**

The two week party was a way we chose to celebrate coming back from the Christmas break. I hung out with the smokers ... all kinds of smokers, if you know what I mean. In fact, I had been smoking (tobacco) for years ... since the age of nine. But let me back up a bit and set the stage.

We moved to Alaska my freshman year of high school and what a high school it was! It had five stories, an indoor rifle range, a three-court basketball gym, gymnastics/wrestling rooms, photography studios with darkrooms and cameras to check out to the students, two cafeterias, a self-contained theatre. I'm not shitting you ... the list goes on and on! It really was an awesome school.

My first day, I was wandering around, hopelessly lost, when this beautiful girl came up and offered to help me find my class. I was dumbstruck, but thankful all the same. We kind of hung out that day as she showed me around. At lunch, she asked if I smoked pot. Well, not wanting to possibly offend, Of course I told her I did, but I'm afraid she saw through that lie by my performance. It was my first time and it showed.

She ended up showing me where the smoking area was (I'm not kidding. The school actually had a legal, authorized smoking area for students! I couldn't believe it either!) and that area became my home base for the rest of my academic tenure there. It was there I learned the lesson she tried to teach me that day, and learned it to perfection. I made a lot of friends there and some enemies too, but that's another story.

A few of my friends, decided that we would skip the first couple of days of the semester. It was a HUGE school and, kind of like college, the class roll really wasn't set until the semester had been in session for about a week. No one would miss us. It was perfect.

We got to school in the morning and headed into the woods to a clearing. We hung out there all day. We would go into the school and "borrow" chairs from the lunchroom, we gathered wood and built a bonfire ... it was a freaking par-tay! Word started spreading and it just got bigger and bigger with more and more people shuffling through.

There was a small cadre of regulars that stayed out there all day, but people came and went throughout the two weeks. Some brought weed, some beer or hard liquor and everybody shared everything. It was kind of like a hippie commune except I think we smelled better.

We would sneak into the school and steal sodas out of the machines to use as mixers and get food from the cafeteria. See back then, all you had to do was stick your arm up the machine and lever the cokes out. If you took so many you couldn't reach anymore, you just put some money in and made your selection. The cokes would fall to the bottom and you just started over again.

Need money? No problem. If you hit a certain one of them right above the coin return slot, it would spit out coins. God we were evil, but we had a good time. We stayed out there for two weeks and it was the best time I think I ever had.

The party probably would have gone on longer, but one day one of the school narcs (employees of the school, kinda like rent-a-cops, that were there to keep order, break up fights, bust drug dealers, etc.) saw some guys walking into the woods and started chasing them. As he chased them past a particularly large tree, someone stepped out and clubbed him over the head with a baseball bat. He ended up being hospitalized with a nasty concussion and the party was officially over.

I have to tell you, I'm not proud of some (many) of the things I did as a kid and I'm happy he didn't get hurt worse than he did. I'm not bragging or anything here, just stating the facts as they happened.

I think that was the semester of the six F's and a D. Just another example of why the school, for good reason, kicked me out. So now that I've fulfilled that promise, on to the new school, but that will be tomorrow. See you here.