Dear Fat Kid,

..Yesterday, in your absence, I plugged around your house, just taking stock of things. And did so with an enthusiasm Howard Stern might call “the feeling of having your hand down the pants of somebody new.” (I do not think he discounted for the scenario in which the pants are empty – are in fact wedged in a time-honored dark place in the hallway closet where they live between stacks of brown boxes, all bearing the title “Things I Need” – but, still. The image has power.) I really gave myself over to the process; in the upstairs closet I modeled some of your clothes in the manner of a committed 9-year-old stalker. I cruised the other rooms looking for signs of life that stood out against all the unfamiliarity of your world now. (And found some stuff; more on that later.)

When I heard the knock at your back door I was in the middle of being disappointed by the lack of anything even mildly pervy under your bathroom sink. How does a person end up with five open cans of Comet, I wondered. None of them are even close to empty. Five? Somehow not aware of the B-grade snooping with which I was busy, I heard the knock and trundled downstairs to find your door open and a man sitting on your couch, a white dinner plate on his lap. I stopped at the foot of the stairs.

“Hi.” I waved at him.

“Greetings,” he said without looking up. From a leather hip purse he withdrew a small pair of scissors and a conservatory of marijuana stuffed into a vaccuum-sealed pouch. Removing a long, crystalline bud, he began to cut away slivers of weed that quickly piled on the plate. My suspicion that he had done this before was confirmed when he looked up at me while his fingers continued to work. The look on his face told me that he was confused; it was then that I remembered I was standing there barefoot, wearing a pair of striped legwarmers and your commemorative Linkin’ in Lincoln! sausage contest hat. “Welcome,” he said loudly, as if to a foreigner.

“Thanks for having me,” I said eventually. “It’s nice to be here.”

His forehead unwrinkled; he shrugged and bent again to his work. I went and sat down next to him on the couch – see, saving face is not the top concern when one is presented with a strange man getting ready to smoke drugs on your friend’s couch. And this man was strange: His long, flowy black locks matched perfectly by bulging eyes; his tailored, French-cuffed business shirt was complemented by fitted denim shorts and brown clogs.

I crossed my legs so I could better admire the legwarmers you used to wear during intramural basketball games. After a while I said, “I’m Hal, an old friend of Fats.”

“Yes, yes you are,” he said, rather as though I had told him something he’d already known, such as my pro-legwarmers attitude. He ran the blunt paper along his tongue and, following one fluid roll-smooth-and-twist motion, turned and presented me with a joint the size of George Foreman’s thumb. “The thing to know about this stuff is that it doesn’t take much,” he said. Between my wary lips the joint was frightening for its girth; just the scent was so powerful as to be dizzying. High-ifying.

“I haven’t smoked weed since—”

“Shh,” he said. “Hush. Now is not the time.” He flicked a silver lighter to life and extended it to me, and as I took a deep drag he announced, “I am Patrick, though Fats calls me Patois.” I began to cough with enthusiasm.

“If it’s been that long,” he said, “you could be in real trouble.”