The Marijuana Chronicles (8 page)

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
—

The older guys sneered and said,
Bullshit
. I backed Johnny up, said I’d seen Mama Cass’s large-size autographed undies, which I had not.

Well, she’s no Grace Slick
, the older guy said, and told me where to park, and we trudged up the stairs of a smallish house to an apartment on the second floor and he’s thanking us over and over for helping him and rolls another joint, which we smoked in between regular cigarettes.

Inside, there was hardly any furniture but the living room was a mess of overstuffed Hefty bags and lots of cartons, and the older guy explained he’d just moved in and was still clearing out all the shit left by the former tenants and how he had to get it looking good because his girlfriend from New York was coming to live with him.

I was only half listening, still tripping and a little worried I’d never come out of it, though the older guy assured me it was just an after-effect of the DMT, and thanked me again because he didn’t know how he was going to clear out the place without a car and how he couldn’t just put all this stuff on the street because the Slumerville garbage collectors wouldn’t take it and how his girlfriend was a neat-freak and really beautiful, a model, he said, me thinking he was lying because no way some model was going to go for this scaggy older guy, but he said he was going to marry her even though he didn’t believe in marriage, while the three of us started gathering up the Hefty bags and cartons and I explained to the older guy how the Studebaker’s seats went all the way down and how it was great for making out but also for fitting in all sorts of junk, and he thanked me again and promised to keep me and Johnny supplied with weed for the rest of our lives.

The older guy said we could leave some of the Hefty bags by the curb, which we did, but not the cartons, which we packed into the Studebaker. When the car was full, I asked,
Now what?
and he said,
Maybe we can find a dump somewhere
, and I said,
Why not just drive around and leave a box here and a box there?
but Johnny came up with the brilliant idea that we dump them into the Charles River, which was exactly what we did with the motorcycle we’d bought earlier in the year, dismantled it and dropped it piece by piece into the river after insuring it with some fly-by-night insurance company, the two of us practically falling down with laughter as we explained that when we tried to collect on our scam it turned out that the fucking insurance company was an even bigger scam and had vanished along with our initial fifty dollars for the phony policy, and how we were so fucked, the older guy shaking his head saying,
You can’t trust anyone, especially capitalists
.

So that’s what we did, drove around and found secluded spots where we dropped each of his cartons into the murky Charles River.

The older guy thanked us again for saving his life and said we had to meet his model girlfriend sometime and I said,
Sure, sure
, and he offered to buy us beers in a local bar but by then my head felt like someone had tied a string around it and pulled it like a top, it was spinning so bad and Johnny was practically nodding off, so we headed back to BU.

The next day I felt awful, as if someone had taken out my brain, played catch with it, and put it back in, but maybe upside down. I met up with my girlfriend and we went to breakfast at three in the afternoon and after four cups of coffee I could put words together and told her about the older guy and how we helped him with his stuff, and she just shrugged.

That night we went to a party, all art students in an Allston apartment where there was more weed, which I smoked and immediately started tripping, this time coupled with paranoia. I told my girlfriend I had to get out of there but she said no because some graduate art student was going on and on about how painting was dead and that art had to be conceptual and there was no point in making paintings anymore because they had all been made and why add more junk to an already polluted world, and there were a group of undergrads, mostly girls including my girlfriend, literally at his feet looking up at him like he was God.

I left and walked the Allston/Boston streets, angry and paranoid, constantly looking over my shoulder, but eventually found my way home where I lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling, which kept breaking open with dazzling displays of shooting stars, like I had my own private planetarium.

The next day I found out my girlfriend had fucked the “painting is dead” graduate student and we broke up. She went out with him for the rest of the semester, which was only a month or so longer, until he ditched her for a leggy drama student who would later become the movie star Faye Dunaway, and I went off to graduate art school where I stopped smoking pot because I wanted to be a serious artist and pot made me tired and hungry and I was living on Dannon yogurt and Cup O’ Noodles and couldn’t have afforded pot even if I wanted it.

My ex-girlfriend got in touch with me once and wanted to meet up but I was too proud and stung by her rejection and thought I was pretty cool now that I was a graduate student studying painting and espousing postmodern theory, plus I had started seeing a girl, a sophomore, who thought I was really cool and hung on my every word.

It was about a year after graduate school, when I was playing the life of the artist for real, that I went to the dinner party in Soho, back when Soho was the hip new art scene. There were about a dozen people there, artists and art dealers, a collector or two, and a curator who had just started working at MOMA—someone I clearly wanted to cultivate—and he was saying how he’d gone to Harvard for his masters
and
PhD and I mentioned I was at BU the same years and he didn’t make a face when I said it because people in the art world knew BU had a good art school, and he asked me if I was there for the Hansel scandal and I said,
As in Hansel and Gretel?
and a few people laughed but he didn’t.

You must have been there when it happened because it was my senior year, which was your senior year, right?
Then he stopped, tapped his chin, and said,
Oh, but it didn’t come out till the next year so maybe you missed it
.

I said,
Missed what?

He said,
This guy, Hansel, cut up his girlfriend
.

At that, everyone stopped eating and turned toward him.

Cut her into pieces
, he said.
Put her body parts into plastic bags and cartons, which
—
can you believe?
—
he dropped into the Charles River!

I started choking.

Oh, please
, said a sophisticated older woman, an art collector wearing a lot of gold jewelry.

It’s true
, said the Harvard guy,
and he might have gotten away with it but one of the boxes floated up to the surface and some students found it and opened it, and aside from a hand or a foot
—
I’m pretty sure it was a foot
—
there was also a letter or a card or something that led the police to him, so he was not only a lunatic but a stupid one, so he must have had help
.

I swallowed hard and said,
Why?

Well, he didn’t have a car and there was no record of a rental
.

I said,
Couldn’t he have … walked?

The Harvard guy looked at me like I was retarded.
Around the entire Charles River? It would have taken days, weeks. No way. He had help. Someone with a car, the police were sure of it
.

You’re quite the expert
, I said.

No, though I admit I read everything about it. They never found out who helped him because the guy was dead when the cops discovered him, had been for days, in some awful apartment in Slumerville
—
that’s what everyone in Boston calls Somerville
.

I said,
How?

He said,
How
—
what?

How
—
did he die?
My heart was banging against my rib cage like I’d swallowed a live bird.

The host, an artist a few years older, who had been getting attention for his hyperrealistic over-life-size portraits, cut in and asked if anyone wanted to smoke some grass and started passing a joint, and I accepted my first toke in over a year as the Harvard PhD went back to his story.

According to the papers, the killer, a loser who had flunked out of some junior college, Bunker Hill or Roxbury Community, took an overdose of something, plus he was inhaling some sort of hallucinogen that was all the rage that year though I can’t remember what it was called
.

DMT
, I said, not meaning to.

That’s it!
He looked at me, eyebrows raised, and so did everyone else.

I only tried it once, at a party in Cambridge
.

In Cambridge
, he said.
Hey, we could have been at the same party!

Then everyone started asking me questions about DMT like I was a specialist—or a junkie.