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inevitably he’d act like an idiot, and say
something risqué to the hostess, or grab someone’s ass, and then
Martha would have to drag him home, like a bad dog who couldn’t be
trusted not to hump the small children of friends.
    They passed the joint back and forth, and
toasted the moon and stars with swigs of tequila straight from the
bottle. She pointed out Jupiter in the same part of the sky as the
moon.
    “It’s fucking beautiful,” said ganja-man through Stanley.
    “On a clear night, I can see Uranus,” she
said.
    Stanley doubled up in laughter.
    Callie stood and began to dance. Her body
moved like a cobra, her rippled belly undulating, her limbs all
moving independently, as bone-less as snakes. As she circled the
fire, its light cast shadows of her arms upon her torso, and it
looked as if serpents were wrapping themselves around her.
    Stanley had been born with a stick up his
ass, so dancing had never come naturally to him, but ganja-man was always up for it, so in a few moments he was
on his feet too, circling the fire with Callie, bobbing and weaving
and swinging his dick in the moonlight. The fire burned down to
embers and still they danced under the light of the moon. Stanley
howled like a wolf until he was hoarse, prompting residents in his
neighborhood to call their pets in and make 911 calls to report a
wild animal, possibly a rabid coyote, on the loose.
    Stanley’s throat was raw. Mas tequila,
por favor , cried ganja-man , who never quite knew when to
quit and call it a night. He drank from the bottle and danced.
    Time passed. The moon sailed over their
heads like a volleyball in slow motion. People came out of the
bushes to watch. A guy in a pair of sweatpants and a leather jacket
held together with duct tape. A woman wearing nothing but a beach
towel. An old man with a fungus on his cheek the size of a muffin.
A couple of kids who looked like they’d just run away from prep
school. A woman with a nest of hair that might have housed a family
of bats.
    The tequila went the rounds until it was
finished. More smoke, more dancing, more howling...
    The police showed up. Callie and the others
scattered into the bushes, leaving Stanley alone, dancing naked in
the moonlight. After a brief struggle, he was handcuffed and led
back to Pottery Road and a waiting patrol car.
    Bearing absolutely no identification, not
even a set of keys for his house, Stanley’s claim of civil service
employment and home ownership in Riverdale was greeted by cop
cynicism and outright disbelief. They took him to the Don Jail and
put him in a holding cell for the night, where he wrapped himself
in a blanket and fell into a restless and hallucinatory sleep.
    In the morning he awoke to the mother of all
headaches, vomited some tequila-flavored berry bile into his cell
toilet and screamed like Kafka on meth until a jailer came to see
what all the fuss was about. After a cup of tea and some burned
toast, Stanley was allowed to make a phone call.
    Isabel arrived an hour later with a bathrobe
and a pair of sandals. She substantiated Stanley’s identity and
fabricated a story for the desk sergeant that her friend suffered
from bouts of premature dementia, and sometimes got lost in his own
neighborhood. She drove Stanley in her Audi back to his place,
where he retrieved the front door key hidden inside a fake stone
under the hedge for situations something like this.
    Stanley called in sick, slept for 24 hours
and woke up on Thursday with an epiphany. By the end of the week
he’d moved all of his personal stuff out of the house on Browning
Avenue, across the Don Valley and into Isabel’s place on Hampton
Park Crescent.
    On Sunday he met Martha at the airport. On
the way home, he pretended to be spontaneous and stopped off in the
Distillery District for a late brunch at a decent restaurant where
on a crowded terrace he told her he was in love with Isabel and was
moving out. He’d thought it would go smoothly but when Martha
exploded with