I'm Not High Read Online Free Page A

finished his remarks and the organist was beginning to play when her father addressed the priest and the whole church with his booming voice.
    “This man had a wife and a son, thank you very much!”
    After what Mom went through with Edwin, her take on organized religion was that it was nothing but a scam and a business. To her, the church didn’t represent God, it represented money and the worst kind of clannishness, and that turned her off forever. But it didn’t diminish her faith, which she passed along to me when I was young.
    Dad, on the other hand, was pretty much a hard-core atheist from the word go because he didn’t have a lot of things to convince him otherwise. He was born in Dayton, Kentucky, the youngest boy in a family of ten kids. His mother died giving birth to his younger sister, who was stillborn, when he was four years old. His father was a massive alcoholic who’d issue beatings for small infractions like milk spills and overlooked chores. At age six he had to walk along railroad tracks to find coal every day for heat and hot water. Dad’s tough childhood came to an abrupt end when he joined the navy at age seventeen and became a gunner in World War II, stationed most of the time in the Philippines.
    And so that upbringing made him cynical about everything, but especially about notions that a great reward awaits those who live a virtuous life. Throughout my life, whenever a discussion of God has come up, he’s been extremely dismissive, but not without a twisted touch of humor.
    I’d ask him, “Do you believe in the afterlife?”
    “It must be pretty good,” he’d say with a wink, “because no one ever comes back.”
    If I asked, “Do you think that we have souls, or a spirit that lives on after us?”
    He’d say, “Sure! Sure we do. They look just like Casper the Friendly Ghost. Floating around above us.” Then, without fail, he’d point up in the air and say something like, “And there’s your uncle now. How ya doing?” And give a sarcastic little wave.
    Anyway, after three and a half years in the war, seeing a lot of combat along the way, Dad wound up back in the United States. Many of his veteran buddies now worked in sanitation on Long Island, and they hooked him up with a job as a garbage man. He got married and had three kids with his first wife, but then they got divorced and he was trying to support them by moonlighting as a bartender. That’s when Mom walked into the Rock Front Tavern and batted her eyes at him. Soon they were dating, and then Mom got pregnant with me. Only she didn’t know it right away.
    She had been having some bad bleeding, so she went to her doctor. Pregnancy was the furthest thing from her mind. The doctor gave her a quick exam and explained that she probably just had an early miscarriage, and she wrote it off as that. The bleeding stopped and she never gave it a second thought. A couple months later, she and my father went out dancing at an Elks club. She was back to partying like crazy as usual (with my developing brain along for the ride). Dad gave her a twirl on the dance floor and she felt a kick in her stomach. She stopped mid-spin.
    “What’s the big idea?” he said. “I thought I was doing pretty good out here.”
    “I can’t tell you here,” she said, somewhat horrified. “But, boy, do I have some news for you.”
    The next day she was back at the same doctor, and he confirmed that she was pregnant, which is when all the abortion talk—due to Mom’s increasing age—began. Everyone she knew tried to talk her into it, even Dad’s sisters.
    But from the moment he knew, my dad never wavered. He wanted her to have the baby, even though I’m sure he knew what a rough ride he had in store for himself. He was in his forties and probably thought he was done raising kids. But Mom trusted his input and she prayed. And the message she got in return was clear. “Something told me over and over again not to abort this child,” she told me. I