The Bonsai

For the last few years on my birthday, I’ve organized a dinner with my three oldest friends. We go to the same place, reminisce about the same old stories, and fill each other in on what’s been happening in each other’s lives of late. This year was no different – except for one thing. . .

One of my friends, let’s call him Azzy, arrived bearing a bonsai tree as a gift. This struck me as a tad unusual as the four of us have never really exchanged gifts. (That is, not unless you count nuggets of weed as gifts.) We were, after all, wayward teenage boys when we met. Four shitheads who’d already burned our bridges at one high school only to find each other at another. One which, for lack of a more elegant way of saying this, was a shithole where delinquents went to run amuck before dropping out to seek whatever low-end employment they could find. And run amuck we did.

We treated that school not so much as a place of learning, but rather as a place to meet before venturing into the streets to find a good spot to get stoned. Between the four of us we always made sure we had exactly what we needed for a good session. Two of us would split the cost of a ‘stick’, acquiring it from one of the friendly neighborhood drug dealers. Someone else would bring the chop bowl, scissors, spin, and a lighter. And the last of our thrifty quartet would bring a bong, which was often an old resin-riddled abomination so ghastly that sucking on it even without any weed was enough to get you high. And if by chance none of us remembered to bring a bong, (a real danger when you’re talking about four teenage stoners) then we’d make one by combining three easily procured parts. A Gatorade bottle that can be found at any good food retailing outlet. A cone piece purchased from the corner-store known as Easy-Plus. And a stem, which I regret to say, would sometimes be obtained by cutting a piece of hose (or sprinkler-pipe) from one of the unfortunate house’s that surrounded our highly reputable school.

The construction of these bongs was another important matter. They had to be ‘air-tight’. This meant burning a hole in the plastic Gatorade bottle just enough that you could ram the piece of hose in there, but not so much that the hole became too big for the hose to plug. It was a delicate procedure. One we fucked up many times. But with much practice, and with the stakes so high, eventually, we all became masters of this maneuver. In fact, it may have been the only thing the four of us collectively learnt in year twelve.

In a rather surprising turn of events, none of us graduated. Instead, some of us were involved in an ‘incident’ on the school bus, which made the local paper, and which drove the school’s faculty to ask us to leave and never return. Being good at evading blame, I wasn’t asked to leave the school. Instead, my departure came when my mid-year report arrived home, and it bore essentially no grades at all, because, and I quote:

“Michael hasn’t been in enough classes for us to give him a grade.”

It was at that point that my father ‘calmly’ suggested that I sought employment if I wanted to continue living under his roof. And so began the next phase of our lives: working menial jobs for as long as our bosses could put up with us, (which was never very long) and blowing all our money on the fantastical drugs we were experimenting with.

I remember lying on my back at the beach one night on acid. Two of these three friends on either side of me. At first, the night sky looked normal, as it so often does when you’re not hallucinating. But then, the LSD I’d consumed began to bend the sky. Suddenly, the stars didn’t look like stars, they looked like they were all part of the same bright light that was hidden behind a black screen with holes in it. And as the black screen began to rapidly approach my face, the holes of bright light grew bigger and bigger. It was quite unnerving. I mean, by all appearances – the sky was falling. Just before it engulfed me, I sat up, which pulled me out of the hallucination. Looking to my left and then to my right, I was relieved to see my friends lying beside me, both equally enraptured in their own chemical-infused-visions. The comfort I felt when I saw my friends lying beside me encapsulates the kind of connection we shared.

See, the four of us weren’t part of some sporting club that instilled us with a sense of camaraderie. Nor were we mathletes or jocks who bonded through some organized activity. We were the wayward kids. Curious enough to question the rules, and mischievous enough to break them. We’d arrived at that school as budding fuck ups. And with astronomical efficiency we rose through the ranks of teenage delinquency to become meteoric fuck ups of the highest order. But what’s important here, is that we did this together. When we had heated arguments with our poor parents about our wayward ways we’d escape to each other’s houses before going to run amuck somewhere. When a girl we dated saw the error of her ways and broke up with us, we always had a fat-session ready to console each other. And when all our rascality started to catch up with us, we shared the burden of our bad choices together.

And then, in a way that seemed to happen much too fast, somehow, we grew up. Like properly. Into what some might even call fully functioning adults. Nowadays, some of us have kids and mortgages. Some of us are sober. And we all have wonderful partners and long-standing employment. And yet, despite our newfound maturity, none of us had ever gotten each other a real gift. At least, not until now. And while there’s no doubt, I’m a sentimental writer who looks for deep meaning where there isn’t any, when Azzy handed me that little potted plant, it felt symbolic of something bigger. A sort of transformation we’ve all gone through. One where our connection is finally rooted in something other than fucking up. However, I suspect, at least for me, that transformation isn’t quite complete – because I’m ashamed to admit, that only three months on from my birthday that poor bonsai looks about as lively and vibrant as our old resin-riddled bongs used to.

Sorry Azzy, I didn’t mean to kill that plant, it’s just – I’m still trying to get the hang of this ‘adulting’ thing.

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