Jason is an old friend of mine. He usually surfaces when the events in his life have taken on such a dire and futile spiral that there's nobody else fucked-up enough to stomach his ruined ideologies but yours truly.
We're sitting alone in his loft apartment. A few weeks ago he sold most of his furniture, leaving bare wooden floors, a scattering of cushions and an imitation Persian carpet, made in a factory in China from cheap nylon.
The weed is particularly strong this evening, this much I do recall. Dense, damp heady balls of bud and crystal -stinking and pungent and evil find their way through our grinders and into the pipe, which we pass between ourselves as 1920s blues and jazz crackles from his turntable. The rain pummels down onto his skylights and the rafters fill with faint wafts of pure white smoke.
"And before you walk," he says, a note of cynicism under his slurred frankness, "you must learn to crawl."
"Shit" I say.
"And it kind of feels to me," he begins again, "Like we skipped a whole crawling stage somewhere along the line. Feels kind of like we cheated ourselves here and now we're paying for it." He blasts the pipe again, the embers growing brighter in the well of the pipe and illuminating his cheeks and forehead. He hands it to me to repack.
Jason's been seeing this woman; a married lady ten years his senior who lives in a fancy house somewhere on the other side of the river. She's chic and stylish and always wears expensive clothes, classy perfume -just the right amount of makeup. He calls her "the witch" because of her ability to summon him, no matter what he's doing. He can't object. Never.
And then she got tired of her plaything and moved on. Then Jason lost his job and his cat (Paulie) hasn't been home in two weeks. Jason likes to think that Paulie's out adventuring, philandering with the local lady pussycats, working the homes of several old women on rotation -six bowls of cream a day, a new armchair every night -all the pussy he can handle.
I'm more inclined to believe that Paulie's lodged in the grille of someone's 4 x 4 somewhere, quietly decomposing. But I don't say this to Jason, I join in his fantasy of his wonderlust pussycat and his magical adventures.
Jason doesn't have a job right now, not that he needs one. A wealthy and misguided grandparent saw to that. now he lives in this loft, collecting rent from six tenants in three other properties and smoking this mind-blowing skunk, day-in, day-out -turning his brain into first a hyper-aware super-active philosophy factory, then a bowl of stale porridge with a few lazy, fat flies sucking up the fluid from the corners.
He's out of shape, I can see that. Not that he's gaining weight, it's more as though the weight he does carry is constantly migrating to his face, eyes and neck. In the right light he looks like a plasticine man. His skin is faintly blue, faintly green; it's like he's decomposing and nobody's got the heart to tell him. He fidgets in front of my, scratching a sore on the back of his left hand that looks as though it's threatening to go septic.
"You should get that seen to," I say "just in case."
"Fuck you professor." he responds.
The rain is still beating down. I lean back on a cushion and look up into the rafters. A huge spider dangles there, patiently awaiting the final flight of a clumsy insect. I stare at the spider for what feels like a long time. It's motionless. The rain keeps falling.
"It's information." He says.
"What?"
"It's information." He repeats, "It's just all about information. That's the key; how we define 'information' is, of course, another matter, but without the ability to see that this is the key to the whole issue, we're fully fucked."
I ask him to explain. He does not.
We laugh.
it rains.
