Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
To look at my parents in the 1970s no-one would have assumed that they were straight, clean living folk. My Dad has been a professional musician since he was 16 and my mother dressed specifically to annoy her snobbish, conservative mother. They would bomb around in a lime green Lotus sports car – my Dad in his three-piece purple pin-stripe suit (pottery cross hanging from leather around his neck), my mother in suede mini and matching high boots – bouffant flowing in the breeze.
We were a creative family, hanging out with people who were on TV and performing in what looking back, were pretty bad shows. Everyone has always assumed that they were very cool and hip and riddled with vice, but in fact they were pathologically naïve – it was up to me as a teenager to educate and inform and unfortunately teach my mother how to smoke a joint.
My Dad gave me ‘the talk’ about drugs when I was 13. He had obviously watched Reefer Madness at a formative age and treated it like a documentary. This despite being the head of youth affairs at one point and even being trained by the drug squad to be a narc on the kids who came to the youth clubs. I doubt if he ever busted anyone as I once saw him lecture a smacked-out drummer about getting enough sleep because he ‘looked tired’ on stage. He remained oblivious to the massive drug use in the music industry and arts, even when he was the only sober person in the venue and people were vomiting backstage. He sailed through it all unaware – I honestly don’t know how.
I tried to educate him, God knows I tried. When I was 16 I pointed out the people he worked with who were functioning, creative, successful people who were drug users. He just couldn’t believe he knew anyone who used drugs and thought I was being nasty about his friends. So that didn’t work. But I must remember that this is the man who told once me that my ‘Bohemian hunter-gatherer existence must cease!’ just before he set off on a six month unfunded, half-booked cabaret tour of Europe, so insight has never been his strongest suit.
My mother was even more naïve. A good little private school princess who had rebelled by getting pregnant to a working class musician while young, but had remained very well behaved otherwise. In her 30s she was a part time youth worker. The kids who made strange smoke at the youth clubs would tell her they were burning ping pong balls and she would leave them in peace to get on with it. She found out years later when she smelt the same smoke sitting in a restaurant. She shouted out ‘someone’s burning ping pong balls!’ to her very surprised friends, who gently broke the news to her that the kids had all been getting stoned.
Not long after this she became convinced that we had a dope plantation in our backyard left by the previous tenants and told everyone she worked with about it – all of whom immediately offered to sell it or take it off her hands, shocking her terribly. She finally told me and I discovered her organised crime drug plantation was actually just some Silverbeet that had bolted. That conversation lead to the question of how did I knew what real dope looked like. Which somehow lead to me teaching my mother how to smoke a joint… Oh God.
The biggest problem was that she had never even smoked a cigarette in her life and didn’t know how to hold it, puff on it, inhale, exhale – you name it, she had never done it. She was going wild – in a very ladylike and refined manner. The second problem was I was teaching my mother how to use drugs, which I honestly don’t recommend – unless you want to deal with a middle-aged lady getting shitfaced for the first time.
Straight parents are a trial. I’m glad I never inflicted such horror on my children, but because life is ironic my son is a completely abstinent 24 year-old who has never touched alcohol, let alone drugs in his life. The curse of straightness continues on. Hopefully I will get bent grandchildren.