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Strange Correspondence
Hollywood Cocaine
Not For Hire
The Gay Bear Epidemic
I Hate You!
Retox
Rap Songs That Never Get Played Out
VP Mulligan, Please
Accidental Raver
Movies That Ruined My Childhood
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Hangover Hungries
Written Word
A Day in the Life
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Sad but true, in sophomore year I didn’t have many high school friends. That’s not to say I didn’t have any friends when I was a sophomore, it’s just that the friends I had weren’t in high school. When I first moved to Austin I spent most of my time going to Emo’s or sneaking into punk shows, which meant the only people that I met were punk rockers. Which means, really, that I was hanging out with people nearing 30 when I was barely 16. Guess what? Those dudes were all a little bit into drugs. The girls too.
For a while it was fun. My older friends knew the doormen at all the bars, so I was drinking freely all along Red River at an early age. I wasn’t really into the harder stuff back then, but it was pretty much around me all the time. At the time I didn’t care. Shit, I thought it was cool. By the end of sophomore year though, I was sick of all the bullshit that went with it and didn’t want to be around any of it anymore. But still, I loved smoking weed and had no intention of giving that up. So as summer neared I tracked down one of my few high school friends, who happened to deal the green, and bought as much as I could from him. The plan was that if I had enough weed to get me through the summer, I wouldn’t have to go through my older friends who also had hookups for speed and coke and ecstasy and got pissy if I didn’t pretend to be a junkie with them. I bought two ounces of schwag during my Spanish final and figured that was that.
I almost laughed when my mom found my stash. It was literally three days into summer vacation and I’d barely even broken into those two ozs. I was wine drunk at the time and again, it’s important to note, 16 years old. So when my mom threw my two ounces down on the dining room table, I was ready to tell her anything to get off easy. The first thing that came out of my mouth I couldn’t believe: “Mom, I don’t even smoke pot. I just sell it.”
Really, can you imagine a dumber thing to say? Immediately after saying it I wanted to take it back. But it’d been said, and my mom was suddenly certain that she’d raised a drug dealer.
Two days later my mom asked me to take a ride with her. If your parents have ever caught you with drugs, you know the exact feeling I had then. It isn’t a good one. I was pretty positive I was being hauled off to rehab, or fuck, maybe even to jail. No matter what, I knew I was fucked.
I was a little surprised when my mom pulled her car east across the interstate, and even more so when she stopped at a huge gated house deep on the east side that was surrounded by old, crumbling homesteads. My mom spoke for the first time since she’d started the engine. “Do you know who Hollywood Henderson is?”
Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson grew up in Austin and wound up playing professional football for the Dallas Cowboys in the mid-70s. He was a world-class linebacker and earned himself a spot on the All-Pro team in 1978. After that it was all downhill for him. He got heavily into drugs and alcohol, and was known to do bumps of coke on the sidelines during games. In 1980 he was finally booted out of the NFL, and in 1983 he was arrested in a hotel room full of crack and underage girls. He served two years in jail, got clean afterwards, and then in 2000 he won $28 million in the Texas Lottery.
I’d heard of him.
Hollywood opened his front door in a white buttoned down short-sleeved shirt and Bermuda shorts, no shoes. He welcomed my mom, hugged her, and offered me a glass of orange juice. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I took him up on the OJ. The three of us then went out to his back patio, where Hollywood bragged to my mom about how awesome his life had been since he’d won the lottery. Apparently he’d pissed away all the millions he’d made playing football back when he was a cokehead. He was proud to be rich again.
After a while my mom headed off to go get lunch. I started to get up to go with her, but Hollywood stuck a hand out, sending me back into my seat. He pointed his index finger at me, which spanned the length of my face. I wasn’t gonna try to get up again.
“I don’t care about your story, I don’t care what you have to say,” Hollywood told me. “I’m just gonna tell you about me.”
Hollywood proceeded to tell me all about how he was a star athlete back in high school. Then he went pro and got caught up in all the trappings that went with it. He spent an uncomfortable amount of time telling me about all the evil women he used to fuck in the old days, and how he’d snort a gram of blow during halftime in the Cowboys’ locker room. He mentioned going to jail, but most of the convo was about all the wild shit he’d done back when he was blowing all the time.
Then he started threatening me.
“You know what crime carries the biggest mandatory jail sentence in the great state of Texas, little man?” Hollywood had his finger in my face again. “It isn’t capital murder. Shit, you can get 25 years for that. It’s conspiracy to sell drugs. You don’t even have to sell ‘em, you just gotta tell somebody that you thinkin’ bout it. That’s life motherfucker. Life! In Jail! Tell me, you still wanna deal dope?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’d lied to my mom because I hadn’t wanted to get grounded for my two bowl a day weed habit. So I told Hollywood that I wasn’t going to sell drugs anymore, and he fixed me another tall glass of OJ.
My mom picked me up a half hour later. Before we left Hollywood made a big point of telling me about how great his life had been since he’d gotten clean. He kept mentioning winning the lottery, like if I quit smoking weed there was a better than average chance that I’d win $28 million too.
I sat silently in the passenger seat of my mom’s SUV the whole ride home. She was waiting for me to say something about the lessons Hollywood had taught me. I wanted to tell her something, if only to reassure her that she’d done good, that I had become a young man reformed. Scared straight. I could only say one thing though, and again, I wanted to take it back as soon as I’d said it: “Hey, how’d you meet that crazy motherfucker and why’d you make me talk to him?”
I’ve been out of my mom’s house for a quite few years now and these days she has no problem dealing with the fact that I often stagger home. We sometimes even laugh about the day she took me over to Hollywood’s house. “Why the fuck did you do that,” I ask her after a few drinks with her that she enjoys refilling.
“I don’t know,” she says. “At the time I felt like it was a good way of keeping you from selling cocaine.”
I’ve always wanted to ask her if she’s fucking serious.
If you wanna hear an equally great story about the insanity of Hollywood Henderson, check this video out: