Party Favors

TRIC ZINE #19, 2005

The biggest problem was there weren't enough hours in the day. If you could just solve that one, thought Kyle, everything else would flow like butter. Or beer, or the inside of a leaking glowstick, or whatever flowed better than butter. Right now Kyle wished that knucklehead Billy Hickman would hurry up and answer the goddamned phone at the Zippy Lube, because he had a hundred miles to drive in the next three hours, and his jalopy wasn't feeling so hot. But the phone just rang and rang. Kyle wondered what the fuck Billy could possibly be doing at four in the afternoon to not answer, the shop probably full up with customers all jammed together in the waiting room, listening to the phone ring. Keep shit like that up, people start wondering if they brought their rides to the right place.

Finally, Billy came on the line. "Thanks for calling the Benjamin Street Zippy Lube, can I help you?"

Kyle had been cradling the phone on his shoulder while he rushed around his apartment looking for the mixtapes. Usually he kept them under the couch, in two padded carrying cases he liberated from Sound Depot a long time ago using a returned receipt scam, but they weren't there. This worried Kyle, because Rooster, one of his weed buddies and occasional employees, had been couch surfing for two months, until he'd met some cracked out girl from Dover at the last party they went to in New Jersey and shacked up with her. That one had been at an abandoned mental institution, hidden in the woods just off the Garden State Parkway, overgrown with vines and crumbling floors, a real safety hazard. The promoters brought in their own generators, Dieselboy came down from Philly, and there were over a thousand kids there. Not that he suspected Rooster would do something like steal the tapes, but with partykids, you never knew.

So when Billy answered the phone, Kyle nearly dropped his cordless into the back of the closet where he was now digging through boxes of CDs and t-shirts, looking for the mixtapes. "Shit, Billy, where the fuck you been? I was hanging on for two minutes straight!"

"Oh, hey Kyle," said Billy. "I was gonna call you today. I need a little sumthin' sumthin'. Just like, fifty worth."

Kyle whirled around fast and bumped his head on the closet door. "Fuck! Fuck! Not you, dude. What do you need? On the cheese sandwich tip, you gotta talk to Rooster, that guy who was staying here. But I can facilitate. Listen, you gonna be there for awhile? I gotta bring by my jalopy."

"Yeah, I'm here," said Billy, and Kyle could hear him ringing up a customer. "Me and Otis just came back from a pizza break."

"Cool." Kyle hung up and tossed the cordless over onto the couch, aiming for the middle, but the phone bounced off one of the worn cushions and fell on the floor. "Bitch ass motherfucker!" Kyle could see the back of the phone had come off again, and the rechargeable battery was loose. Cheap thing did that all the time. He was surprised it still worked at all. As he bent down to pick it up, Kyle noticed something that looked like newsprint stuck to the black marble coffee table he'd lifted from the UD Student Union in Newark. Kyle loved that table, he'd found it one night while wilding with his friend K'Gai. They'd carted it out around three-thirty, the campus deserted, everything still in the night air around them, carrying the table upside down with two chairs, another triangular-shaped corner table, a mirror, and a lamp balanced precariously in a big illicit furniture pile. As soon as they made it into the bushes across from the Student Union, campus cops drove right by. If they'd been held up a minute more smoking that joint in the elevator, they'd have been busted for sure.

Peering closer at the table, Kyle realized the newsprint was from last week's Delaware Loafing. It was stuck to the table in a ring that looked approximately the size of a beer can. Kyle was pissed. He picked up the phone, tried putting it back together, and wondered why Rooster couldn't have taken a goddamned shower now and then while he was crashing with him. Fucking walked around coated with a thin layer of grime, a glaze, really, always looking half plastered, or high, probably because he was. So it was no wonder his glaze stuck to whatever he touched, including his beer cans, which then left a ring on the table, and that's how the newspaper got stuck. It all made sense, once Kyle thought about it long enough.

But Rooster didn't care enough to clean it up. Why should he? It wasn't his place. Kyle just left the ring there, too, because he was late, and didn't have time for spring cleaning. Kyle was usually late, especially when it came to showing up on time for parties. Hurrying just to be on time for a bunch of goddamn ravers rubbed him the wrong way, even though it also meant he’d wind up making less dough. But getting to a rave on time was close to impossible, anyway. Shit, he had to spend days just digging through all his boxes and making sure he had enough stuff on hand, then nearly a whole afternoon packing the car from back to front. At least twenty boxes crammed full of shit, some of them big boxes. A few were shaped weird, so they wouldn’t fit quite right in his jalopy unless he tied the hatchback down. It was a hassle.

Usually he’d be low on something or other, so he’d have to make a trip to the dollar store and stock back up. Then maybe swing by the Big Jawns and pick up a couple gallons of antifreeze, ‘cuz his jalopy wasn’t really running so great ever since he hit a deer one night coming back from a party in rural Pennsylvania. Kyle never should have bought the used radiator, but he only paid $750 for the jalopy, so he refused to pay more than four hun for any single repair. That’s why the shit ran so funny. Something with the heating and cooling system. The temperature gauge was all fucked up, too. So not ten minutes after he got on the road, that gauge would be right up to the top. But as long as he didn’t go over 60 miles an hour, it wouldn’t go any higher. If it got up like, an inch or so above the top, he’d pull over and add some more coolant. “Car needs a drink,” said Manda one day while they got off the highway halfway to Baltimore, looking for a gas station with antifreeze on hand. Manda used to help Kyle out before Rooster showed up, he was a good guy. Rhymes with Panda. He was from Burma, where there weren’t any raves. Or at least not very good ones.

And it wasn’t just mixtapes they’d be selling. Kyle had moved beyond that scam a long time ago. He did CDs, t-shirts, breakdancing and kung fu videos, toys that lit up, and all the barely legal drug accessories he could think of. Pacifiers, of course. And glowsticks. But if the promoters got cold feet, or the venue owner came around to check out what the vendors were selling so they could sell the same shit themselves next time around, you could always make a case that neither product had anything at all to do with drug use. Glowsticks? Everybody loves glowsticks. They bring back the fun and magic you enjoyed as a child. Crack the stick, and suddenly you’re running through the wet grass on the Fourth of July, waiting for the fireworks to start.

Pacifiers were basically a fashion statement. Just like all the frigging beads and other little kid shit these ravers liked to wear, big floppy hats, and fuzzy bear slippers, like they were going to a goddamned slumber party. It was harder to pull the wool like that about stuff like masks. Face masks. They were a huge item for about a minute. You’d bring in a couple jars of Vicks, buy a box of 100 masks for fifteen bucks from Wal-Mart, then smear a dab on each and sell ‘em at two dollars a pop. The kids couldn’t slip them on fast enough. Kyle wasn’t satisfied until he looked up from his table at three in the morning, peak party time, and saw everybody in the fucking place running around with masks on their faces, pacifiers dangling, clutching a handful of cheap plastic glowsticks.

For once, Kyle had the car almost packed with time to spare before getting on the road, assuming Billy Hickman could hook him up with no holdups at the Lube. But that was before the mixtapes turned up missing. After a few more minutes, Kyle decided the tapes were expendable. Everybody wanted CDs these days, anyway. It was a good thing Kyle knew Harold from the video store, that kid was a frigging electronics genius. Last year, Harold hooked Kyle up with a CD burner and some high tech type of bubble printer that printed real nice, glossy CD labels. Ever since, Kyle had slowly been adding CDs to his product line, bootlegs of the already-bootlegged mix CDs that DJs from faraway states like Connecticut and North Carolina were always handing him at parties, hoping he’d call them up to order multiple copies at $8 apiece wholesale. Kyle figured it wouldn’t be long before all the kids got CD burners, so he should move ‘em while he could. These fucking ravers all had rich parents, and it was 1999, goddammit, everybody was getting rich, even the poor slobs stuck working at hot dog shacks were doing a little day trading on the side.

With the CDs under one arm and the last box of t-shirts under his other, Kyle hustled out his front door and locked all three deadbolts rapid fire. He slid into the front seat of his ride and gunned the engine. Once Kyle was listening to that Car Talk show on the radio, and heard he should wait at least six seconds for the engine to warm up before putting a car in gear, but he still hadn’t found time to try it out. He sped the whole way through his neighborhood, came out on Benjamin Street, and ran two lights in the eight blocks it took to get to the Zippy Lube.

Kyle never carried drugs with him in his jalopy, especially not when he was going to vend at a party, so he was usually a little careless with road rules. Twenty times a night he’d get asked if he sold beans, or knew where the kids could get some, but he honestly didn’t. Not just for fear of selling to the wrong undercover, he also didn’t want to be responsible for some underage kid’s overdose. Plus Kyle knew too many fools who got popped, and he liked life on the outside too much to pull a dumb stunt like trying to sling beans at a rave. Even though he’d probably have made ten times the cash he usually brought home from the glowsticks and whatnot just selling a little on the DL. Using runners, maybe, like this other vendor he knew did.

As Kyle pulled up to the Zippy Lube, he noticed the parking lot was full, as usual. You'd think they were selling drugs, too, for all the business that spot did, but it was their leave-a-twenty-on-the-dash inspection policy that really sealed the deal. It was wide open like that even before Billy started working there, when his friend Otis used to be the assistant manager. That was before Otis got fired for pulling a practical joke on the rest of the crew, by giving them a sealed note and sending them all to the bank at once to make the night's deposit. It was a hold-up note, and the tellers forked over three grand to the hapless Zippy Lube gang, oblivious until they got out to the parking lot, saw the money and realized something funny was up. Lucky for them they didn't run, just hung around looking stupid until the cops wheeled up. It was never clear if this was Otis' master plan to get rich quick and escape from the Lube, or if he was just fooling around, but he got fired fast and barely escaped jail time.

Kyle slammed his car door shut and hurried inside. The waiting room was crammed full of customers, most looking bored and irritated. A line stretched three deep at the counter of heads waiting to pay. Billy was nowhere to be seen, but Otis was there, a slice of pizza in one hand, adjusting the reception on the waiting room's wall-mounted TV with the other. Since getting fired, Otis swung a paper route for the Wilmington News Journal in the mornings, then dropped by the Lube in the pm to hang out with Billy, just like he still worked there.

"Yo Kyle! Whassup, dawg!" Otis was all smiles when he saw Kyle, and the other customers glared at him. Crooked inspections or not, the whole waiting room looked like they'd been waiting too long for Billy to get back from wherever he'd frigging disappeared to.

They bumped knuckles, and Kyle grinned. "Otis, good to see you, man. Where's Billy?"

"Oh shit, you lookin' for him too? Join the club, boy!" Otis took a bite of his slice, piled high with green peppers and black olives. "He was just here, I think he went downstairs to get somebody's paperwork."

Just then, Billy popped back into the waiting room and on cue, the first person in line began to tear into him. Kyle stepped up to the counter, ignoring the drama, and nodded to Billy.

"Hey Kyle," said Billy, rolling his eyes. "Sorry, all the dumbasses in Wilmington been through here today. You waiting long?"

"Naw, man," said Kyle. "I just got here. But I'm totally rushed, I gotta be where I'm going in like, two and a half. Can you squeeze me in?"

Billy laughed. "No problem! Hey, Otis! Get my man's ride here started, okay? I'll be there in a minute."

Otis wolfed down the last of his slice and grabbed Kyle's keys. "Special treatment, right? Yo, where you gotta be?"

Oblivious to the dirty looks coming his way from the entire waiting room, Kyle followed Otis out to his jalopy. "I gotta drive to fucking Clinton, it's like somewhere in suburban D.C. But I gotta be there to set up early, like by seven. Goddamn promoters all paranoid about what we're selling, and it's right near Andrews Air Force Base, so military intelligence probably sending crazy undercovers there to keep tabs on the scene, keep the enlisted away from the ecstasy. It could be a nightmare."

"Whoo-wee, boy!" Otis marveled at Kyle's car, packed from one end to the other with boxes and gear. "You got enough shit in there? You better hope you don't blow a tire or nothin’, 'cuz you ridin' a little low! Then you'd have to unpack all those boxes just to get to your spare, and man, you'd be fucked!"

"Yeah, well, I'm gonna be definitely fucked if I don't get outta here soon enough," said Kyle, as Otis climbed into the front and started the engine. "Treat her gently, dude. She’s seen better days. Like, every day before I started driving her."

Otis giggled, and in a flash wheeled the car like a pro into the Lube's only empty bay. Otis liked to show off, and working on a friends and family favor like Kyle's car gave him a chance to show just what the Lube was missing not having him around anymore. He disappeared down the back stairs, and then Kyle could hear him cursing as he started monkeying around beneath the jalopy. Kyle walked back into the waiting room. He felt a little sleepy, all of a sudden, and figured he'd curl up in a chair underneath the TV while Otis got his ride good to go. Billy was still at the counter, busy arguing with another customer. The TV was tuned to WWVD, Channel 9, Delaware’s local news leader, and there was a program on about people who claimed they’d seen honest-to-god angels appearing in downtown Wilmington. Kyle sat down in the first chair he saw and started nodding off immediately.

The next thing Kyle knew, he was waking up in slow motion to the sound of a very loud backfiring. He looked around, noticed he was all alone in the waiting room, and wondered what time it was. Through the heavy plate glass windows separating the Lube's waiting room from its inner bays, he could see Otis in the driver's seat of his jalopy, gunning the engine. Billy was standing near the back of the car, watching a gigantic plume of thick, black smoke streaming out of his exhaust pipe, shooting out into the parking lot behind the Lube. Kyle thought he must be dreaming, because the smoke seemed to fill the entire back parking lot, and he could almost smell it through the plate glass windows, too. They usually cleaned his exhaust system like this, hooked up some special flush treatment to get out all the impurities, but Kyle had never seen his car smoke so much before. He had a sudden, sinking feeling that something might be wrong.

Right then, Otis started to scream. "Shit! Shit! She's gonna blow, man! Run!" With that, the two of them took off in different directions, Otis running out the Lube's front doors, Billy disappearing into the hazy clouds of black smoke that shrouded the back parking lot. And then Kyle saw his jalopy's poor, overworked engine burst into flames, and he was up from his chair, running out the waiting room's side door himself, still not knowing if he was dreaming or not, but not wanting to take a chance and find out wrong. A few seconds later he heard the explosion, and as he darted into the path of oncoming traffic he looked up and saw flaming glowsticks and pacifiers and oil-smeared plastic CD cases hurtling through the air into the Benjamin Street treetops, and he marveled at how colorful they seemed even in the daytime, and how he was definitely gonna be late to the party now, right before a delivery truck hit Kyle head on and all he saw was black.

Roommate Wanted

I never planned my rendezvous with destiny. Things just happened to turn out the way they did. I would have been the first one to call the cops if I'd known what was going on, but who would have thought something like that would ever happen in a place like Newark, Delaware. Shit, there's hardly anything here except for UD, and you can't hardly call that a real school. I mean, its biggest claim to fame is consistently making the list of the top twenty party schools, but that's only counting ones on the East Coast.

Newark's not that far away from the Pennsylvania border. The Klan is still strong around there, I heard the national grand wizard-poobah-whatever now lives in rural Pennsylvania. They got a permit to march in Newark a few years ago, but so many people turned out to protest the march that the Klan never showed. Dumbass racists.

That's why I was a little freaked out when I first met my roomie back then, right around oh, '98 or '99. He answered my ad for a roommate wanted, well, actually my ad was all set to run in the Wilmington News Journal, but he called even before it did. He'd seen the notice I sent out on the listserv for UD grad students who need housing, although later he admitted he wasn't a grad student. I think he was just using the school's computers. This was before somebody got raped in the stacks of Neimers Law Library and they cracked down on letting outsiders onto campus. Anyway, he said he was living in Bowman, this little tiny rural Pennsylvania town about thirty minutes away, and was looking for a place in Newark.

He seemed a little funny right from the get. He e-mailed me a couple times, all cryptic, and wouldn't answer the simple questions I asked him about how long he needed a place for. Then finally he called me, and wanted to see the place right away. At this point, I really didn't give a fuck. I needed a warm body to fill the spot. My previous roommate was real nice, he was a pothead, deadhead, you name it, if it involved the 60's, he was into it. Adam worked for this group called Save The Earth, until he fell in love with a fellow canvasser who, big surprise, was a major hippie chick, and they both moved to her uncle's farm in Tennessee. I think their plan was to raise medicinal marijuana and babies.

Adam was cool, because he always used to leave his weed in the fridge, and I was welcome to it. Maybe he also moved out 'cuz he was trying to protect his weed. But he jetted right before the summer started, with four months left on the lease. Man, it's murder finding somebody over the summer in a college town. The only cats who don't have their shit all lined by April are the sketchy ones, or the kids who are coming to Newark because their internships with MBNA or Dupont are connected to fellowships at UD, so they're trying to live near campus. But I don't live anywhere great, I mean, there's no washer or dryer, just a clothesline out back, but it's usually in use because the guy downstairs from me has this clean clothes fetish. Day or night, rain or shine, Soggy Britches is out there hanging up some laundry. And the dishwasher doesn't get the dishes all the way clean, plus the same fridge dude used to keep his weed in doesn't close properly, and over time it's gotten kinda worn down. I think the motor's burnt out, 'cuz nothing stays cold. I swear, next summer, I'm gonna look in the $50 or less section of the News Journal classifieds and buy another fridge outta somebody else's house, which is how I found this one six years ago.

Almost nobody else had responded so far to the notice I'd sent out over the listserv, except for a few people with cats. Wow. If you really want to rent your place, I'll hip you to the magic words - "cats welcome." Nobody ever puts that in their ads, so right away, you'll automatically hear from all the mugs with cats. People with two cats, three cats, sometimes more, short haired, long haired, indoors, outdoors, the whole nine. And they all smell great and never, ever shit in the house, except for maybe once or twice two years ago, but they've learned their lesson since. They only reason I was open to cats in the first place is because I had an ex-girlfriend with the sweetest little cat, he used to sleep curled up right by my face, and ever since I sorta missed that little guy. But faced with the reality of my crib becoming a full-fledged cathouse, people calling and e-mailing me left and right trying to bring their critters over to sniff out both me and the turf, I had to just say no.

Besides, my ad hadn't even started running. I'd almost given up on the listserv when I heard from this new guy. So then he shows up to actually look at the place. As luck would have it, right around the time I'm expecting him, the doorbell rings, and it's a fucking canvasser from Save The Earth! They were doing my neighborhood that day! I asked ol' girl if she knew my ex-roomie Adam, but predictably, she's new on the job, a summer recruit. Just as she's leaving the porch, my new roomie walks up. So my guard was a little down from the start, I thought he might have been her canvassing director, or whatever. Nope, he was there to see the room, right on schedule.

I got a weird feeling about him right away. Not bad weird, just funny. He had a shaggy beard, and dark, piercing eyes. He seemed a little jumpy, and talking with him was a little strained, like he hadn't been around people in awhile. This should have been all the warning signal I needed to tell the dude, hey, I got a few other people ahead of you who already saw the place, so I'll call you if it's still available. But at the same time, I was getting desperate. It was five days before the end of the month. My ad wasn't due to start for another two days, and the knuckleheads who wait until three days before they gotta move to read the classifieds are truly a sorry bunch.

It wasn't even my fault that my ad was running so late. The deadline for classifieds to start on a Sunday is Friday, it's been Friday ever since I've lived in Delaware, and I called those bastards at 2 pm on Thursday. Come to find out, since the first of the year, there's a new policy in effect for all real estate ads, and now the deadline's noon on Thursdays. Great. Of course she wouldn't squeeze it in for me, even though I'm a regular classifieds customer and a faithful News Journal subscriber. When I used to stay in Wilmington, I even had a roommate once named Otis who delivered the News Journal. But she didn't care about any of that.

Dude said his name was Robert. Robert Ericsson. Then he said he was from Western Pennsylvania, but had lived all over the country, everywhere from Gainesville to Austin to L.A. and back. That was about all he mentioned about where he was from. Claimed he was thinking about going back to school at UD, studying Horticulture. Which sounded promising. When I asked him if he liked to puff, his eyes lit up, and he said, yeah, sure! So I figured maybe I'd still have a source of fridge weed. He wasn't really clear about how long he wanted to stay, he just said he was applying to some other schools, and might only be around for the summer. I said fine, whatever.

Next thing I know, dude's borrowing my measuring tape and checking out the dimensions of the room, so he could be sure his shit's gonna fit! I was like, hey man, not so fast. But on the other hand, renting the room was the plan. I kept selling him on how quiet the street was, how nice it was having a dishwasher, and how there was a great laundromat just down the street. That made him stop in his tracks. He said something about not liking to go out much, and I was a little relieved thinking the deal might be off, until he asked to borrow my phone book. Sure enough, the dot-com bubble hadn't burst yet, and Sudsy Duds had expanded its operations to include a pickup and delivery service. He also looked up the pizza delivery options, and was pretty psyched to find Newark had at least a dozen places flipping pies. Gotta keep the college students fed.

So that was that, the guy moved in. I was relieved to have the place rented, and for the first week, I kept telling myself he seems nice enough. Then, once it was obvious he was a little nuttier than the average acorn, I kept sane by reminding myself it was only for the summer. After the summer came and went, and my efforts to get rid of him and find a nice, normal roommate all came up short, I shrugged my shoulders and said, hey, how bad could things get?

All the phantom stuff he'd been so concerned about having enough room in the apartment for turned out to be nothing more than two army-issue duffel bags, and a lot of milk crates packed with dog-eared videotapes that looked like they'd all come from the same mom & pop video store. I asked him about them and he said he bought them all from a store in Bowman for a dollar apiece when the place went out of business. Except once that summer when I was watching this flick called "Hardbodies," all about the philosophy of the BBD, which stands for Bigger, Better Deal, and also has lots of naked chicks, I noticed a metallic sticker on the tape that said "Video Plus, Murphy, NC." But I didn't say anything to Robert. By this point, I'd gotten used to him telling tall tales. In fact, he never told the same story twice, about how his applications to school were going, or where he sometimes disappeared to for days at a time, nothing. But it never really bothered me. I decided he was just a habitual bullshit artist, and I'd take the stuff he told me with a grain of salt.

Besides, dude was not only keeping the fridge stocked with weed, it was all over the house! The motherfucker was growing! His room had these two enormous closets, one on each side, and they opened up on exposed rafters, so it got really hot inside. This was another thing that made his eyes bug out when he opened the closet doors with my measuring tape in hand. Said they'd be perfect for his "gardening research." Little did I know exactly what kind of horticulture he had in mind! But I didn't give a fuck, because number one, I just rent the place.

It wasn't like they were gonna haul me into forfeiture court and confiscate the apartment. Our landlord's some Chinese lady named Syreeta who lives in Hong Kong. Her son stays in Wilmington, and every once in a while he shows up to check on the place and make sure we're not breeding animals, or sunbathing on the roof. Those are pretty much the only things Syreeta cares about, that and the six hun she makes off us each month. Dude never thought to check in Robert's closets, maybe he could sniff out pets but not three dozen five foot tall mature female cannibas sativa plants.

And no way they would really take the time to bust somebody for growing weed in Newark. The cops around here have bigger fish to fry. Downtown Wilmington's like, twenty minutes away, and people will hardly drive there after sundown because they're afraid of getting shot. The downtown businesses have private security guards that patrol the streets! All the little shops and stuff close around dark. It's 'cuz there's no middle ground in Wilmington, you either work in a gleaming corporate building and escape to the suburbs daily, or you're one of the little people stuck working at a little job and living in the city, and you're struggling just to make it. Or you've got a city job, in which case you're also struggling, 'cuz there's been a recession on for the last couple of years and everything's gotten cut. Or you're on welfare. That's about all there is to Wilmington. That and the rich people who live on the hill over by Brandywine Park, and that's who the cops and private security guards mostly care about. God forbid they might be afraid to go out to the theatre and enjoy a night on the town.

People struggle in Newark, too. Like I said, there’s nothing in this town except the University. No industries, nowhere for people to work who don’t have college degrees or enough dough to open their own business. And kids come from all over Delaware to go to school here, but if you’re born in Newark, and you’re from the wrong side of the tracks, chances are the closest you’ll get to UD is working as a groundskeeper, housekeeper, or employee in the Physical Plant, spending your life making sure things run smoothly so other people’s kids can get a good education. What’s really fucked up is back in slavery days, some of the same black folks working for the school today had ancestors who built its original buildings, brick by brick. Betcha didn't know there were slaves in Delaware. They might have outlawed slavery, but it’s almost like the University’s still a big plantation.

The thing Robert liked most about the university was the co-eds who walk to class in the mornings and back in the afternoons, ‘cuz there’s a big front balcony and our place is right near campus. Robert spent a lot of his time out there in the late afternoons, when he wasn’t lying around on the living room couch. He also liked taking naps, watching predictable stoner stuff like Cheech and Chong movies, ordering takeout pizzas, and of course, smoking weed. He was usually reading something, and muttering to himself, but it'd always be two three magazines at a time, so I could never tell exactly what he was reading for real, underneath the big copies of the Weekly World News he always kept on the outside. I figured it was probably porno mags, but when I heard later what kinds of stuff he used to subscribe to, and was likely keeping in his room the whole time he lived with me, it really freaked me out.

I mean, I had no idea. It's not like I was keeping up on the news every night. Fuck, I read the paper, but it's mostly for the horoscopes and classifieds! Plus the film reviews and schedules. See, one of my friends used to work for the Regal, this little theatre across from UD on Main Street. The Regal's the only arthouse theatre in Newark, and they've had a deal cooked up with all the chain theatres in town for years where employees of the Regal get to go see chain movies for free, and vice versa. So me and my friend go to the movies for free all the time.

There's all kinds of free stuff like that in Newark, you just have to know where to look. Like, you can call up WVUD, the campus station at UD, and win free tickets to shows at the Rocket in Wilmington, where any bands that bother coming to Delaware usually wind up playing. Why anybody ever bothers paying for tickets to the Rocket when they give them away all the time over the air is beyond me. You can also get free toilet paper on campus, if you don't mind wiping your ass with something cheap and scratchy.

On Wednesday nights, except in the wintertime, the Falung Gongers from the temple in Delaware City serve a free dinner on the campus Green. It's all vegetarian food, and it's all free. You can go through the line as many times as you want, so if you want to get two or three plates worth of food, no prob. It's all veggies and rice and weird Falung Gong applesauce and shit, so if you stick it in the fridge it'll keep for a couple days, long enough to get you close to Sundays, when the Feed The World anarchist kids serve a free dinner at the Little Red Bookshop, right down the street from the only McDonalds in Newark.

Monday nights, there's no cover trivia nights, where you can go to the Moonlight Cafe and win free beer and sandwiches just by answering some silly questions! I swear, people in this town must have nothing better to do on Monday nights, 'cuz that place is jam packed on the regular. There's even a theme song, and people from the audience join in to play it with trombones and accordions. Maybe there's so many people there because all the restaurants in Newark close down on Mondays, and eating's pretty much the only industry in this town besides the University.

I must have developed a heavy tolerance from having so much weed around me all the time in the apartment, because eventually, it didn't seem to get me high like it used to. It was right around the time Nevada voted "No" on legalizing small quantities, in the fall of '02. Robert had been excited all summer long for that shit, yammering on about it whenever I was around, telling me how he wanted to drive out there and volunteer for the cause, and how he was gonna lead the charge to pass a similar bill in Delaware. I was excited too, but after the election, reality set in again. That's when I finally had to tell him he should think about downsizing the garden.

Robert didn't take the news so well, and then we started fighting about other, trivial stuff. I got on a neat kick after four years of living like a slob. I realized I was the only one who'd been cleaning up, wiping down the counters, taking out the garbage, stuff like that. Once I opened his medicine cabinet, and out fell a crusty Ding Dong and half a dozen Rice Krispie Treat wrappers. I asked him to start pulling his own weight on the chores, but he still never lifted a finger. Then I asked if he could maybe start taking off his shoes in the house, and he refused. Live with somebody four years in a weed haze, everything's likely to be fine, but take away the weed, you might just realize they're an asshole. One morning, I woke up and just found him gone. All his things were cleared out, and there was no note, nothing. Talk about no class. That was a few months ago. I didn't hear anything else about him until this past week. Then, when it all made the papers, suddenly everything hit me at once.

Maybe I should go to the cops and tell 'em what I know. That he wasn't really living in the woods for five years, like a mythical Davy Crockett. While armies of FBI and ATF agents were combing the hills of Western North Carolina looking for his ass, he was laughing at them from the relative comfort of a run-down second floor apartment in Newark, Delaware, sitting on the front balcony every afternoon getting stoned, devouring junk food and pizzas, reading his fucked-up white supremacist literature, and watching UD co-eds go by. But to be honest, I don't want the publicity. People might think I was harboring him because I was a racist, or a dum-dum because I didn't realize who he was for so long, or even figure out that I was sharing my crib with a radical right-wing fanatic who hated gays, blacks, Jews, even the Olympics. And screw it, he's not about to talk, mess up his outlaw fugitive image. I'll tell you what, though, this experience has definitely taught me one thing for sure. I'm gonna be a lot more careful next time I need a roommate.

The Green House

1. Irony

I should have known I'd end up back here. This town has been my personal salvation, but also my eternal curse. So once I finally escaped, broke free after nearly ten years wasted in a hazy, sex and booze drenched post-collegiate limbo, and against all odds managed to make it to L.A., where my dreams of fortune and fame as an A-pic screenwriter finally seemed just around the bend, it figures that the only project of mine anyone was remotely interested in turned out to be all about the sinkhole of a place I thought I'd left behind forever. Newark fucking Delaware. Home to UD, the world's only Happy Fingers Massage Parlor located next to a Big Jawns, and the goddamned Green House.

Don't worry if you've never heard of my movie, my amazing magnum opus, The Green House. You're not alone. Except for my circle of college buddies and my ex-fiance's rich friends who we convinced to pony up enough dough to get the thing made, almost nobody has. We got rejected by Toronto, Telluride, Sundance, shit, they wouldn't even show my fucking movie in Burlington, Vermont! I didn't even know Burlington had a film festival.

And you want to know the funny part? It's still not yet finished! Ready for submission and release, maybe, but not done as far as I'm concerned. Three years ago this September we wrapped principal photography, two years ago completed all the necessary re-shoots and dialogue overdubs, with everyone nailing their lines far more brilliantly the second time around then they did during that first disastrous summer's shoot, and a year ago it all got edited down to a rough cut. Everything was coming up roses. Then, all the shit turned sour and really started to stink.

Now I can't wake up in the morning without this fucking digitized turkey laughing at me from deep within the cold, gleaming guts of my blueberry iMac, whispering to me, goading me, telling me that one more edit, one more sound cue, one more second shaved off the response time of a major joke's punchline will make all the difference and turn this sorry mess into gold. Pretty ironic, huh? All I wanted to do when I came to Newark was move into the Green House, all I wanted to do once I'd moved in was get out, and now, I've somehow doomed myself to live there forever, in a celluloid nightmare of my own making that seems to have no end.

When I showed up at UD, I was a freshman, a virgin, and a Princeton hater. I got over the first two quick enough, but the last part stuck with me. It had to do with what happened when I visited Princeton the previous spring. An innocent campus tour of the only one of America's pre-eminent, elite institutions within a two hour drive of home, aka Dover, Delaware.

My tour guide wasn't named Muffy, but she might as well have been, because she smiled and bantered her way through the tour in an oh-so-vacant way, pausing every few feet to wave to another Buffy or Biff who walked by us, and telegraph her obvious contempt at having to degrade herself by showing the kiddies around. We filed into the cafeteria for lunch, and as I was coming out of the line, I slipped on a patch of slick faux granite, or whatever the fuck kind of space age linoleum they had in there, and the entire contents of my tray went flying into the middle of the Princeton mess hall floor. A blonde girl wearing a tight sweater and insanely short checkered skirt whirled around and yelled, "Nice going, dork!" In a flash the whole lot of them were laughing at me, a sweet, helpless 17-year old with red hair and freckles from Dover, all the kids at tables, Muffy the tour guide, everybody. As I looked around the room at their cackling, moronic, in-bred, privileged, evil little faces, that's when I knew I was probably going to UD.

It felt like heaven just arriving on campus as one of the unwashed freshman masses at Delaware's finest state university, even though they stuck me in Neimers, this hideous ten story dorm that holds about 1,000 undergrads, conceived by an architect whose main line of work was designing prisons. Before long, I had discovered the finer points of life in Newark. That very first weekend, I skipped the wanna-be Princeton frat and sorority rush scene and went to a house party I heard about from a guy wearing a Smiths t-shirt who was buying two bottles of gin at Big Bertha's, which was the mom & pop-owned supermarket across from campus before they tore it down and put up a Be-Lo.

I walked up the lawn with the two coolest guys I'd met on my hall, and somebody fell off the roof, right in front of us. He landed in the middle of a tangle of thick roots that knotted up the entire front yard of this house, which was strewn with more empty beer cans and liquor bottles than I'd ever seen in my life. He looked up at me, smiled, and passed out. Later I found out he was DM'ing, probably swallowed a whole bottle. Sometimes when you drink that stuff you can fall to the floor and bounce right back up like a puppet on strings, but this guy wasn't so lucky.

Once we made our way through the clouds of cigarette smoke and shadowy bodies sprawled around the porch stoop, we stepped through the front door and found a raucous Green House party in full swing. They called it that because the whole outside of the house was painted lime green in ancient, peeling paint, even though we couldn't see it in the dark. The only light in the front room came from a single white beam trained on a huge disco ball suspended from the ceiling, spinning and reflecting all over the room, and two dingy colored bulbs in ornate, gothic looking plastic fixtures that hung above a fireplace along one wall. The room was full of bodies, the sound system blaring Deee-Lite's "Groove Is In The Heart," every window in sight steamed up and dripping with sweat. As I scanned the crowd of Newark's aspiring bohemians, scenesters, theater types, drag queens, small time campus cons and makeout artists, all of them writhing to the rhythms of Lady Miss Kier, I knew I had found a place where I could belong.

But it was the mural of Patty Hearst that clinched the deal. She covered an entire wall of one of the downstairs bedrooms, and she was beautiful. It was Patty as Tania, clutching a machine gun, in that scene caught on the security cameras when she helped the SLA rob some bank. I stared at her with awe, wondering how many similar nights of decadent debauchery she'd witnessed with her inscrutable, smiling gaze. One of the girls who lived in the house told me she was painted by a famous local hippy muralist who left similar murals on walls of houses all over the Newark neighborhoods that surrounded UD back in the 60's and 70's, but she was one of only two left. "All the rest got painted over," she said, with a sad, half-drunken giggle, as we stood and pondered the injustice of it all. Later that night, she forgot ever meeting me when a townie who played drums in a Ramones tribute band showed up, but we had our moment, worshipping beneath Patty's timeless image as the party raged around us. It was then that I vowed to myself that one day, I too would live in the Green House.

2. Memories

"Something wrong, man?"

Jonah had a funny look on his face as he put down the copy of Adult Video News he was thumbing through. "You know, we used to hang out at that house a lot back in the day."

Stanley giggled. "Yeah, wasn't your older brother like the head poobah of that place and shit? How come he isn't writing the script?"

Just then, Emma came rushing through the door to the break room, her eyes blazing. "Guys! What are you doing right now?" She almost bumped into Stanley, who was balancing on top of the refrigerator, methodically removing tiles from the ceiling.

Jonah shrugged. "Just hanging out, reading stuff."

"What's up, girl?" Stanley sneezed and stirred up a huge cloud of tile dust.

Emma collasped on the couch next to Jonah, all out of breath. "You would not believe what's going on out there. Remember that fucked up film crew you were telling me about?"

Jonah and Stanley exchanged glances, and it took Emma a second to catch her breath before continuing. "They're filming a scene from their little movie right now in downtown, the city's got the streets blocked off and everything, and two of the main characters are like, riding in this big lime green car being chased by a whole gang of neo-nazi type skinheads! Half the dumbasses in Wilmington are over there lining the streets trying to get themselves into a wide angle crowd shot."

Jonah rolled his eyes. "Very serendipitous, because we were just talking about that bullshit."

Stanley pulled out a flashlight and shined it up into the crawl space above the tiles. "Yeah, I bet your older brother's pissed. He should sue their asses."

Emma remembered. "Oh yeah, didn't he used to live in that house? What's the movie called, The Green House?"

"Right," said Jonah, "the movie's an Animal House rip-off cooked up by a dude named Brian who used to live there. He tried hard, but he's out of his depth trying to capture the true vibe of that place. Stan & I used to drive down to Newark and visit my brother there all the time with our Palestinian friend Firas, who we haven't seen in a couple of years."

Emma's eyes went wide. "I remember that cat! He was super political. Probably on an Israeli hitlist as we speak 'cuz of how outspoken he was about the Palestinian national liberation movement."

Now Stanley was on his toes, peering up into the crawl space, and his voice echoed a little. "That's heavy. Straight up, that place was mad cool. We were always going over there to get high."

Jonah laughed. "Every time we showed up someone was puffing a legendary amount of weed!"

Then Stanley got all serious, and sat down on the refrigerator, legs crossed in the lotus position. "But yo, Jonah's right. The Green House was about a lot more than smoking weed. It was like, all about diversity. Kids from different racial, sexual, gender, and national backgrounds, all living together in harmony united by their common bohemianism."

Jonah nodded. "Yeah, that place was like an underground United Nations. It didn't matter if you were black or white, Indian or Japanese, Bahamian or Bolivian. And it was totally co-ed, there were gay and straight cats living side by side, everybody was an artist, musician, writer, actor, or activist."

Emma pulled out a little plastic film canister and started packing a bowl. "Weren't you telling me that place was like ground central for all kinds of organizing? And how they had kids sleeping on the couches for a while who were national staffers of that SDS-like organization they were trying to found at UD?"

"Totally!" said Stanley. "One of those cats, his name was Ernesto, and he was this native American from Guatemala or somewhere. Worked in military intelligence, until he got radicalized. Or some weird shit like that. Anyway, we flowed by there one day, middle of summer, nobody in sight. Breeze blowing through the windows. Right when you passed through the living room, there was this little hallway at the bottom of the stairs with a really tall ceiling. That's where the phone was. So me and Jonah are both standing there, and he's about to use the phone, leave voice mail for his bro, when from directly above us comes this silly giggle. And we look up, and it's Ernesto!"

Jonah took the bowl from Emma and paused before lighting up. "He didn't even live there, he just liked to drop by the Green House every once in a while and meditate up in that little alcove, wedged between the walls." Then he took a long, slow hit, smoke curling out of his nostrils and drifting up towards the crawlspace above the ceiling tiles, before settling back into his corner of the couch.

3. Reality

"Whaaaatt?!" Zep shook his head, and his dreads waved from side to side. "At least your character's the lead."

George didn't look so excited. "Yeah, but the whole time, it's like the central joke is that he's still in grad school."

K'Gai set his drink down on the bar. "Remember when this place used to be Caffe Double? I used to come here all the time."

"When you weren't playing your flute, delivering newspapers, or blunted," laughed Zep.

"I don't see why you two are bent out of shape at all," said K'Gai, ignoring him. "They even called you up to go be in it. I didn't find out about it until those friends of Dexter's little brother told me, and they had me all worried. Stanley said I should sue their asses for character assassination. But then I read the script, and it's all good."

George downed the rest of his beer. "They made your character the right race, for one thing."

Zep doubled over, hysterical. Then he calmed down a little. "That was kinda fucked up. I didn't know about the shoot either, but I've DJ'ed at that house where they shot it plenty of times. If I'd showed up, and seen some white kid playing the DJ, but with my name? Yo, speaking of, I love Duncan's character. What'd they call him, Shakes?"

"Plus made him the original white negro. That was cute. Oh shit, fellas!" K'Gai had been staring at the bar's mirror, and now he spun around in his seat and pointed out the window. Outside, a very foxy looking sister passed by, headed to evening classes at UD.

"Nice," agreed George.

"Yo, why do you care about the grad school thing?" As soon as he said it, Zep felt K'Gai kick him underneath the stools, and he remembered. George was still in grad school, going on twelve years, and it was a sore subject. At least he was shooting for a PhD.

"I don't want to talk about it," said George.

4. More Stories

Stanley woke up with a start and almost fell off the refrigerator. "Shit, I feel all light headed. And my legs fell asleep."

"You're just stoned," laughed Emma. "Tell me some more stories about the Green House."

"The place was off the hook," said Stanley, not missing a beat. "Jonah's brother and his crew furnished the whole place with furniture stolen from UD, then masterminded these dope-ass campus-wide parties that drew like, 500 or 600 heads a crack to a wide-open den of all-night hedonism kids had only dreamed college would be like. Even when we'd go over there on a weeknight, there'd always be a crowd of like, ten or fifteen people just chilling, bullshitting, scheming. A 24-7 party. It was mad."

Jonah slouched a little further down on the couch. "Don't forget, the whole while they were pulling sophisticated pranks like disposing their used mattresses in the right-wing student body president's office, and cooking up mad political campaigns like electing their friends to the Newark city council and running grassroots voter registration campaigns at concerts all over Delaware, before there even was a Rock The Vote."

"Wow," said Emma, taking it all in.

Jonah smiled. "Bottom line, my brother's philosophical about the whole thing. Y'know, he didn't even live in the house by the time Brian showed up. His whole crew had pretty much graduated and passed the torch onto a new group of kids, whose ranks were slowly infiltrated by slack motherfuckers who let the place deteriorate until they were all kicked out for being slobs."

Suddenly, Stanley got all agitated. "Yeah, but what I find offensive is how this Brian guy based his whole movie on shit that went down back when we were hanging out there! And he's based his characters on real people, but selectively changed key aspects of their personas, and now they're nothing but frigging caricatures!"

"Right," said Emma, "so your beef is that you knew the cats who actually lived the life, and these other kids that the movie's based on just imitated it."

Stanley was still hot. "Be blunt, man! Dude is totally whitewashing this whole story, and relegating its non-white characters to predictable, played-out roles! The main character's white, but he's based on a hipster from NYC who was half-black and half Chinese. The secondary character's also white, but he's based on a guy whose real role at the Green House was somewhat incidental, aside from the comic relief he provided when he slept on the couch for a year while still commuting to school at Princeton."

"What about K'Jay?", said Jonah, struggling to keep his eyes open. "He's black."

Stanley was fuming, and looked like he might levitate into the crawl space. "Don't even get me started. Yeah, one of the major characters is black. And he's based on the coolest cat who lived there, this dread named K'Gai. Check it. His real name is Akinwole K'Gai. Very afrocentric. He was the editor of Black Think, the main organ of the Black Student Movement at UD, which was a sorry-ass newsletter before he get there and the hippest publication on campus when he left. Akinwole was admittedly the biggest pot smoker at the Green House. But he was an intellectual, politically engaged, and a seeker of truth."

Emma was speechless, and Jonah sat up, suddenly wide awake. "You're pissed because in the movie, he's this one-dimensional weedhead whose most political act is giving a speech to the crowd at the big party asking them to contribute to the keg."

Stanley continued. "Well, he does dose the neo-nazis with LSD at their meeting, which is cool, but even so, it's while he's there working as a waiter, I mean, on a catering job. Gimme a break. And to add insult to insult, his character's name is K'Jay. While we're on the subject, why is the DJ in the movie called DJ Zep, who was the real DJ at all the Green House parties, but he's played by a white guy instead of a black dread like the real DJ Zep? Why use his exact name if you're not going to be true to the icon? And it's not only a racial whitewashing, it's a political white-out, too! There's no overt political content in this flick whatsover!"

Emma shook her head. "That's really wack."

Jonah just shrugged. "It's called fictional license, guys."

5. Dreams

I guess I wan't too hung up over the would-be Princeton boneheads in the frat scene at UD, because I did end up joining a frat myself, eventually. It was Psi Fi, the cool, offbeat frat, but it was poor consolation. All the while the Green House continued to exist on the other side of Newark, starring a rotating cast of bohemians, musicians, and weirdos, and I'd sometimes end up at parties there, having a great time, still secretly wishing I lived there myself.

After I graduated, I settled into a hazy stretch of making up for too little time spent chasing girls and having fun while I was still in school. My career as a scenester lasted several years, and finally, through a strange twist of events, I fulfilled my ultimate Newark fantasy by moving into the Green House. Then, I don't know what happened. It was great and all, but the reality was a little less romantic than my dream. Nobody seemed to be in charge of the bills, the place was falling down around us, it was like a flophouse in search of a den mother. And at that stage of my life, I didn't have enough energy to reverse the trend. Within a year and a half, we all got kicked out so they could renovate the place and rent it out to sorority girls.

I took it as an omen, and headed for L.A., elated to have made it out of Newark before I turned thirty. I'm not even going to go into what happened to me when I got out to the West Coast. I went through periods afterwards when I was severely depressed that things hadn't fallen into place easier, convinced myself there was something wrong with my timing during those first crucial months, and that I had narrowly missed out on some chance meeting with someone, some director, or producer, or somebody, one of those fateful connections that could have made everything turn out differently for me. I'm also trying to forget about the backstabbing bunch who shared the group house I moved into just outside Brentwood, a place that made the Green House's dying, squabbling days look positively benign by comparison.

What I'm really trying to do in my movie is capture the magic that made me fall in love with the Green House to begin with. A lot of other people felt that magic too, and a lot of them have stories of their own to tell about the place. Even famous people lived in the Green House. There was Curtis Clintwood, star of several real blockbuster movies. Like Five Fingers of Tooth, which was the sequel to Tooth Chow, this movie about a vampire superhero from Hong Kong terrorizing the streets of Miami. Curtis was one of the victims, actually, he was one of Count Tooth's victim's victims, he was the young intern on duty in the ER at South Beach General when they brought in one of the streetwalkers who got bit by Count Tooth.

And Curtis also had a great role in Up From The Deep, about the giant octopus aliens who decide to conquer the world one day, not realizing Eric Stolz is on the case. An Eric Stolz action vehicle. Betcha didn't know one of those was around. Curtis played one of the desperados who are trying to hijack this floating casino that just happens to be anchored off the coast of Los Angeles when the alien octopus clan makes their bold move. You could tell which desperado he was right off the bat, all the rest of them were big, beefy, mercenary looking dudes, then there was Curtis, who weighs about 130 pounds wet. But he kicked some ass, anyway! He blow smoke in somebody's face, and punched some guy during a fight. This was before the octopus aliens ate him alive.

Then there was Penn Bolds, the famous singer songwriter with the piano keys of gold. Penn only lived in the Green House for a couple months one summer, he eventually moved out because he couldn't get any work done. Good thing he didn't move his piano in, because it might have fallen through the living floor right down into the basement, then the whole place would have been devoured by an angry plague of camel crickets. They lived down there by the hundreds.

Oh, and lots of bands used to pass through the Green House. There was a fully outfitted practice space in the basement, which the camel crickets loved, because they nested in the mattresses that blocked off the windows for soundproofing. There'd usually be at least a few practice sessions a week in the living room, and the bands would perform during parties. There was Veda Dada, Pine Street, and various short-lived incarnations of bands featuring Green House residents and ex-members of famous Newark outfits like Silverflake Father, and Superduperchunk. Hans Jowie from the Three Quarter Revolvers was in a band with my housemate George, the guy who became the lead character in my script, even though that character's also half based on me. People are always asking me how come that character's a white guy. Sure, George is half Jamaican and half Chinese, but I've got red hair and freckles, and I wrote the goddamned script, okay? It's my story, if you don't like it, go make your own movie! Besides, the only male lead we could find with any talent who was willing to work on a low-budget movie like ours had red hair and freckles!

I'm going to stop worrying about finishing the film, getting it accepted by some festival, or selling it to a cable channel as a last resort, and look on the bright side. By the time this movie finally hits the street, so much time will have passed that one of our previously unknown stars will probably have struck it famous, and then we'll get swept along on their magic carpet. It could happen. Then I can stop thinking about the phantom business meeting or small talk connection at a party I missed when I first got out to L.A. in '97, the crucial missed opportunity that closed Hollywood doors to me I never ever knew were open, and finally put the goddamned Green House behind me.

6. Whatever

"Look, fuck it," said Jonah, brightening up. "It doesn't matter anyway, because their budget is barely $150,000. The biggest stars are a kid who played the bully in A Christmas Story, and some unknown actor who had scenes in Crooklyn and Cop Land, but they all got cut out. Realistically, who's ever gonna see this movie?"

Stanley started climbing down from the refrigerator, shaking his head. "You so don't know that. And you forgot to mention that Heather Matzo-what's-her-name from Welcome To The Dollhouse is in this shit, too, she's a recognizable commodity."

Emma gasped. "Maybe some major studio will buy it and push it as a Can't Hardly Wait for the about-to-go-to-college set."

They all laughed, and Jonah handed Emma back her bowl. "Well, great, 'cuz then we can say we were there passing the blunt around and they got it all wrong."