My Burroughs friend Doug Degrazio was my cameraman, and we used some serious equipment. I rented an éclair 16 mm camera, and Haskell Wexler was kind enough to lend me a small dolly that allowed us to maneuver the camera more smoothly. We filmed over three long days, and Doug and I edited the film at the postproduction shop where he worked part-time sweeping up and running errands. It was located on a seedy stretch of Western Avenue in Hollywood, in what was then one of the tenderloin districts of L.A., dominated by sex shops, tripleX movie theaters, and pizza joints that were fronts for drug dealers.
Nominally, the place where Doug worked specialized in nature films and industrials, but off the books, it was doing a ton of porno films. Doug and I had the run of the place provided that we worked at night, which I was now accustomed to, thanks to American Graffiti. Occasionally we heard the unmistakable sounds of grunts, moans, and bodily friction being mixed in an adjacent room.
The Initiation is technically weak, but it was an ambitious undertaking for me at the time and it gave me a nice running start at USC. Cheryl and I both chose to attend college locally. To save money, she spent her first two years at Los Angeles Valley College, a community college, while living at home with her dad. She got her requirements out of the way there and then transferred to Cal State-Northridge, where she majored in psychology. Unlike Steve in American Graffiti, I had no desire to see other people while at school. Instead, I became intimately familiar with L.A.’s freeway system while regularly commuting in my Bug to Burbank to see Cheryl . . . and, sometimes, when I got homesick, my parents and Clint.
I moved into a dorm room on the third floor of Trojan Hall at USC and happily assimilated into college life. My freshman roommate grew marijuana under an ultraviolet light in the closet. I was not a pot smoker and always politely declined when it was offered to me. But plenty of people in the American Graffiti cast and crew were, so the sight and smell of weed didn’t make me uncomfortable. I don’t know how this happened, but a rumor took hold that my roommate and I were in business together. A couple of years later, when I was on Happy Days, Marion Ross said to me nonchalantly, “I heard that you were one of the biggest dope dealers at USC.”
I’m afraid not. That is one “Dopey Opie” scenario that was too good to be true.
CLINT
If you’re looking for the family dopehead, that would be me. I spent the majority of my teenage years learning how to catch a buzz. It all started when I was fourteen. One of my childhood buddies, a fellow Howards Hurricane I’d known since second grade, had hippieish older brothers who offered to kick us down some weed. But we would have to wait—they wouldn’t be scoring for a couple of weeks.
Over the course of those two weeks, I was beside myself with nervous anticipation: What’s it like to smoke marijuana? I had witnessed plenty of drinking: Dad always had a six-pack of Schlitz tallboys in the fridge and Bob Totten medicated himself with whiskey in the director’s chair. But the only place where dope ever crossed my radar was in the movie Easy Rider, which Mom and Dad took us to. I thought Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper were incredibly cool. I wanted in.
I was so anxious about my pending marijuana experience that I did what an actor does: I rehearsed. I took some pencil shavings from my pencil sharpener, rolled up a joint, and sparked it. I took a few drags and coughed up a storm. I can report with certainty that there is no such thing as a pencil-shavings high. All I got was the harsh taste of fireplace smoke and possibly some lead poisoning.
But finally, along came the big day. My buddy had scored a couple of joints, and a few of us gathered in a Toluca Lake alley to partake. I took my first couple of puffs and immediately thought to myself, When does the shit hit you? A couple of minutes later, we were all giggling. This laughter was stifled somewhat when one member of our group was gripped by a brief bout of paranoia.
I loved the high and I tolerated the comedown reasonably well. I must have been a little paranoid, too, because as soon as I got home, I hopped into the shower and scrubbed myself raw for twenty minutes to ensure that Mom and Dad wouldn’t suspect anything.
Overall, my maiden voyage smoking weed was a success. I’m someone who likes to laugh, and weed made me laugh even more. It was my boon companion. I was not having success with girls. In the sixth grade, I had a heavy-duty crush on a classmate named Paulette Fraconi, and in the seventh grade some of my buddies started pairing up with girls our age. One of my friends fell so hard for his first steady that he crudely carved her initials in his hand. I found that nuts, though I understood his passion. I really wanted a girlfriend but I couldn’t work up the nerve even to ask someone out.