The Ghost in the Gardening Hat

Stoner friends and first loves

Wanting to get fucked up and be bad was one of the most ordinary parts of my adolescence. A lot of other kids around me wanted to get fucked up and be bad, too. Some kids, however, wanted to get fucked up and be bad more than others. For some of these kids, it was as if they had decided very early on that getting addicted to drugs and getting pregnant before graduating high school was their destiny. On the other side of this was me. I always knew I wouldn’t get addicted to drugs or get pregnant before graduating high school. Even though my internal compass led me to sustain a decent level of self-preservation, I was still very drawn to the baddest kids, because my mom was a nonfunctioning alcoholic for my entire adolescence. The bad kids made the most sense to me.

Picture this: I’m in middle school. I’m eleven years old. I’m in seventh grade. I walk into the bathroom right next to the cafeteria. I have braces. I wear thick black eyeliner. I’m probably wearing a Taking Back Sunday shirt and flared jeans. Standing in front of the mirror applying a thick layer of lip gloss and smoothing out the skinny pieces of hair plucked from a thin black headband that’s actually just a gigantic hair tie called a headband, is Amanda McIntyre. She looks at me in the reflection of the mirror and I smile at her. I go into the bathroom stall to pee. After, as I’m washing my hands, I peer into her pink pleather purse and see a pack of Newport cigarettes. My heart races. Without knowing it at that moment, we made a pact. We would soon become best friends.

I remember asking Amanda then: Do you smoke? I felt like such a little girl. I felt like such a noob for asking that kind of question. She was so cool about it. She was like, yeah, do you? And I was just like, yeah. Give me one of those. Then I started smoking cigarettes. I thought that made perfect sense. I was like, why wouldn’t I start smoking at 11 years old? We smoked cigarettes then in the bathroom. We stood on top of the toilet and blew the smoke into a ceiling vent. That never did anything. The bathroom just smelled like cigarettes. I don’t remember there ever being consequences for these actions. I think about it all the time. How were there all these adults just walking around their job at a middle school with 11-14 year-old kids thinking, yeah, the bathroom stinks like cigarettes, but that’s normal. That’s just what they do and that’s just what it smells like. It was all so normal. That’s why I felt like such a loser asking Amanda if she smoked cigarettes. She was like, duh? What, you don’t? So of course, naturally, I was like, no, I do. I was just making sure you do too.

After that we were inseparable. I was very easy to control. I was her puppet. I did whatever she told me to do. If Amanda wanted to skip school, we were skipping school. I was already a bad kid because of my emotional outbursts and I couldn’t even maintain the bare minimum at school. My grades were terrible. I cried a lot. I was very emotional. (I still am.) So whatever she wanted, she got it. It was the path of least resistance. It all made sense to me. I remember we skipped school one day and instead of walking into the building, we just walked across the soccer field and into the woods. We stood on top of a big hill, looking at nothing. Just a little nothing town, a little nothing place. Another time we skipped school and went to this kid’s apartment in the complex where he lived. There were a lot of apartment complexes. Dozens of buildings with one pool at the center. I forget his name, but there was another kid there named Kyle who would later become my boyfriend for 1-2 days. I remember being very disgusted by him once he became my boyfriend. Any attraction I’d previously felt towards him just completely fizzled away. We “fishbowled” the kids bathroom who lived in the apartment complex. His mom worked all day so we could do whatever we wanted there. I had the feeling then that I still do now when I get too stoned in the middle of the day. Something feels so wrong about it. There’s a dull panic coursing through my veins while I sit there, immobilized, speaking very little, and if so, like a caveman in 1-2 word sentences. If you don’t know what fishbowling is, it’s when you close yourself into a space, usually a very small space, like a car or a bathroom, and you smoke a shit load of weed, probably from a bong or a blunt, and you let it fill the room. It gets you really high. The goal then was always to get as high as possible. That was Amanda’s single motivation: to get higher. We were always moving on to the next blunt-related activity. Amanda loved smoking blunts. I think on this day in particular, though, we smoked out of a bong. We turned the shower on really hot to create a lot of steam and sat there, all four of us crammed into this kid’s little bathroom, one person on the toilet, the other on the vanity, and me and Amanda on the floor. The fishbowl fog got thicker and thicker. I was so high it felt impossible to even comprehend that I was in the presence of three other people. We left the bathroom and sat on the kid’s bed and watched porn, unmoving, for four hours. Later we took a walk into the woods. We were so high. I was scared. I told Amanda I wanted to leave. I remember a log with words carved into it by some other adolescents. Amanda hated it when I wanted to leave. She was always trying to get me to chill out.

During this time, we also drove around with a lot of guys, and later a butch dyke named Renee who was obsessed with Amanda and hated me—more on that later. We knew a lot of Juggalos and a lot of guys that were 16+ and wanted to hang out with us, or maybe just her, cause she was a bad girl and she liked to fuck. We spent a lot of time with Amanda’s brother Scotty, too. He also loved weed. We listened to ICP and the Kottonmouth Kings and Lil Wayne together all day long, smoking bongs with Scotty and his friends and whoever Amanda was dating at the time. She had a boyfriend named Joe for a long time that she fucked in front of me at least a dozen times. Once, we were driving around with some guy smoking a blunt (a “blunt cruise” as she called them) and he was going on and on about all the drugs he did. Even though I smoked a lot of weed, I was terrified of other drugs. To me, all drugs besides weed were terrible. I don’t think I understood the difference between hard drugs and party drugs. They all seemed extremely dangerous to me. That was where I drew the line. Amanda was long past that fear if it ever existed in her at all. She did it all. She loved molly, coke, ecstasy, and all pills. I started to get scared. I was scared of him and I was scared of all the drugs he was talking about and I wanted to leave. I started freaking out. They were both like, whoa, what’s up? I had no idea who this guy even was. Even now I don’t remember. He was a nothing person. He was like, what’s up with your friend? (As in: make your friend calm down.) I went off on him then about how he was talking about “all these drugs” and it was freaking me out. I thought he had “laced” the weed with something, that was what I whispered in Amanda’s ear as she tried to get me to calm down. In the end, someone passed me a bag of cool ranch Doritos, and that calmed me down. We then turned it into a joke that I thought was very funny about how sometimes when you get too high you just need a bag of chips to bring you back to reality. I ate so many little bags of chips then. Amanda’s dad was a firefighter and he was never, ever home. If and when he was, he was very angry about the amount of kids smoking bongs in his house. He had no control over his children whatsoever. I think he knew that. He had no parenting skills at all. He supplied the stuff of every stoner kid’s dreams: frozen pizzas, stacks of bulk potato chips in variety packs from Costco, soda, Gatorade, and most importantly: cash.

Weed being “laced” was very common back then. We smoked a weed called “white rhino” once in the Wendy’s/Sudbury Farms parking lot (the grocery store all my more normal friends worked at, nicknamed “suds”). The weed was supposedly “laced” with cocaine. Looking back on it, I doubt that was true, because if there were any uppers in that weed whatsoever I would have been drastically more energized than I was. I do remember, though, that it got me extremely high. We used to smoke our weed with Scotty and all his friends under the overpass where there was a little stream you could walk down and sit by sometimes. When we were done, everyone wanted to go to Wendy’s to eat and sit on the plastic picnic benches, but I was too high and I couldn’t move. I was sitting on a rock and told them to go without me. That irritated Amanda, but Scotty and the rest of his friends told her to leave me and let me be. I’d come eventually.

I was sitting there for what felt like an hour but was probably only three minutes. I was just looking around, listening to all the noises, looking at the trees. It was kind of pretty, kind of bleak. Every time I turned my head I heard a noise in my mind that went, “boing!” like a giant spring that contracted and released every time I swiveled my head around. Internally, I was as uncomfortable as I always am when I’m high, but I was having a little bit of fun, too. I finally mustered the strength to climb up the tiny hill that would bring me to the street. This was all happening under the main street that ran through the town. It’s literally called Main Street. I was standing on the side of the road waiting til all the cars had passed so I could cross the street. My group of friends was making their way through the parking lot and someone noticed me. They started walking back towards me and I noticed Amanda looking at me very intently. I was so high. She started yelling at me from across the street but she just looked like an ant with glasses on, yelling nothing out to me. I was laughing and shrugging. I don’t even think I could speak. She was like, “Mikena, what are you doing!” At this point in the story, I have historically announced that I saw a ghost. Whether or not I actually saw a ghost, I don’t know. But at the time I must have hallucinated because I saw a woman in a gardening hat trying to cross the street, and when she walked into the street, a car drove right through her. She was right there with Amanda who was still yelling at me. Amanda was so controlling. I was shocked. This propelled me to want to cross the street so I could tell everyone about it. The experience felt like it lasted an eternity. When I made my way across the street, I told everyone about the ghost in the gardening hat. Scotty and his friends were so entertained by me, this little twelve-year-old girl who got so high, and I’ve always been very playful. This just made Amanda resent me more and it drove her urge to control me. If anyone was laughing at me or with me, she wasn’t willing to accept that reality unless it somehow involved her. She always had to redirect the attention back to her if it ever seemed like I was lapping up too much of it. I’ve always loved attention, too, so I secretly took pleasure in my innocence and charm. The more she got annoyed with me, the more innocent I felt, because technically, I was innocent. I didn’t do anything to her. She just didn’t like it when I wasn’t under her control.

Amanda’s mom was an addict, too, but to what I never knew. She was a natural-born Juliette Lewis on steroids. She had a rock-n-roll chick thing going for her, but apparently, she was a real tyrant, because Amanda’s dad couldn’t stand her. Amanda’s mom’s presence, in any capacity, was always a point of contention in her family life. I remember her mom very distinctly. She had dark eyes, always coated in black eyeliner, and she usually wore her frizzy brown and grey hair in a ponytail. Her bangs sat on her forehead in a thick stack, always straightened in a way where you could see where her hair went from curly at its roots to flattened by the hot straightening iron. She had a raspy voice from years of smoking, a habit which she also supported for Amanda without question, just as her dad did with all the money he gave her. They often shared cigarettes if the other had run out. Amanda’s mom was a very strong-looking lady, too. I remember her hands; they were so thick and sturdy and strong-looking, and her nails were always cut short and looked like she’d been working on some sort of dirty project, although I don’t think she ever actually was. I guess that’s just what they looked like. She was kind of a hot lady now that I think of it, but she scared me as much as Amanda did, if not more. When we skipped school, we went and hung out with her mom sometimes. One of those times we were walking down Main Street when I saw my dad’s enormous, bright yellow F250 driving by. I shrieked and hid behind a bush. We were in hysterics, but I was legitimately scared. My dad had a lot of rage, too. Everyone’s dad did then. That was also normal: getting screamed at by your scary dad. That day, I remember going into an apartment where her mom was staying, but she never seemed to stay anywhere for long. She wasn’t always in town. She was a mysterious lady, and I’m pretty sure Scott Senior didn’t want his daughter hanging around her too much, but like I said, he had no control over his children whatsoever. I told Amanda’s mom about what happened, how my dad drove right past me in his truck as we were walking over to the apartment, and she just laughed, taking a long drag of her cigarette. She was completely unfazed by this. Skipping school to hang out with your mom was the most ordinary thing in the world to this woman.

Later on, in high school, me and Amanda both became friends with a girl named Tara Pushee. Tara always looked old to me, and I guess that’s because she was. I think when I met her she was like, 18, and she was still a Junior. Aside from that, she just had the vibe of someone who had seen a lot of shit and had somehow become more chill because of it. That happens to some people—they see and go through a lot and become very subdued and laid-back about everything. Nothing seemed to surprise her. She had a hot brother named Stephen who I was obsessed with. It made going to her house extremely exciting. I was always disappointed if I arrived there to find out he was out with a friend and wouldn’t be home til later. I loved hanging out with Tara, genuinely, but the pull to go to her house was greatly intensified by my attraction to Stephen. He was into nu metal and I thought that was very cool. He also wasn’t too cool for anything, he was just a very reserved person in general. I read into all of my interactions with him. I was always asking about Stephen and if he said anything about me. He had a shaved head and deep blue eyes, very pale skin, he was kind of short, and he was strong but slender, not stocky. They lived with their evil grandmother and their mom, but the mom was never around, just the evil grandmother. She sat in the living room in front of the TV all day and all night. Everything kind of centered around the grandmother and how she would feel about anything that occurred within the walls of the house. Tara was the first person to ever play Stevie Nicks for me, and I became obsessed with the song If You Ever Did Believe because of her. When I came over to her house, all I wanted to do was sit in her room and listen to that song. You’ve left me now and it’s seasoned my soul. I don’t exactly remember how or why, but she had two different MP3 players, one of which had the song on it and could be played from a speaker. Or maybe the song just played from the speaker of the MP3 player. All I know is that sometimes, for whatever, we couldn’t listen to the song.

I’ll be honest, my fondest memories with Tara weren’t when we were hanging out at her house. There was something a little bleak about it there. We didn’t go there much. What we did do, though, was hang out with her boyfriend at his house. Did he live alone or something? If so, how? Where were his parents? Did he pay rent? There are a lot of things I don’t remember or understand about this moment in my life. He was older and had graduated high school by then, but still, he couldn’t have been older than 19 or 20—or was he? At this point, I think I was 14 or 15. Amanda would hang out with us sometimes, too. We would go over to Tara’s boyfriend's house and we would drink beer and malt liquor and smoke a lot of weed and cigarettes all night long. One night, we sat in Tara’s boyfriend’s car smoking weed and drinking beer, and I blacked out. I think I kissed Tara’s boyfriend, but it was funny to everyone, including Tara. Like I said, she was very cool and laid-back. I blacked out a lot back then. I knew that was not only possible, but highly likely if you smoked weed when you were really wasted, but I could not control my alcohol intake nor my desire to smoke weed. I just wanted to get fucked up, partly because I loved getting fucked up, partly because it made me feel good that my fucked-up-ness was so entertaining for my cool older friends. That was how I perceived it in my mind at least. The next morning we all woke up in Tara’s boyfriend's apartment. He was about to drive me home and I realized I couldn’t find my shoes. Where could they be? It had snowed a lot the night before. We found my shoes outside. I was so drunk that for some reason I took my shoes off and walked back inside barefoot from the car. We all thought that was very funny. I did a lot of things then at my expense for the entertainment of others. I just wanted to feel loved, adored, celebrated, accepted.

When I was a sophomore or a junior, I met Lauren McDonald. I remember the moment I became obsessed with her very distinctly. I hadn’t even met her yet. I just heard her name. “Did you hear Lauren McDonald is coming back to Avon?” I overheard some friends discussing. For context, Avon was the High School I went to, which was actually how I ended up meeting all these new kids I’d never known before, because it was one town over from my hometown. I went there because it was a little bit better than the high school in Randolph, which was radically underfunded and kind of fucked up, and Avon was a very small town that allowed kids from neighboring towns to apply to go to school there instead. It was what Amanda did, so naturally, I followed in her path. Lauren was “coming back” to Avon from the regional technical high school most of my friends from middle school went to, Blue Hills. I don’t know why Lauren decided to come back, but the moment her name was mentioned, I became fixated on her and knew that I had to befriend her as soon as she made her return. I found her on Facebook and sent her a friend request immediately. As imagined, we became fast friends, and we also smoked a lot of weed together.

The real reason I was obsessed with Lauren was because I was in love with her. To this day, I still regret not coming out sooner. My closeted-ness wasn’t as sad as it is or was for so many other gay people, but I still feel bad for my high school self for not realizing how in love I was with Lauren, especially because she was bisexual, and because of that, it could have easily been a requited love. Anyway, I chiefly thought that Lauren was so cool because she was bisexual. That was the first thing that allured me about her. She was also very beautiful. She had amazing skin, long, straight, dark brown hair, hooded eyelids, and supple lips that were naturally a beautiful, dark, punch-pink hue. In her bedroom, she had Sports Illustrated posters all over the walls. I thought that was amazing. I asked her about it when we first started hanging out. I was like, what’s with all the posters, ha-ha. I was very nervous about it. I had no idea what was happening in my body at the time. She asked me what I meant. Like, why do you have them? I asked. “Because I think girls are hot,” she told me flatly. I was amazed. I couldn’t believe it. I slept over at her house a lot, and every time I went to sleep next to her, my heart fluttered in my chest. I remember telling Amanda about this. “I have to tell you something,” I confessed. She just looked at me, unamused. “What? What is it?” she pressed. I couldn’t speak. “It’s about Lauren, isn’t it?” She asked. I just started laughing nervously. “Well, what is it?” she pressed on.

“I-I think I’m bisexual,” I admitted finally.

She just laughed.

“Because of Lauren!?” She exclaimed.

“Well, I don’t know!” I told her. I was freaking out.

Amanda laughed again. She told me it was no big deal.

“I fuck girls all the time,” she said, brushing it off.

“But this is different,” I wanted to or should have said. But I didn’t, and that was the end of it. I never told Lauren how I felt until years later when I was in Australia, high out of my mind on bad ecstasy and some other pills I took, laying in the bathtub at five in the morning at some random lesbian’s house named Genevieve. I called Lauren on Facebook messenger video.

“I was in love with you in high school,” I told her jubilantly. At this point, I had been out for a few years, and I was in a very, “I’m queer so fuck you” phase.

“Are you on drugs?” She asked. “Your pupils are huge.”

“Yeah, I am,” I told her. I don’t remember what happened after that. She seemed unfazed by the information. I think we caught up. I found out she had some serious health problems via Facebook a few years later, some sort of blood disease, and that one of her best friends died tragically, but I think she’s okay now.

We spent a lot of time in Lauren’s basement. That was where we got stoned and watched TV. The basement was technically her brother’s bedroom, but he wasn’t home most of the time—I think he worked nights at a pizza place and was gone by the time we got out of school. We once accidentally exploded a pen on the couch in his room and we were scared about him finding out about how much time we spent smoking weed in his room. Lauren’s mom periodically came downstairs to check on us. During one of her visits, she once sniffed the air and asked Lauren in her thick Boston accent, “ah yew tew smokin’ pawt down hea?”

“No, mum,” she’d respond, rolling her eyes.

Her mum just paused and looked at us.

“Alright,” she sighed. “Do ya want me ta make yaz some bagel bites?” She asked earnestly.

“YES!” we replied in enthusiastic unison.

“Alright,” she said, “just as long as yaz not smoking pawt down hea!”

She went upstairs and we immediately erupted in laughter. It was funny to me that her mum didn’t want us smoking weed in the basement, or anywhere at all for that matter, but offered to make us a little snack anyway. I liked Lauren’s mum. I liked her whole family. I liked being at her house. It felt safe and normal. Lauren had some demons, like me. She was an emotional person, but in a different way from me. She was more of a brooding, mysterious person; it always felt to me like her demons were never identifiable or understandable to me. I felt their presence; I felt the cloud of darkness that sometimes shrouded her, and when she went dark, she was in a different place, a different world. She was very atmospheric. When she was playing and laughing, she was playing and laughing, but when she was struggling, that was it. There was no in-between.

Another person I spent a lot of time with in high school was a kid named Billy Rakutis. He was extremely tall, with bag fat lips and a messy mop of brown emo kid hair on his head. I hung out with him mostly, but sometimes his best friend Andrew reluctantly accepted me into their duo. Andrew drove a truck and sometimes we would go on a “safari ride”. This meant Andrew would speed down an unpaved dirt road that led to an opening in the woods while Billy and I sat in the seats next to him, flinging around rapidly and wildly as the truck barrelled forward. The truck got stuck there in the mud once, and we made a video on Billy’s camcorder where we acted like we were stranded out there with no food or water for days on end. I think it was loosely inspired by The Blair Witch Project.

Billy was in love with me. I was getting closer to realizing I was gay, but I still hadn’t totally figured it out. I felt more kinship with him than anyone else at that moment in my life. I worked at a sub shop called D’Angelo’s right down the street from his house, so after school, I’d take the school bus with him to his house and hang out with him til I had to go to work. I hated going to work. I just wanted to get stoned with Billy and watch The Goofy Movie. Billy had three brothers, one of whom was his twin, Brody. Amanda had her first child with Brody. He was the person that made sure she was pregnant by the time she graduated high school. For whatever reason, the four of us never really hung out together. Billy and Brody didn’t get along very well, and Brody was a particularly dark soul. Another one of my best friends from high school dated Brody and Billy’s other brother, Taylor. The last brother, the eldest of them all, was never around. I never knew much about him.

We ate a lot of frozen pizzas and played around a lot. We were always charging around his house in character, making up involved stories about who we were and what we wanted from one another. Sometimes when I got on the bus to go to his house with him I just assumed he’d wanted me there, when in reality, he’d be sort of brooding and depressed. I knew it was because he was in love with me. Those days were never very fun. He’d ice me out and be very cold towards me, always hoping I’d ask him something that would allow him to confess his feelings towards me. But I knew how he felt and I just didn't feel the same (because I was gay). I remember when I finally came out, I passed him a note in math class that just said, “I’m bisexual” on it. He just rolled his eyes at me. He was pissed.

The last I heard of him, he was working as a manager at that same D’Angelos I worked at down the street from his house in high school. I can’t get a hold of him, and if I could, what would I say, anyway? So many of these relationships can’t survive past their adolescence; perhaps that lends some magic to their narrative structure—they remain frozen in the past, unflinching witnesses to my fever-dream coming-of-age.