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 Dončić. 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.