“This place is disgusting,” I said.

“This place?” said Wheeler. “You’re the disgusting one, Dunphy. That was your napkin.”

After that I felt sort of out of it for the rest of the afternoon and in a way, I guess, that’s how I felt for those first two months.

I thumbed home to Pawtucket for March vacation and went straight to the Hilltop Cafe. The Hilltop was a tiny stone building with a faded Narragansett beer sign out front. Dusty, stuffed fish were nailed to the knotty-pine walls inside, and a broken pinball machine covered with forgotten bowling trophies was jammed into the corner. Pickled eggs and pigs’ feet sat in big jars behind the bar. The place reeked of cigarettes and beer mingling with the faint odor of stuffed-up shitters.

Mousy was the first person I saw. We stood over a tense, paycheck-potted pitch game. DeCenz, Drugs Delaney, and Tommy the Wire watched me from across the room. They were pissed off at me for not giving the old man a harder time about sending me to Cornwall.

“Oh, Jeez,” the Wire finally called, “look who just flown in. Mr. Snuffington. You catch a limo from the airport?”

“What a sport,” DeCenz said. “He’s come home to visit his cronies.”

“Shut up, you guys,” Mousy said. “I don’t blame you, Dunph, I would’ve went, too.”

Mousy and I moved to the booth with the other guys and drank dollar-twenty-five-cent pitchers of beer. It was Friday night, and they were a quarter off. I bragged that I’d learned how to play backgammon, and Tommy the Wire said, “Backgammon this.”

After our fourth pitcher we were speculating about what we’d do with our lives. Drugs Delaney was lucky. He knew his calling.

“Reefer, man,” he said. “They’re gonna have to legalize it in five years, and then no one but the conglomities are gonna make out. The government has millions of acres of reefer growing underground in Alaska right now, man. Don’t believe all that pipeline shit; they’re just planting a lot of grass and they’re waiting for the day it’s legalized. My cousin read about it in some top-secret CIA stuff that a friend of his stole when he was working for the post office last summer. Like they have these wicked modern underground greenhouses just full of the shit for when they legalize it. That’s no shit, man. Till then, I’m gonna be doing my own selling. And not just LBs, man. Talking tons. As soon as I get enough money to buy a boat, I’m gonna clean up.”