Rollie showed up to class late. He slid into his chair, thizzing. He'd
been thizzing even7 day for a week. He started tapping his nails on
the desk. He yanked at the purple Mardi Gras beads dangling from
his neck. He scratched his thin, wispy goatee. Acne scars marked the
side of his face, and he looked completely strung out. But give the guy
a break. You would look that way too if you had been on a pill for
seven straight days.
Up in the front of the class, Mrs. Christopher was talking to him,
asking where he’d been. I didn't know where he'd been, but I knew7
that it didn't matter. Wherever he wTas coming from, he wasn't going
to say.
‘Rollie! I'm talking to you!'
He finally glanced up. 'Sorry, Mrs. C. I overslept.' He grinned
like a Cheshire cat, wThich is to say he grinned and bared his teeth
with slightly psychotic wildness. Mrs. Christopher must have felt his
look too, because she dropped the subject and continued teaching
about aequus, alter, ago. and other Latin derivatives.
Rollie ripped out a piece of paper from his journal and huddled
over his desk. He started drawing, scraping away with his pencil. I
leaned in to look at what he wTas doing, then felt his right eye rotating
toward the back of his skull, watching me watch him. I shifted and turned awav.
Tammy Winston sat three rows in front of me. I was fine staring
at her. Even from the back, her hair has serious sheen. Even from the
back, she's a sight.
‘Look,' Rollie said.
He slid his drawing onto my desk. It was a stick figure lady
sucking off a stick figure man with an enormous cock. The lady had
two large circles for boobs and a hairy vagina. It said ‘MRS.
CHRISTOPHER across the top.
I laughed because I knew I was supposed to, and handed him the
drawing back. Mrs. Christopher saw7 this transaction. Sometimes, I
guess, I’m pretty indiscreet.
If you're sharing notes, Rollie, share them with the class,’ she
said, and marched over, sticking out her hand. For a moment I
thought Rollie looked scared, but maybe that's just because I was
scared for him. Rollie popped the paper in his mouth like a pill. He
chewed it down, making loud throat}’ sounds. When he finished
swallowing; he showed his empty palms.
I went to a part}* with my girlfriend; Maria, that Friday. I dropped by
Rollie s house to purchase an eighth before I picked her up. His mom
was around, so he had me come through the alley. When I got into
his room, there was a girl King asleep in his bed. She was a younger
girl, and I recognized her from a couple of Westside parties. She was
always falling over drunk, always wearing black plastic frames with
cut out lenses. She wasn't wearing those now. She had the covers
pulled up to her neck, and I doubted she was wearing anything.
Rollie had my eighth bagged and resting on a scale. The digitized
device read 3.9 grams. The homie hook-up, he said, although I knew
that the scale had probably been tampered with, and he wras serving
me a scant eighth. Beside him was a large glass bong packed with a
mole and he passed it to me. I immediately thought of Maria, thought
of the bitching I'd receive when I picked her up with bloodshot eyes,
thought that she wasn’t wrong when she said it was weird to spend
an evening in the shadows of a part}, stupefied, hood up, arms folded
across my chest.
I shook my head. Tm good.’
'For real? You’re eyeing it though.’
People like Rollie are out there getting it. You and I, we dream of
doing lawless tilings, but they actually exist in a universe with no
boundaries. It’s hard not to appreciate their untamed authenticity7.
It’s hard to tell them no, and turn into an actor in their eyes.
I shrugged. He laughed and punched me on the arm. a collision
of bone against bone that was certain to leave a bruise.
The bowl burned bright and layers of smoke filled the glass,
changing from milk} to yellow* to brown. I cleared the bong and
exhaled a cloud. My head unscrewed like a bottle top. My body fizzed
and collapsed into something stale. For fifteen minutes I lay
motionless, burping up smoke lodged at the base of my lungs. Rollie
watched me, cackling. I stared at his television screen, set on the
NBA 2K homepage, listening to a song that repeated on a loop.
Maria was as pissed as always when I picked her up, and we sat
outside her mom’s apartment, arguing in my dad’s car, while she
kept threatening to break up. We must have sat there for nearly an
hour, going nowhere, before we finally agreed to drive to the party7.
Eventually, I guess, the sheer exhaustion of fighting defeated us both.