Read Online The Marijuana Chronicles by Jonathan Santlofer - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jonathan Santlofer
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serious artist and pot made me tired and hungry and I was living on Dannon yogurt and Cup O’ Noodles and couldn’t have afforded pot even if I wanted it.
My ex-girlfriend got in touch with me once and wanted to meet up but I was too proud and stung by her rejection and thought I was pretty cool now that I was a graduate student studying painting and espousing postmodern theory, plus I had started seeing a girl, a sophomore, who thought I was really cool and hung on my every word.
It was about a year after graduate school, when I was playing the life of the artist for real, that I went to the dinner party in Soho, back when Soho was the hip new art scene. There were about a dozen people there, artists and art dealers, a collector or two, and a curator who had just started working at MOMA—someone I clearly wanted to cultivate—and he was saying how he’d gone to Harvard for his masters and PhD and I mentioned I was at BU the same years and he didn’t make a face when I said it because people in the art world knew BU had a good art school, and he asked me if I was there for the Hansel scandal and I said, As in Hansel and Gretel? and a few people laughed but he didn’t.
You must have been there when it happened because it was my senior year, which was your senior year, right? Then he stopped, tapped his chin, and said, Oh, but it didn’t come out till the next year so maybe you missed it .
I said, Missed what?
He said, This guy, Hansel, cut up his girlfriend .
At that, everyone stopped eating and turned toward him.
Cut her into pieces , he said. Put her body parts into plastic bags and cartons, which — can you believe? — he dropped into the Charles River!
I started choking.
Oh, please , said a sophisticated older woman, an art collector wearing a lot of gold jewelry.
It’s true , said the Harvard guy, and he might have gotten away with it but one of the boxes floated up to the surface and some students found it and opened it, and aside from a hand or a foot — I’m pretty sure it was a foot — there was also a letter or a card or something that led the police to him, so he was not only a lunatic but a stupid one, so he must have had help .
I swallowed hard and said, Why?
Well, he didn’t have a car and there was no record of a rental .
I said, Couldn’t he have … walked?
The Harvard guy looked at me like I was retarded. Around the entire Charles River? It would have taken days, weeks. No way. He had help. Someone with a car, the police were sure of it .
You’re quite the expert , I said.
No, though I admit I read everything about it. They never found out who helped him because the guy was dead when the cops discovered him, had been for days, in some awful apartment in Slumerville — that’s what everyone in Boston calls Somerville .
I said, How?
He said, How — what?
How — did he die? My heart was banging against my rib cage like I’d swallowed a live bird.
The host, an artist a few years older, who had been getting attention for his hyperrealistic over-life-size portraits, cut in and asked if anyone wanted to smoke some grass and started passing a joint, and I accepted my first toke in over a year as the Harvard PhD went back to his story.
According to the papers, the killer, a loser who had flunked out of some junior college, Bunker Hill or Roxbury Community, took an overdose of something, plus he was inhaling some sort of hallucinogen that was all the rage that year though I can’t remember what it was called .
DMT , I said, not meaning to.
That’s it! He looked at me, eyebrows raised, and so did everyone else.
I only tried it once, at a party in Cambridge .
In Cambridge , he said. Hey, we could have been at the same party!
Then everyone started asking me questions about DMT like I was a specialist—or a junkie.
Was it like acid?
Was it addictive?
Wasn’t it unhealthy?
I dragged on the joint picturing my pink Studebaker filled with boxes of body parts, me and Johnny
My ex-girlfriend got in touch with me once and wanted to meet up but I was too proud and stung by her rejection and thought I was pretty cool now that I was a graduate student studying painting and espousing postmodern theory, plus I had started seeing a girl, a sophomore, who thought I was really cool and hung on my every word.
It was about a year after graduate school, when I was playing the life of the artist for real, that I went to the dinner party in Soho, back when Soho was the hip new art scene. There were about a dozen people there, artists and art dealers, a collector or two, and a curator who had just started working at MOMA—someone I clearly wanted to cultivate—and he was saying how he’d gone to Harvard for his masters and PhD and I mentioned I was at BU the same years and he didn’t make a face when I said it because people in the art world knew BU had a good art school, and he asked me if I was there for the Hansel scandal and I said, As in Hansel and Gretel? and a few people laughed but he didn’t.
You must have been there when it happened because it was my senior year, which was your senior year, right? Then he stopped, tapped his chin, and said, Oh, but it didn’t come out till the next year so maybe you missed it .
I said, Missed what?
He said, This guy, Hansel, cut up his girlfriend .
At that, everyone stopped eating and turned toward him.
Cut her into pieces , he said. Put her body parts into plastic bags and cartons, which — can you believe? — he dropped into the Charles River!
I started choking.
Oh, please , said a sophisticated older woman, an art collector wearing a lot of gold jewelry.
It’s true , said the Harvard guy, and he might have gotten away with it but one of the boxes floated up to the surface and some students found it and opened it, and aside from a hand or a foot — I’m pretty sure it was a foot — there was also a letter or a card or something that led the police to him, so he was not only a lunatic but a stupid one, so he must have had help .
I swallowed hard and said, Why?
Well, he didn’t have a car and there was no record of a rental .
I said, Couldn’t he have … walked?
The Harvard guy looked at me like I was retarded. Around the entire Charles River? It would have taken days, weeks. No way. He had help. Someone with a car, the police were sure of it .
You’re quite the expert , I said.
No, though I admit I read everything about it. They never found out who helped him because the guy was dead when the cops discovered him, had been for days, in some awful apartment in Slumerville — that’s what everyone in Boston calls Somerville .
I said, How?
He said, How — what?
How — did he die? My heart was banging against my rib cage like I’d swallowed a live bird.
The host, an artist a few years older, who had been getting attention for his hyperrealistic over-life-size portraits, cut in and asked if anyone wanted to smoke some grass and started passing a joint, and I accepted my first toke in over a year as the Harvard PhD went back to his story.
According to the papers, the killer, a loser who had flunked out of some junior college, Bunker Hill or Roxbury Community, took an overdose of something, plus he was inhaling some sort of hallucinogen that was all the rage that year though I can’t remember what it was called .
DMT , I said, not meaning to.
That’s it! He looked at me, eyebrows raised, and so did everyone else.
I only tried it once, at a party in Cambridge .
In Cambridge , he said. Hey, we could have been at the same party!
Then everyone started asking me questions about DMT like I was a specialist—or a junkie.
Was it like acid?
Was it addictive?
Wasn’t it unhealthy?
I dragged on the joint picturing my pink Studebaker filled with boxes of body parts, me and Johnny
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