Chapter 7

The next morning I emailed in sick.

Erik:

Got no choice but to bag it today, man. Strongly suspect some fish tacos from last night and I will,
hoo baby I will leave it at that lol. Stand by for further updates on my condition. Very sorry for any
inconvenience and very truly,

yours,
Billy

After talking with Pancho the night before I’d set my alarm for 6:00, so I could get up
and write it then. I knew Erik would check the timestamp, and perhaps imagine I’d sent it
from the toilet, or something.
Or maybe he would make the connection. He’d fired Pancho long after I’d gone
home. So there was a chance he thought I didn’t know yet. But of course he knew Pancho
and I were tight enough to communicate outside of work hours. I’d once overheard him tell
Lauren we were “as thick as thieves.” I’d been just about to step out of the bathroom, and
stopped when I heard them speaking outside in the hall. Erik gasped audibly when he
bumped into me leaving The Buttercup.
I’d planned on going back to sleep but I’d gone to bed so early the night before I felt
rested. I went down to my truck and drove around for a bit. I was rarely out and about this
early. Shadows were everywhere. I stopped at a Denny’s ordered bacon and orange juice, and
read The New York Times. I felt sophisticated and in control of my destiny.
By 9:00 I was bored. I thought about just going into work anyway, telling Erik things
had cleared up rather miraculously. After all I wasn’t getting paid. These were hours that
would come out of my monthly invoice. Just one day off was costing me…well, it was
costing me what I would’ve made for a day’s work.
On the way back home I decided, instead, I wanted to smoke weed. I don’t do that
very often (that is, typically, I don’t do it unless the opportunity sits down in my lap and puts
its arm around my neck). I could’ve stopped at a dispensary. There were probably half a
dozen of them between the diner and my house, dingy little places with green branding and
pharmacy signs. Hell I could’ve downloaded an app and had it delivered to my door. But
where was the fun in that?
I don’t think I had exchanged, in my life, more than 20 words with Arturo, in
addition to however many we’d spent introducing ourselves the day I moved in. He must
have thought I was insane, knocking on his door before 10 a.m. and asking if he had any, I
hadn’t even said it, I’d put a finger and a thumb up to my mouth and made a smoking
motion. His eyes lit up. He put a hand on my shoulder. Mijo, he said. Entre. Arturo is in his
early 40s, balding, and well over six feet tall with an Armenian-esque allotment of chest hair.
He was wearing a robe, open, and a pair of silk boxer shorts. He was carrying a cup of coffee
in one hand and a cigarette in the other. For whatever reason, that morning I’d wanted to

1
buy weed the way I imagined other people doing it. I’d wanted to dip my toe in the
cinematic underworld. Arturo was coming through.
We sat on either end of a couch with sunken cushions and rust-colored upholstery.
Arturo rolled a joint on the coffee table, making a mess with the leaves. The bamboo shades
on the window behind us were half furled. A little sun was coming through.
—I didn’t know you smoke, he said.
—You didn’t know I didn’t either.
—Ha.
—Haha.
—Here. Take this.
I hit it pretty hard. I could hear it crackling just beyond the tip of my nose, like a
campfire, or a pile of burning leaves, which I suppose that’s what it was. I tried very hard not
to cough, and I did manage to keep a lid on it for 10 or 12 seconds, but eventually I couldn’t
help it. I looked at Arturo, relieved to see no reaction. He was busy rolling another. After a
few seconds I hit the joint again, more careful this time to take the smoke down in diluted
form, with a big gulp of air, and passed it to Arturo. He hooked it in his lips and kept rolling,
sweeping the leaves up off the table with his hand and dumping the kief from the grinder
onto a plate. He licked the rolling paper, sealed the second joint shut, set it aside, took a drag
of the first, and reclined luxuriously on the couch.
Previously, when I had passed him in the parking lot or in the hallway outside of our
apartments, he had always struck me as focused and insular. He walked with his hands in his
pockets and his head down.
I marveled at how often in this cold lonely world we are just one overt request or
gesture away from making a new friend. Do you have a job? I asked.
—Do I look like I have a job?
—I don’t know.
—You’re not a cop, are you?
—Do I look like a cop?
—Sort of.
—I’m not a cop.
—How is it treating you? he asked me.
—This?
—Oh yeah.
Answer: honestly, in retrospect, like it was trying to eat my soul. Here is a lesson for
anyone who might need it. “Weed” is not just “weed,” anymore. And if on a whim you bum
from your 40 year-old unemployed Mexican neighbor you’re not getting beginner stuff.
—Speaking of unemployment, I said. They fired my best friend last night.
—Who did?
—The people I work for.
—Oh man. I’m sorry.
—He’s pretty fucked up about it, I said.
—I bet.
—I am too.
—I’m sorry to hear that.

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 —My boss is a terrible person. People like that should not have power.
—Do you want me to kill him?
—Kill him?
—Yes.
—Maybe.
—I can do it for you.
—Could you?
—If you pay me.
—He’s Egyptian.
—Your boss?
—No, my boss is lily white and nonreligious. My friend is Egyptian. He’s Muslim. I
bet they fired him for that. He used to pray in his car on his lunch break.
—He’s really Muslim?
—Uh huh.
Arturo was hunched over, his chin in his chest, watching the smoke come off his
joint. A sunbeam was laying across the armrest at his end of the couch, so he had a good
detailed view of it. Muslims are crazy, he said, don’t you think?
—Some of them.
—I’ve never been friends with one.
—Me neither. Not before him.
—Hmm.
—Maybe you would like Muslims.
—Maybe.
—Maybe you could team up.
—Team up?
—Against all the racists in America.
—Muslim is not a race brother.
—Tell that to the racists.
Arturo stewed on this for a moment. I could see him wrestling with it intently. Finally
he reemerged with an answer: I’m not teaming up with any Muslims, he said. He waved his
joint at a cross on the far wall by the television, hanging from which was a gaunt and forlorn
Christ figure.
—You’re serious about that? (I pointed to it too.)
—I don’t see the point otherwise.
—Aren’t you just defaulting to something?
—No.
—I bet your parents are catholic. I bet their parents were too.
—That doesn’t make me wrong.
—But it might be a reason for asking questions.
—What makes you think I haven’t?
—Most people haven’t.
—Do I look like most people?
—Most people don’t.

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 He pointed to the crucifix again. He was wagging his fingers and staring at it, pausing
for a moment to formulate something.
—Show me another religion, he said, or a philosophy, where God knows what it’s
like to suffer. I’m not interested in an abstract principle or cosmic super-force that doesn’t
have any fucking idea what it’s like to hurt. I’ve been on that cross myself.
We sat quietly for a moment. I was familiar with his sentiment. A God coming down
to soil himself with the poor and die a criminal’s death was a commonly cited note in
Christian marketing pitches. Arturo passed me the joint.
—That doesn’t make it true, I said. If you grew up where Pancho did you’d have a
nice speech like that for being Muslim. You’re still defaulting, in a way.
—Well it’s better than defaulting to nothing.
—Is it?
—You can’t do anything with nothing. You gotta have something.
—I’ve got myself. And I’ve got my pride. That God up there on that torture rack still
wants me submit. But I need a few answers first. I wanna know why anybody’s suffering at
all. Because He could’ve stopped it, and didn’t. So I’ll stay off my knees, thank you. I’ve been
on that cross too.
—Your family is Christian?
—Yes.
—Then it’s in you, he said. You’ll come around.
This made me angry.
—I bet I won’t.
—You will, he said with perfect placidity.
—Watch me.
We were quiet for a moment while I brooded and Arturo lit another joint, still
smiling, perfectly and absurdly content in his position the way only religious people can be.
Perhaps it was the weed. My anger left me quickly.
—You got a girlfriend? Arturo said.
—Kind of?
—Kind of? Poor girl.
—Her name is Katerina. She’s over here a lot.
—I’ve seen you two together. I thought that’s who you were talking about. She’s
pretty. She has a very nice ass.
—I feel bad about the way I treat her. I’m lucky to have her. It hasn’t been easy for
me over the years, with the womenfolk.
—Why is that?
—Why is what?
—Why haven’t you had luck with women?
—I’m shy, I said.
—Me too.
—Plus I’ve got this thing on my face.
—Yeah that thing is gnarly.
—Thank you.
—Can you see it, out of the corner of your eye?

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 —A little, if I look down.
—My sister has one like that, on her forehead.
—Why doesn’t she have it removed?
—Same reason as you I assume.
—What reason?
—I don’t know. What is your reason?
—I don’t know.
—Interesting.
—What about you?
—Women?
—Yeah.
—I’ve been divorced twice.
—Kids?
—Four. They all live in Mexico.
—Girlfriend?
—No.
—Fuck buddy?
Arturo took a big deep drag, letting the question hang just long enough for me to be
sort of embarrassed by it, and then jabbed two fingers at another wall, to our left, putting a
kind of arch in his motion, which I understood to mean the apartment on the other side of
mine, where Lisa lived.
—You’re kidding.
He jumped his eyebrows and grinned.
—You dog!
—It’s not bad either.
—You fucking dog!
Suddenly he stopped smiling.
—I wouldn’t hurt her, he said. It’s not like that. She’s lonely.
—I see, I said. It’s pure charity.
He raised two fingers again, the joint stuck in between them, pointing at me this time.
You…are kind of a smartass, he said.
As I recall, there had seemed to be a strange new aggression in his voice, directed at
me without a hint of playfulness. As I recall, I felt my insides turning over. Then I
remembered his offer to murder Erik, and I was unable, replaying it in my head,
remembering his face, to locate any flippancy in it. I considered whether, having reached a
bona fide impasse in our discussion of Christianity, there were not now a wall between the
two of us. I considered, too, whether that famous cannabis-induced paranoia weren’t kicking
in. In that moment, if I’d been able to stand up without falling over, I think I would’ve run
out of Arturo’s apartment.
I spoke but my voice seemed to belong to someone else.
—How long?
—Lisa?
—Yeah.
—Maybe three months, he said.

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 —Well you two are awfully sneaky about it.
—It’s usually in the afternoon, before you get home. And when it isn’t we hardly
make a peep. She insists it be perfectly silent.
—She wants to hide it?
—No, it’s some kind of fetish. Like, she opens her mouth and makes all the faces,
but no sounds come out, like she’s deaf or something.
—No shit. And she makes you do the same?
—Yeah.
—Lisa!
—I know, right?
—What is Lisa? Like 45?

[HAD HIT IT HARD, THEN TEMPERED MYSELF, THEN GOTTEN LOST

IN CONVERSATION AND ACCIDENTALLY GONE TO FAR; HOW I FELT]
[FALL ASLEEP?]