There's a simple reason I was not caught up in the Modoc Massacre. I wouldn't be caught dead hanging out on Modoc Street with the open stoners.
There are so many reasons.
It would have meant investing more time at school. Granted, across the street from school. Same thing. Maybe they all thought being at school was okay, if they were high enough.
Mostly, I was never a stoner. I dislike weed, and I was not in any way interested in participating in group activities.
The whole scene seemed tacky to me. Low rent. Great crowds of kids sitting on people's fences smoking dope. It seemed so rude to the people who owned those fences. Half a million spotty giggly teenagers loud as jet engines, leaving trash.
The major reason is I didn't want anyone to know. It was about disrespect. Why would I share the real me? There were only one or two people there with whom I'd have ever wanted to be genuine. I expect they would have had me arrested.
Because I wasn't smoking giggly cheap weed that was mostly sage anyway. I was swallowing fistfuls of whites, washing them down with quarts of wine or rum & coke. It wasn't about being giggly and sociable. It was about being elsewhere. Largely it was about being at the beach, or UCSD, or the OB Pier where I bought the whites from bikers.
In hindsight I realize it was mostly about self-medicating. I should have been on Ritalin; the whites calmed me down. Without them I had the jitters and the can't-stand-still-in-one-place tremors. I was bolts of lightning in a blue windbreaker. You can see it in the film which captured us one afternoon. My movements are sudden, partly random, lightning fast. I can see immediately that I was sober that day.