A home at the end of the world by Michael Cunningham Page B

day I did not tell any stories; I hardly spoke at all. I learned that Bobby found sitting silently beside me just as amusing as he did listening to me talk.
    “I like those boots,” I said as he sat for the first time on the floor of my bedroom, rolling a joint. “Where did you get them? Or, wait a minute, that’s the kind of question you’re not supposed to ask, isn’t it? Anyway, I think those boots of yours are great.”
    “Thanks,” he said, expertly sealing the joint with a flick of his tongue. I had never smoked marijuana before, though I claimed to have been doing it regularly since I was eleven.
    “That looks like good stuff,” I said of the plastic bag full of green-gold marijuana he had produced from his jacket pocket.
    “Well, it’s—you know—all right,” he said, lighting up. There was no scorn in his stunted sentences, just a numbness and puzzlement. He had about him the hesitant quality of an amnesiac struggling to remember.
    “I like the smell,” I said. “I guess I’d better open the window. In case my mother comes by.”
    I naturally assumed we needed common enemies in the forms of the United States government, our school, my parents.
    “She’s nice,” he said. “Your mother.”
    “She’s all right.”
    He passed the joint over to me. Of course I tried to handle it in a polished, professional manner. Of course on my first toke I gagged so hard I nearly vomited.
    “It’s pretty strong,” he said. He took the joint back, sucked in a graceful nip of smoke, and returned it to me without further comment. I choked again, and after I’d recovered was given the joint a third time, as if I was every bit as practiced as I pretended to be. The third time I did a little better.
    And so, without acknowledging my inexperience, Bobby set about teaching me the habits of the age.
    We spent every day together. It was the kind of reckless overnight friendship particular to those who are young, lonely, and ambitious. Gradually, item by item, Bobby brought over his records, his posters, his clothes. We spent just enough time at his house for me to know what he was escaping from: a stale sour smell of soiled laundry and old food, a father who crept with drunken caution from room to room. Bobby slept in a sleeping bag on my floor. In the dark, I lay listening to the sound of his breath. He moaned sometimes in his dreams.
    When he awoke in the mornings, he’d look around with a startled expression, realize where he was, and smile. The light slanting in through my window turned the medallion of hair on his chest from gold to copper.
    I bought myself a pair of boots like his. I started growing my hair.
    With time, he began to talk more fluently. “I like this house,” he said one winter evening as we sat idly in my room, smoking dope and listening to The Doors. Snowflakes tapped against the glass, whirled down into the empty, silent street. The Doors sang “L.A. Woman.”
    “How much would a house like this cost?” he said.
    “Can’t be too much,” I said. “We’re not rich.”
    “I want a house like this someday,” he said, passing me the joint.
    “No you don’t,” I told him. I had other things in mind for us.
    “Yeah,” he said. “I do. I like this place.”
    “You don’t really,” I said. “You just think you do because you’re stoned.”
    He sucked on the joint. He had a cultivated, almost feminine way of handling his dope, pinching a joint precisely between thumb and middle finger. “So I’ll stay stoned all the time,” he said on his exhale. “Then I’ll always like this house and Cleveland and everything, just the way it is now.”
    “Well, that would be one way to live,” I answered.
    “Don’t you like it?” he said. “You should like it. You don’t know what you got here.”
    “What I’ve got here,” I said, “is a mother who asks me first thing in the morning what I think I’d like to have for dinner that night, and a father who hardly ever leaves his