Gordon

I hooked up with Tommy V behind White Castle's. I handed him two dollars and he slipped me a hit of Windowpane. He warned me to only do a quarter hit because this stuff was pure, so I immediately popped the whole thing.

I went to my next class which was an advanced creative writing course that the school set up for five of us who were so far beyond the regular seniors English curriculum that making us sit through it would have been a joke. Because there was no where else to put us, we met in the back of the junior honors English period.

It was a beautiful, late September day. The sun was shining through the classroom windows, and the leaves on the trees had just a tinge of color.

I opened my spiral notebook and started my writing exercise. It had been about forty-five minutes since I had done the hit, and I was beginning to feel a little fuzzy around the edges. I tried to concentrate but the pale, blue lines on the page wouldn't sit still. I looked around the room at the other kids and listened to the teacher, Ms. Brown.

She was a young, black woman and that day she was wearing a black pants and vest suit with a long-sleeve, lemon colored blouse. She was waving her arms as she spoke and I was seeing vivid trails of yellow pulsating through the air. Trails are what you see when you wave a sparkler around in figure-eights after dark on the 4th of July.

I was really peaking by this time, my mind and sensory perceptions expanding with no signs of leveling out into the long, fun trip. I was becoming paranoid and felt that I needed to communicate with someone.

One row over and one seat up, sat a kid with shoulder length sandy blonde hair. I knew he was cool from his participation in class and that he played bass guitar. I wrote a note telling him I was tripping and having a hard time maintaining.

I passed the note over, not sure how he would take it, as we had never really been introduced. I watched him open the note and write something down. After a moment, he passed the note back. I cannot remember what he said, but it was incredibly funny and enough to break the tension. I was able to relax and thoroughly enjoy the high. For the rest of the class, he kept turning around and making funny faces. It was all I could do not to lose it.

That was how I met Gordon.

(We became fast friends and were roommates in college for my sophomore and his freshman year. His girlfriend Dana also attended NIU and we were like the Three Musketeers. They never made me feel like a third wheel. Unfortunately my teenage fantasies of a ménage à trois were never realized. Gordon and I still keep in touch on Facebook, and Dana is now actually my sister-in-law. Strange, strange world.)

Gordon modeling our high school uniforms