The Marijuana Chronicles by Jonathan Santlofer Page A

books for you, he said. The box was filled with plastic sandwich bags of Jimmy’s marijuana, his fat, perfect buds, very clean, very sweet. There was an envelope in the box. Inside it was a Polaroid of Jimmy. He was dressed in a tank top and grinning at the camera. He had a rifle on his shoulder, poking through his hair. I could see mountains behind him and the sky. On the back of the picture it said, How do I look?
    After that, we lost touch. People come, people go. They cross your path and alter it. There’s no turning back.
    Life grew more complicated. I no longer lived alone. I quit drinking and smoking pot. It bored me. I hated the smell. Twenty years was enough. My relationship ended. I changed my look. I never thought about Jimmy. Until he phoned, out of the blue, an epoch or so later.
    Hey, it’s Jimmy! Remember me?
    What, you kidding? Jimmy!
    He was back in New Jersey, in the town where he grew up. He was a family man, married, two kids. He even had a job coaching high school football. Yeah, he said. White picket fence. The whole nine yards.
    He wanted to come into the city. He was clean now, he said, but he still had his weed.
    Alice was gone, I told him. Breast cancer. Johnny, his brain exploded. That’s all I knew.
    I heard, Jimmy said. But you sound good.
    I’m good, I said. Call anytime.
    He never did.

J ONATHAN S ANTLOFER is the author of five novels, including The Death Artist and Anatomy of Fear . He is the recipient of a Nero Award, two NEA grants, has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, and serves on the board of Yaddo. He is coeditor, contributor, and illustrator of the anthology The Dark End of the Street , and editor and contributor of LA Noire: The Collected Stories , and Touchstone’s serial novel Inherit the Dead . Santlofer is director of the Crime Fiction Academy at the Center for Fiction. He lives in Manhattan where he is at work on a new novel.

the last toke
    by jonathan santlofer
    I t’s ironic because it all started at a be-in or a love-in, one of those hippy-dippy-paint-your-face-with-flowers events that were so widespread in 1969. This one, on Boston Common, a rare spring day when the sky was painfully blue and everyone was happy or pretending to be, three or four hundred college kids assembled for more than the usual peace and love, a free Tim Hardin concert, blankets on the lawn, jug wine, radios thrumming Mamas & Papas, Beatles, Donovan, Starship, Joan Baez, a folk-rock olio riding the wave of a pot cloud so potent the squirrels were stoned.
    My girlfriend had painted flowers on my cheeks and I did the same on hers, petals and stems and leaves, all perfectly delineated and suitable for framing, a competition as we were both art students. My roommate and best friend, Johnny, had rolled a half-dozen joints, something Tim Hardin would appreciate being a junkie and all, though we didn’t know that until he OD’d a decade later, my mind a little vague on some details though not others. Tim’s first album, mostly melancholy love songs perfect for pseudo-sad college kids, “Don’t Make Promises,” “It’ll Never Happen Again,” “How Can We Hang On to a Dream,” were filled with palpable despair and words I still know by heart, so it’s not true that marijuana will rot your brain as I was smoking it every day at the time.
    Tim was an hour and a half late and more than a little fuzzy, forgetting words and once or twice nodding off in mid-song, though we cheered him on the same way I’d cheered on a stumbling-drunk Janis Joplin at Madison Square Garden earlier that year while she lamented her failed love life in between songs and shots of Southern Comfort.
    It was later, as we were leaving the concert, all three or four hundred of us pressed together in a throng of impatience that tested our all-you-need-is-love sensibility, when we met the Harvard boys and the older guy, a friend of a friend of a friend, though I never found out whose friend. He was at least