The older guys sneered and said, Bullshit. I backed Johnny up, said I’d seen Mama Cass’s large-size autographed undies, which I had not.
Well, she’s no Grace Slick, the older guy said, and told me where to park, and we trudged up the stairs of a smallish house to an apartment on the second floor and he’s thanking us over and over for helping him and rolls another joint, which we smoked in between regular cigarettes.
Inside, there was hardly any furniture but the living room was a mess of overstuffed Hefty bags and lots of cartons, and the older guy explained he’d just moved in and was still clearing out all the shit left by the former tenants and how he had to get it looking good because his girlfriend from New York was coming to live with him.
I was only half listening, still tripping and a little worried I’d never come out of it, though the older guy assured me it was just an after-effect of the DMT, and thanked me again because he didn’t know how he was going to clear out the place without a car and how he couldn’t just put all this stuff on the street because the Slumerville garbage collectors wouldn’t take it and how his girlfriend was a neat-freak and really beautiful, a model, he said, me thinking he was lying because no way some model was going to go for this scaggy older guy, but he said he was going to marry her even though he didn’t believe in marriage, while the three of us started gathering up the Hefty bags and cartons and I explained to the older guy how the Studebaker’s seats went all the way down and how it was great for making out but also for fitting in all sorts of junk, and he thanked me again and promised to keep me and Johnny supplied with weed for the rest of our lives.
The older guy said we could leave some of the Hefty bags by the curb, which we did, but not the cartons, which we packed into the Studebaker. When the car was full, I asked, Now what? and he said, Maybe we can find a dump somewhere, and I said, Why not just drive around and leave a box here and a box there? but Johnny came up with the brilliant idea that we dump them into the Charles River, which was exactly what we did with the motorcycle we’d bought earlier in the year, dismantled it and dropped it piece by piece into the river after insuring it with some fly-by-night insurance company, the two of us practically falling down with laughter as we explained that when we tried to collect on our scam it turned out that the fucking insurance company was an even bigger scam and had vanished along with our initial fifty dollars for the phony policy, and how we were so fucked, the older guy shaking his head saying, You can’t trust anyone, especially capitalists.
So that’s what we did, drove around and found secluded spots where we dropped each of his cartons into the murky Charles River.
The older guy thanked us again for saving his life and said we had to meet his model girlfriend sometime and I said, Sure, sure, and he offered to buy us beers in a local bar but by then my head felt like someone had tied a string around it and pulled it like a top, it was spinning so bad and Johnny was practically nodding off, so we headed back to BU.
The next day I felt awful, as if someone had taken out my brain, played catch with it, and put it back in, but maybe upside down. I met up with my girlfriend and we went to breakfast at three in the afternoon and after four cups of coffee I could put words together and told her about the older guy and how we helped him with his stuff, and she just shrugged.
That night we went to a party, all art students in an Allston apartment where there was more weed, which I smoked and immediately started tripping, this time coupled with paranoia. I told my girlfriend I had to get out of there but she said no because some graduate art student was going on and on about how painting was dead and that art had to be conceptual and there was no point in making paintings anymore because they had all been made and why add more junk to an already polluted world, and there were a group of undergrads, mostly girls including my girlfriend, literally at his feet looking up at him like he was God.
I left and walked the Allston/Boston streets, angry and paranoid, constantly looking over my shoulder, but eventually found my way home where I lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling, which kept breaking open with dazzling displays of shooting stars, like I had my own private planetarium.
The next day I found out my girlfriend had fucked the “painting is dead” graduate student and we broke up. She went out with him for the rest of the semester, which was only a month or so longer, until he ditched her for a leggy drama student who would later become the movie star Faye Dunaway, and I went off to graduate art school where I stopped smoking pot because I wanted to be a serious artist and pot made me tired and hungry and I was living on Dannon yogurt and Cup O’ Noodles and couldn’t have afforded pot even if I wanted it.
My ex-girlfriend got in touch with me once and wanted to meet up but I was too proud and stung by her rejection and thought I was pretty cool now that I was a graduate student studying painting and espousing postmodern theory, plus I had started seeing a girl, a sophomore, who thought I was really cool and hung on my every word.
It was about a year after graduate school, when I was playing the life of the artist for real, that I went to the dinner party in Soho, back when Soho was the hip new art scene. There were about a dozen people there, artists and art dealers, a collector or two, and a curator who had just started working at MOMA—someone I clearly wanted to cultivate—and he was saying how he’d gone to Harvard for his masters and PhD and I mentioned I was at BU the same years and he didn’t make a face when I said it because people in the art world knew BU had a good art school, and he asked me if I was there for the Hansel scandal and I said, As in Hansel and Gretel? and a few people laughed but he didn’t.
You must have been there when it happened because it was my senior year, which was your senior year, right? Then he stopped, tapped his chin, and said, Oh, but it didn’t come out till the next year so maybe you missed it.
I said, Missed what?
He said, This guy, Hansel, cut up his girlfriend.
At that, everyone stopped eating and turned toward him.
Cut her into pieces, he said. Put her body parts into plastic bags and cartons, which—can you believe?—he dropped into the Charles River!
I started choking.
Oh, please, said a sophisticated older woman, an art collector wearing a lot of gold jewelry.
It’s true, said the Harvard guy, and he might have gotten away with it but one of the boxes floated up to the surface and some students found it and opened it, and aside from a hand or a foot—I’m pretty sure it was a foot—there was also a letter or a card or something that led the police to him, so he was not only a lunatic but a stupid one, so he must have had help.
I swallowed hard and said, Why?
Well, he didn’t have a car and there was no record of a rental.
I said, Couldn’t he have … walked?