4.

Once Marty was off work and home--he got home around 1:30 a.m., the buses being ridiculously infrequent at that hour--he put an AC/DC record on his record player. He’d seen the record player for sale at a yard sale two years prior, and not only did the thing work--it worked great. He picked up records at the Mile High Flea Market and a buy/sell place downtown, and pretty soon had a large collection.

Looking forward to the bongs that he was about to sink, Marty played around by increasing the speed of the record--which was supposed to be played at 33--to 45. The AC/DC rendition of Ted Nugent’s “Baby Please Don’t Go” sounded high pitched, impossibly fast and ridiculous. Marty smiled as he listened to the absurd sound of helium-pitched voices and high twanging guitars. He got immense pleasure these days out of such things as this, and he played records the wrong speed often. He liked to play with words too; he liked writing simply “Ahhh sooo” to Asian Americans in computer chat rooms and forums--some vague racial stereotype that even Marty did not fully comprehend--and he thought it was gently hilarious. In these days, nothing could have pleased Marty more than Bazooka gum wrapper jokes and their like, light silliness of that sort. Perhaps it was some sort of Zen mysticism that let him be pleased by the simplest things, roses smelt in the journey of life; or perhaps it was just that he was slowly becoming an imbecile, the type of person who ten years from now will marvel at a pretty shining coin.

Presently, he started the song up again at the proper speed and pulled his dope out from under the sofa cushion where he kept it, then reached for his bong and lighter.