Chapter 10
BACK WHEN I WAS just a kid—a teenager—my dad used to insist on
smelling my breath whenever I came home from a night out with my friends. It’s
not that he didn’t expect me to have a good time and do those things boys and
girls will do when they are coming of age. He didn’t mind if I drank a beer or
two, so long as I wasn’t driving and so long as I wasn’t getting in the car
with any of my friends who might be drinking and driving. But he wasn’t looking
for the smell of beer so much as he was looking for pot. Dad was a single
parent, and a conservative one at that. Smoking pot, he used to say, was a
wrong that would inevitably lead to other wrongs. All it would take was one
toke and I’d be heading down that dark, slippery-sloped, h****n-LSD-crystal
meth tunnel from which
