Waltham introduced himself to Drugs Delaney and flashed his bag of weed as a sort of calling card. Irving had recently fallen grease-backed head over wing-tipped heels for a Westchester, New York, girl named Kara Kellinan. She was a junior at the Girls School and was heavily into cosmic awareness and drugs. Irving Waltham was the kind of guy who associated James Dean with pork sausages. In order to get into Kara’s ballpark, he’d bought an oz. of high-altitude Colombian rainbow weed off Billy-Fu the night before we went to my house. He’d then nailed the door shut and sat in our room for hours playing with his pot. He weighed it, cleaned it, weighed it again, then sat at his desk rolling and re-rolling bones. He tried several techniques and timed himself at each.

Drugs Delaney was the perfect mentor. Ripped jeans, a red flannel shirt, a rope belt, long hair pulled back in a ponytail, a sparse, random beard like metal slivers on a magnet, and a feather earring. He’d recently traded in his VW microbus with the bumper sticker that read SUPPORT THE MARINES for an old Volvo with WARNING: I BRAKE FOR HALLUCINATIONS. He never went anywhere without his idiot dog, Roachclip. Someone had accidentally given Roachclip some bad acid when he was a pup and they were sleeping outside the Providence Civic Center waiting for Dead tickets to go on sale. The poor dog had been walking into walls ever since. Drugs was lucky; he’d eaten the same acid but got sick on a bottle of Jack and puked most of it up.

“What kind of weed is this?” Drugs asked after lighting up and taking his first toke.

“Marijuana,” Irving replied.

Jane and I laughed. Drugs looked at us quizzically and then also laughed.

“Hey, that’s a good one, Herbie,” he said.

“Irving,” Waltham corrected with an awed smile.

Drugs Delaney had already eaten his Vitamin Q’s (Quaaludes) and was well on his way to achieving cerebral paralysis. He’d done two hits of blotter acid the day before, so tonight he was taking it easy.

“This is good shit,” Drugs said. “How much it set you back, man?”

“Pardon me?” Irving said.

“How much did it cost, Irv?” I said.

“Three sawbones,” he answered.

“Bucks,” I whispered. “Sawbucks.”

I told Jane that I thought we were cramping Irv’s style so we went into the parlor where Tommy the Wire was confiding to the world about having recently knocked up his girlfriend, Debbie Sylvia.

“So what’s her beef?” Jack asked. “Hasn’t she heard of women’s lib? Chickens pay for their own abortions these days.”

“Right on,” a guy named Mickey Costa said, raising a clenched fist.