A Couple Of Joosies In A Futura

I woke to Sam lying next to me, with the TV off. 4am. The room was dark, silent, spookily still. Were my ears ringing? Was that noise in my head?

“You fell asleep.” Sam almost sounded disappointed. It was quiet.

The last thing I remember was that we had fired up again, but, apparently, I fell asleep. Out to it. Sometimes I just pass out.

Lying on the bed, my head on the pillow, I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling. Silence. I turned my head to see Sam lying next to me. Asleep. It was still dark. The room looked like a bomb had gone off.

“I think you passed out.”

That is all I remember.

I opened my eyes again, seemingly just a moment later. I looked over at the clock, it said 10.30am. "You awake," said Sam. He was standing at the end of the bed. Buddy jumped up onto the bed and came over and licked my face. I could only get one eye open. Sam had come up to the room and was cleaning up a bit. He thought it was time for me to be get up.

"I was wondering when you were going to wake up."

All I felt was some kind of exhaustion. Out of it. Numbness. Not a hell of a lot. Buggered.

Oh why oh why didn’t I just buy the 2 points like Sam told me to? Why did I waste the money? I could have had three bags of pot.

"Are you hungry?"

"I don't know, but I guess I should eat."

Sam headed downstairs. I dragged myself to the edge of the bed and pulled on track pants and a t-shirt. I wondered if I'd feel too hot dressed in too much more.

We ate noodles. They were a little claggy, but then they were reheated noodles. They felt kind of slippery and they seemingly required a lot of chewing. So maybe, not all was lost. All was lost, and this hint of something else was just annoying.

I felt a little fucked up, for a bit. It was the balance thing. Reality wasn’t quite moving as fast as the movement of my head and eyes. I’m sure some people would call it motion sickness, good thing I have never suffered from it. Maybe those six months where I learned what amount of pot was good for me, those first months when I first smoked it. That involved a lot of motion sickness, and toilet hugging.

We lay on the couches, Sam with his herb gel eye patch on. We fell asleep. Buddy lay under the coffee table out of the way, as if he knew we couldn’t be trusted not to step on him. He lay in the super dog position. We slept for much of the day, most of the afternoon. We woke much later. Buddy was asleep next to me, on his back with his paws in the air. Sam was no where to be seen.

I headed outside to have a smoke, there was a wobble, I felt a wobble. I decided that if I was going to smoke cigarettes I could just as easily be smoking pot. We should have just got stoned for the weekend, we would have saved hundreds of dollars.

That’s it, I am done with crystal.

I text Guido. You will have to come to Thomastown, or wherever it was, he was at his farm, to get it.

I went to see where Sam was. I could hear him in the bathroom pissing in the toilet, so I waited at the bottom of the stairs for him. You know, romantic.

“My darling, there you are, why were you gone from me for so long?”

He seemed please with me waiting at the bottom of the stairs. He smiled over the bannister. Needless to say, Sam wasn’t so pleased about the pot trip. “I have to go to Thommy, wanna come?” He still agreed to accompany me, after he had stopped slapping me, telling me he didn’t want a pot-head boyfriend.

I looked at him quizzically?

There was heavy traffic on Sydney Road. Actually, there was heavy traffic practically the whole way there. We seemed to be swimming in a sea of cars. They were good. Their dogs were cute.

For the driver’s amongst you, this was sixteen hours later. It did cross my mind as we drove up Sydney Road, especially when there was an inexplicable traffic jam around the old jail. But I felt nothing, I never felt anything. I felt as sober as a judge.

“No officer, I haven’t taken anything.” Today.

The sun shone gold in the late afternoon sky.


“Mate, you can try whatever you want, we all have. But you always come back to her. She’s reliable. The old whore is a cert,” said Guido. He looked down at the zip lock bag in his hand, as we rested our elbows on the railing of his deck and looked out across the brown paddocks. He coughed a mucus cough. He spat something green out of his mouth over the deck rail.

We followed an immaculate early 60s bright red, 2 door Futura, with two “Joosies” sitting in the front seat on the way back. Litres of hair gel, huge sunglasses and sequinned leather jackets, chewing gum, music blaring, base thumping, heads nodding. They continued straight ahead on Bell Street when we turned right into Nicholson Street.

We stopped and bought baked potatoes in Brunswick Street. I parked illegally as Sam ran in.

The bright red, 2 door Futura came burbling up Brunswick Street, 5 minutes after we’d parked at the spud shop. Boom, boom, boom! The joosies heads were still rocking, a cloud of smoke was escaping from the open windows.

I like my potatoes made with all the fresh coleslaw and fresh veggies. It is like a big Hawaiian salad, complete with pineapple. Sam got Bolognese.

We watched Happy Feet Two. Then some incomprehensible Stephen Hawkins documentary. I think I was pretty tired by then and I had trouble following it. “Yup. Yup. Yup.”

I wanted to go to bed first, in a surprising twist of our bedtime etiquette. I was exhausted. It was Sam who was saying, “Wait.” That has never happened before.

Usually, it is. “Come to bed.”

“Oh… um… err…”

“Come to bed.”

“Oh… um…”

He’d be gone.