The Marijuana Chronicles

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 Da

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 di

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.

Was it like acid?

Was it addictive?

Wasn’t it unhealthy?

I dragged on the joint picturing my pink Studebaker filled with boxes of body parts, me and Joh

Wasn’t it dangerous? The sophisticated woman with all the gold jewelry gave me a pointed look.

No, I said, and took one last toke swearing I’d never smoke again. It only lasted a few minutes. Not enough time to be dangerous.

PaRT II

DeLIRIuM & HaLLuCInaTIOn

A

BRAHAM

R

ODRIGUEZ

was born June 13, 1961 in the South Bronx. From an early age, he showed a big interest in writing, especially on his father’s large, clunky typewriters. His father bought him a portable when he was eleven, and from then on he began writing stories and novels. His books include

The Boy without a Flag, Spidertown, The Buddha Book

, and

South by South Bronx

. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including

Bronx Noir

and

The Dark End of the Street

.

moon dust

by abraham rodriguez

1.

Report to Commission C

Inclusions: video files, one (1) short story manuscript

Package of: tainted substance, referred to as “green,” “pot,”

“weed,” or, in this case, “Moon Dust”

[WARNING!! DO NOT SMOKE SUBSTANCE.]

Substance will be submitted to the Justice Ministry for examination. It has been weighed and is vigorously controlled. Any misuse will be prosecuted under penal code 717-3 SUPERIOR!!

The sun golden-yellowed over tenement tops.

They were up on the roof, looking down on the apartment. It was a chilly morning, and they both had the collars of their raincoats turned up high.