Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison by T. J. Parsell Read Free Book Online

sales contest by delivering the paper as early as anyone wanted it. I converted several News customers to Free Press accounts by delivering before 6:00 A.M. The papers were ready as early as 3:00, but I preferred getting them at 4:00. That way, I could be back in bed by 5:30 to catch an extra hour of sleep before school. Even in the summer, I was up and out before dawn. I loved how peaceful it was, being alone on the street, with the solitary sound of my rusty red wagon's rickety wheels.
"Does anyone have a cigarette?" I yelled through the screen of the hippies' home. They were early on my route and often still up when I got there by 4:15.
"Who's that?" one of them asked.
"It's the paperboy!" a guy yelled from the couch.
From the porch, I watched as he passed a joint to the gal sitting on his lap. She was in cut-off jeans, with filthy feet, and her long brown hair looked as scattered as her speech.
"How cute," she stammered, handing the joint toward me. "Do ya wanna hit, toke smoke off of this?"
Her name was Crystal, but she sometimes answered to Joy.
"Na," I said. "But I'll take a cigarette."
Her eyes looked red and watery.
Zingy, the guy who let me in, must have used the same barber.
I was about to turn fourteen, and like most kids in my neighborhood, I had started smoking that year. I didn't like it at first, but we all thought it was cool to smoke Kools. The hippies were always good for a cigarette, or a beer, and if I wanted it, pot, but it made me feel stupid and fearful, so I stuck to the smokes and an occasional brew.

Pretty soon, the hippies' home became a regular hangout for me.
An aging poster of Jimi Hendrix hung on the wall above a large stack of albums. A beat-up sofa, a beanbag chair, a few overstuffed pillows, and three dead houseplants completed the living room. An uneven beaded curtain hung from the doorway that led to the kitchen. The quadraphonic stereo was their only decent possession. They said things like shedding the shackles of social conformity and ridding the mind of material illusions. The house reeked of patchouli incense that camouflaged the smell of marijuana.
I loved having older friends, and even better, it made some of the younger ones jealous. My brother was away in the military, and they somehow made missing him easier-even when they ragged on me about the Vietnam War. It didn't seem to matter that my brother was in Texas, or that the war had ended earlier that year.
The hippies were good tippers too-that is, when they paid their bill. Each week when it came time to collect, they'd pass a hat and fill it with coins, cigarettes, and joints. I gave the pot to my friends, keeping the cigarettes for myself. Most of the time, there wasn't enough change to cover the cost of the paper, but since I never saw anyone reading it, I figured it was a fair trade. I enjoyed their company and with the cost of cigarettes and beer I came out ahead, especially when my other friends and I needed someone to "buy." The drinking age in Michigan was eighteen.
Every third or fourth morning, I'd find the hippies had crashed, and the house lay quiet. Bodies were strewn on the sofa, sprawled on the floor, and sometimes even in the hall. One time, when I went to use the bathroom, there was someone sleeping in the tub. On these occasions, I'd just step over the bodies, grab a beer from the fridge, a cigarette from the table, and toss the paper onto a chair.
It was on one such morning that I discovered my first addiction-stealing cars. There, next to the cigarettes, an overflowing ashtray, and a baggy of green and white pills, lay a set of car keys. Out the kitchen window, their rusty blue station wagon sat tempting me in the drive. It was a 1968 powder blue, Ford LTD station wagon.

Well, if I'm old enough to smoke and old enough to drink, then why shouldn't I be able to drive? I stared at the keys and the bag of drugs on the table. "One pill makes you larger," Ziggy would say, quoting Jefferson Airplane. I'd have it