Inappropriate

When I was in fifth grade, our class was put through the rite of passage that is federally-mandated drug prevention education, or DARE. I assume the DARE program has since died at the hands of a thousand academic studies on its futility, but in those days it was all they had to keep us off drugs. The method was simple: scare the living shit out of us on so many fronts that we didn't know what was what. Drinking was bad. Drugs were bad. Friends turned bad. Pot was the worst of all, because it was sure to lead you from the rewarding life you led as a fresh-faced student to a hoodie-wearing, sunken-eyed loner, which I later learned was also the effect of high school.

We didn't particularly focus on cocaine in DARE. That substance, which would eventually emerge as the partying teen's true rubicon, was at that time too far outside of our spheres. When we touched on it, it was with a hysetrical ninety foot pole. One such day, I was late getting out of class and my teacher and I were the only ones left in the room. I mentioned that I knew a song about cocaine, thinking of the the track that my dad always, scandalously, skipped in the car, leaving only the scintillating opening chords ringing in my brain as the sucky "Wonderful Tonight" replaced it, forcing me to explore it in stolen moments alone with the CD player. This song was explosive; danger of the sweetest kind. My teacher looked at me with a look that at the time I interpreted through DARE-induced paranoia as grave concern, one that was a comforting interview away from a call to DCFS, but that I now understand was "Is this kid really trying to have this conversation?" She dropped her eyes to the bag she was packing, and disinterestedly asked me, Oh, what song. Seized by fear, I knew I had let too much slip. I was going to splinter our family with my loose lips if I didn't shut up. I refused to answer. My eyes blank and wide. As her glance shifted from distracted to askance, I blurted out that I did not, and at no point did ever, know the name of that song. Who's it by, she asked. "YOU know..." I hinted. It was THAT song. How could there be so many dangerous cocaine songs in the world? Clearly we were talking about THAT song. She grew visibly confused by my sudden anxiety. "Who's the artist?" I boiled over. "Eric Clapton!" at the top of my lungs. Who else, idiot? She jerked back a little, refocused on her bag, and said, "Oh. I was thinking of Prince." I still don't know what the hell she was talking about.