Sex Crimes

Dir:

B. Skow

Rating:

Vivid.com

When I was 19, I had a casual Mrs. Robinson thing going on with a wonderful woman in her 40s from Easton, Pennsylvania, home of Crayola crayons. Over the course of our relationship I got to know some of her younger friends who skated, and we'd often hit up the now defunct Shimerville skate park or one of the many colleges in the Lehigh Valley. The entire crew of stoners was highly entertaining, each for his own reason, mostly from being high all the time. Every minute of every day a cloud of smoke hovered above their heads like the dirt around Pigpen from Peanuts: They'd wake and bake, smoke on the way to the skate park, at the park, after skating, etc.

I was the first of my friends to stop smoking weed after high school, due to extreme paranoia. This allowed me to sit back and really observe the baked bunch with heightened clarity. They were always concocting the most absurd get-rich-quick schemes (most of which revolved around pot: growing it, selling it, stealing it), and I was smart enough to jot down notes on their genius.

My favorite member of the group was a fellow I'll call Bud, for obvious reasons. Bud was the worst criminal I'd ever met and the most burned-out of all the bros. He got popped for everything he did; he couldn't jaywalk without getting arrested. His rap sheet was a mile long and had every manner of charge, from selling dime bags to holding acid to breaking and entering and waving to the store security cameras as he exited.

The story that most defines Bud's life of crime was when he got himself a job at UPS so that he could steal expensive merchandise off the truck. He lasted one week and was arrested for attempting to lift six Mac desktop computers. I'm not sure if you recall the size of Macs in 1995, but they were massive and packaged in boxes as big as washing machines. In his diabolical wisdom, Bud decided to reroute the six enormous boxes to a new location in the UPS computer—his house. Not his neighbor's house. Not an abandoned building. No, he sent the Macs to his own home, and both the computers and the police were waiting for him on his front porch when he arrived.

After the computer incident Bud was unable to get a straight job, and he couldn't do anything against the law, because all the cops in the tiny town were watching him. So he chose to do the only thing a clever fellow in that position could do: transport copious amount of weed from NYC for resale. That was more short-lived than his UPS gig. On the way to the skate park, hauling a trunk full of weed, Bud got into an argument with his buddy Tom over an EPMD tape. Bud was driving his own car and wanted to listen to Strictly Business. Tom, the prick in the passenger seat, did not and kept turning the tape off and ultimately threw it out the car window. The two started arguing, and Tom punched Bud in the face as he was driving and broke his nose. Naturally, Bud drove directly to the police station to have Tom arrested for assault. Seeing the notorious Bud bleeding before their eyes, the cops decided, rather than hear Bud's side of the story, to get the drug dogs to search Bud's car. In the trunk they quickly found five pounds of dirt weed, and Bud was arrested on the spot.

As Tom recounted the story for us, he joked that as the cops took Bud away one of the officers told him, "You gots to chill."

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko on Twitter.