I knew pint-size James Farrell well before I met gigantic Josh Kagan. His dad was an old-school New Haven Italian whose grandparents had worked the gun factories way back when. James’s father made his money selling Cold War widgets for some forgettable corporation — the kind of deadening white-collar job that doesn’t really exist anymore, which rewards talentless upper-middle-class white people for being just that. His mother was a dental hygienist who smiled all the time, ever since she found a Protestant Jesus. James and I coughed on our first Camel Lights together back in elementary school, lifted our first Playboys from the bookshop in the Post Mall when we were twelve or thirteen. Why did we fall head over heels for ganja, that five-fingered green goddess? I dunno. Pot was easier than booze. It was easier to get your hands on, and easier to transport with our parents driving us around. It was a hobby, an extracurricular activity — a sport for two kids who were scrawny, shy, and not especially good-looking.
Me and James Farrell, we liked each other’s company because together we could embrace the goofiness and apathy that came so naturally to us both. And if I’m being totally honest with myself, it was easy to be around him because he was so passive. He was such a shy, quiet kid. He did have his talents — he could fix anything with his hands, from the carburetor on my rusty old Civic to his grouchy old Italian grandfather’s hearing aid — but various undiagnosed learning disabilities condemned him to a high school career of Cs and Ds in level 3 classes. Let me come out and just say it then: being around Josh made me feel smart. Smart and in control.
James and I met Josh Kagan during the first couple weeks of tenth grade, when we were sparking up a shitty metal bowl full of seeds and stems underneath the bleachers at a high school football game. Josh said, Yo, you shrimps better share that shit, unless you want a beating. Or something along those lines. He was flashing his irresistible Judas Biden smile, so we hoped that he was joking.
Josh was my first Jewish friend, or my first good one at least. His ancestors had ended up in New Haven via Stalin’s gulags and then London, or at least that’s what he told us. Josh’s father was an optometrist and his mother a realtor, and yet they were always broker than a junkie on payday. We’re talking six credit cards perpetually maxed out and the power being shut off on more than one occasion. They squandered their dough on leather interiors for their luxury sedans, and saunas and hot tubs that Josh and us weren’t even allowed to breathe on — things my good immigrant parents would never have dreamed of getting.
During Josh’s ninth-grade year, before we’d even met him, he’d already tongued more than a hundred tabs of acid, and then he dropped out of school. When he returned for tenth grade, they placed him in the alternative high school, for kids who were less bright and more fucked up than he was. But he still read more than anyone else I knew, except possibly my own father. He got me hooked on Kesey and Kerouac. He got me thinking about what Brave New World had to say about capitalist America and its retarded culture of media. And the fact that he could talk so smoothly about books had a way of legitimizing all the illegal and immoral shit we got up to back then. James and books, though, were like oil and water. Yes, James might have been able to grow out his dirty white-boy dreads when my parents would have shit bricks if I’d have tried the same thing. He might have been game to try Special K when I was too scared. But James hadn’t read a book since Dr. Seuss on the knee of his Jesus-loving mother.
Josh was 6'3" and handsome, and the girls, they really liked him. Even though he was crude and rude. Even though he’d deflowered several young women without ever speaking to them again. Yeah, Josh, he got lots of sex. Jenny insists his stories are boyish exaggerations. But they’re not, and I know that for a fact. I used to wake up drunk in the middle of the night, on the floor of some kid’s basement next to a Ping-Pong table, or the sofa of some kid’s older sibling’s apartment in the Taft Building — don’t get me started on that racist bastard of a Supreme Court justice — and I’d see Josh sitting there getting a blowjob, or doing some girl from behind, and he’d give me that Biden grin. I’d smile back and shake my head, and for a few moments it was as if I were the one who was getting the girl. I, of course, never got the girl. Josh got girls, and even little James got laid by the second month of eleventh grade. But not me. The girls would be my friends, but they didn’t want my body. Jenny used to say it’s because I signified so differently from their pasty-ass fathers and brothers. That she would have wanted to jump my bones had she known me in high school. These days, she doesn’t come close to jumping my bones. She says there’s too much distance. That I oscillate between three modes of repugnant behavior: shutdown, passive-aggressive, and just plain mean. Unlike her, who has only one mode: ass-kissing schmoozer.
Forgive me for rambling. Old wounds run deep. The one thing you do need to know about Josh — Josh back then, at least — was that when he was around, you felt safe. You always felt like you were a part of something bigger, part of a weird newfangled family or something. (Or maybe it was more like a cult?) With Josh Kagan in our lives, James and I got to walk around our suburban school with a don’t-even-think-about-fucking-with-us swagger. So when Josh suggested the three of us start selling a little pot to fund our weekends of beer and bong hits, neither one of us said, Really, Josh, do you think that’s wise? No, in fact, I got a notebook from my L.L. Bean backpack and started crunching numbers, like the good subcontinental that I am. I figured that if we got an ounce of pot and sold half that ounce as eighths, and a few stray grams at ridiculously high prices, we could smoke the other half for free and still have some money to spend on ales and stouts, on cheeseburgers at Paulie’s Lunch, where we ended most of our weekend nights. How’s that for immigrant ingenuity?
We had a nice system going by the middle of eleventh grade. Before we met Ink down on Gilbert, there was this dealer, Nick DeLuca, who Josh called DeMookfuck. James’s older sister Beverly used to date him, and now he was selling weight so that he could live large while taking classes at UNH, where my father taught civil engineering. DeMookfuck rented an old colonial on Fountain Street, near Dayton Street Apizza, which used to serve decent pie. Speaking of pie, let me be clear about something: I’m a Sally’s man all the way, no corporate or soggy pie for me. The Stalies may put up with those two other spots, but not someone who knows their ass from their elbow when it comes to New Haven pizza.
Anyhow, our trio would stop by DeMookfuck’s apartment on most Fridays. He’d smoke a bowl with us out of one of his many handblown glass pipes, which we found both impressive and cheesy. Then he’d front us an ounce of midgrade seedless greens. We’d sell the stuff cheap to a few friends, and rip off a few athletes or girls. The following week we’d bring DeMookfuck back his money, and he’d hand us over another fat satchel of pot. Once he’d gotten to know us, he’d always throw in a bonus. A small bag of mushrooms or little yellow pills that were allegedly made of THC. The funny thing about the whole situation was that after a while DeMookfuck only wanted to deal with me. He only made eye contact with me, and he would only accept cash from my hands. No wonder I got so deep in that world. It was the only club that wanted me, that didn’t make me feel like some Jungle Book pariah.