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boofing her, too. Because with the mornings, with the rising of suns and fungus-eyed friends—whichever friends happened to’ve been in whatever house she and the brother-at-hand had done their boofing in—Lucille would appear all by her lonesome in the crumpled state she’d adopted as style. Back then, the girl wore nothing but Birkenstock sandals and macramé anklets, cutoff Levi’s or OshKosh overalls smeared with the paint of her artistic dabblings—an imitative blend of Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley with a hint of Homer’s seascapes—them and her Grateful Dead tees, tie-dyed, of course. When the weather was bad, she’d wear some Tijuana poncho and often even a blanket round her neck, like some queen-of-People’s-Park swaddled in mangy ermine. And this was on top of her feeble attempt at sprouting a noggin full of dreads. The day would begin like habit, bong hits all around, the morning’s wine in homemade mugs. Whichever Gladden brother she’d been with had already slipped through the woodwork like the creeping ferret he was, so that when all was said and done, that, as they say, was that.
    Later, after these affairs had caved, we began to crush Lucille with gossip. And though for the next few years shadows kept the details grey, the matter cohered vaguely nonetheless. That’s how these things work: one morning, said Misha, who’d got thescoop from Lisa, who’d pinched it from her boy Sam, whom Bobby himself had told, Bobby bragged about the compliments his lovers all gave his beautiful cock, which, according to Lisa-by-way-of-Karen-by-way-of-Lucille, was hardly the case; as for Brad—Lucille’s last of the brothers—he had caught the clap (someone else had slipped between him and Ben); and Ben had a girl in the east who’d found out about his slick business, then told another friend, who, of course—because, again, that’s the way these things go down—was a friend of mine.
    And where I was concerned, what could Basil ask he didn’t already know? How many diseases I’d got by the time I hit twenty, or had I shoplifted as a kid or tinkered with sex? The closest it came to that was kissing my cousin when I was five, beneath a blanket on Christmas Eve. Though my dear old toad had no doubt caught us, he was kind enough to wait till morning, dressed like a Hare Krishna elf, to beat me with his paddle.
    Nor would Basil ask why I’d called last year at four a.m. to say something was amiss with his granny. She’d just suffered a lapse in health he and his mom went nutty for, some sort of brain hemorrhage I knew nothing of. At the time I considered my little call a motiveless joke spawned by a five-day binge during which I’d consumed three eight balls, seven quarts of bourbon, five cases of sucky beer, and nineteen or twenty packs of smokes—and that’s forgetting my jaunt through Berkeley’s midnight streets in nothing but a beanie with a propeller on top, ranting about Ezekiel’s wheels gleaming of beryl and the predictions of Nostradamus.
    But later, in the clarity of my regret, I saw the canker in the bloom. Basil had “fired” me (that was the expression he used once he started talking smack) from what he obviously had considered “his” band. In a dull autumn noon veined with dull autumn smog, we sat over a mound of pad thai and confessedour interests had suffered a rift. He felt, or so he said, I could do better elsewhere. Get out on my own maybe, he’d been stifling my creativity and such, he said. But even in the midst of these shams we both knew he was wonking through his bullshit tulips, making a farce of protecting my ego while disguising the rage of his own.
    That he knew I knew he knew I knew all this made it the more obscene. His head had grown bigger even than Dinky’s, which wasn’t to say my own had shrunk. I’d risen from the glop of my tyro swamp,