3.

Marty was absolutely convinced that he’d gotten high with Quentin Tarantino about ten years ago. It was just a little while after Pulp Fiction had come out and he’d been in suburban Denver at a keg party. He’d gone into the basement which was packed with people and there was a little office room in the corner from which he detected marijuana smoke. Lured onward he opened the door and saw two black men--sort of gangster types, but a lot of blacks dress like that without actually being gangsters--along with Quentin Tarantino. They were passing a pipe between them and presently Tarantino held it out to Marty. He stared in disbelief, took the pipe and hit off it, closing his eyes for a moment as the sensation washed over him. It was the most potent damn shit he’d ever had and he must have closed his eyes for a while because when he opened them only one person was left there with him--one of the black guys. Tarantino and the other black guy were gone.

“But what in hell would Quentin Tarantino be doing in suburban Denver at some seedy keg party?” people would say when he heard the story.

“I’m telling you--it was him!” Marty would always say. But it was in vain--no one would believe him, no, Tarantino wouldn’t be found in Aurora after he’d hit it big with Pulp Fiction--North Aurora no less, which was the topper; but Marty insisted, he was certain: it was him, and he’d not stand for anyone’s denying it.

Now Alex was humming some song that was stuck in his head. It happened to him often; he would get songs stuck in his head and no amount of listening to other music could get it out. What was worse, as sometimes happened, was that the song would mutate ever so slightly, so that bit by bit it would transform from the song he’d heard and got trapped there to a song of his own mental invention. He’d heard that the great composers heard music in their head like that, but it was always shitty music that would come to his own mind, repetitive and absolutely boring. When he played guitar the same thing happened to him. He didn’t know any songs proper but knew some chords and would just play the same melody with a variation here or there, the same melody to the same rhythm, over and over. He disliked playing guitar these days because no matter how long he went without picking the axe up, no matter what music he’d heard in the meantime, when he picked it up the same melody would come to him. This time a little heigher, this time a little lower; but basically the same idea. It often made him wonder if he were slightly autistic, but then again he wasn’t quite sure what exactly autism was.

“I think you’re channeling random radio wave junk,” said Marty one night. “There’s radio waves everywhere--they go through us, they fly through the space of our brains. Some of it is actual TV stations, radio channels; but most of it is just junk, stuff coming from the Earth’s magnetism.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Alex.

“There’s some random radio static entering your brain, getting that damned repetitive rhythm in there, into your head.”

“How does a radio wave go through shit--shit like a skull?”

“It’s not articulate, I mean particulate, it’s . . .”

“It’s the same with all your bullshit,” said Alex. “You talk about string theory and you don’t know what the fuck a string is.”

“If the earth were as big as an atom, a string would be the size of a tree. That’s what string theory is.”

They spent the afternoon after picking up Alex’s last check watching a football game. Neither of them really cared about either team and so they watched indifferently.

“What do we do now?” asked Marty, and strangely enough Alex knew what he meant.

“I can get us a quarter pound. We can deal.”

“Fuck that shit,” said Marty. “We’ll get caught. If not in a month then a year.”

“We don’t have to do it for a year,” said Alex. “Besides, I’ve got a foolproof system.”

“What system?”

“Look--we only sell to hardcore potheads. And what do all potheads have in common?”

“There ain’t nothing they have in common that a cop can’t fake.”

“But the cops don’t know about it,” said Alex. “They all overuse the word ‘weird’. Didn’t you ever notice that? Whether they talk about how it is to be getting older, what college is like, what Socrates said, whatever. They’ll just pause and say, ‘Weird.’ ”

“That’s fucking bullshit man.”

They both glanced to the TV. Someone scored a touchdown.

“Touchdown,” said Marty.

“I wonder why they call it that.”

“Call it what?” said Marty.

“Touchdown.”

“Because that’s what it is.”