ME AND THE KIND BUD...CH. ONE....
I smoked my first joint behind the gym at my school during a night football game in 1971.
I was 12 years old, the guy who had the joint was probably 16 and a tried and true hair farmer. I had just transferred to this school from one that was decidedly more redneck, I mean they had a dress code. I had died and gone to heaven. This school had no dress code, and they smoked weed here too! Further proof that repression is not a good thing.
It was also around this time that my lifer dad retired and enrolled at UT on the GI bill. What with the marches at UT and the new school and just the tenor of the times, it's no wonder I became a pothead.
I smoked constantly until my junior year, when I decided to get serious about my education and smoked only on weekends.For the first month my teachers would regularly pull me out into the hall and ask what was wrong with me? Was I high? This still cracks me up.
Despite the bales of pot I've consumed in my life, I am cursed with a vivid, unrelenting memory.
Here is a recollection:
I was on the newspaper staff in my sophomore year and me and my friend Snowy got a pass to go to the gym to take pictures of girls volleyball practice...hell yeah!... The coaches hated us because we were filthy hippies, and as soon as they saw us in the sacred and hallowed gym they ran us off.Despite our signed pass.
With 45 minutes to kill and nothing to do, we decided to go to one of the spots in the creekbed behind the gym and get high. I had one of those waterproof match containers full of roach weed, and the spot we were going to had a gasmask pipe (a gasmask mouth piece,a length of garden hose and some brass plumbing fittings for the bowl stashed under a brush cedar.
This, by the way, is what I looked like back then:

The caption to this picture reads:
"Finding amusement in almost anything, Rob Clattenburg enjoys the outdoors".
Translation: "Rob is stoned out of his mind...the dirty hippy freak".
Anyway, back to the story...

The creekbed was narrow and deep, and our spot was in the middle of the creekbed on a corner,you had a steep 25ft. climb out.
So I'm hitting the pipe and all of a sudden I hear "Don't move!". I look to my left, it's Coach Stratton at the top of one escape route. I ditch the pipe and turn to my right and there's Mr. Grimes blocking my escape with a rather sympathetic face on. He was my history teacher (history of the minorities) who gave me a "B" on a paper I wrote about the hells angels after convincing him the angels, in a social sense at least, were indeed a minority.
What was this guy doing here? Mr.Grimes!? You're COOL, why are you tryin' to bust me? Politics,it turns out.
Anyway,were trapped, busted. They escort us to the coaches office and separate us.Snowy gets locked in the bathroom -"listen for a flush!" admonishes coach Wallace (he even looked like George Wallace...the racist governor).Keeping us separated so we couldn't "get our story straight".
Then, they called the sheriff. In the meantime, coach Stratton returned from his investigation of the "crime scene"... with a joint! Now, if you recall,I only had roachweed, and for the record,Snowy never had any pot...ever. Where did this joint come from? A plant? Another visitor to the spot dropped it? Who knows...
They let me call my dad and the conversation went something like this:
Me: Hi dad? Yeah...I got busted for pot at school today..."
Dad: HaHa-Very funny Rob... CLICK.
He hung up!!! They let me call him back after I explained the great tradition of practical jokes in our family.....
Me: Dad! I'm serious! There's a Travis County Sheriff here...They REALLY busted me.
Dad: Your'e lucky your mom's in england... I'm on my way.
And my dad bailed me out...again (did I mention I miss him?)
I took the rap for the pot, Snowy's parents would've killed him otherwise, and got 3 weeks....suspension but allowed to do my work at home.
Snowy got one week.
I graduated high school early, and then it was the eighties.....