Jeff Grant

We weren't upper class.

We weren't, but we weren't rich, but nobody was poor.

And so my mother was into mother's little helpers, you know, so she had uppers and downers.

And there was this big bar in the house that was this big wraparound bar in one of the rooms where they kept all the liquor.

And, you know, it was in a locked cabinet, which, of course, we knew where the key was.

So mother's little helpers is basically my mother went to a diet doctor.

And the diet doctor gave her uppers to diet, you know, so amphetamines, and that would get her up.

But to go to sleep at night, she would have to take these downers, second alls, two and alls, placid dills.

And she had them in jars of like 500 a piece.

I mean, it wasn't like now.

And so once I started drinking...

And so I'm stealing vodka or something from the bar.

And I'm literally sitting on the floor of my mother's bathroom.

And underneath the medicine, underneath the bottom, there's just these jars of pills.

And so after school, my friends and I are sitting there like drinking, popping pills, trying to figure out

What they would do, and sometimes we would get it right.

Like, we wanted to take downers, and so we were taking downers, and sometimes we saw something that we didn't know what it was, but they were really uppers.

And so I had sleepovers with my friends, but they would stay over the house, and we took uppers but didn't know it, and then we'd, like...

have to push my mother's car out into the street because we wouldn't have started in the garage.

And then we just did joyrides all over Long Island, you know, completely stoned out of our minds.