“Hold on for a minute, please.” Ben got out of the car, retrieved a rusty machete from his trunk, and made his way to the wall of foliage.
“She’s got one mean cat.” I thought he was kidding until the old gray furball lunged at him from the branches. He swatted it away, felling a small palm that had sprouted up in the middle of the path. Then he vanished. “Can you stay here?”
“Vincent, I haven’t even seen it yet. Maybe.” My limited options demanded that I not be picky.
“Well I don’t see Sara visiting us here.” We both burst out laughing like we were stoned. Even though I’d never in my life tried any kind of illegal drug., I’ve heard it makes you laugh … and hungry. And what possibly could possibly be wrong with that?
“I want to get stoned once while I’m here, and this looks like a good place.” Vincent looked at me like I was crazy.
“I do. Just once.”
“Well I can’t, we have drug testing at work.”
“I didn’t say I wanted you to. I said me.” That’s the worst thing about druggies. They always want you to try a little with them. And that’s my pet peeve about drugs. I never cared what people do in their own homes, but don’t get me involved. That’s how I almost lost my good friend Darlene. She loved pot and grew it in her garden, hidden behind the most beautiful zinnias you have ever seen. But you couldn’t go visit her without her dragging you back into her little secret garden and rolling a joint. She didn’t push it on you so much as make you feel like you were a square because you wouldn’t smoke. She was always a ‘happy’ girl, but when she smoked she got to laughing and I swear she wouldn’t stop until she ran out of breath. Then she would go in the house and eat everything within sight. I just had to stop going over to visit. Miss Edna said I should have called Sheriff Holmes, but I couldn’t do that. So Miss Edna went over to Darlene’s house one night and hoed down the entire garden; she wasn’t sure what a pot plant looked like. Darlene’s prize-winning zinnias were lost in the raid. She didn’t speak to me after that for almost a year.
“All right, if that’s what you want.” I could get most anything I wanted from him right now, and he knew it.
Ben returned smiling, revealing a shiny golden tooth gleaming in the sun.
“She’s open, and completely empty. Do you want to take a look inside?”
"Colin Powell endorses Barack Obama for president of the Coconut Cake Eaters of the World"
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