“UB president calls for tuition increase at FSEC meeting.”

—The Spectrum, 10.5.07

It was early in the morning when John came home, high but coming down, and looking for something to keep him going.

“Let’s hit the bar. Come on. Come on, man. There’s people there.”

This again. I asked why he woke me up in the middle of the night, and he responded with watery, bloodshot eyes that he’d been at the bar, had seen some girls, and had come home to get me.

This was pretty exciting. This guy had never really invited me to go anywhere before, save some meeting at the place where he worked—boring shit. The guy was pretty rich, and he’d changed a lot since we’d started living together. He was hardly ever around anymore. He started what I pretty much saw as a gang that called themselves The Believers, a pretty pathetic name for a pretty pathetic group of mail-order friends. They left garbled notes all over the place for me to read about their big plans. John had been coming up with plans for a while now, even gave them funny science fiction names to get me to take him seriously.

On nights like these, though, he wasn’t himself. On nights like these, he was sleazy.

“All right, fine, man, listen. You’re my best friend, man. My best friend, you know what I’m saying? I need you to help me out, man, I got this idea.” He got really excited and bent his head at the end of all of his sentences like people do when they’re messed up but trying to get you to look at them with a straight face. I was still pretty excited about this whole John talking to me thing, but I knew what was behind it even before he told me.

“I just need, like, two-hundred bucks.” This was disappointing. I didn’t have any money to buy him coke; I had been working as a line cook at a diner down the street from the apartment we shared. We were still living together, just until I made enough money to get a place of my own and start my so-called life. I don’t know why he’d ask me for money, anyway. The guy’s got to have boatloads of money on him, state money, from some lawsuit about wet pavement or something.

“Enough for an eight. Maybe two. You gotta see these girls man, they’re crazy. They totally want it, and we gotta be the ones to give it.” He had his pudgy arms around me and his BO was pungent. Single-malt scotch on his breath was punching me about as hard as he was pretending to hit me in the stomach. This was what happened when he talked about girls.

“I don’t really even use that stuff.” In fact I hated it, for no other reason than because it was annoying. For most of the time we lived together, John had taken pride in quoting lines from Scarface at otherwise mundane moments in the day.

“Dude. These girls aren’t waiting. Give me the money and just trust me. When have I ever let you down?” I thought about it. Most of the time John spent the money I lent him, it ether went up his nose or went toward projects involving words I couldn’t even pronounce. The last time I loaned him money, he said he was buying some stuff to make the apartment look better. He came back with ten yards of manure and a bunch of cheap plastic crap that resembled something between the Starship Enterprise and a long forgotten Salvador Dali print. He put them in the middle of the living room. It was weird. He was so weird. Being tired and resigned, I handed him my ATM card and told him to take out $200.

“Why do you always take money from me, man?” I shouted at him on his way down the front steps.

“Don’t act like you care,” he shouted, then ran down the street, quoting Al Pacino and laughing hysterically.