Every year, I held a 420 party, since the first time I’d heard the term.
Being a true stoner, street artist, and computer geek, I devoured every magazine that related to marijuana, art, and computers. I’d first discovered the term in High Times magazine.
Apparently back in the 70s, a group of California teens would sneak off to a statue after school and smoke to their hearts content. The statue had been of no true importance, a memorial to some famous microbiologist. What had snared my attention was the fact that this group met at that spot each day, at the exact same time.
4:20pm.
It became their thing. They’d used the phrase as a code word. The editor of the magazine found the story so inspiring, he declared that everyone should smoke at 4:20pm, no matter where they were around the world.
My 420 parties carried their own reputations. I provided the most expensive marijuana leaves, smoking tools, and munchie-quenching snacks.
At times, I had products shipped from all over the world.
For this party, my servers showcased a new strain of marijuana named Oracle. One seed cost two hundred dollars. One plant—a thousand dollars. The actual bud was priced well past that. I’d spent six figures to supply it for my guests.
It didn’t dent my pockets, but the weed bill had made me gasp.
You’ve come a long way.
When I was a toddler, my parents brought me over to Miami on a battered boat. I still didn’t know how we’d made it through that treacherous sea journey from Cuba to America.
That being said. Life served us well in the States, even if every parent-teacher conference, I had to translate for my mom.
I was a good kid. Being that my dad had a heavy hand, and my mom a no-nonsense tongue, I kept my butt in school and studied hard. My teenage years made me silently rebellious. I still got good grades, but at night, I snuck out of my bedroom window and painted the streets. When I graduated from high school with all honors and a full scholarship to MIT, my mother cried and my father beamed with so much pride, people in our neighborhood thought he’d won the lottery.
After college, I bought them a car.
After graduate school, I bought them a house.
And after my first million, I retired them both.
Yeah. I’ve come a long way.
Yet, last year. . .
my mother had complained, “Where are my grandkids?”
I put my back to her and rolled my eyes. “I don’t have time for marriage and kids.”
My mother was a short woman compared to my six feet, she hurried after me. “You don’t have time for marriage and kids, but you have time for drugs?”
“Marijuana is my brain food.”
“Your brain doesn’t need anything to eat. It needs love.”
Sighing, I faced her. “I date.”
“No, you just have women in and out of that penthouse.”
I’d raised my eyebrows to that comment. “And how do you know that?”
“Because when I come over to tidy up—”
“Tidy up? Really, Mom? I have a staff that cleans. You are not going over to tidy up.”
“I am,” she argued.
“Tidying up? That’s what you call snooping around my place?”
“I go to make sure your staff is doing a good job. What do I find? Women’s stuff thrown around? Their bras and panties under the bed and everywhere else. What type of woman walks out of a man’s home without her bra and underwear?”
I smirked. “A good woman.”
She wagged her wrinkled finger at me. “That’s why they call you Wolf.”
“You started that name, when I was six.”
“Well, it’s grown on you. You’re being a wolf. You need a good Christian woman.”
“Listen.” I held my hands together as if for prayer. “I like good Christian women. I’m just a fan of the ones that don’t wear panties?”
She snorted. “You treat love like some game between predator and prey.”
“Hey. Who’s giving you your information?”
“The discarded panties are a good sign.”
“I’m a good wolf.” I raised my hands in the air. “Besides, wolves are cousins to dogs, which are surely man’s best friend.”
She pointed at me. “You chase women.”
“Maybe they shouldn’t run.”
“But when they stop running, you discard them.”
“I am a wolf after all.” I shrugged.
Mom had cursed several times in Spanish after that. It had taken her a few years to grasp the English language, but still when she got angry, foreign wickedness rushed out of that kind mouth.
Laughing, I pushed my mom’s last conversation out of my mind and directed all of my attention on Red.
Mom had been right. I enjoyed my conquests. Women served as a sport, nothing more. I couldn’t tell anyone why it was that way.
My childhood never taught me this. In fact, my parents were the opposite of my life.
My father worshipped Mom—held the door open for her still to this day, even though his arthritic fingers found it hard to grip most knobs. When she walked on the sidewalk, he made sure to keep himself between the traffic and her. If a car should happen to wander on the pavement, he wanted to make sure he was the first person to be hit, not Mom.