The Marijuana Chronicles, page 5
Jimmy always had his ear to something. A telephone, mostly. It’s my girlfriend, he’d say as he dialed. It’s my bookie. It’s my mom. He didn’t have a job. His work was being Jimmy.
He lived with the fashion model who supported him. She was often out of town on a shoot or in Europe for the collections. He knew all the models because of her. He liked pretty women. If you saw them passing a joint, chances are they got it from him, along with diet pills, tranquilizers, and cocaine. He always had a roll of cash. He didn’t worry. He didn’t have to think.
Never take the subway, he said one night when we couldn’t find a cab. The subway was beneath him in more ways than one. He was a king.
I saw him eat now and then, usually breakfast at five a.m., after the clubs had closed. Generally, he lived on drugs and drink. His usual routine was to stay up for eight days and then take a day of rest. Alice called him a miracle of modern medicine. Her father was a doctor and after he met Jimmy he said the same thing.
Alice was divorced. She lived in a suite of rooms on the second floor of her father’s sprawling duplex on the Upper West Side, on the park. She kept a full bar in her sitting room. She had cable TV long before the rest of us. Her mother had been an alcoholic who died young, and Alice was moving in the same direction. She worked in a boutique off Fifth Avenue, modeling swimsuits and designing displays. One afternoon, Jimmy stopped by with a bottle of champagne. The sales staff gathered around him with the customers in the store. When the boss arrived, Alice was fired. Jimmy was her consolation.
He’s been here for three days, she said, when I went to see her. They hadn’t slept at all. She was sitting on her bed, doing her nails. Heavy chains were nailed to the wall above. Leather cuffs dangled from the chains.
Jimmy wasn’t just the best sex she had ever had, he was the best fun. I can’t describe it, she said. Bondage appealed to her. Something about the resistance, she said, nodding toward the cuffs. The friction. The harder he pulled the more she wanted him. They fucked all day, all night. They had takeout. He made phone calls and then they fucked again. Of course, there was booze. Of course, there was pot and cocaine and pills. I’ve never been so wet, she said. It’s heaven.
Alice was my best friend. She was almost as tall as Jimmy, but had dark curly hair and wore exaggerated makeup. When she laughed you could see bubbles in the air. More often she was sad, adrift. She felt like an orphan. In her laugh you felt the depth of her.
Jimmy appeared with a bottle of Johnnie Walker. He downed some pills with it and rolled a joint. It was football season and there was a game on TV that he wanted to watch. The only thing that Jimmy liked better than getting stoned was football. And guns. He collected firearms and subscribed to magazines for enthusiasts. In high school, he’d been the quarterback. His only ambition had been to go pro but something had happened. He’d broken training. He’d gotten a girl pregnant. He’d beaten up the captain of the team, I don’t know. He had stories.
Now he was back on the phone. Not to his girlfriend. His bookie. He bet on games and he won the bets, for himself and others. When the game was over, he passed out.
Don’t go, Alice said. I don’t want to be alone.
Sometimes Jimmy called to complain about his girlfriend or Johnny. I don’t know how they met. Johnny got on his nerves. He repeated everything he said and needed constant attention. Sometimes Jimmy called to buy weed. I always had a connection. One day he invited me over to his place. His girlfriend was at work and he wanted to play.
I lived in the Village. He was in Spanish Harlem. I took the subway. I had to change trains a few times. It took forever. You gotta get out of that habit, he said. He looked mad.
He had a one-bedroom on the eighth floor. He poured me a cup of coffee and locked himself in the bathroom. Excuse me, he said. I gotta go shoot up.
What a joker. I laughed. And I waited. I sat on the leather couch in his living room, thumbing through the gun and fashion magazines on the coffee table. Thirty minutes later, he emerged in full makeup and a dress.
Am I gorgeous or what? he said, sashaying across the room, a hand on one hip then the other. His gravelly voice had become a breathy falsetto. He ran his tongue over his lips. Think I could get a guy to pick me up in a bar? he twittered. I could go for some handsome devil in a suit.
His slinky blue frock clung to his body, which suddenly seemed curvaceous. The slender legs were good and he walked in his girlfriend’s gold heels as if born to them. I took out my lipstick and applied it, partly in self-defense.
You ought to be a model, I said.
I know, he replied. I’m wasting my time taking bets. C’mon, he said. Come out with me. Let’s see if we can pick up a couple of jocks!
There was a mirror on the wall and he checked himself out in it. Did his girlfriend know?
Don’t you breathe a word, he barked. She hates when I wear her clothes. But see? They fit me better.
I couldn’t say. I’d never met her. I was thinking of Alice. His eyes met mine and fluttered. He asked for help with his zipper.
He was naked beneath the dress.
Jimmy wasn’t hugely endowed, considering the rest of him. It didn’t matter.
Let’s go watch the game, he said, and led me into the bedroom. The bed was large and had a steel frame. Its white satin sheets glowed in the waning sunlight from the windows. He closed the blinds and turned on the TV at the foot of the bed. Under it was a large black suitcase. He opened it. Don’t peek, he said. When I looked up, he was holding two sets of leather cuffs on short lengths of chain.
Jimmy’s tongue filled my mouth and I didn’t resist. I was stoned and feeling amorous. He undressed me. Take a breath, he said, attaching a metal clip to each of my nipples and screwing them tight.
That hurts, I said at the pinch. I was surprised by how much it excited me.
Lie down, he said, and I did. He cuffed my wrists and ankles, and hooked the chains to the bed. A flame of desire leapt through my body from my toes to my eyes. They were burning. I opened my legs. I needed air.
I knew you’d like this, he said. He turned on the television. He rolled a joint.
Jimmy!
Don’t rush me, he said, and busied his hands in the suitcase. Blood rushed into my ears. I was throbbing. He lit the joint and took a deep toke. Watch the game, he said. Relax.
How does anyone fall in love? I couldn’t guess. I thought about money. Money was something you could measure and count. It added up to something. Love was intangible and confusing, impossible to manufacture or predict. Escaping it had more pitfalls than embracing it.
Jimmy!
He put tape on my mouth. He sat down to watch the game. I heard the sound of a crowd cheering, of helmets cracking, men grunting. He turned back and held himself over me, caressing me with his hair and licking me. He tightened the screws and I bucked. He was hard. You look beautiful, he said, and kissed me again. His mouth was soft and his tongue was long. What was I doing? Most of the time, I preferred women to men. But they weren’t Jimmy.
He reached into the suitcase.
Fuck me, I said.
He stood up. Now he was holding a shotgun and jerking off. I can’t fuck you, he said. My girlfriend would kill me. She’d cut off my hair! She’d dismember me.
The gun went off. I felt the bullet rush past my ear. It hit the pillow inches from my head. You weren’t worried, were you? he said. C’mon, let me teach you how to shoot.
He released me and slipped back into the dress. He showed me how to hold the gun, click the safety, how to take the gun apart and clean it, how to put it together again. He stood behind me to guide my aim. The gun had a telescopic sight. We were standing by the bedroom window, looking at a man on the roof of a building across the street.
Get that dweeb, he said. Let me know when you’re ready.
I wanted badly to pull that trigger, but not at a total stranger. All that provocation. It got to me.
I’m ready, I said.
That was the last time I saw Jimmy. He called a month later. He was moving to Hawaii, where he was going to get rich growing pot. He was leaving for the good life. He would call. Don’t forget me, he said. And stay out of the subway.
For a while, he called every week. The land was fertile and the sensemilla was prime. He still wasn’t sleeping. Poachers kept him awake. He shot them. Police helicopters flew overhead. It wasn’t the life he expected. But he was determined to stick it out. Once you go a certain distance, there’s no turning back.
On my worst day of the hepatitis, the mailman brought a cardboard box postmarked Hawaii. Some books for you, he said. The box was filled with plastic sandwich bags of Jimmy’s marijuana, his fat, perfect buds, very clean, very sweet. There was an envelope in the box. Inside it was a Polaroid of Jimmy. He was dressed in a tank top and grinning at the camera. He had a rifle on his shoulder, poking through his hair. I could see mountains behind him and the sky. On the back of the picture it said, How do I look?
After that, we lost touch. People come, people go. They cross your path and alter it. There’s no turning back.
Life grew more complicated. I no longer lived alone. I quit drinking and smoking pot. It bored me. I hated the smell. Twenty years was enough. My relationship ended. I changed my look. I never thought about Jimmy. Until he phoned, out of the blue, an epoch or so later.
Hey, it’s Jimmy! Remember me?
What, you kidding? Jimmy!
He was back in New Jersey, in the town where he grew up. He was a family man, married, two kids. He even had a job coaching high school football. Yeah, he said. White picket fence. The whole nine yards.
He wanted to come into the city. He was clean now, he said, but he still had his weed.
Alice was gone, I told him. Breast cancer. Johnny, his brain exploded. That’s all I knew.
I heard, Jimmy said. But you sound good.
I’m good, I said. Call anytime.
He never did.
JONATHAN SANTLOFER is the author of five novels, including The Death Artist and Anatomy of Fear. He is the recipient of a Nero Award, two NEA grants, has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, and serves on the board of Yaddo. He is coeditor, contributor, and illustrator of the anthology The Dark End of the Street, and editor and contributor of LA Noire: The Collected Stories, and Touchstone’s serial novel Inherit the Dead. Santlofer is director of the Crime Fiction Academy at the Center for Fiction. He lives in Manhattan where he is at work on a new novel.
the last toke
by jonathan santlofer
It’s ironic because it all started at a be-in or a love-in, one of those hippy-dippy-paint-your-face-with-flowers events that were so widespread in 1969. This one, on Boston Common, a rare spring day when the sky was painfully blue and everyone was happy or pretending to be, three or four hundred college kids assembled for more than the usual peace and love, a free Tim Hardin concert, blankets on the lawn, jug wine, radios thrumming Mamas & Papas, Beatles, Donovan, Starship, Joan Baez, a folk-rock olio riding the wave of a pot cloud so potent the squirrels were stoned.
My girlfriend had painted flowers on my cheeks and I did the same on hers, petals and stems and leaves, all perfectly delineated and suitable for framing, a competition as we were both art students. My roommate and best friend, Johnny, had rolled a half-dozen joints, something Tim Hardin would appreciate being a junkie and all, though we didn’t know that until he OD’d a decade later, my mind a little vague on some details though not others. Tim’s first album, mostly melancholy love songs perfect for pseudo-sad college kids, “Don’t Make Promises,” “It’ll Never Happen Again,” “How Can We Hang On to a Dream,” were filled with palpable despair and words I still know by heart, so it’s not true that marijuana will rot your brain as I was smoking it every day at the time.
Tim was an hour and a half late and more than a little fuzzy, forgetting words and once or twice nodding off in mid-song, though we cheered him on the same way I’d cheered on a stumbling-drunk Janis Joplin at Madison Square Garden earlier that year while she lamented her failed love life in between songs and shots of Southern Comfort.
It was later, as we were leaving the concert, all three or four hundred of us pressed together in a throng of impatience that tested our all-you-need-is-love sensibility, when we met the Harvard boys and the older guy, a friend of a friend of a friend, though I never found out whose friend. He was at least thirty, tall and skinny in ratty bellbottoms and a Harry Nilsson T-shirt, and before we made it off the Common he’d asked us (actually he asked my girlfriend) if we wanted to go to a party in Cambridge and she said yes—nobody said no to a party back then.
Cambridge was smarter and savvier than Boston. Boston University students were always a little insecure with the Harvard/ Radcliff gang, though as art students we were exempt from academic competition because we didn’t take any academics and being art students made us cool by default with our paint-splattered jeans and turpentine cologne. I wore my cool like a Jackson Pollock Halloween costume though deep down I was still a suburban kid who’d let his hair grow and wore John Lennon glasses, twenty years old and about to graduate thinking I knew everything. Oh, if you had seen me with my parents, screaming about capitalism and the war and how money didn’t matter and how I was never going to be like them.
The Boston day was slipping toward darkness when we strolled back to BU for my car, a pink Studebaker I’d inherited from my grandfather, mellow on Tim Hardin and grass and cheap wine, face makeup streaked across our cheeks like war paint, me and my girlfriend and Johnny sharing a joint, puffing away in public like we owned Boston, like we owned the world, and we did in the way all twenty-year-olds do with their youth and beauty and audacity.
The Cambridge pad was like so many others, a railroad flat of endless rooms all reeking of weed and sweat, couples dancing slow to fast music, others dancing alone, a few grinding away, the sexual revolution in full swing.
We’d only been there a few minutes when the older guy offered up some hash. Got it from a dude who grows it up near Woodstock, powerful stuff, he said, and after a couple of tokes I knew he was right, cotton batting taking up residence in the crevices of my mind. I was already stoned when he said he had something even better, unwrapping a handkerchief to display what looked like translucent pebbles. DMT, he called it. Like acid, but short and sweet, you only trip for, like, five or ten minutes.
I was game. So was Johnny, who asked if it was anything like banana peels. The older guy said, You kidding? Much better than that, laughed, and dropped a pebble into a hookah and put a match to it, all of us rapt as it flared like a tiny comet.
Johnny took the first inhalation, eyes tearing as he held the smoke in his lungs. Then I took a hit. It smelled like burning metal singeing my nose and throat and then wham! my heart was beating like mad, everything starting and stopping, coming and going, the room there and not there, people zooming in and out of focus, George Harrison whine-singing “Within You Without You” deep inside my head, faces around me morphing and melting, apartment walls dissolving into fast-moving clouds like I had been transported into a Magritte painting, and it didn’t feel like a few minutes; it felt like forever and a little scary, everything at warp speed.
Then it was over and I was back in the dingy Cambridge apartment, sweating like I had a fever and the older guy was leaning into my girlfriend, the two of them on a mattress covered with a torn Indian blanket, other people on it too but all I could see was them, as if they were in the middle of a fish-eye lens. The older guy placed a joint between her soft lips and looked over at me with a sort of leering smile, then dropped another one of those pebbles into the pipe, and Johnny and I took turns again like trained junkie monkeys and the ceiling exploded and lightning lit up an emerald-green sky and I could feel my heart squishing and squashing, sending blood through my body and I guess I was talking, could hear a kind of slow-motion echo emanating from my mouth but had no idea what I was saying though now the older guy was slapping me on the back and saying, Thanks, man, thanks, and the next thing I knew the four of us—me and my girlfriend, Johnny, and the older guy—were piling into my pink Studebaker, windows down, air on my face like a wind tunnel, lightning and comets above us as I drove through Harvard Square, all of us laughing.
At some point I had agreed to help the older guy clean out his apartment though I could not remember when; then my girlfriend said she didn’t feel well (an excuse, I was sure) and wanted to go back to the dorm, so we dropped her off but kept going until we were in the suburbs, the whole time the older guy rolling more joints and Johnny and I smoking them, radio blasting Sly and the Family Stone, “Everyday People,” and singing along.
Slum-er-ville, the older guy said when we got there. What everyone calls Somerville, the only place I can afford, with my college loans and all, a dark street of single and attached houses, none of them nice and not at all like Boston or Cambridge, no streetlights, no charm. I was a Communications major but can’t get a good job so I work part-time for a record producer who fixes me up with cool singers like Grace Slick, who I fucked by the way, says the older guy, which I did not believe though he went into detail about how Grace smelled and how she talked during sex and how she was from a rich family and how she was kind of a spoiled brat, and then Johnny, always competitive, said, You wanna hear about the time I fucked Mama Cass? and he goes right into it.
It was in Monterey, you know, California, and she announces her hotel room from the stage, can you believe that? So I figure what the hell, I go after the show and sure enough there’s a bunch of guys hanging in front of her room and finally she comes out, good ol’ Mama Cass, I swear to God, all fat and cute in a flowered muumuu, and she crooks a finger at me and says, YOU, and next thing I know I’m in her room, in her bed, and we’re smoking dope and drinking champagne out of the bottle and I’m trying to find her clit, not so easy, heh-heh-heh, and she’s telling me what to do and saying what a big cock I have—and I do, man, I really do have a big cock—and I fuck her and she gets off practically screaming and when it’s over she asks me if I like her, can you dig it, Mama Cass asking me if I like her? I say, sure, sure, of course I like you, and ask if she’ll autograph my T-shirt, and she finds her panties and writes on them, To Johnny with love, from Mama Cass, and hands them over and I’m like, Holy shit, right, so I say, Hey, will you do me a favor and sing something for me? and she starts singing, “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” but she’s changed the words to Dream a Little Dream of Johnny, and I swear to God I get goose bumps up and down my arms but I see she’s crying, so I ask what’s wrong and she says nothing but tells me to go because she’s got to get some sleep because they’re on the road in the morning, so I fight my way through the crowd of guys still outside her room waving her undies in the air, and they’re all hooting and laughing and smacking me on the back and making fat jokes and—
