He could jump so high it amazed me. Sometimes, he even made it over the top of the kennel wall, which stood about three times as tall as I was at the time. We wouldn’t have Link much longer, maybe not even until the end of that 80s summer, not after he kept escaping and Pop had to drive the neighborhood for hours to find him or to pick him up from the houses of people who were nice enough to call when they saw our phone number on the tags. But for now, he was still with us, and he was barking his head off out back.

Jess figured the dog must be lonely and he agreed with my suggestion to give up on our stupid mission to call Jeff and Pop outside. The new plan would be to find Mom in her garden, way out past the tall weeds of our back yard, and to say hi to Link in his kennel along the way.

After I jumped to the ground, I reached up to catch Jess but realized too late that he thought it would be funny to stretch his arms out like Superman and to launch his body directly at me. He crashed into my head and chest and we both fell with a thud that took my wind away. We were laid out there in the dirt, filthier than usual and riddled with scrapes.

As usual, after playing, we ended up bleeding and bruised and generally hurt. But Jess was laughing next to me, and as soon as I could breathe again, I was laughing along with him.

We couldn’t know at the time that Mom was almost ready to divorce our father; we couldn’t know then that life at home would dramatically improve as soon as Pop left our house; we couldn’t know how heavy an influence he would have on us afterward, or how his absence over so many years would impact us more than any memories of time we spent with him—but despite the decades of our own tribulations with alcohol and drugs as teenagers and then as adults, Jess and I would always be bonded by the times we shared, like that summer afternoon when the pain of our wounds hadn’t quite set in yet, when we laughed like little hyenas while the babysitters were stoned.

About the author:

Jason Allen writes and teaches fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. For his novel, The East End, Bonnie Jo Campbell provided the cover blurb: “Every page is filled with wise insights about social class and the human heart.” Jason has since been nominated for an Edgar Award and the Georgia Author of the Year Award, and recently completed a book-length memoir. His poetry collection, A Meditation on Fire, was initially published by Southeast Missouri State University Press and is now with Black Lawrence Press, and he has published essays with Salon, Literary Hub, and The Strand Magazine. Jason teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Wichita State University and lives in Kansas with his sweet rescue dog, Luna.