At the Reagan Airport terminal in Washington, DC, I got into a waiting cab.

“How you been?” the driver asked me in a strangely familiar tone.

“Good, thanks. Can I go to Mass. Ave?”

“Sure.”

I’d phoned Buffalo Jim and told him I was coming back to DC, but had no place to stay, so he’d agreed to let me crash on his couch till I found an apartment.

The taxi dropped me off at an aircraft carrier of a building—a city to survive the winter in—with grocery store, weight room and barber shop. The building had large impersonal hallways, wandering stoned college kids in the corridors and geriatric patients talking to themselves in the lobby.

I rang the doorbell of apartment 115E and Jim opened.

“D-u-d-e,” he said.

I dropped my bags by the door and sank exhausted into an armchair, its stuffing, like entrails, spilling from the worn cushion. He lay back on a stained futon and spat dip into an empty Coke bottle.              

He introduced his roommate, a heavy-set guy with blonde dreadlocks, wearing clothes that looked like he slept in them.

“Hoss,” he said, “is a food and beverage transportation technician.”

“Really?” I said. “What’s that?”

“Someone who fills vending machines.”

Hoss shook my hand. “Hey dude.”

“Nice place you got,” I said, looking around their spacious living room. “Guess you don’t miss the dorms.

“No way,” Jim said. “They were disgusting. When I came home some nights, I’d have to tip-toe through dip-cups of saliva, chewing tobacco and crud all over the floor.” Jim spat into a paper cup and a string of brown saliva dribbled down his chin. “The toilets were always flooded in vomit and piss ‘cause those morons always missed the bowl when they were wasted!” He wiped his chin with his arm, leaving a shiny trail of saliva on his sleeve. “There was graffiti all over the toilet stalls…sick jokes and comments…names of all the guys who banged the campus slut.”

When they lived on campus last year, Hoss and Jim plugged the sinks in the bathroom as a dumb prank and flooded the dorm floor. They were suspended and placed on social probation.

Two days later, in the middle of the night, they crept quietly into the apartment where they’d been staying. Awakened by the scuffling, their friend Neil crept into the dark living room armed with a baseball bat. He saw two men dressed in black, struggling with a large object wrapped in a white sheet.

Recognizing his friends, he turned on the light.

“The hell’s going on?” he shouted, lowering the baseball bat.

“Man, we struck a gold mine.” Hoss whispered, his eyes wide with excitement.

From the sheet, they unwrapped a pay phone.

“Man, this thing’s so heavy, it must be loaded with money. When we crack it open we’re gonna be rich.”

From an old newspaper, they pulled out a small arsenal of hammers and screwdrivers and began pounding and prying at the lock but only managed to scratch the metal.

“Stop that…you assholes.” Neil said, yawning and wiping sleep from his eyes. “It’s the middle of the night. I’m gonna get a noise complaint. Besides you’d need a blowtorch to get through that bolt!”

Jim and Hoss were asked to leave the college for good and were now renting this small apartment. I soon discovered that I wasn’t there only temporary tenant. Their apartment was a haven to a community of nomads and refugees from the Washington winter. I soon established my dwelling space on an old couch in the living room and kept my clothes in a cardboard box by the TV. 

I learned that the apartment was known as the Oven, because its tenants were always baked on marijuana. Soon I joined the others in their morning wake-n-bakes, which often faded into the afternoon and sometimes lasted till the nightly void of languishing in front of the glowing blue square. Sometimes the TV mute was on and reggae thumped from the stereo in the background while we smoked herb and watched the silent square. All day, thick trails of ganja smoke, creeping, crawling, flooded into the hallway. Burning incense wafted through the spotlights illuminating a poster of Bob Marley. In the evening, in the glow of a lava lamp, ganja smoke pumped to the mellow beat of SOJA, a reggae band from DC.