When I woke up, I could hear what sounded like a bird squawking outside my window. I was a beautiful day in my little Cleveland suburb and I was going to have a great one. My room had a door to the upstairs porch and I liked to go out there and look up at the stars. Today I was looking for a terribly loud bird so I looked up and then down. I saw my friend Parker at the base of the tree that ran right up the side of my house. All that "racket" was coming from him. My sleepy haze cleared and I answered the door. My parents were not home, they went to work but we were on a teacher work day. Parker came in an we went about the business of figuring out how our day would be spent. The local swimming pool was open for the summer, end of the school year start up. They also had a great ice skating rink that we frequented in the winter.
I threw on my trunks and a shirt and we rode our bikes to the pool. I knew I was a great swimmer but I was a pudgy self conscious kid so my abilities were overshadowed by my lack of confidence. With a different mind set, I could have been the "Biff" of school.
I liked diving and swimming in the deep end, at this point I did not have a full understanding of why I liked girls but I did. Parker always had the prettiest girls after him. The irony of that is, I would find out thirty years later that he was gay. Which, when I found out I was happy because in school he was such a womanizer, I was worried what he would become.
We hit the pool just about every day and enjoyed the weather while we could. We lived in Cleveland, snow would be along shortly.
One day, Parker got his hands on some weed and this was the first time I had seen weed so I couldn't tell if it was an herb from my Mom's garden or the real thing. One of the kids from the neighborhood gave Parker a mini bong to partake. We were such novices, we had to get his sister to help show us how to do it. His sister was coming from the pool that day too and she was in a bikini. She was a year older than me and Parker was a year younger. She was starting to become slightly statuesque, sixteen year old five and a half foot blond. Now the scene is this, I'm in my bedroom with Parker, a thirteen year old blond white kid and his sister in a bikini smoking weed, or trying to in my parents home. Stupider things have been thought of but very few performed. Now of course, this is the day that my Dad comes home early from work right. and as he pulls in the drive we all begin to vacate. He is coming in the house and up the stairs. We all pass him on the stairs, Parker and his sister in a bikini, smelling of weed. As a young black man I would not really realize the gravity of that moment until it had long passed. But that day, I rode off on my bike and stayed away until the street lights came on and he never said a word about it. I don't know if he ever knew but he had a keen sense of smell so I am sure he was hip. I thought for sure that would be the day of my demise but nothing. Why didn't he say anything? I don't know, and I buried him three years ago so I will never know.
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