They were a cross between rednecks and hippies. It was an unusual dichotomy, how they listened to The Grateful Dead and smoked weed yet also liked NASCAR and shooting things. How they were into both Jesus and casual sex.

One of them preached that sodomy is righteous and cool with Jesus because it prevents abortions.

The pair had good drugs. The kindest buds, sometimes LSD, shrooms, and coke. But mostly they just drank and smoked weed.

They were my neighbors, lived across the street, on the upper floor of a subdivided house.

Whenever you walked by their apartment, you’d smell the pungent aroma, the fragrance of funky weed. And you’d almost instantly catch a contact high whenever you’d walk inside their place. Their place fucking plastered in trippy psychedelic posters and Dead memorabilia.

There’d always be plenty of perpetually stoned stoners on the twin couches, in their living room; stoners burning joints, ripping bong hits, while video games or videos of 60s concerts or Cheech & Chong flicks played on the big screen TV.

Weed was illegal, sure, but almost everyone in that neighborhood smoked, even another one of our neighbors- who was a cop.

That neighbor, the cop, was musclebound, had lots of tattoos and a porn-stache, and he’d come by to smoke weed with us, sometimes knocking on the door, yelling “police” jokingly, and sometimes bringing a couple of other cops, in uniform, over to burn.

So, yeah, seeing as we smoked weed with some of the local cops, we didn’t worry too much about getting busted.

Shit, we’d hardly ever even get pulled over. You’d have to be driving really badly, like a total fucktard, to get pulled over. And even then, the cops would just take your keys, give you a ride home. Unless you were an asshole to them, talked shit. Then they’d definitely arrest your fucked up, drunk ass. Make you spend the night in the slammer.

But usually, the cops left us alone. Or were plain nice, smiled and chatted with folks at the diner. I guess the cops had greater issues on the other side of town. That’s where the violent crime was. But strangely, though most of the murders and shootings were there, and cops patrolled the area a lot, still, I heard from a classmate who lived there that if you called the cops, they might not show up for an hour.

In our neighborhood, though, if you called the cops, even for stuff like a snake in the grass or a housecat stuck up in a tree, the cops would be there in a heartbeat...

I grew up nearby, and there was one time when I was a snotnose kid, riding my bike, and I saw a grown man crawling in through the first-floor window of a neighbor’s house. He didn’t look like Santa Claus, and I freaked out, furiously peddled home, ran inside, called 911. After reporting the crime, the lady who answered 911 asked me if the man was Caucasian, and I didn’t know what that was. “Was he white?” she asked, sounding annoyed. I wasn’t sure why she’d cared to know that, but I remembered he was.

He was a fat white guy, a hairy gorilla looking fuck, and his ass crack was hanging from his pants, like a plumber, as he shimmied in through that window ... I didn’t say he was a gorilla or tell her about the ass crack, though...

Mere minutes later, I remember several squad cars came reeeeaaah-reeeeeee-aah reeing in, and a helicopter hovered in from the heavens and sounded warbled police things ... Turns out the hairy window guy was a dude who’d been renting the house. He’d just been locked out ... Dude must have been shitting bricks when the coppers roared in like that. Bet the motherfucker called a locksmith next time...

Back to what I was talking about before ... We didn’t venture into that other neighborhood much, except a couple of times to buy drugs. Other than that, there wasn’t much reason to go there. And if you did go over there, sometimes you’d be stopped on the street by one of the locals, usually an older man, usually an older man with lots of facial hair and bushy eyebrows and a concerned gaze, and he’d kindly but firmly let you know that you were “in the wrong part of town.”

Besides looking for drugs, more people from my neighborhood started going over there, though, when a nightclub opened in that part of town.

My neighbors’ cousin’s boyfriend was a part-owner of the club, and he said over bong hits that they had gotten a lease on the land for a bargain. He’d kindly invited us over some time, gifted us free VIP passes.

He said the land had formerly been public housing, which had been torn down to pave the way for an entertainment center, featuring nightclubs. The development developed in hopes of attracting more affluent visitors to the area...

I’d seen a report about it on the local news. The development being criticized by locals. One of them was this tall round-shouldered deacon with big puffy white hair hanging like a snowball atop his head. He had on this shiny black suit that looked made of plastic and these eyes that appeared glazed, and the deacon was animated as he was saying, in a raspy hiss, something about this being the beginning of a gentrification drive...

My neighbors’ cousin’s boyfriend’s club spun mostly electronic music. Next door was another club that played hip-hop.

I was surprised that my neighbors liked electronic music, because they usually listened to The Grateful Dead and other 60s music, but they said they wanted to have a look at the club, dance and party there.

I was game. I liked all types of music. And still do. And I liked getting fucked up and partying. And still do, sometimes.

The night we were to visit the club, we warmed up before we left, and sank a few shots of tequila, ripped a series of bong hits of some super strong sticky-icky stinky skunk Sativa. We were all pretty fried when we set out to drive over to the club.

As we began our journey, the weather, which had been its normal fall crisp and cool, transformed, like instantaneously. The night grew even darker and then erupted into an angry fit of hail, rat-a-tat-tatting on my neighbor’s station wagon’s windshield as we pulled onto the highway.