HIGH (eBook)

An X-Rated Marijuana Memoir

Leonard Buschel (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
266 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-9986-2 (ISBN)

An action packed, racy memoir that depicts a 23 year drug dealing career (never got busted) and all the unbelievable antics that come along with such a treacherous occupation. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll rule this raw and vulnerable retelling that spans decades and portrays the life-changing impact of the artists, filmmakers, and musicians on Buschel's life.

Leonard Lee Buschel grew up in Philadelphia, PA where he learned the art of scamming, scheming, and drug dealing from various shifty and lovable characters. At a young age, Buschel was faced with insurmountable loss, massive grief, and life-threatening health issues. Packed with sharpness and sarcasm, HIGH is an adventurous retelling of an exhilarating and, at times, highly precarious life. Told with depth, love, and wisdom, Buschel invites us all to look inward and summon strength from our imperfections and wildness as he has. From A list celebrity run-ins to near death experiences, this risque memoir is a can't-put-down-must-read party from start to finish. It's an exciting story of a good boy doing bad drugs every day for 26 years who lived to tell the tale. And not from prison. From drug dealer to drug counselor. This is an amazing story, travelogue, comedy, romp, seeker's tale of a miraculous recovery, redemption, and hope.

Chapter 1

Grief Like a Torn Dress Should Be Left at Home

I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.

—Carl Jung

OPENING MONTAGE: Camera descends through the delicious mists above a pot of simmering chicken soup at 4639 N. 10th Street—the house where I grew up. There I am, having just been born into an idyllic Jewish family unit smack-dab in the middle of the twentieth century, with a working father, a beautiful, house-wifey mother, and a strong handsome three-year-old brother. I started life in the North Philadelphia neighborhood called Logan, in a row house with mortgage payments my parents considered affordable.

When Mom and Dad brought home their bouncing baby boy from St. Joseph’s hospital, my mother pressed her tender ear to my tiny chest and heard a heartbeat that was anything but regular.

The next day my mom called the delivery doctor and told him she’d heard something strange when she put her ear to my chest. The doctor had already detected a loud murmur associated with a bicuspid aortic valve disorder. The doctor didn’t want to tell my parents right away about my defective heart and ruin the family’s first night home with their new beautiful baby boy.

There was an operation available to repair said defect, but in the 1950s, 1 out of every 10 kids who went under the knife to repair the errant valve never made it back home to watch Howdy Doody.

In those days, there was no heart-lung machine. The surgeon would have had only three-and-a-half minutes to replace the little piece of shit valve in my heart. Mom was not about to play Beat the Clock with a life-threatening experimental surgery. But she was willing to bet that operating room technology would advance faster than my valve’s health would retreat. Mom was certainly right on that estimation.

Three weeks after I took center stage, my daddy dropped dead of a heart attack on his way home from working the night shift at the post office. He was 34 years old. Suddenly there was a gaping hole in our lives. No husband, no father, no breadwinner.

January 5, 1951 Bad News

Mom was a grief-stricken and frightened widow. Shock prevented her from breastfeeding, so at three weeks old, my first bartender eighty-sixed me. Mom had no job and the mortgage became unaffordable. She was now confronted with a new reality: How was she to have the time to raise my brother and me into men when she needed to get a nine-to-five job? How would a 100 percent woman manage to raise two sons without a father around? Could her instinct and intuition carry her through? The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Dr. Spock was not in her library.

I was a particularly large drain on family emotions. Before I could even walk, I was faced not only with a life-threatening heart condition but with a gnarly breathtaking case of severe asthma, which ultimately led to numerous emergency room visits.

My lucky brother’s life started with daddy’s gentle masculine push. Over the years, I’ve seen 8 mm home movies of my brother Bruce, being pushed by my father on a swing and another home movie shows him being held above the cresting waves in the Atlantic Ocean off Atlantic City by the proud, strong hands of our daddy. Others called him Morris. I called him deceased.

What Me Worry?

For my brother, our father’s death was much more of a loss than it was for me.

I’m sure on an unconscious level, I must have been devastated. Though at the time I probably didn’t notice, being so focused on Mom’s fountains for youth. Who was going to hunt for food, gather wood, and keep our row home supplied with heating oil to stay warm at night? At three weeks old, I had to metaphorically stand on my own two feet while actually only able to lie on my back or stomach, as newborns do. I was already starting a new chapter in my life, as I did again 44 years later when I got sober. It’s not like I was on one uninterrupted trajectory from infancy to the Betty Ford Center. I did stop at nursery school, public schools, weddings, fatherhood and racetracks. But at three weeks old, without realizing it, I was pretty much faced with having to fend for myself.

Being brought up by a single mom is like being an electrical plug with only one prong. The energy is not a balanced flow. A missing father is a missing prong. A missing father short-circuits a child’s learned response to stimuli. As a man, he may overreact to everyday problems as if he were from Venus and not from Mars.

How would I learn the aplomb a father uses to smoothly carve a holiday turkey? Or repaint the bedroom or change a flat tire? I would never know how to safely experience the fear and unsteadiness that come when Daddy takes off the training wheels to unleash the careen of the bike on the asphalt. Or feel his love, assistance, acceptance and protection at the same time. When I had my own son, I told him the first thing to learn when riding a bike is how to fall over (on a grass field), and the second thing is how to get up and keep pedaling. Somehow, I managed to master this life lesson without a daddy of my own.

When I started to attend elementary school, I heard kids in the playground talk about their fathers and the jobs they did. I would slink away embarrassed that I didn’t even have a father. Heretofore, I never really knew what I did not have. I did have some older guys in the neighborhood who took me under their wings from time to time but never like a father would.

One of the best realities of my life was that my family lived in the same house for 20 years. I felt secure in the Brigadoon-like neighborhood of Logan in North Philadelphia. I say Brigadoon because to me Logan was like the mythical village in Scotland that rose out of the Scottish mist once every 100 years, for only one day of joy and splendor.

Logan, built on top of a buried creek, existed as a middle-class Jewish ghetto for about 50 years, before three square blocks (including my house) sank into the mud, disappearing off the face of the earth forever. There is no old block to go back to visit. Except through memories, and in family photos, 10th Street will remain forever a shimmering universe of childhood adventures and fantasies. And where my creation story started off with a death and a wheeze.

My mother, Rose, only drove a car twice in her life; once for a lesson and then to get her driver’s license. She really didn’t need one because she usually only travelled with her boyfriends or took public transport. We never owned a car. As a kid, the only modes of transportation I ever knew were buses and subways, walking, riding my bike, and hitchhiking. I hitchhiked to Olney High School every day for three years. When I was late, the teachers understood that I didn’t get a ride fast enough to be on time.

I grew up self-reliant, with two bus stops a block from my house and with only a 20-minute walk to the Broad Street subway. Our station was the Wyoming Avenue stop. From here, for a fivecent token, I could travel up and down the spine of this city of neighborhoods or to where the Declaration of Independence was birthed and to the home of comedian W. C. Fields. One story has it that Fields had the following words engraved on his tombstone at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California: “All things being equal, I’d rather be here than in Philadelphia.”

School was a challenge to my developing ego. I attended a big school that had three floors and two elevators. My heart problem, a bicuspid aortic valve that should have been tricuspid, got me a special elevator pass (like a seat on the “special” bus).

I was never allowed to participate in the regular gym class, so I took remedial gym where the only equipment was a Ping-Pong table. And there wasn’t always someone to play against. I became bored with boredom.

My special pass to use the elevator was necessary all winter, when my ridiculously bad asthma caused me to wheeze like an out-of-pitch accordion. That wheeze embarrassed me greatly. I didn’t want the other kids to know I had any physical defects, so I would wait for everyone to go into their classrooms before I slipped into the elevator. Self-stigmatization. If a guy saw me and asked what I was doing taking the cripple’s elevator (kids are cruel)—because they all saw me playing basketball and other ball games at lunch and recess—I would make up a story (lie).

I got along with pretty much everyone in the neighborhood, a skill that would eventually help get me through some of life’s biggest challenges. Luckily I was born in the Chinese year of the chameleon.

I grew up playing sports on neighborhood streets every day and was able to do more than my doctor advised. The rules for street games weren’t set like in Little League. The guys would have to renegotiate the rules and boundaries every day. One day, first base was the black Chevy, second base was the old Fairlane, and third base was the blue Caddy. We debated every little disagreement but not for long. We wanted to get on with the game.

Whatever game we were playing became the most important thing in our otherwise dull lives. Physical exertion and competition made us feel more alive than any homework assignment or family chore. We knew our dream game would be cut short when someone’s mother called them in...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	15.5.2023
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
ISBN-10	1-6678-9986-4 / 1667899864
ISBN-13	978-1-6678-9986-2 / 9781667899862

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