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I was game. So was Joh
Joh
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 Joh
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 Joh
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 Joh
It was in Monterey, you know, California, and she a
The older guys sneered and said, Bullshit. I backed Joh
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 Joh
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 Joh
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 spi