Beer Smokers
Beer Smokers
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I went to a park at the beach with two friends, Aleks, and his girlfriend, Jeneca. It was late night, probably after midnight and we had walked a couple miles to get here, just to hang out and smoke weed.
We sat down on a park bench that faced out to the ocean and loaded a bowl and started smoking. Halfway through the bowl, Aleks suddenly stopped and put away the pipe. “People are coming,” he said, and motioned up the path toward three people walking toward us.
They were three males about college-age who looked like the type who had played football in high school, then joined a frat and became professional partiers. I shrugged to Aleks. “I wouldn’t worry about them,” I said.
But Aleks refused to bring the pipe back out. “You never know who you can trust,” he said.
The three gentlemen approached us, and the biggest guy in front said, “Hey, you guys smoking weed?”
I was just about to answer an affirmative, because at first glance they seemed like nice guys, but Aleks blurted, “No! We’re just looking at the ocean. We don’t do that shit.”
“Oh,” the big guy replied. He paused. “Good. I fucking hate pot smokers… that’s why we’re down here… cuz hippies hang out here all the time so we’re out looking to crack some skulls… I tell ya, there’s nothing I like more than bashing in the faces of stupid pot smoking hippies.” And he slapped his fist. “If you see any of those faggot potheads, you let us know and we’ll take care of ‘em.”
“Okay, sure,” Aleks said. “We haven’t seen any tonight.”
“Maybe we scared them all away,” said one of the other guys on the path, and the three laughed.
“Let’s go,” said the third one.
“Have a nice evening guys,” said the first guy, and the three turned and walked on down the path.
After they had turned the corner I looked at Aleks and he just grinned. “What did I say?” he asked. “I told you, some people are just psychos. You can’t just trust random people you meet.”
The ironic thing was that Aleks was normally very open about his pot smoking, and in fact this was one of the few times I can remember him being afraid to tell people he smoked pot.
“How could you tell?” I asked.
“Something about them,” he replied. “They just had bad vibes.”
We waited half an hour or forty-five minutes before going back to smoking our weed. We watched the three guys from a distance wandering out of the park, and finally finished our bowl after they had completely gone. Feeling more comfortable now, we continued wandering around the park, and the three of us walked out to the end of a long floating dock. We started smoking another bowl, and eventually let our guard down.
Halfway through our smoke, we all looked up to see the three guys walking down the dock toward us. I stuffed the pipe in my pocket as quickly as I could but clearly they had already seen what we were doing. It’s not hard to see a lighter flickering in the darkness, even from a distance.
The leader of the three guys walked down the narrow dock with what looked in the darkness to be a simple, blank stare. I looked at Aleks and Jeneca and we all looked around, our gazes pausing on the water. It would be a cold swim, I thought, but we wouldn’t die, and these dumb jocks probably wouldn’t chase us through the cold, mercury infested bay. We backed up to the edge of the dock. Fortunately there was no railing to block our escape.
And the big guy came out into the larger portion of the dock that floated directly on the water and opened up his jacket, like people do in the movies when going for a gun, and I prepared myself to dive into the water as soon as I confirmed that he had a weapon.
But what he pulled out of his inside coat pocket was a huge blown glass pipe that would have cost sixty or a hundred bucks in a head shop. “Hey you guys wanna smoke some weed?” he asked.
And we simply stared back silently.
With his other hand he pulled a glass stash jar out of his pocket and popped the cork.
Immediately I got a whiff of his weed and could tell without even looking at it that he had some chronic. He loaded the pipe and offered it to Aleks who waved it away. “Why don’t you start it,” Aleks said.
The guy shrugged. “Oh, I see, you guys are nervous about us.” He took a toke. “Sorry about that. We thought you guys were smokin’ weed before, but then you were all like ‘hell no’, so I got scared… some people are just psychos… dumbasses who are all like ‘We’re only beer smokers around here.’ I’ve met people who actually do go around finding hippies to beat up, and when you told me you weren’t smoking weed… you just kinda had that narc vibe about you, and I got nervous… you never know who you can trust, you know…”
