by Jessica Pine
Up was the right word. It was a plant, a huge plant that almost reached the ceiling. It was like Jack had sold the cow for a handful of magic beans and this was the result, only a lot more illegal. No wonder the place smelled danker than usual.
"Right," said Bog. "So...um...about this..."
"About this?" I said. "Holy shit. No wonder you're paranoid."
"...I know it's kind of a pain..."
I could hardly see the other side of the room. Everywhere I looked was foliage - lush, green, illegal foliage. The buds were stinking the room out; my living room was now some kind of pothead Eden.
"...he was gonna get raided," Bog said. "And I said I'd take care of it. Just for a while."
"I'm going out," I said. I couldn't deal with this right now. I got in the car, called Steve and headed for my favorite diner. The beer had woken my stomach up and I was fucking starving.
I was into my second helping of pie a la mode when Steve finally showed up. He looked anxious in a way that told me immediately he knew everything there was to know about Bog and the small weed rainforest now growing where I had used to watch TV.
"Et tu Steve?" I said, glaring up through a mouthful of ice cream.
He held up his hands in surrender and slid into the booth opposite me. "Look, I think I can sweeten the deal."
"Sweeten the deal? What deal? Have you seen that thing? It's like a jungle in there. I need a machete to get to the window. And if I do make it that far in I'll probably find Marlon Brando squatting on his heels beside a camp fire, mumbling about 'the horror, the horror'..."
"...I know, I know..."
"No, you don't know. That's my house, man. I fucking live there."
"Listen," said Steve. "I understand things are complicated right now, but that's no reason to lose your shit. Be cool. These things have a way of resolving themselves."
He leaned forward for a moment and slid a baggie under the side of my plate. "That's not gonna 'sweeten the deal'," I said, taking it anyway. "Okay? My life is enough of a mess without some Afghan drug lord coming by to break my kneecaps because I didn't have the proper hydroponics to take care of his precious crop."
"He's not an Afghan," said Steve. "He's a local boy - Tadley born and bred."
I narrowed my eyes at him. "Who?"
"His name's Robert. You can call him Bob."
My blood ran cold. "Psycho Bob?"
Steve sighed. I moaned.
"That was in his past," said Steve. "He has a whole new outlook on life now."
Bullshit. Bob was a maniac and everyone knew it. He was like a second generation Hells Angel; it was said his old man had been one of the original Angels of the legendary 'Berdoo' chapter out in California. He'd been riding on the back of a Harley since before he was born.
"Steve," I said. "I don't care if he's found God, Buddha or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I don't care if he's clean, sober and Jesus wants him for a motherfucking sunbeam. I want that thing out of my house and I want nothing to do with Psycho fucking Bob, okay?"
"Clay, this will be over before you know it," said Steve, in the velvet tones that I knew never meant anything good. "Trust me."
Trust me. Didn't that just have the ring of famous last words? I folded my arms and sat back, scowling at him.
"Look," he said. "It's very simple. Originally Bob just needed a little help with the sales and distribution side of things..."
"Drug dealing," I said.
Steve leaned over. "Will you keep your voice down? Since when did you get so pious anyway? You smoked enough yourself."
I leaned over to meet him and lowered my voice. "I was never a dealer," I said. "Dealers get busted - that's why I never did it, stupid. What the fuck am I supposed to say if the cops show up at my door? 'It's all a mistake, officer - that ganja rainforest in there is strictly for personal consumption'? They're not gonna buy that. Snoop Dogg couldn't smoke his way through that shit..."
"...if you'll just listen to me."
"Listen to what? What's there to listen to? 'Oh hey, Clayton - I have a perfectly good reason for filling your house with illegal substances and I want you to sit quiet and listen nicely while I explain why'?"
"Yes," said Steve. "In essence, that's exactly what I'm asking you to do."
I sighed, realizing there was no point arguing further because whatever I said I was going to yell myself hoarse at a rate of about fourteen fucks per minute and Steve was not going to budge an inch. It had always been like that ever since we were little; Steve could always come up with a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why we should attempt to climb the chain link fence into the junk-yard at night, or why we should try to build a scale model of a medieval trebuchet with the intention of firing his younger brother into next door’s pond. He'd been class president through most of High School, prompting some of the staff to worry that he might consider politics as an actual career; they all agreed that his unusual talents would be better channeled in less harmful directions, like pyramid selling or cult leading.
"Okay," I said. "Fine. Hit me."
"It's simple. What happened was our man Robert ran into a little difficulty with an old friend and this led to a certain need to expedite the uh...the redistribution of certain assets. Do you follow?"
"No. Try that again. This time in English."
Steve glanced round and lowered his voice. "Okay. Bob got arrested for beating the shit out of someone in a bar fight down at the Fuzzy Duck. Basically he needed to hide his weed-growing operation before the police showed up at his house and found the goddamn place smelling like the inside of Bob Marley's sock drawer."
"And you said you'd take care of it?"
Steve looked shifty. "Some of it."
"Some of it? Hence the psychotropic jungle in my fucking house? How did you get mixed up with that maniac in the first place?"
"It doesn't matter," he said, taking a napkin from the dispenser to polish his glasses. "You're making things needlessly complicated. The fact is that Bob couldn't just ditch the stuff in the compost - it's too close to harvest. You know how much those hydroponics set-ups cost? And you have to buy every little bit separately and cover your online footprint because the police have geeks who are paid to look for these things..." He sighed. "Look, just don't sweat the small stuff. It will be gone before you know it. We just gotta dry it out, sell it on, take our cut and kick back to Bob."
"We?"
He held up a hand. "Don't flip out on me, Clayton. This kind of merchandise, this kind of quantity, I'm talking ten grand each."
"I don't care," I said. "What the hell is wrong with you? You make enough money unloading used cars. Is this because you spent those two weeks in July marathoning Breaking Bad? Have you got delusions of druglord grandeur or something? Do I have to write a strongly worded letter to fucking Netflix or something?"
"It's merely a brief business association," said Steve. "Nothing more. I was thinking of you."
"Me?" I was thinking of strangling him when the waitress came over to top off my coffee. She fetched an extra cup for Steve and I sat back wondering where the hell it had all gone wrong. I could have blamed the moment my Achilles tendon went pop and put paid to a football scholarship, but things hadn't been that bad when I graduated High School. I had vocational training and with the housing boom everyone had needed carpenters. And then the economy went foom. Yeah - that hadn't helped.
"I fucked Heather's mom," I said, sinking deeper into self-pity.
Steve gave me a strange look and so it all came out - how I was slowly turning into a bigger loser than my Dad, an asshole so lazy he complained if he had to lift the sofa cushions to look for the remote control, the reason we had no future beyond the dole or the army, and look how that had turned out. "One day," I said. "I'm going to look in the mirror and that's who's going to be looking back at me - my old man. That whole thing with Heather and her mom - that was just like the stories he used to tell. Those stories were the reason why everyone thought he was such a 'g
ood guy'. He was a great guy, a great fucking drinking buddy. A lousy husband and a worse father, but hey - he was a blast."
"So keep your dick dry," said Steve. "What's the problem? You're not your dad; I'm not my dad. We don't have to turn out like our parents."
"I guess not," I said. Steve's old man would lose a battle of wits with a grilled cheese sandwich. It figured Steve had to get his fiendish intelligence from somewhere but his Mom offered no clue. Perhaps the whole slightly ditzy book-club bit she did was just a cover and she was actually a full-blown evil genius with henchmen and an underground lair.
"It's fine," Steve said. "Bog and I will have the plant out of your way by tonight. You don't have to be involved..."
He was pretty good about it, which should have tipped me off right away. As it was I was tit deep in self-pity and determined that I wasn't going to end up a barhopping, skank-banging waster like my Dad. My mood wasn't improved when a cop stopped the traffic and said there'd been an accident up ahead and I'd have to take a three-mile diversion. It was one of those weird little twists of fate that are supposed to pass unnoticed, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel something. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper as I moved through a tiny little tourist trap named Westerwick - one of those places where New York yuppies come in the fall, to look at the leaves and buy maple syrup and antiques.
I'd been here before, but I noticed a shiny new sign – JONES & SON. RESTORATIONS. I resolved to look them up online when I got home. I'd never done restorations before, but these days they were probably grateful for any carpenter who knew a dovetail joint from the hole in his ass.
When I got back, the plant was almost gone, replaced by a dustsheet covered in a huge pile of weed. "It doesn't seem to be drying out," said Bog.
"Has Steve been by?" I asked.
He shook his head. I was pissed by this point and went stomping into the kitchen to call Steve. That turned out to be a mistake; I found myself thigh deep in the fucking floor. "Bog!" I yelled. "Bog! Get in here."
He peered out from behind the curtain and for a moment looked confused; I was a lot shorter than he was used to me being. "Dude, what are you doing down there?" he said.
"What's it fucking look like? Pass me my phone."
I dialed Steve. "Okay, you evil bastard," I said. "You win. I'm in. Turns out I need a new floor."
That was how I ended up that Saturday night in Burlington, trying to sell weed to drunk yuppies. Turned out Steve was not the drug kingpin he thought he was and in fact had precisely no fucking contacts whatsoever. Worse, when Bog took Steve's brilliant advice of drying the 'product' in the microwave he set fire to a good half pound of the stuff, which led to a certain amount of panic before Steve announced we could adulterate it with catnip and nobody would be any the wiser. Except maybe cats.
I watched Steve go to work on a couple over by the bar. The girl was flipping her long dark hair back from her shoulders while Steve yelled in the guy's ear, probably talking him out of something - monogamy, sobriety, heterosexuality, his pants. Neither me nor Bog knew exactly what greased Steve's pole, but he had some New York friends who were pretty touchy feely with him and who would maybe be into some kind of freaky three-way scene of Steve's fiendish devising.
The girls here were model thin and beautiful, the kind who wouldn't look twice at someone like me when surrounded by guys with trust funds and Rolexes. I thought my virtue was safe until this one girl bumped into me. She was short where the others were tall, and where the other girls had bodies like Victoria's Secret models, this one had a little meat on her bones. She looked kind of lost, kind of angry and kind of like she didn't belong; she looked like I felt.
"You look like you could use a drink," I said.
She tiptoed up and shouted in my ear over the music. "Forget it. If I need anything right now it's a shirt."
She was wearing a short black skirt and a draped halter-top in some kind of velvety material. She hugged her bare upper arms as she spoke and for some reason I just knew someone else had dressed her. Just like I knew that the brown hair hanging poker straight down her back was never meant to hang like that - it was already curling up. I gave her my shirt and she looked at me with an odd mix of pity and gratitude. She said her name was Lindsay and she had the most amazing eyes I'd ever seen; at first glance they looked so brown they were almost black, but when the light hit them for a brief moment I saw they were a kind of toffee, topaz color, flecks of chestnut brown raying out from where her pupil shrank.
"I can't ditch my friend," she said, when I asked her if she wanted to get the hell out of here, and just like I knew someone else had put those clothes on her I knew that deep down she wanted to.
"You don't have to," I said. "Wanna go blaze one in the parking lot?"
At first I thought maybe she was just cold. I turned the car heater on for her as she huddled deeper into the seats. "I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to sit in cars with strange men," she said.
"I'm not strange," I said, lighting up and passing her the joint. "I'm eccentric."
"Bullshit. The word eccentric modifies like two words in the entire language - 'English' and 'millionaire'." She took another deep drag and held it in her lungs. "Since you're neither," she said, exhaling. "You're just plain weird."
I was beginning to see why she didn't quite fit the mould. "How do you know I'm not a millionaire?"
She gave me a sidelong look that said it all.
"You leave my car out of it," I said. "It's old, but it works."
"I never said a thing about your car," she said, giggling as she passed the joint back. "Anyway, it's nice. You know what they say about guys who drive expensive cars." She waggled her pinkie finger and said "Com-pen-sating," in a singsong voice that told me we were smoking the stuff that wasn't cut with catnip.
"Is that good news for me?"
"Sure. At least, I hope so."
"You hope so?"
"Yeah. If you're a stripper then you'd better have something to show 'em, right?"
She was flirting with me but I couldn't very well tell her to knock it off and toss her out of the car; after all, this had been my idea. And she was cute - really cute. Someone had painted her up as carefully as a doll, but where her lipstick had worn away I could see her lips were every bit as full without it. Some girls wear their make-up thick as masks, like they're terrified the world will see who they really are, but with her it was like the mask didn't fit and kept slipping. I liked the glimpses of what lay beneath - the cinnamon flecks in her eyes, the wide bridge of her nose, the brown hair that kept trying to spring back into curls. Did she have freckles under all that make-up? And did they carry on down to her arms and the tops of her boobs?
"Just so we're clear," I said, trying not to think about what her tits looked like. "You're talking about my dick, right?"
"Yep."
"Okay," I said. "I thought that's what you were talking about."
She leaned back in the car seat as her buzz settled in. "Wow," she said, softly, tipping her head back. Her neck and chest were pale in the dark and her tiny skirt rode up. Her thighs were shiny with some kind of fancy panty hose. "Haven't done this in a while."
"Do you smoke up in college?" I asked, not daring to look at her. I guessed she had to be a college girl.
"Once or twice."
"Where do you go?"
"I don't. I graduated."
I wanted to touch her legs. They were so weirdly glossy. Was it Lycra they used or something? "Let me guess," I said. "English Major?"
She nodded. "I come off as that aimless, huh?"
"No. I was gonna say sophisticated. What with your dick jokes and all."
She laughed. "Hey, nothing wrong with dick jokes. Shakespeare was a big fan."
I offered her the last toke. She shook her head and sank lower on the seat, making her skirt hike up even further. "You made it soggy," she said, as if we'd known one another forever. "Shotgun me instead."
I didn't know if there was e
ven enough left to do that, but I was sure as hell going to try. I put the joint the wrong way around in my mouth; I could feel the heat of it above my tongue. She turned to face me, her mouth open to receive the smoke, her bared neck white as the moon. I snapped my fingers and she breathed in the smoke from my lungs, mouth to mouth.
The joint was burning my tongue. I took it out of my mouth and crushed it out in the ashtray. As I straightened back up to flop into my seat my hand kind of landed in the gap between her legs. I was going to pull back but she said 'No,' and grabbed my wrist, so that we were back where we'd been before, only this time she was not only close enough to kiss but I could feel the heat of her against my hand.
"This isn't fair," I said.
"What's not fair?" she said, her breath touching my lips, her amazing eyes almost black. She moved her hips barely a fraction of an inch, but it was enough to break my resolve. I cupped her in my hand, her underwear just a thin wisp under the nylon. I saw her throat work as she swallowed.
"I'm a man," I wanted to say. "I'm a pig. Don't you know we can't control ourselves? Didn't your mother tell you we only want one thing?"
But I didn't say anything like that; my brain was too fried. Instead I tore her stupid panty-hose open. For a moment I wondered if I was going to get slapped or learn more than I ever wanted about the price of women's hosiery; her eyes were like nothing on earth. Then she mouthed one word - "Please," and it was the work of a second to push her tiny little thong aside and push inside her. She felt like heaven itself.
"This isn't fair," I said, even as she rocked her hips back and forth against my hand. Our foreheads were touching but we hadn't even kissed yet, which for some reason turned me on all the more. "Because I really want to fuck you."
I could feel her muscles shiver inside and it was hopeless - I was doomed to be a man-skank for the rest of my days. My thumb found her clit and I rubbed it with slow circles that made her shudder. Her mouth fell open and for a moment she hung there, gently fucking herself on my hand, panting into my open mouth. I kissed her then and felt her moan echo in her throat. "So fuck me," she said.
