Bad boys, bad boys
Whatcha gonna do?
Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?
That lyric is from the TV show Cops.
There’s a simple answer to this question.
I know whatcha gonna do. Your ass is gonna go to jail. That’s what you’re gonna do.
For Dad, it was only a matter of time before his ass was going to jail.
I remember the first time I watched Dad roll a joint. I must have been six or seven. He sprinkled the weed onto an extremely thin sheet of paper. What came next fascinated me: a slow pinch-and-roll, the paper tightening around the green like he was tucking it into bed. He pinched the paper between his fingertips and rolled it back and forth between his thumb and index finger, shaping it around the bud. A quick lick along the edge of the paper with his tongue, a confident twist at the ends, and he held it up as if inspecting his craftsmanship.
Even then, I understood that smoke obeyed the laws of physics. It curled, it claimed, it clung. I knew there was only one thing I needed to do when Dad smoked pot. Sit very still and breathe very little. That shit stunk.
When Dad lit up in our living room, he wore the expression of someone conducting a sacred ritual. He held the joint as if it were a thin piece of truth glowing at the end. One, two, three slow pulls. His eyes rolled back like he stepped off the planet.
By ten, I wasn’t shocked anymore. I knew the choreography: lighters clicked; the room thickened; adults sank deeper into couches they didn’t own.
On one particular night, the haze was green and heavy.
“Here,” one of Dad’s friends said, stretching out his hand, the joint pinched between fingers.
“Hell no,” I shot back. Short. Quick. The kind of answer a street-wise, God-fearing, Bible-believing kid gives.
A few grown-ups laughed. Not mean—just careless.
But tequila—that was different. It came in a bottle shaped like a dare. Someone poured the liquor into a shot glass and pointed to it. “Just a taste,” I heard.
The others hooted. Someone said, “Start ’em young!” Someone else clapped.
Succumbing to peer pressure, and I have to admit, I was curious, I did try a shot. It was all done in fun for the adults.
They coached me through it like it was a rite of passage.
“It’s lick, shoot, suck,” someone said.
“Huh?” I asked.
“Moisten the area between your thumb and index finger,” another said, bringing his own hand to his mouth and demonstrating exactly how to do it.
“Place a small pinch on it,” he continued, handing me a salt shaker. “Lick it off your hand. Good, now shoot.”
I raised the glass to my nose. It smelled like spicy and sweet stuff got mixed up.
I threw it back. A tiny fireball dropped straight into my chest, and for a second, I couldn’t breathe.
Before I could even wince, a lime wedge was shoved in my face. “Bite!”
I bit. Sour exploded. My eyes watered. The adults roared like I’d just joined their brotherhood of terrible decisions.
“Burns, doesn’t it?” Dad said.
I nodded.
And the room grew louder, older, and somehow smaller, full of grown-ups who didn’t seem quite as grown-up as they should have been. They laughed in that loose, echoing way people do when they’re trying to convince themselves they’re having a good time. The kind of laughter that bounces off the walls, looks around for a place to land, and gives up.
That’s the part that stayed with me—not the cloud of smoke, not the tequila, but the strange role reversal. The adults drifting into adolescence, and the actual adolescents sitting there like junior archivists, quietly recording the evidence.
And I did record it. Mental notebooks. Footnotes. Asterisks.
Do you see where this is going?
Don’t worry. Despite the scenes I witnessed and the ones I haven’t even described yet, I stayed remarkably straight-laced. Church on Sundays. Mostly A’s, with a B or two to prove I was human. Every sport I could sign up for. I followed the rules the way my classmates followed rappers—religiously.
In a room full of people losing the thread, I was the kid holding the spool.
It was Dad who continued to do stupid shit. Real stupid shit.
One day, I came through the back door after school—the utility room, our unofficial customs checkpoint—and there it was. Leaning against the wall like it had marched in on its own: an Army duffel bag. Three feet tall. Green canvas. The kind of bag television soldiers sling over their shoulders before catching a flight home.
Only this one wasn’t full of uniforms.
It was full of weed.
Marijuana. Enough to make several counties very relaxed.
The zipper strained as if it were holding back a leafy uprising. The whole thing gave off the faint, unmistakable scent of someone’s “botany project” gone industrial.
I froze. Every PSA I’d ever been force-fed flashed before me in a panicked parade. “Just say no.” “Walk away.” “Tell a trusted adult.” Well, unfortunately, the trusted adult was the reason the duffel bag was here in the first place.
So I did what any straight-laced, rule-following kid would do: As if the duffel might wake up, I tiptoed around it, like it was a landmine, easing into the kitchen. There, I poured myself a glass of milk—the safest liquid I knew of—and made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
I took a sip, trying to act casual, as though contraband grown on a 10-acre cannabis farm was something a boy encountered between math homework and dinner.
Dad never said anything, and I never asked.
Like I said, Dad did stupid shit. There’s more.
In our town, like every other town in America, there was a Taco Bell. Ours was on South Van Buren Street. Van Buren was the artery—our own little stretch of Highway 81, the long backbone that ran from the bottom of the state to the top. Our stretch had it all. An Air Force base. One of the largest pipe fitting producers in the world. Motels. A variety of stores. A city park. A flea market. Fast food. Italian. Chinese. A hair salon. Car lots. Mustangs revving in quick, arrogant bursts. And that Taco Bell.
One night, Dad and I were parked there in his truck, but we weren’t eating. That alone seemed wrong. I liked Taco Bell back then. Rarely ever got it. The inside of Taco Bell had a pulse, and we weren’t part of it. Teenagers spilled out, laughing. A sedan idled, stereo bass rattling.
Then Dad got out. I watched him stride across the lot toward two men standing beside a car. I squinted, trying to guess who they were—friends, work buddies, strangers. A conversation started. I turned my head like a criminal on the lam, trying to see without being seen, wondering what he was doing. The lot suddenly felt huge, and I felt tiny.
Minutes stretched. Time slowed. The laughter, bass, and revving engines of the rest of the lot faded into background noise, replaced by the quiet, electric tension of something serious taking place.
Finally, he returned. He got in, and we drove off. That was the story that unfolded before me. But it wasn’t the whole story.
Later, I learned what had actually happened. Those two men, the ones Dad had approached? Undercover cops, posing as construction workers, looking to buy some dope. Dad had noticed something no one else would: manicured fingernails. Calloused hands, grime under fingernails, are a construction worker’s signature. These guys were fakes. The second he realized something was off, he stepped away from the deal. That night, the Taco Bell parking lot became a Hollywood movie set that almost cost Dad his freedom. Lucky for Dad, he could read the scene—the hidden danger—while everyone else didn’t have a clue what was going down.
Dad was not so lucky the next time.
He always moved his product in large quantities—pounds, not ounces. He was the guy between the grower and the ounce peddler. More money. Less traffic. That was part of his code, the professionalism he brought even to the wrong profession. But on that night, desperate and looking to make a little money to buy us food for the next couple of days, he broke his own rule. He sold a quarter-ounce bag. Twenty-five bucks. A sampler size. Practical. Necessary in his mind, but honest, in all the wrong ways.
Dad didn’t know the guy he approached. Only knew him through some friends, a chain of introductions that seemed harmless enough, but he was going to be taught a big life lesson: don’t sell weed to a snitch.
A snitch, otherwise known as a confidential informant, who works with police, is someone who gets another person in trouble so they can skate free of their own crimes. Subtle, invisible, like a rattlesnake slithering in tall grass—you don’t see it until it’s too late. Dad thought he was doing a small, contained thing; instead, he was walking straight into a booby trap.
The guy said the right things. Played the part of a customer just a little too well. Dad handed over the bag, took his money, and left, thinking it had gone smoothly.
That was until Enid police showed up one morning, six months later, around seven, the kind of hour when the world is soft and unguarded.
It took the cops two tries to arrest Dad, because the first time, he wasn’t home. He had been out all night partying, and I was left alone at home. They didn’t know that. They came in like a thunderclap.
I was in the backyard, in the dog pen, feeding Smokey, our German Shepherd-Chow mix. The sky was still gray, the kind of half-dawn that makes everything look like a memory even as it’s happening. Smokey’s head jerked up first—ears stiff, a low rumble building in his throat.
Then the shouting started.
“Hands up! Hands up! Let me see your hands!”
I froze. The bowl slipped from my fingers and hit the dirt. Smokey barked like he was trying to hold back a hurricane, teeth bared, hackles raised. I didn’t even see the handful of officers jumping the fence—boots hitting the ground, guns drawn and pointed straight at me.
“Kid, don’t move,” one officer said.
I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. My arms felt like they belonged to someone else. I raised them anyway, slow and shaky, palms open. The morning air suddenly felt thin.
“It’s just me,” I heard myself say. “It’s just me.”
Two officers cornered me, and the others rushed to the back door as if Dad was in the house.
Smokey was at the end of his chain, the one hooked to his doghouse. He lunged forward, still barking. His paws dug into the dirt as he strained against the collar, furious, the chain snapping tight each time he threw his weight forward.
The yard felt too small for all of us—too many beating hearts, too much adrenaline, too many guns for a child to process. It didn’t matter to them that I was a kid in a T-shirt, holding a metal dog bowl. I was part of the scene now, and scenes like this have rules.
They kept me in the pen while Smokey paced in tight, patrolling arcs, still bristling from the invasion. An officer stood a few feet away—boots planted, jaw hard—eyes fixed.
Inside, the search began. Finally, after what felt like an hour but was probably five minutes, the officers came out and shook their heads.
“He’s not here,” one of them said.
And just like that, their urgency deflated. Guns lowered. Radios clicked. Footsteps softened. The storm passed.
But they didn’t leave.
“I’m guessing you live here?” the lead officer asked me.
“Yes,” I responded.
“We are looking for Dennis. Do you know where he is?”
“I don’t. He was gone all night.”
He studied me for a moment—slow, careful, measuring the damage.
“All right,” he said, nodding once, as if my answer settled something he already suspected. “Listen, son… we’re done here for now.”
He muttered something low and unhurried into his radio, the crisis now officially downgraded. Then he looked back at me—really looked, taking in the yard, the dog, the house, the silence.
“You got school today, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That’s where you need to go.”
That was it. No more questions. No child protective services. No paperwork. No adult stepping in to ask the obvious: Why is this kid alone in a backyard at sunrise while we raid his house with guns drawn?
At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. I just nodded and weighed his instructions.
Only later did it hit me: I’d been standing in the middle of a drug raid—and the plan was simply to send me to school.
They filed out without ceremony, and I was left standing alone in the backyard. Dazed.
In retrospect, it was absurd what they did, or rather what they didn’t do. I sure didn’t do what they told me to do. I hurried past the spot where the officers had stood with their guns out, walked briskly through the front gate, and sprinted to Buddy and Nancy’s house three doors down.
I pounded on the door. Nancy opened it just enough to see me—a wild-eyed eleven-year-old, chest heaving, hair plastered to my forehead with sweat.
“Nancy! I gasped.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I tried to catch my breath, my words tumbling out fast, spilling over each other. “Cops… they—they came to my house! Guns! Guns, I was in the backyard and—Smokey—he went crazy—and—my dad! He’s not at home. They came to arrest him!”
Nancy’s eyes widened.
“Come inside,” she said.
I could almost see the story unfolding in her head, each detail snapping into place like a comic book panel.
“They pointed their guns at me!”
I paused, trying to breathe again, my chest rising and falling like a bellows.
“Sit down, Jeremiah,” Nancy said, directing me to a chair by a window looking out to the street.
Buddy joined us in the living room. He was a firefighter.
“They told me to go to school,” I said.
“You’re not going anywhere, Jeremiah,” Buddy said firmly.
I sank into the chair by the window, chest still tight, legs stiff. I couldn’t stop glancing out, expecting any moment to see flashing lights, sirens, and the storm returning to our house. My stomach churned with the certainty that the cops were going to come back—and this time, for Dad.
An hour passed. Then we saw them: a throng of cop cars parked at the Dandy Deli. Doors opening and closing. My pulse hammered against my ribs. Time stretched, slow and cruel. Minutes dragged by. I stayed pressed to the window, eyes following every movement.
And then I saw him. Dad, hands behind his back, seated stiffly in the back of a cop car. The world seemed to tilt. The car rolled down Maine Street, past Nancy and Buddy’s house. He looked out the cruiser’s window towards their house. We made eye contact for a brief moment. I closed the window curtain quickly, scared of where his world was going. Scared of where my world was going.
Later that evening, I saw Dad on the six o’clock Channel 9 News. I watched him get escorted through the Enid Police Department cruiser garage. On this particular day, different police teams swooped down on I don’t know how many houses and arrested I don’t know how many people on a variety of drug charges. I know it was a lot. Most of the arrests dealt with illegally selling marijuana, I recall. Officers and informants of the police department’s narcotics unit bought the drugs at several locations during the past several months in Enid.
For Dad’s crime, he spent the first fifty-nine days in county jail, and he finished the rest of his two-year sentence, shortened to nine months at the Mack H. Alford Correctional Center, a medium-security prison in Atoka County, or as I called it, Stringtown, and then a halfway house in Oklahoma City.
Dad was a good example to me in those early days. A good example of who I didn’t want to be.
Word Count: 2,772
Here are six “writing” takeaways from this chapter:
The Beginning
1. Start with a Hook That Tilts the World
Open with something unexpected—a lyric, a contradiction, a sharp truth. My opening lines about Cops and “your ass is gonna go to jail” snap the reader awake and set tone instantly.
Try This: Begin your next chapter with a line that surprises even you.
2. Use Precise, Concrete Details to Invite the Reader In
My description of my dad rolling a joint—the pinch-and-roll, the confident twist, the green tucked in like a child—pulls the reader into the room through specificity rather than summary.
Try This: Don’t write “He rolled a joint.” Write what his hands actually did.
The Middle
3. Let Scenes Do the Emotional Heavy Lifting
When the adults coach me through my first shot—lick, shoot, suck—I don’t explain how I felt; I let the scene show it.
Try This: Replace one paragraph of explanation with a scene that reveals the same emotion.
4. Pattern Your Story Around a Clear Contrast
I set up a recurring tension: the adults behaving like children; the child behaving like the only grown-up in the room. This contrast is a structural spine.
Try This: Identify a contradiction in your own life and let it guide a whole section.
The End
5. Slow Down Time at the Climatic Moments
The raid sequence is moment-by-moment—boots hitting the ground, Smokey’s hackles rising, the bowl dropping into dirt. Slowing time increases tension without melodrama.
Try This: Take one high-stakes moment and write it in slow motion. One beat per sentence.
6. End with the Cleanest, Truest Line You Can Write
My closing note—he was a good example of who I didn’t want to be—it’s simple, honest, unadorned. A memoir needs clarity.
Try This: Rewrite your final sentence until it’s nothing but truth.
