Текст книги "The Marijuana Chronicles"

Автор книги: Jonathan Santlofer

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J

ONATHAN

S

ANTLOFER

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—

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.

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 Johnny driving round the Charles River, dropping cartons into murky water and watching them sink while the older guy fed us hash and thanked us over and over for helping him.

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.

They were laughing. Bobbing back and forth. They were on a stakeout on a cold morning in the South Bronx. They were freezing their asses off. Their clothes were from the freaking 1890s. They couldn’t stop laughing.

“I’m fa-fa-freezing.” Killy’s teeth chattered.

“It’s not even officially fall,” Kelly said.

Killy sniffed his own lapel. “Why do we always buy such cheap suits?”

“Uh-uh. I’m not spending money on clothes I’ll need just for five minutes someplace. We’re doing a lot of time-jumps lately.”

“But we’ll make ourselves cuh-cuh-conspicuous,” Killy said.

“What?!” Kelly stood his six-foot tallness straight, giving Killy an up-and-down look. Black raincoat. Black derby. Killy looked Kelly up-and-down right back. Black raincoat. Black derby. “I think we look quite dapper,” Kelly said, lighting an Amnesian stick.

“Hey! Didn’t you light an Amnesian stick before we left?”

“I don’t remember,” Kelly said, and the giggles started for them again.

Killy turned grim. He regarded the stick in his hand. “This is not from this time. We’re going to have to smoke it all right now.”

“And eat the roach,” Kelly said.

A quick couple of tokes for each of them.

Killy went back to his Thermospecs, again sweeping the apartment from one end to the other. Kelly nudged him.

“Hey,” he said, “what year is this again?”

This investigation began with a report that there was a “time disturbance” originating in the year 1973 in New York. The disturbance in this case being marijuana tainted with iridium, a substance yet to be discovered. Iridium is the classified substance used in the assembly and successful functioning of the time-sequencer device. We suspect a scientist well-known to this commission, Abraham Ziegler, found a way to somehow break down the active properties of the time portal. To synthesize its elements and somehow compress them into tiny bits. This fine, glittery dust is then sprinkled or sprayed onto marijuana buds

.

[See sample. WARNING!! DO NOT SMOKE SUBSTANCE.]

The cumulative effect of smoking the iridium-laced marijuana is limited-experience time travel, “limited” by the amount ingested or smoked. We have as yet acquired no data on duration of the “trips” or what happens when the drug wears off, but we suspect the subject returns back to its own time. This may depend on the amount ingested or smoked

.

The Thermospecs made a weird whirring sound. Killy scanned the apartment. “I’m seeing four people,” he said as he pulled the small gun from an inner pocket. He set the laser sight, and fired. Sounded like sand through a straw. The sonic bomb is about the size of a small kiwi. The term “sonic” is a misnomer, since the blast is not loud, but the effect on the nervous system is severe and instant. There was a bright flash, a muffled thump. More thumps. Glass breaking, something falling.

Kelly checked with his Thermospecs. “They’re all down.” He pulled out a small gun of his own, and loaded it with a glass ball. He sighted with the laserscope and fired the ball through the same window. They could hear it clatter against a wall, roll along the floor.

“Okay,” Killy said. He pulled out a small mirrored disc from a small leather case.

“Portal,” Kelly said. “Follow the bouncing ball.”

There was a flash and a whoosh of some considerable violence. Killy and Kelly found themselves in the living room. Killy first thing picked up the glass ball at his feet and pocketed it.

“Portal recovered,” he said.

The living room: a couch, some cushions, a pair of mattresses on the floor. A couple of tables loaded with scales, plastic baggies, packed weed. One guy was sitting on the couch when the sonic bomb hit, and there he fell, a bent heap, face tranquil with unconsciousness. Another one collapsed by the table in the kitchen, the broken glass around him from the coffee cup that fell with him.

“Fuck! We’ll have to take Mendoza with us,” Kelly said. “We don’t have time for a chat!”

Killy found Jose “Crash” Mendoza in bed. He had fallen onto it, still clutching a smoking bong. The water stained the maroon bedsheet.

“Shit, he was smoking it,” Kelly said, examining the dark residue in the bong.

He searched around for Moon Dust, looking through the thick cakes of weed, the bags of buds and leaves. Killy found a briefcase full of the stuff in the bedroom, Kelly a small leather pouch. Kelly time-jumped with it all back to the safehouse while Killy went back to the bedroom to check on Crash Mendoza. There was still time before these stoners would come to. Killy scanned all of them, checked their vital signs, and had just reached the bed when he noticed he could see the maroon sheet right through the guy. Crash was fading right before his eyes. He quickly scanned what was happening, getting footage of the irresistible moment when he put his hand right through the fading image of Crash. After a few seconds, just a ruffled sheet, an empty bed, the stink of bongwater.

“What happened?” It was Kelly, having returned from the safehouse. Killy showed him on the mini-screen. “Oh crap,” Kelly said. And he rushed out to check on the others.

“I don’t think they smoked it,” Killy said, examining one of the bongs. “Only him.”

“We’ve got to set up a trace and find him,” Kelly said.

“Won’t he eventually come back?”

Kelly was heading to the kitchen when he heard the sound. Killy heard it too. It was a buzzing, familiar. Growing to a flaming sizzle.

“I don’t think …” Kelly said as they gathered up their equipment, “that we’ll have time to find out.”

There was a bright flash. The far wall in the living room glowed as five figures rushed in. Time Control Enforcement Troopers stormed into the room. A number of loud cracks—flashes from particle guns already drawn. Killy fell sideways in mid-dive, folded up like a snail on a stick. More cracks, as Kelly flipped a table over. Troopers tumbled in all directions. Kelly crawled over to Killy, who was twitching, his body glowing strangely.

“Hold it right there!” one of the troopers yelled.

The firing stopped.

Kelly grabbed the twitching Killy in a tight embrace. “Consuelo,” he said.

There was a brief flash. It was a quick blink. The two of them were gone.

“Fuck! They portal’d out!”

“How they do that?”

“McClaren! Set up a trace!”

The one called McClaren worked his tablet just as there came another flash. The troopers snapped to attention with a shout. McClaren, irritated to see the trace wasn’t working, found himself staring into the face of the Regional Commander himself. It was a harsh, battered face, cheek once slashed by a meat cleaver, his glowering glass eye uncovered by his usual patch.

“Damnit,” he said.

2.

Report to Commission C [SPECIAL]

FROM:

TIME

CONTROL ENFORCEMENT [TCE] REGIONAL COMMAND “D”

Colonel Johannes Belasco

As of date 201262-208==

Primary Report:

As Deputy Commander of all TCE Troopers in the fields of time, I wish to place a complaint with this board

.

For the second time this month we have intercepted two commission agents on a “time disturbance” case. I have been briefed that these two agents, Randolph “Killy” Jones and Rick “Kelly” Santana, are working to correct a time imbalance, confirmed by Time Control “K” traces

.

These two agents are operating in restricted jurisdictions. Their actions come up on random traces and of course our agents respond to all violations of the codes. There are no exceptions and TCE REGIONAL COMMAND “D” would never apologize for its agents doing their jobs

.

I also request that information be given to this office regarding the nature and purpose of their actions in the time zones involved, so that ultimate effect can be certified by TIMELINE SURVEY. Only then should an investigation be launched, always under the auspices, and obeying the codes and jurisdictions of the TCE regional structure. “Killy and Kelly” are no such thing as private investigators. They are ex–TCE Troopers, thirteen years of service between them. And since washing out of the force, they’ve left a trail of time violations a mile long. Why don’t these “agents” put in for clearances or apply for permits? Why don’t they follow the rule of law with regard to time interference? Why do they feel they can somehow act independently of the TCE and its guidelines? And why has this commission enlisted the services of two suspicious characters instead of relying on the TCE which is already running its own investigation? They are a constant danger to that investigation. It is crucial that the commission share its files and all information pertaining to THE ZIEGLER FILE. If this is not done within the next twelve hours, I will sign a warrant for their arrest. These violations must be addressed, and jurisdictions respected

.

I MUST ALSO POINT OUT that while Abraham Ziegler is missing, there is as yet no evidence that he is behind these recent events, or any reason to go outside code or sidestep TCE investigations which are more than well-equipped to handle the case. I hold the commission personally responsible for any setbacks resulting from this affair

.

3.

The strange smell of burnt toast.

Jose “Crash” Mendoza woke up in a room. A dingy bulb, a tiny window. A room of brick walls and stone floor. His brain was sluggish, his limbs rusty and slow. He stood up and looked around. A couple of tires. An old cajón. A dirty old mirror, half covered in a dark cloak. Crash gave himself a good gander in the spotted glass, as if to make sure he was still … “he.” His afro, wild and free, still in effect. His jeans jacket with the Puerto Rican flags on it, his street colors (and that included his prized Young Lords button and that Black Panthers patch). Made him feel good just from looking so wild, resistant, and Afro-Rican. It was Funkadelic, it was Hendrix. Reached for his afro-pick in his back pocket. (Yeah, reassuring feel of that plastic handle shaped like a small black fist.) Pulled it out to give his hair some flow action. But what’s with this room? A slow brain, like when he smoked bad weed. Weed, weed … he remembered smoking weed, right? He looked around the room again. There was only that steel door. The way out.

Crash opened the door slow. He was in a small courtyard between buildings. There was a narrow alley through which he could make out street. A line of trash cans. He walked down the alley carefully, the sight of street growing bigger. Through the steel gate, there were people walking along. Cars rumbled by. A bullet-shaped bus picked up passengers across the street.