Man with a Ponytail
We were in a Grateful Dead, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Pearl Jam and basketball phase. We smoked weed, wore tie-dye shirts AND balled. And we balled hard, harboring hoop dreams, grandiose aspirations of being the next Big Bill Walton, Larry Bird, Chris Mullen, Luc Longley… or maybe Kurt Rambis…
We were trashy suburban teenagers. Honkeys with ponytails hooping. A couple of us had game, hops, too, and could slam dunk, turn heads on the playground. Mind you this was pre-Mac McClung. Pre-Steven Adams. Pre-Luka Doncic. This was the White Men Can’t Jump Era… But we broke the mold… Blazed a new path…
And “blaze” we did. Daily. We’d even play high. We’d rip bong hits, then storm the court, dripping with sweat, playing ’til way past sundown… I don’t know how we did this, in retrospect. Back in those days, cannabis wasn’t as high quality so that could have played a role.
With all the legal weed, dispensaries, the net, it’s weird reflecting on those pre-legalization, pre-web, pre-dark web days. How you had to know someone, have connections, in order to score.
If all our plugs, our normal connections were dry, we’d head down to the “hood” to buy weed. However, this entailed a risk of robbery. Or so we’d worry. And when we’d journey to the “other side of the tracks,” we’d bring a knife, mace, stash a baseball bat in the backseat, or my friend would sneak one of his dad’s handguns, conceal it in his ’89 Ford Escort’s glove compartment.
The worst rip-off I can remember, though, didn’t come from a drug run to the hood. In fact, we never once got ripped off there. The dealers, “streetside pharmacists,” dudes there were always cool, hooked us up properly with killer, crystally red-haired Jamaican buds… Nah, actually, it was a high school classmate of mine that gave it to us the worst. Another honkey.
This honkey was the sort often then referred to as, unfortunately, a “wigger,” but also known as a “yo.”
He was the type of White kid who spoke in Ebonics, wore baggy pants, oversize shirts, Reebok Pumps, Charlotte Hornets Starter jackets and stocking caps. He had a hi-top fade, eraserhead haircut like Kid from Kid ‘n Play and cut lines in his eyebrows like Vanilla Ice. He beatboxed, breakdanced, slap-drummed on lockers and freestyled in the hallways… He was our school’s Eminem, Andrew Schultz, or maybe a Michael Rapaport… Or he could have been the kid from that old Offspring music video, “Pretty Fly for a White Guy.”
The yo and I were in Shop class together, and he was strongly disliked by a couple of my friends. Because they hated any yo. One of my friends, a particularly violent and fat hippy had wanted to beat the shit out of the yo. Just because he claimed to hate “fuckin’ wiggers.” Even stranger, the yo backed down, in the hallway, when shoved and challenged to fight the fat hippy.
(This might have been the first and only time in the history of American high schools that a kid in a Starter jacket refused to fight a fat dude with a ponytail, in a Grateful Dead shirt, but I digress…)
Maybe my friend’s racially charged animosity wasn’t what it seemed. Perhaps it was a premonition. An omen to keep away from the yo…
Like lots of hip hop kids, the yo smoked weed. And I’d join him, sneaking off from Shop class to burn blunts by the football field. There, under the empty bleachers, we’d trade cassette tapes, mixtapes and bootlegs, listen to our Walkmans. And he introduced me to NWA, Cypress Hill, Das EFX, House of Pain and Funkdoobiest, a lot of which I liked, and I introduced him to Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Zep, and got him to breakdance to “Casey Jones,” which he claimed to dig.
The yo had high-quality cannabis. Kind buds… And while smoking, he told me his cousin, who went by the unique appellation “Teddy Bear,” was moving pounds of the same cannabis. Some sticky, skunky Vancouver BC shit. The chronic… At a price too good…
Four other friends and I pooled our cash to purchase two pounds. We were scheming to then sell the stuff as nickels and dime-bags. My friend who’d invested the most had saved up for a while, had planned to peddle a pound of the stuff back at his boarding school.
I wasn’t there when the “buy” was scheduled. But my friend back from boarding school and another hippy friend went to meet Teddy Bear. Details were murky, but Teddy Bear, also a yo, was with another yo and somehow the yo pair separated my friends, had them wait in different spots. Then the two yos vanished after receiving the cash. Leaving us dry and certainly not high.
My friend back from boarding school had put in the most cash and was angrier than anyone. It turned out his older brother had also put in cash. And his older brother was not at all a hippy. Actually, he was sorta scary. This was a dude who was like 25, had a shaved head and had been in prison. A dude who had lots of muscles, tattoos. A dude who worked at a motorcycle shop…
My friend’s prison dude brother rode his Harley to my high school to confront the yo. Tight-lipped and angry-eyed, Prison Dude lay in wait for the clang of the three o’clock bell. Prison Dude pacing the school bus stop like a cagefighter during pre-fight introductions…
However, the yo pleaded ignorance, threw up his arms and claimed twice that he “din know noffin’.” That wasn’t a satisfactory explanation, and Prison Dude shifted his weight, clubbed the yo with a hard right hook to the jaw that sent the yo drunk walking, staggering and tumbling to the pavement. Prison Dude proceeded to start kicking the crouching yo in the ass. Flung a steel-toe boot right at the yo’s red boxer-clad ass that’d been hanging like a target from his saggy Guess jeans. Prison Dude got in a good four or five kicks and a stomp or two before being chased off by school security guards.
The yo had literally gotten his ass kicked…
What was most intriguing was the outcome of the yo’s beating. The yo’s jaw had been broken, and he’d spent a lengthy time in convalescence. But when he returned from the hospital, the following school year, he was a changed man.
He’d become a hippy. Grew his hair long, was wearing tie-dye shirts, patchouli oil. He’d started playing guitar, too, and had gotten heavily into The Grateful Dead.
Even weirder was that the yo-cum-hippy had become violent, was regularly getting into fistfights. He eventually got expelled after savagely beating up, hospitalizing a scrawny freshman in a school bathroom. Fucking slammed the poor kid’s face into a urinal after jacking his pager…
Some years later, I heard from a friend of a friend that the yo-cum-hippy had become a professional musician. And that he’d become embroiled in a legal battle after being accused of stealing another folk singer’s identity. Allegedly he’d been performing the singer’s music and was actively touring, playing shows in bars, clubs, and state fairs under that folk singer’s name.
He’d allegedly stolen the folk singer’s likeness, too, and was even pulling his chestnut-brown hair into the same scruffy style of ponytail.
