Buddy [Pt. 2 of 2]

I left the house shortly after that. I sent messages to Robbie, Joe, and Darian to inform them of the situation. Joe sent an email to Mr. Braddon letting him know that that Buddy had become dangerous and someone would need to interfere before anyone got hurt. It turned out he was two steps ahead of us. A few days earlier he’d approached Buddy to discuss unpaid rent, and Buddy not only refused to pay but made some sort of vague threat that referenced the gun. Mr. Braddon sent Joe an email back informing him that Buddy was already set to be evicted within 48 hours for unpaid rent and violating the terms of his lease. I was glad that Buddy would soon be gone, but was terrified that he would blame us, and possibly me specifically, for his eviction, and if he stayed as unhinged as he’d been earlier that day he might come back with the gun and kill every one of us for betraying him. I sent Mr. Braddon an email expressing this concern:

Mr. Braddon,
Joe told me that he talked to you about Buddy and that you are planning on having him evicted. I just want to ask that I get a heads up beforehand, because I don’t want to be around when/if that happens. I also think any attempt at eviction should be done with a police officer on hand and without any pretense that our complaints have been the cause. I will not be able to sleep at night if Buddy is walking around Charleston thinking we all went behind his back to get him evicted. He seems like a highly volatile person and he has made allusions to a gun. I want to make sure all of this is handled in a way that isn’t going to endanger anyone. I’m very disturbed at the moment, and I will not feel safe in this house if we can’t find a way to resolve this delicately.
—Theo

A few hours later l was on Hunter’s couch and my phone buzzed. It was Mr. Braddon’s response:

Don’t worry. It will be by the book without involving you in any way.

I can’t say that it made me feel much better. I was picturing Mr. Braddon showing up with a cop and an eviction notice, then Buddy greasing them both with the pistol before turning it on me. I’d try to reason with him, to guilt him into sparing me, but he was too far gone to care.

Hunter offered to let me spend the night on his couch, to wait things out at his place until all the Buddy drama was over and done with. I probably should have agreed, but I rarely slept out and I thought Buddy might find my absence suspicious. If he got arrested before seeing me again, he’d have every reason to think I’d ratted on him for the whole “kill Robbie” thing. I also just wanted to be there to help ensure he didn’t actually kill Robbie. Robbie’s response to my warning had been flippant and dismissive. “I’d like to see that piece of shit come at me,” he’d written, which didn’t inspire much confidence in his survival instinct. Even if Buddy cooled off, Robbie might do something to provoke him and wind up getting shot in the face anyway.

It also didn’t help that Robbie really had stolen Buddy’s drugs. He had gotten home from AC’s (a bar on King Street) the night before with two friends with him, Donny and Snell. They’d found Buddy passed out on the living room couch with the mirror in his lap and a Ziplock bag of drugs on the pool table. In the bag was an eighth of weed, a couple grams of cocaine, and about fifteen Kathies. Robbie took the bag upstairs, and together the three of them had smoked all the weed and done all the cocaine. Nobody did any of the Katharax, but Robbie kept those too because he knew he could sell them to freshmen for at least five dollars a piece.

I suspected that Robbie had stolen the stuff, but I didn’t know for sure until I got home and he offered to smoke me out with the remaining pinch of weed, which he proudly explained had been Buddy’s. Even though I knew Buddy had no business doing all those drugs by himself— it was evident he had in six days done at least five grams of cocaine and more than thirty Kathies— I was also irritated that Robbie would take his stuff. Stealing was stealing, even if you were stealing from an addict, and I was also concerned that Buddy’s Katharax withdrawals could get dangerous if he didn’t have any way of getting more and weening himself off. He had averaged roughly five a day over the last six days, meaning he had already developed a tremendous tolerance. He had probably started with one or two, then two or three, then four or five, then five or six. It was impossible to start out with such a high intake, because for the average person even just three Kathies with a few beers can be fatal. In any case, if he had done thirty in a week it was a certainty that he was now heavily addicted and would be going through withdrawals. I told Robbie that the ethical thing to do would be to return a few of the Kathies. He could do it anonymously, and, sure, he would be out of some easy money, but that would be better than letting his roommate die painfully from withdrawals.

To my surprise, Robbie agreed without much of a fuss. He went into a drawer in his desk and pulled out the Ziplock bag. He gave it to me without taking any of the remaining pills for himself, and all he said was to make sure Buddy didn’t know it was him.

As I walked to Buddy’s room to give him what was left of his stash, it occurred to me that I might be making a grave mistake by giving an addict a bag of pills. I'd be enabling him, and, worse, I might inadvertently give him the impression that I had been the one that stole his drugs in the first place, not Robbie. On the other hand, this gesture could be the olive branch to keep myself from getting greased when he finally went postal, and if he was passed out on Kathies for the next 24 hours then he wouldn’t be in any shape to be shooting me or anyone else. So as I walked up to his door I decided I would tell him I found the bag on the floor near the living room couch, that I had no idea who looted it or left it there, but in any case here it is, I figured you’d want what’s left.

“Hey, Buddy,” I called, standing in front of the door. I rapped on it with my knuckles, trying to make the knock audible but non-threatening. “Hey, Buddy, you in there?”

The handle jiggled then the door opened slightly with a sound of straining wood. Buddy’s face appeared in the door, his eyes bloodshot and his face covered in sweat.

“Whatchu want?” he grumbled, in a voice that was neither hostile nor particularly friendly.

I held out the bag to him and said, “found this in the living room and figured it was yours, though it looks like somebody’s already been through it.”

He took it out of my hand and looked at it.

“Huh, nice uh Rob to put it back,” he said. “Only stole all my weed and all my cocaine.”

He leaned back to grab something— I couldn’t see what it was because the door was barely open, and whatever he was grabbing was behind it. The door opened more, just enough for him to squeeze his way out of it then close it quickly behind himself. It was obvious there was something in there he didn’t want me to see, and for some reason I pictured Caroline’s body wrapped up in a rug or something for disposal, but it would have to be an enormous rug, looking like a snake that died from swallowing something too big to digest, and my cruel sense of humor nearly made me laugh out loud at the image. Buddy adjusted his shirt, stuffed his Ziplock into the pocket of his blue jeans, then something caught his eye and he stomped his hairy bare foot onto the wood floor. He scraped the bottom of his foot against the bump in the floor that divided the kitchen from the laundry room, and a crushed roach fell from behind his toes. Another roach watched this happen and went running underneath the cabinets for shelter.

Buddy walked ahead of me into the kitchen, and as I tentatively followed behind him I saw more roaches, all of them running frantically to make him a path. I followed behind him into the hallway, wondering what it was he was planning and what he had grabbed from his room. He reached the end of the hallway and looked up the staircase.

“Is Robbie home?” he asked, an ear tilted up to listen for Robbie’s voice.

A chill ran through my body as I began to suspect what Buddy had taken from his room and what might now be concealed in the waistline of his jeans. I said, “I don’t think he’s home, or at least I haven’t seen him. But anyway, would you be down for a game of bumper pool?”

It was the first time I had asked Buddy to hang out in any capacity. I’m sure it struck him as odd if not suspicious, but after a moment he huffed and said, “Okay, you got any vodka left?”

As a matter of fact, I did. I had bought a bottle the day before to replace the one that had mysteriously frozen. I said, “Yeah, you read my mind. I’ll go get the vodka if you want to go ahead and start setting up the table. Oh and feel free to put on some music with my laptop. It’s hooked up to the speaker already.”

He said, “Okay,” looked up the stairs one more time, then walked into the living room.

The point of the music was to keep Buddy from hearing Robbie’s voice coming from the room above us. It would also be a good way of entrenching myself on Buddy’s good side. Tonight I’d let him be the DJ for as long he wanted, and I’d love every song he played.

I went back into the kitchen and took the vodka from the freezer and the orange juice from the fridge. Both of them had already been opened by somebody, and a third of each was missing. There were roaches everywhere— all over the counter, the face of the fridge, scurrying out of the cabinets when I took out the plastic cups— but I didn’t swat at any of them or even care about them at all. I was too petrified by what might happen with Buddy. I made two screwdrivers, listening all the while for the music to start or Robbie to make the fatal mistake of yelling at his video game. I wanted to text him and warn him to be quiet and not come downstairs, but every message I thought of sending led inexorably to a scenario where he disregarded my advice and immediately revealed himself.

I pinched the two drinks with my left hand and cradled the vodka and orange juice bottles with my right arm, and as I walked back toward the living room I heard ALLL ABOOAARD HA HA HAHAAA!, the beginning of “Crazy Train” by Ozzy Osbourne. I noticed abstractedly that the vodka bottle was freezing my arm and that my heart was pounding in my chest. It was the first time in recent memory that my heart was pounding because of a real external threat and not just internal anxiety. There was something strangely comforting, even euphoric, in that fact. My fear of panic-induced heart failure now seemed trivial and ridiculous next to the very real threat of being shot to death by Buddy. I found myself growing excited as I neared the living room and the sound of the music, feeling high on what I considered to be a newfound courage, an ability to find excitement in danger instead of just fear.

The euphoric delusion fled from me as soon as I rounded the corner into the living room. Buddy was rubbing chalk onto the end of a pool stick, a lit cigarette dangling out of his mouth, and just behind him on the mantel, between my laptop and the model of an old ship, was a black handgun. I already believed that he had it, but the fact that it was now visible made it much more horrifying.

I set the cups on the closest edge of the table then put the bottles down on the lamp stand. I pretended not to notice the gun, and I tried my best not to look at it. The fact that it was out and visible meant that Buddy trusted me, but I wasn’t sure that was a good thing, considering how many times I’d betrayed him in the last few hours. The music was uncomfortably loud, the guitar chords building into a crescendo that made my heart palpitations feel less like adrenaline and more like terror. Buddy took one of the cups from the table and nodded to me in thanks, then he gestured to the other end of the table where the other pool stick was leaning against the edge. The balls were already in position. I took my own cup from the table, took several gulps, then set it down on the lamp stand as the first verse of the song went: “Crazy, but that’s how it gooooes…. Millions of people, living as foe-whoa-whoas.”

I took my position on the other end of the table.

To begin a bumper pool game, both players simultaneously shoot their spotted ball from in front of their own pocket counter-clockwise around the table, trying to get it as close as possible to or into their opponent’s pocket on the other side. Whoever’s ball stops closest to the pocket or enters the pocket first will get the first shot, and from then on the players take turns. You have to make your spotted ball before you can start using the others, but after you’ve made the one with the dot you can hit any of the other four plain ones in any way you want. Because of this, the first shot of the game is by far the most important. If you put your first ball into an unmakeable position and your opponent advances, they can then use their regular balls to play defense, forcing you over and over into a corner or the other side of the table, and they can end up winning the whole game before you ever manage to sink that first ball.

I tell you all this about the rules because I was very good at those first shots, and especially from the end of the table that Buddy had put me on. The floor and table were both tilted in such a way that the balls would curve after you hit them. From my side, a ball hit laterally in front of Buddy’s pocket would roll toward the pocket. A ball on my side of the table would roll away from the pocket, making steep angle shots virtually impossible. All of this was concerning to me, because I didn’t want to see what would happen if Buddy got frustrated, but I also didn’t want to throw the game and risk him noticing and thinking of me as a snake. I decided I would botch just the first shot, then I would start playing normally after that. I might lose the game but it would be a close one and I would be a good sport about it one way or the other.

“Okay,” I said. “Ready?”
He nodded and the ash fell off the cigarette that was dangling from his mouth. He wrinkled his nose and brushed the ash into the red fabric of the table. He spat the cigarette toward a cereal bowl on top of the space heater, but it missed and landed on the rug, still lit. He left it there and looked at me.

I said, “Okay! Here we go! One, two, three…” and we both shot on four. I had hit my ball as carelessly as I could, hoping it would find its way into a corner, but to my dismay it began an all-too-familiar curve that led it, as if by some magnetic force, directly to the pocket. Buddy’s shot, meanwhile, had been made at far too shallow of an angle. It hardly bounced at all off the side wall before rolling into the corner wall and holding that line all the way until it rolled into the back of the two white balls that were set up to the right side of my pocket. His next shot would be virtually impossible, and it was unlikely he would be able to do a set up shot without a considerable amount of luck. Even if he could, I was already onto the next stage. I could block him over and over again.

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No matter how hard I tried to keep things close, Buddy kept missing and I kept getting easy shots. I deliberately avoided disrupting his spotted ball, but the plan backfired because he kept failing to make it anyway. He didn’t seem to care, though. He was distracted, stopping now and then to step out into the hallway and look up the stairs or turn his ear up and listen. Several times he went to the window and looked out like Malcolm X. All the while the gun sat in plain sight on the mantel next to a model ship and a painting of some ducks flying over a river. Neither of us mentioned the gun, and Buddy didn’t seem to notice or care in those moments when I was closer to it than he was. If I hadn’t been a coward, I might have taken it from him and ended the whole charade right there, but instead I started to focus on how I might subdue him peacefully.

It seemed strange that he hadn’t done any of the Kathies yet. Either he had already found some from another source and he was hiding the symptoms well or the withdrawals weren’t as bad as I had expected them to be. In any case, if I could get him to blow down then he might pass out before having a run in with Robbie, and I could be reasonably assured that he would stay incapacitated until whenever the cops arrived to evict him.

I won the first game and immediately started making excuses for it. I said, “Ah, good game, I got lucky with that first shot. You want to switch sides? I think this side is easier to shoot from because of the slant.”

Buddy chugged the rest of his drink and started pouring vodka into the empty cup. His silence disturbed me, even more so because the music was in a lull between songs and I was worried he’d hear Robbie upstairs yelling something at his television.

I had to say something so I said, “You know, I talked all that shit about Katharax the other day, but I’ve never actually tried one myself.” That was a lie— I had tried Katharax once in college but I had done too much, blacked out, and didn’t remember taking it. The lie made me uncomfortable. I was worried Buddy would sense the dishonesty somehow, so I quickly modified my statement and said, “Well, actually, I did do a kathy once, but I don’t remember it at all, so it’s like I’ve never done it.”

“It only works with cocaine,” he said, talking into the cup as he took a straight-faced sip of the vodka.

“What?”

If you wanna remember it, gotta do it with cocaine. Or ya hafta do justa half a one.”

“Could I pay you to let me do just a half of one?”

He nodded. “Only have a lil coke right now, so we’ll hafta do it that way. And nah, don’t hafta pay me.”

Buddy walked past me to the wall where the shards of his mirror were still scattered on the floor. He looked at them for a minute, or maybe he was looking at himself in the fractured reflection, then he bent down and picked up the biggest piece, a long triangle with one curved edge. He carried it over to his usual spot on the couch. The youtube playlist he’d started finally moved on to its next song, “Highway to Hell” by ACDC. There was no exhilaration this time around. I still felt dread, though I was hoping a line of Katharax might give me some relief from the anxiety, even if it did nothing to keep me safe besides enticing Buddy to take one himself and, perhaps, to continue trusting me. Buddy set about crushing two Kathies onto the surface of the shard of mirror using a casino rewards card, I hovered around near him, still standing and sipping from my drink, which was almost empty. He had the lines chopped up and ready before the chorus could start and before I could finish my drink.

“You first,” he said, gesturing to one of the two moderately large lines he’d made.

I said, “Ohhh I think that’s probably too much for me. Half that would be plenty.”

“Suit yourself.”

He cut my line in half and moved what he’d cut into his own line, then he looked up at me again to ask with his face if this was suitable.

“Yeah, that’s perfect,” I said, and I accepted the mirror as he handed it to me. I set the mirror on the edge of the bumper pool table then took my wallet out of my pants, took out an old dollar, and rolled it up into a flimsy straw.

“How bad is this gonna fuck me up?” I asked.

He puckered his lips in deliberation then said, “Enough.”

“Splendid,” I said. “Well, here goes nothing.”

I stared at the line for another few seconds, knowing that there could no backing out but contemplating the decision all the same. Once I’d snorted this innocuous pile of white dust, I would lose any semblance of control I still held over the direction this evening might take. I would likely blackout, and I might find the world a very different place when, and if, I woke up.

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The most bizarre thing about Katharax blackout is that it often starts before you even take the drug. Because it makes you forget things retroactively, not just in the moment, a major Katharax blackout doesn’t just include the time when you’re high on the drug— it can include hours, days, and in extreme cases even weeks leading up to the actual event. For the user, the transition is seamless, so seamless that it can feel like time travel, and that’s exactly how it felt for me when I did that line with Buddy. One moment I was looking at a sliver of myself behind the white powder on the mirror, imagining where and how I might wake up in the morning, and as this thought was still passing through my head I found that it was the morning. I was lying in my underwear on my deflated Aero bed, no blankets over me, soaked in sweat but feeling light and hollow as a balloon. All I could feel was the infinitesimally thin membrane dividing my inside from outside, and while I could feel the division, it seemed for several minutes that my consciousness wasn’t seated on either side of it. I was just floating around in the ether, detecting the feeling of humid air on my skin as if through a far-away telepathy, an astral projection that had settled, by unfortunate coincidence, on this pale and sweating pile of flesh.

I was forced out of this strange purgatory by the shriek of the doorbell. It began with a single, shrill buzzing, but soon it was coming in rapid bursts, and with each sound I became more firmly couched in my own body, and I realized with amazement that it really was the next morning, that I really had leapt ahead in time. This realization and my return to my body were followed immediately by a wave of anxiety and a myriad of questions. What happened to Buddy? Is Rob okay? Did I do anything insane in my blacked out state? Who is at the door and why do they sound so frantic?

I sat up dizzily and watched the roaches scattering from the movement. My eyes hurt from the light, dim as it was. I stood up, wobbled, then took my Dark Side of the Moon t-shirt off the floor and put it on. I looked at a pair of shorts a few feet away on the floor, but I didn’t bother to put them on because the buzzing had picked up again, building to such an insane pace that it seemed the ringer would prefer my lack of shorts over any further delay.

I floated out of my door and down the hallway, scanning as I went for anything unusual or anything that might bring back a memory of the night before. There was nothing different about the hallway. The living room looked normal too, by its own low standards, except that the orange juice bottle was empty and the vodka bottle was gone. The gun was gone too. The doorbell had stopped ringing, and I hesitated at the door, wondering if I should open it at all. What if it was the police here to evict Buddy, and I was standing around hungover, no shorts on, with shards of a cocaine mirror behind me?

The hell with it, I thought, and I pulled open the door. My eyes weren’t ready for the sunlight I’d let in. I recoiled from the glare then squinted into it, a small woman’s silhouette forming in the white stain on my retinas.

“Oh thank God!” cried the shadow, and it threw up its arms. “Where is Buddy? Is he okay?”

My eyes finally adjusted to the glare enough to recognize the woman I’d met two days earlier and whose name I still didn’t know. The bowl cut was unchanged, but everything else about her seemed older, frailer, and altogether exhausted. Her skin hung over her face and neck like a wrinkled piece of fabric, and there was a bleakness in her eyes that reminded me of Buddy’s in that first time I had met him, right here where we were standing now.

Where was Buddy? I didn’t know, and she could tell from my glazed look that I didn’t.

“I’m going to check on him,” she announced, and she walked past me into the house.

“Buddy? Buddy!” she called, moving rapidly into the hallway. “Buddy, it’s momma!”

I shuffled along behind her, passing my open door and considering how awful and frightening the place must look to a parent. The roaches were as bad as ever in the kitchen, running around with impunity on top of the mound of uncleaned dishes that sat piled in the sink. There was a hole in the wall from where Buddy’d thrown the toaster. She reached Buddy’s door and pounded on it with her fist.

“Buddy, it’s momma, open up!”

I stood behind her in the opening to the kitchen, still not knowing what to say, but growing more and more concerned. She kept hitting the door, but there was no response. She jiggled the handle, but it was locked.

“Maybe he isn’t home,” I offered.

“He’s home,” she said. “And I can hear his music playing in there.”

She was right. Now as I inched closer, I began to hear the guitar chords of some classic rock or folk song coming faintly through the wall.

“Buddy open up!”

She twisted the knob one last time, then she kicked the door in frustration.

“I’m going to try the other door,” she said. “You stay here and keep calling him.”

There was a second door to Buddy’s room. It led to a small porch overlooking the back lot, and it had a staircase leading down to the corner where Buddy always parked his truck. He never seemed to use that door, but there was a chance it might be unlocked. As Buddy’s mother raced back through the kitchen and down the hallway, I took a jam-covered butter knife from the kitchen counter to try and unlock the door. I’d seen Buddy do it one time when he’d drunkenly locked himself out, and if he could do it drunk then surely I could do it now. The door was old and stood loose in its beaten frame, which was so damaged that there was a significant gap where the deadbolt would slide in. If I could get the knife in there at the proper angle, then I could force the tongue of the deadbolt out of the way just long enough to pull the door open.

As I started jamming the knife in there I heard Buddy’s mother starting to knock and yell from the other door.

“Buddy! Buddy, it’s momma! Please answer me!”

I could tell from her voice she was starting to weep. As incongruous as it may seem for the situation, I began to think of Schrodinger’s Cat, the quantum mechanical notion that prior to direct observation an ordinary object can be held in a superposition of contradictory states. On the other side of that door, Buddy was either alive or dead. He wasn’t waiting for us to find him to collapse his wavefunction and become one thing or another. He was either alive or dead, and hoping one way or the other wouldn’t change a thing, but I prayed to God anyway: Please don’t let him be dead. Please don’t let him be dead.

Suddenly, the end of the knife slid past the tongue of the dead bolt. The door came swinging toward me, and since I’d been using the resistance to balance myself I went falling back onto the floor. The music was clearer now, a Neil Young song I didn’t recognize, a lazy melody going, I think I’ll pack it in and…. buy a pick-up… take you down to L.A… Three or four roaches came spilling out along with the sound, and I heard Buddy’s mom’s muffled voice yelling, “What was that? Buddy? Is Buddy alright?”

It was half an hour before the ambulance arrived. Not that there was any point in them coming— the cop I spoke to said it looked like Buddy’d been dead for at least ten hours, judging by the discoloration. As awful as it had been to find him— and it had certainly been awful— the worst part had undoubtedly been the pointless waiting for the ambulance, as if they could just cart off his body and everything would be made right again. The state of the room was appalling— the carpet wasn’t visible anywhere from all the delivery and fast food trash, plates, cups, clothes piles, and everything else. An open suitcase in front of the bed had two dildos, a vibrator, and a strap-on, and the roaches were everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of them. It was like the room itself was a petri dish and the roaches were some bacterial culture that was boiling up out of it. Buddy’s bed was an island in the middle of all that mess, the only place the roaches wouldn’t go, maybe out of respect for their great benefactor, the man who had planted the seeds of their civilization, and now lay dead and white and open-eyed, staring at the fan that was squealing and shaking on the ceiling, as if it were trying to free itself and escape. I stood around in the middle of that hell hole as Buddy’s mother threw herself over her son’s pale and naked body, sobbing, weeping, screaming at him, screaming at God, screaming at herself, screaming at me, asking why, why, why, over and over, as if the question even had an answer. I stood around until the police told me to leave, then I went back into my room and sat in the swivel chair, noting how the mess in my room might have looked like the early stages of the mess in the room I’d just left. I tried to weep, but I couldn’t. So instead I just sat there staring, not a meaningful a thought in my head.

Nobody from Buddy’s family ever returned to pick up his stuff. Mr. Braddon sent a couple emails but never heard anything back, so on July 4th we rummaged through and took all the valuables— a gold watch, several unworn convenience store t-shirts, Prison Break on DVD— then we put the rest of the shit out on the street, even the big bed and its frame. The only other thing we kept was a little painting, clearly done by Buddy’s daughter, that said, “My dad is as strong as the Hulk, as brave as Captain America, and as smart as Iron Man— but best of all he’s my dad!” We put it up in the hallway as a little tribute, but everything else we threw away. After that, the roaches disappeared. They had overextended their reach, and once the heart of their civilization was taken away the food shortage drove them to extinction. There was a disquieting stillness in the house then. My eyes still flickered with insect movements, but when I’d track the movement to its source I’d find nothing there. Nothing was moving anywhere except for the useless breeze from the AC units. The whole house was dead quiet and desolate, and the only roaches left were the dead ones that no one had bothered to throw away.

Things quickly went back to their peculiar version of normal, so quickly it was like the death had just been a loud and unpleasant noise that rang in our ears for a few days. Perhaps it was part of the grieving process, but Buddy’s death became a sort of joke we kept coming back to. Only a few hours after we’d finished putting all his possessions out on the street, we were out on the third floor balcony and Darian proposed a toast to Buddy that ended in us all “pouring one out” for him, but I said the beer we had wasn’t cheap enough for Buddy, only PBR or Natty Lite would honor him properly, so we found one of each in the fridge and poured those out too, as if the dirt and the gravel in the back of the driveway had somehow become Buddy’s spiritual mouth or stomach, like bread and wine for Jesus’s body and blood. After we’d emptied the PBR and the Natty, I said there’s no way Buddy’ll be satisfied after just three beers, we gotta go get him some vodka, and so Robbie went and found some vodka he’d been hiding, which turned out to be the same bottle of mine that Buddy and I’d shared on his last night alive. Robbie gave us each a shot of it, poured out a shot for Buddy that landed indifferently in that same puddle of mud and beer, then he put the cap back on and said he needed to save the rest for later. No sense wasting it all on Buddy, who drank more than his fair share in life.

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