Two Can Play That Game

“Oooh, Superfly. You’re gonna make your fortune by and by.…”
Curtis Mayfield
“Superfly”
1972

I awoke on the third day, well rested and feeling pretty good considering what those two rat-bastards did to me. Eberbach had just lost his roommate, a space engineer on exchange from England, so I lucked out and picked up his room, eagerly and hopefully indefinitely. How long that would be remained vague. Steve was one of the cool guys at the lab and the price was right. He liked to smoke pot and snort coke, so my suitcases full of Mexican gold helped a bit with the convincing. He didn’t like the risk of harboring contraband, but he sure liked the idea of a constant house stash.

I stuck mostly to my new bedroom on the second floor overlooking Division Street, wondering if the cops would show up hunting for the hand cannon that broke the Ann Arbor sacred Sunday morning brunch peace and executed an authentic, yet innocent horse-hair plaster ceiling. Everything was oddly quiet.

The university was getting ready for a new academic year and the drought was driving up the price of pot. My little trip to Mexico was proving quite fortuitous, particularly due to the timing of my partner’s indiscretion and resulting forfeiture of his share for the sake of love. I became uncharacteristically grateful that some romantic stories don’t end happily ever after.

But I wasn’t about to start another career and become a local weed dealer. Joining the ranks of hipster dealers did have the allure…