Chapter 7

I wake up at five in the morning with the blankets of the couch suffocating me with my own body heat. How did I get on the couch? The living room is dark and and the only thing I see is the lights of the clock. A dog barks and a car drives by, headlights invading the room. I grab the remote and turn the TV on. People talking about some kid who killed people at a school. A stupid annoying cartoon with too many colors. A commercial advertising the likeness of an attractive red headed women with soft luscious hair. A Spanish channel. I leave it on the Spanish channel.

Upstairs I hear Annie open her window, probably smoking a joint. I get off the couch and my feet find the warm cave of my house shoes, brown and soft and terribly disgusting, tainted with years of dank feet sweat. Flashes of intense Latino facial expressions make me laugh and the laughing makes my head hurt. Movement upstairs. Footsteps. Annie doing something. What the f**k is she doing?

Upstairs the light in the hallway is blindingly dark, and light from Annie's room comes on and seeps out under the door. I stop in front of her door and hear her talking on the phone, dramatic whispers sometimes becoming loud enough to bleed through the door. 

“I don't know what you're going to---”

Footsteps. Something falling on the floor.

“S**t, why don't you for once just---”

In my bedroom Andrea's still asleep and for a minute I stare at her expressionless face before I reach under my bed and grab my marijuana box. I stand in the doorway holding the wooden box, open the lid slightly and the smell of overwhelming herb warms me. I look back at Andrea and she shuffles in a dream. 

Walking downstairs I can hear the muffled voice of Annie talking on her phone and her agitated conversation reminds me a younger Andrea. The television is displaying a commercial with a flashing telephone number. I grab a blanket off the couch and turn the television volume down after laughing at a Mexican midget and go outside, cradling the wooden box.

The sky is dark and fog filled. I mist is very visible and almost tangible. I walk across the lawn towards the garage and open the side gate and greet the awoken dogs in the backyard. Their muddy feet thrash at my sweatpants and I gently nudge them away yet to no avail.

“Will you f**k off!”

The dogs scramble away and I open the side door that goes into the garage. The room is freezing and vague lights shine off of Andrea's car. My hand practically seduces the wall for five minutes until I find the light switch. I set the box down and open the bottom drawer of the tool cabinet and take the bong out, the red glass bleeding crimson light on my palm. I pick up the box and go back outside, fighting the dogs off with my house shoes.

Over by the pool I sit in one of the chairs at the table and set the box down and throw a ball to keep the dogs away from me. The glass of the bong is cold and the color is so sexy. I set the bong down and open the box, sorting through all the random paraphernalia until I find the bag of weed and a 1963 Zippo lighter that my dad gave me. I pack the weed into the stem of the bong in haste, terrible haste, and the weed is sticky on my fingers and the dogs walk slowly around me, their eyes bugging out, their snouts convulsing, they know what I'm doing, they know exactly what I'm doing, and my thumb ignites the fire and the milky smoke fills the bong and my head tilts up towards the dark sky, shooting out a cloud of ignited marijuana and the sun makes its first appearance.

The neurons in my brain feel loosened, as if they were all held clumsily together by a wad of glue, and the warm, baking smoke filled my brain and melted the glue away, and the glue is slowly oozing down my nostrils, past my nose hairs, and random natural nostricalities. I then realize that the glue in my nose is just mucus, warmed by the smoke and loosened from the bong hit.

From outside I look through the window and see the light from the television. The image of a serious faced Mexican midget makes me cough out the consecutive bong hit prematurely, but the coughing forms a pressure in the core of my brain and releases a euphoric ecstasy and I slouch down in my chair and look at the nearest dog, Sadie. The other two are off sniffing around the grass or pissing on Andrea's f*****g ugly garden gnomes. Sadie, a black terrier dog, sits on her hind legs and looks up at me, as if she wants some of the weed, her black eyes bulging out of her head, the carbon dioxide steaming out of her nostrils and clouding her eyes, those black eyes, no white scapula visible, just the black cornea staring at the black and white image of me sitting in the chair, a bong cradled in my crotch, smoke whispering out the top on the bong, staring back at the dog, staring and then it sees me take another hit off the bong and she opens her mouth and her tongue falls out, craving the smell, the mysterious other form of nutrition, not a liquid of water or a solid piece of chicken, but a visible vapor, something like a cloud but with more of a consciousness to it, disappearing inside me and then shooting back out in front of the cavity of my face like a volcano. I take one more hit off the dying weed, the life slowly burning out of it and directly into me. I blow the smoke in Sadie's face and she runs off barking.