"I guess you've found a job by now," he said, groping. "None of your checks have bounced." He stared silently into his cup.

"Do you have plans for the next eight or nine hours?" I said suddenly, feeling that if I weren't going to eat some of this acid, I would have to go immediately to sleep.

He raised an eyebrow. "I dunno . . ." Those eyes continued to watch in stunned fascination as I emptied my wallet of several thin strips of brightly-stamped paper. "No wonder you're up all the time," he muttered.

"I'm going to eat two of these," I told him, "and you're welcome to join me. I think we'll have a good time. But you'll have to eat them if you want to stay."

He nodded blankly, then recovered to inspect the pattern on the paper, which appeared to be the feet of a Goony Bird . . . though I would've needed the rest of the sheet to really be sure. "Jesus, where'd you get so much of it?"

"Isla Vista," I shrugged. After I had told him about Johnny, I handed him two squares. "Here. Just put it in your lower lip, like Copenhagen, forget it's even there. In about forty-five minutes, you'll feel like you need to laugh. Then you won't be able to help it. Neither of us will."

He did as instructed, his tongue fiddling along the buccal membrane every so often as we talked about his dead-end draftsman's job with a local interior design firm, and how he would never see a promotion for lack of a college degree, of which he found himself shy by at least eighty units.

"That's a tough spot," I admitted, searching myself for the drug's first telltale clues, but finding none.

"So I keep thinking about my art," he said. "You probably haven't seen any of it yet."

I shook my head, suddenly feeling a strange new relationship with this wood-shingled house near the beach, and especially with its long-term resident. "I'd like to, though. I really would. I love art."

He nodded, settling down into the cushions of the sofa, and I could see it as some kind of physical manifestation of the acid, a hunkering down before the hurricane.

"Is this music okay?" I wondered, trying to make his journey on the Lysergic Express a pleasant one.

"It's really twisted," he said, and he seemed to be genuinely involved in the way Peter Gabriel had coiled himself around my speakers, like the original King Cobra. He leaned forward and picked up the dust-jacket of Selling England by the Pound. "God, these guys were pioneers," he said, and it was then that I knew he had been bitten. "They make Led Zeppelin sound like a bunch of horny boys." He began slicking a thin lock of blond hair back over his forehead, which revealed a marked destiny toward male-pattern baldness. Then he sucked in his breath.

"You want to take a walk?" I asked him.

"Uhhm . . ." and he was forced to think about this one, "maybe soon. I think I should see where this goes."

The phone rang in my room, and we both looked at it like a diseased thing.

"I'm not home," he said, shaking his head. No way. I picked up the receiver. It was Paddy. I looked at my watch, and saw that it was also 2:38 AM. "Everything alright?" I wondered. "Oh, sure," the old man chuckled. I could hear the ever-present music pulsing through his Nakamichi system. It sounded like the Allman Brothers at one of their early '70s Fillmore gigs. "I hope I didn't wake you."

"No. I'm just up talking to my roommate. Do you need something? Do you need me to come over?"

"No," he laughed, brittlely. "It's . . . I was just wondering . . ." he said, taking his time with what it was he wanted to say. "Just something that stuck in my mind. I was wondering what might have set your friend off. The one on the cannery rig: Marcus, was it?"

"Yeah," I said, becoming edgy, because I knew Paddy would forget Marcus's name no sooner than he would forget his own: the old man had a mind like flypaper. It caught everything, some of it useful, most of it flotsam; but he kept all of it stored upstairs, to use someday, when he felt like writing again. As he told it, what motivation the Hodgkin's hadn't stolen, the chemotherapy took care of neatly. He hadn't written a story for nearly two years, and had been placed on an extended medical leave of absence by University of Southern California, his salary halved, but his job guaranteed until he felt able to return to full-time teaching. Until then, he convalesced beside the beach, taking on a few especially promising graduate students whose writing he coached and guided and polished for inclusion into the literary magazines, the "littles," as they are called by those who find homes in them.

I was not among the lucky.

Promising as my work appeared to the Professional Writing faculty, I owned enough rejection letters to spark a heinous fire at the houses of any of the individual editors of the hundred-odd "littles," on which I had wasted $.74 a pop in postage over the course of more than a year.

"Hang on a minute, Paddy." I cupped the mouthpiece and looked over at Scott, who was now the proud owner of a seam-splitting grin. "Can you make it another couple minutes?" I wondered. "It's my writing teacher. I can't tell what he wants."

Scott nodded squarely, succumbing to the recesses of the sofa. "No problem. Take as long as you need. I'm not going anywhere."

I nodded, releasing my hold on the receiver. "What happened to Marcus?" I repeated, finally.

"Uh-huh," Paddy answered, breathless.

I sighed. "Our freshman year in the dorms, he decided he wants to see other girls, legitimately, without having to sneak around. He had been dating his high school sweetheart for a long time, but her parents sent her off to a Catholic college in Nebraska. So he wrote her a letter, at least he told me that’s what he had planned on doing. He wanted to tell her in person, but Christmas break was four months away, and he just didn't want to string her along. He loved her, but it was over," I said, dredging up the putrefied foot-locker. "The gal took it really hard, and then she stopped writing. A few weeks later, Marcus' mom called him at school. We were playing backgammon and drinking Scotch in his room, and I'll never forget it. His face aged ten years. He didn't say much, just hung up. Then he put the cork back in the Scotch and we finished playing backgammon until the sun came up. He wouldn't let me leave. After that, he would stay in his dorm room for days. I would bring him food from the cafeteria, and we drank and played games and got to be really close friends. But I was the only one. He was shattered."