By the time I came around, T was a regular in stoner circles. He was the guy that could get his hands on good weed, acid, speed, mushrooms, and coke from time to time. But that didn’t make him any less freaky.
Going to T’s house to score an eighth was a roll of the dice. He might be zonked in front of his Apple II playing
We didn’t talk much. He was just too strange for me to handle, and I was just the crippled jock tagging along with his pal Wade. He was the only guy in school who actually gave me a bad time about my injury.
Last time I saw T was at graduation. He had spent four years smoking, sniffing, and eating anything he could lay his hands on, alienating virtually every member of the student body, faculty, and administration, and he graduated with an effortless 3.9. Someone told me he had scholarship offers from the computer departments at Berkeley and Stanford. Instead, he did a quarter at Modesto Junior College, started dealing crank, and ended up taking a jolt in county, and later another for the state.
– EASY, HITLER.
I wake up shivering.
– Easy, Hitler.
Why is it cold in the Yucatan? Because it’s not the Yucatan maybe? Ass. Hole. Something growls.
– Shush, Hitler.
I open my eyes, and see a dog as big as a truck. It’s growling and showing me all of its teeth. It’s wearing a collar, but no leash. I tilt my head and look up. Elvis Presley is standing behind the dog. He’s about five eight, wearing pegged black Levis, black engineer boots, and a black leather vest over a white T-shirt, is beanpole skinny, and has sideburns down to his jaw and an oily black pompadour.
– Who the fuck are you and why are you on my fucking porch?
What am I doing on his porch? I start to sit up.
– Don’t fucking move or Hitler’s gonna eat your face.
I don’t want my face eaten by anyone, let alone Hitler. I stick out my hand to ward off any face eating and Elvis grabs the Christmas card that I’m clutching. He opens it.
– What the fuck?
He looks from the card to me, and does the best double take I’ve ever seen in real life.
– Holy shit! Holy piss, shit, motherfucker, tits. Fuckshit. Holy fuckshit, fucking Christ. Fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck me.
– Nice to see you too, T.
He picks up all the money, drags me to my feet, hauls me into the trailer, and dumps me on a couch in only slightly better repair than the one on the porch.
– Still havin’ trouble walkin’, huh, superstar?
He takes the two guns from my pocket. The dog stands in front of me, teeth still bared, assuring that I stay put. No problems there. I close my eyes.
– WAKE UP, superstar.
I open my eyes. T is sitting on the coffee table in front of me, his left hand resting on top of the dog’s head. The dog is an English Mastiff, a light-coated two-hundred-pounder with a sad face. T snaps open a Zippo with an American flag sticker on its side, and holds the flame to the Marlboro Red in his mouth. I stop staring at the dog and reach in my own pocket for a smoke. The dog twitches.
– Hitler, no!
The dog eases back. Comprehension finally dawns.
– Hitler is the dog.
T nods.
– Hitler is the dog.
I take my empty hand from my empty pocket. I’ve lost my cigarettes somewhere. I point at T’s pack.
– Can I have one of those?
He nods, hands me a smoke, and lights it for me.
– Didn’t think superstars like you were supposed to smoke.
I take a huge drag.
– Yeah, things change.
He laughs.
– Shit yeah, they do. Shit. Yeah. I mean, check this out. Me and you, we never had much to say to each other, and yet here we are chatting. How’s that for change? Or how ’bout this? Last time I saw you, you were this kind of fallen, small-town golden child and I was a wigged-out school freak. And now? Wow. I may not have come far, but look at you. Now you’re a full-blown success story, an American celebrity. Must feel great to have all that thought-to-be-lost promise come to fruition. Yeah! Gotta admire a guy with that kind of drive. Can’t get to the top the way you planned, so just go out and blaze a new trail up there. Bang, bang, bang. I tell you, man, everybody back home is real impressed at what you’ve done with your life. Especially, you know who is especially impressed? Wade. Oh, I’m sorry, that should have been past tense, shouldn’t it?
There are burn scars up and down T’s forearms. The smaller ones are dots the size of M&Ms, the largest are lines almost exactly the length of a cigarette from tip, to the top of the filter. T’s favorite game in high school was Cigarette Chicken. Two players press their forearms together and drop a lit cigarette lengthwise into the crease where their arms meet. First one to pull his arm away loses. I never participated. From the fresh pink of some of the scars, it looks like T is still an avid player.
– I didn’t kill Wade.
He stubs his cigarette out in an ashtray made from an old cylinder head.
– No shit, numbnuts, no one said you did. Seems pretty fucking clear to anyone who can watch TV that that punk Danny Lester was to blame for that shit. One look at that guy on the tube and you just know he’s the biggest dick ever. A lying sack of shit, he is. But fuck, who cares, right? Wade is dead all the same, which believe me when I say I think is pretty fucked up, seeing as he was just one of the only people I gave a shit about in the whole world. And now here I come home from a late night of work and find you nodded out on my porch in a pile of money with the Christmas card I sent him in your hand. Which has to beg the question: What the fuck is your fugitive ass doing here, trying to fuck up my already legally fragile situation?
I open my mouth, close it. Open it again.
– I.
I take in his bouncing knee and the way he’s furiously scratching Hitler between the eyes, and I realize for the first time that he’s thoroughly speeded up. He opens his red, jiggly eyes wide as they will go.
– Come on, man, enlighten me.
– OK, I. See. How much? Do you know much about New York? Or?
Oh, Jesus, there is no way I can do this now.
– T, I don’t think I can really.
I open my hands, my jaw slacks helplessly.
– I don’t even know where to.
– Right. Right. It’s late and you’ve clearly had a rough night and would like to get some rest. We can take care of that.
He opens his cigarette box, digs his index finger inside, and pulls out a little white tablet.
– Take this.
– Oh, T, no, that’s such a bad idea right now.
He balances the pill on the tip of his index finger and holds it in front of my mouth.
– Don’t be a pussy, superstar, this is a fucking diet pill. I deal harder stuff to the kids at UNLV so they can cram for their finals. Eat it.
He presses it onto my lips.
