He reached into the suitcase.

Fuck me, I said.

He stood up. Now he was holding a shotgun and jerking off. I can’t fuck you, he said. My girlfriend would kill me. She’d cut off my hair! She’d dismember me.

The gun went off. I felt the bullet rush past my ear. It hit the pillow inches from my head. You weren’t worried, were you? he said. C’mon, let me teach you how to shoot.

He released me and slipped back into the dress. He showed me how to hold the gun, click the safety, how to take the gun apart and clean it, how to put it together again. He stood behind me to guide my aim. The gun had a telescopic sight. We were standing by the bedroom window, looking at a man on the roof of a building across the street.

Get that dweeb, he said. Let me know when you’re ready.

I wanted badly to pull that trigger, but not at a total stranger. All that provocation. It got to me.

I’m ready, I said.

That was the last time I saw Jimmy. He called a month later. He was moving to Hawaii, where he was going to get rich growing pot. He was leaving for the good life. He would call. Don’t forget me, he said. And stay out of the subway.

For a while, he called every week. The land was fertile and the sensemilla was prime. He still wasn’t sleeping. Poachers kept him awake. He shot them. Police helicopters flew overhead. It wasn’t the life he expected. But he was determined to stick it out. Once you go a certain distance, there’s no turning back.

On my worst day of the hepatitis, the mailman brought a cardboard box postmarked Hawaii. Some books for you, he said. The box was filled with plastic sandwich bags of Jimmy’s marijuana, his fat, perfect buds, very clean, very sweet. There was an envelope in the box. Inside it was a Polaroid of Jimmy. He was dressed in a tank top and grinning at the camera. He had a rifle on his shoulder, poking through his hair. I could see mountains behind him and the sky. On the back of the picture it said, How do I look?

After that, we lost touch. People come, people go. They cross your path and alter it. There’s no turning back.

Life grew more complicated. I no longer lived alone. I quit drinking and smoking pot. It bored me. I hated the smell. Twenty years was enough. My relationship ended. I changed my look. I never thought about Jimmy. Until he phoned, out of the blue, an epoch or so later.

Hey, it’s Jimmy! Remember me?

What, you kidding? Jimmy!

He was back in New Jersey, in the town where he grew up. He was a family man, married, two kids. He even had a job coaching high school football. Yeah, he said. White picket fence. The whole nine yards.

He wanted to come into the city. He was clean now, he said, but he still had his weed.

Alice was gone, I told him. Breast cancer. Johnny, his brain exploded. That’s all I knew.

I heard, Jimmy said. But you sound good.

I’m good, I said. Call anytime.

He never did.

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.