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If we're being honest, that is entirely too much weed for one person, but I was just 16 at the time, so I wasn't exactly privy to the specifics of his illegal business. I'm sure in his mind, there was a logical escalation from "growing pot for personal use" to "BECOMING WEED LORD OF ALL CALIFORNIA," but I couldn't tell you what it was. The two immediate impacts this had on my life were that I always had awesome weed, and that I had to lie, constantly, to everyone. Somebody would ask me what my dad did for a living, and I'd mutter, "Oh, he's doing movie stuff."

"What movie stuff?"

"Just ... movie stuff." (I never claimed to be a good liar.)

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It was a harder secret to keep from my friends, because they were smoking the stuff with me. They'd ask, "Who do you get your weed from? This is incredible," to which I'd respond: "I can't say, but I can get you some."

It's a suspicious answer, but when you're hooking your teenage friends up with spectacular weed, they aren't too eager to suddenly transform into investigative journalists. That said, it became harder and harder to cover up -- there were some days when I'd be getting home from school, with friends on their way over, only to discover that the living room was full of Hefty garbage bags overflowing with weed. I'd have to run out into the front yard and try to catch my friends before they got too close to the house and offer up a last-minute change of plans, such as "Hey, let's go skateboarding!" or "Three burglars broke in and shit on the carpet, let's hang out somewhere else." Eventually I just stopped having friends over.