I grew up in a small town where it was really easy to get into trouble. The place was an economic dump and there wasn’t a lot for teenagers to do. We had to create our own fun and much of the time it was illegal. Mind you, this was before I got heavily involved with the gym (which probably saved me from ending up in prison).
I was a real punk back then, just a stupid asshole with no real purpose or drive to me. However, I did enjoy having fun and regular jokes/pranks were just something I did regularly.
We had a public access television station back then. If I’m not mistaken, I think it was channel 2 on cable television. Most of the time the channel was nothing but snow and fuzz as nothing was ever really broadcast on it. Then one day, my friend and I found this fucking gem on the public access channel!
You see, after school I would go to my buddy Mike’s house because his mom didn’t come home from work until about 5:30 pm. That gave us a couple of hours to do stupid shit. It wasn’t always stupid shit though.
We made our own mountain bike trails in the woods next to his house. We would ride our skateboards in his driveway while we listened to bands like Pantera and Sepultura on the boombox, and sometimes we would watch movies. But in all honesty, it was usually bad shit that we did.
We liked to start fires., we’d regularly made prank phone calls, and we just fucked with people in general. For example, one time near Halloween we took a plastic skeleton and strung it up over a tree branch that went over the road, and when cars drove around the curve, we would let the rope go and this plastic skeleton would drop onto the hood of their vehicles and scare the fucking shit out of them!
Yes, it was mostly bad shit that we did. Where was I again? Oh, about the public access television show, this guy who was probably in his 30’s at the time, had long blonde hair, and probably didn’t work anything better than at a gas station, started his own shit-ass show about legalizing marijuana. And we are talking LOW BUDGET HERE, think like TikTok loser type videos about 30 years before TikTok ever existed.
The guy would usually be sitting in a dank apartment, with a marijuana flag and some Bob Marley type shit hanging up on the wall behind him (amongst all the other same tie-dye, hippie shit that every fucking pothead has owned for the past 4 fucking generations!)
This guy was a fucking loser, straight up! His purpose in life was to fight for the legalization of marijuana. Now that NY state has legalized pot, I’m sure he has no purpose anymore and probably did the world a favor and off’d himself! But back then? Shiiiiiit, THIS MAN HAD WORK TO DO AND VIDEOS TO MAKE IN THAT SHIT-ASS TOWN OF 27,000 PEOPLE!
He loved to call out city officials too, it was nothing for him to start pointing his finger at the camera and start screaming at the mayor or the city manager.
“AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE MAYOR QUIMBY, YOU’RE A FUCKING LIAR!”
And on and on he would go with his bullshit. Sometimes he would step off screen to smoke his marijuana, and then he’d blow his weed smoke into the camera so all of the 6 total viewers watching him just knew he was a real badass!
So, every day after school we would turn on this terrible public access channel to watch this fucking tard go off on his rants about the city and how pot needed to be legalized. As shitty as it was, you couldn’t stop watching it!
Well one day ‘ole Andy fucked up by starting something called CALL IN TIME. This is where you could call a number that he advertised and speak to that dumb motherfucker!
AND THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT WE DID, AND THAT IS EXACTLY HOW THIS STORY BEGINS!
Naturally, we played the part of a pissed off father who was paranoid about his son doing drugs. We would change our voices to sound older and let him know how upset we were with him and his television show.
“Hello, is this that dumb-fuck pothead that I caught my kid watching on television the other day? Let me tell you something bucko, you got a big puff of smoke between your ears, and if my son ever comes home stoned it’s gonna be your ass!”
And of course, like all extreme pothead leftists, this guy loved to debate and argue! He would say things like, “You don’t scare me Sir, and you don’t scare the other 57,000 activists in the state of New York that are on my side and fighting with officials for the legalization of marijuana! Come on down here and see me, and we can have an adult conversation!”
“Don’t you FUCKING WORRY about seeing me, boy! Cause you won’t even see it coming son, you’ll just be walking through town high as a kite one day and you’re gonna’ get yanked into a van and dealt with!”
The show was prerecorded, so we had to make sure to rush home after school the next day and tune in so we could listen to our phone calls with him and laugh our asses off!
This soon became a new hobby of ours, sort of an after-school tradition if you will. Back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth with the local pothead. I cannot even begin to tell you how many death threats were made to this guy over the phone by Mike and myself.
So, the calls were fun and all, but it wasn’t enough for me. I needed more, and I felt like I could articulate myself better with a letter. That’s why I made the decision to write to his P.O. box address after he advertised it one day for any of his “fans.”
So, there I was one night around midnight as a 14-year-old kid, armed with my pen and notebook paper, writing my letter!
The letter pretty much took the same position as the pissed off, paranoid father. I spent about 3 paragraphs telling him what a loser he was, 4 paragraphs talking about how he was causing harm to the little ones with his drug propaganda and horseshit agenda, and 5 paragraphs warning him not to come out of his house and not to ever let me catch his ass on the street!
BUT… THAT WASN’T THE FINAL PARAGRAPH OF MY LETTER!
For some damn reason, that to this day I still can’t explain, I thought it would be funny to sign the letter as my 9th grade English teacher. So, in the closing of my letter, I went on to explain to him that I would like to invite him to come to my class and talk to my students, so they could see what a real-life fuck-up really looked like in person.
Looking back on it all, this letter sounded like it was written by a high school English teacher that had hit the bottle that night and stupidly signed his name.
“Yeah, come on down to my classroom so I can show my kids what a fucking dope smoking loser REALLY LOOKS LIKE IN PERSON!” Sincerely, John Wesley – Central HS English teacher
I went and got a stamp the next day and mailed the letter off to the pothead’s P.O. box, not thinking anything would ever come of it.
Boy, was I wrong about that one! Next thing I know, I’m getting called to the principal’s office, where I was informed that this dumb motherfucker came down to the school with a VHS video camera, made his way to the English teacher’s classroom, and started blasting him on camera yelling “IS IT TRUE, ARE YOU THE WRITER OF THE LETTER? ARE YOU HIM, IS THIS YOUR LETTER TO ME!?”
I could just visualize this English teacher’s face on camera, like, “What the hell are you even talking about? I have no idea who you are or why you’re down here!”
This teacher had sat down and went through all of his students handwriting (and he taught like 2 or 3 different grade levels too) and he had nailed me!
I had stupidly written the letter with an ink pen, like some pissed off inmate.
Now, you might be thinking that I was about to be in some really deep shit here. Well, the truth is that every other staff member in that school thought that what I had done was fucking genius and hilarious! The high school principal could hardly hold his composure as he talked to me about what I had done to my teacher.
The ladies in the office next door to his were laughing so hard you could hear it through the walls.
The fact of the matter was, everyone in that school thought that English teacher John Wesley was an absolute nerd!
I didn’t get arrested, I didn’t go to jail, and I didn’t get suspended. All I got was a Saturday detention out of it, and I was told to leave that poor man alone and stop bullying my teacher.
A Saturday detention for basically a death threat was a plea deal I couldn’t pass up.
And that my friends, is the story of the pothead and the English teacher!
