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who, like a magician, had suddenly appeared again.
    â€œI’m baack,” Dash said to me on my cell phone, sounding in his clowning way like Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
.
    â€œHey, how’d the gig go?” I said, trying to sound light-hearted.
    â€œFabulous, primo. They loved us.”
    I congratulated him. I was suddenly full of congratulations, like Santa Claus with his bag of toys.
    â€œI’m going over there now, you wanna come? It’s no biggie to me if you do or not but I’m only gonna do this one or two more times, so if you do it, you have to buy in quantity.”
    â€œIs one hundred OK?”
    â€œOne hundred’s OK. I’ll be over in fifteen minutes, then we’ll take a ride together.”
    I wanted to ask him if he’d actually spoken to the source first but I held my tongue. While he was away I’d secretly worried whether I’d ever hear from him again, being afraid he might move to the Midwest or else truly have his much-threatened change of heart about dealing, and now that I finally had him on the phone I didn’t want to aggravate him.
    Meanwhile, Dash was telling me more information about our trip. “We’re gonna go straight there, I just have to stop at a Kinko’s to check my e-mail—unless you have a computer I could use at your place. Do you?”
    Reluctantly, I said yes. The dealer had only been in my condo once before and even that was over my protests. Instinctively, I didn’t want to ever have him over. The first time I did he commented on how big my place was and asked me what the rent was, not understanding that I owned it. I told him it was five hundred a month less than it would have been if it were an apartment and he believed me. In some ways the dealer was naïve (like the way he believed everything Bill O’Reilly said). This time he said almost the same things as before.
    â€œLook how long the hallway is,” he gushed, as he lumbered bear-like toward my computer room. “Look how big the rooms are. How much money you make anyway?”
    I could feel my heart beat as I mumbled something incoherent.
    â€œTurn left for the computer room,” I finally said, and then quickly changed the subject. Fortunately, it was easy to do that with Dash, who I think had ADD or something close to it. He also seemed to have a belief that socializing was something he had to do in business, even the cut and dried business of dealing. That’s why he kept me waiting so long when he was with the source. He felt he had to chat up the electrician, and, to a lesser degree, he did it with me too.
    â€œThis won’t take long, brother,” he said as he sat in front of my computer. “I just need to go through my mail while I was gone. … Hey, how ’bout those Red Sox?” Dash added. “Isn’t it a drag how they blew that last game?”
    â€œYeah, tell me about it.”
    â€œYou watched it, right?”
    â€œOf course. I felt like committing suicide afterward.”
    â€œOh well, if we hadn’t traded Manny, we would have won it, right?”
    The dealer and I were both native New Englanders. I’m from Brookline, which borders Boston, and he’s from Stowe, Connecticut, so we’re both Red Sox and Celtics fans. He’d use this connection relentlessly when we talked, but a part of me enjoyed it, I have to admit. It isn’t easy to leave your hometown, especially when you’re over thirty-five, as I was, and then find yourself in a new, bigger city like Philly that doesn’t even know you exist. In spite of what he was doing, the dealer was a naturally friendly guy, which I appreciated.
    Predictably, with all our talking plus his insisting I check out the pictures taken from his latest gigs on the Internet, it took much longer than he said it would before we hit the road. During our trip the dealer made one call after another on his cell. Between the calls I