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

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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 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

2
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.
—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.

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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 waved at it too.)
—What would be the point if I wasn’t.
—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.
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 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 might know what it’s like to suffer but he still wants me submit. Well, 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.

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 —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?
—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.

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 —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.
—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?]