I’d met Joe the day I got to Pocatello, and I moved in with him right away. He was living in the house on Fifth with a couple of his friends, but he kicked them out after a week, and then it was just the two of us. I didn’t have to pay any rent. Joe said I could stay there just because I--as he put it--“kept him happy,” but I also cleaned the house and did the cooking.
Rose was standing outside the Fine Arts Building right across the street. I’d never seen a black person before, except on TV. That’s easy when you grow up in Paris, Idaho, population 581, all white, almost all Mormon. Anyway, Rose stared at me real hard, and I stared back, and then she started walking over my way. I remember noticing how hard she swung her arms when she walked, and she didn’t smile. She kept looking at me with this real intense expression on her face, like she didn’t have her glasses on and needed to concentrate in order to get me into focus. She was wearing a bright red shirt and faded levis with holes all up and down the legs, not on the knees where you’d expect them to be, but on the fronts of the thighs and down lower on the shins. She had on big clompy boots--the kind my brothers wear when they go pheasant hunting and walk through the corn stubble in the fields.
She just kept coming, swinging her arms, and she didn’t even watch for cars when she crossed Fifth Street. When she got closer, I could see that a red bandana was threaded through the loops of her levis to make a kind of belt, and her hair was pulled up on top of her head in a fuzzy little bun.
She walked right up to my front steps and said, “Hi. Wanta smoke a joint with me?”
I’d never gotten high before, but I’d heard about it, so I said, “Okay,” and we went inside and sat down at my kitchen table. Rose pulled a little red leather bag out of her front pocket and unzipped it and laid out an orange paper folder that said “Zig-Zag,” some silver tweezers, a tiny box of wooden matches, and a black plastic film canister. She told me to bring her a plate, and I got one out of the cupboard and gave it to her. She flipped the top off the film canister and shook some of the dried weed out on the plate and started crumbling it between her fingers. I noticed how slender her fingers were, and pink on the tips. Her fingernails were long and painted red, but the polish was pretty chipped. When the weed was crunched up real fine, she took a thin, yellow paper out of the Zig-Zag folder and made a couple of extra folds in it lengthwise, pressing it down on the table. Then, cradling the paper gently, she filled it with the weed. She rolled the joint back and forth between her fingers ‘til it was slender and round, and then she licked the sticky on it with one quick swoop of her long pink tongue. She gave the end of the joint a tiny twist, stuck it between her lips, and, with only one hand, she tapped open the match box, shook out a match, and scraped it against the side of the box to light it.
The match flared, and she held it to the twisted end of the joint, drawing on it heavily. When she passed the joint to me, I drew on it the way she had. I heard the burning paper crackle as I inhaled. I choked. Smoke scraped the sides of my throat as I coughed it up, and the glands under my ears burned. “Went down the wrong way,” I gasped, handing the joint back to her.
“Happens.”
I coughed my way over to the sink and stuck my mouth under the tap. “That’s a mistake,” Rose warned. I hung far into the sink and choked water and struggled for air. I thought of the fish I caught the first time I went out with Dad and my brothers. It took me forever to land the damn thing--nobody would help me, not even Kip--and when I finally got it into the boat, it gasped frantically, flipping from side to side, its glassy eye begging me to put it back in the water. My own glassy eye stared at the ceiling as I lay over the sink and waited for the coughing to subside. I thought I heard Rose laugh, but when I finally got my breath back and turned around, she was smoking and picking at the polish on her fingernails. “You’ll get used to it,” she said, “but you probably won’t catch a buzz the first time.”
“How’d you know it was my first time?”
Rose pursed her lips and gazed sideways into middle distance, stroking an imaginary beard. “Hmmm. How’d I know it was your first time?”
“Okay, okay,” I laughed. “Guess it wasn’t too hard to figure out.”
“Not too.” She threw her head back and exhaled smoke at the ceiling. When she looked back down, I took the joint from her and tried another, more cautious drag.
“My name’s Rose,” she said without exhaling, “What’s yours?” She sounded like some hippies I’d seen in a movie once who talked like their noses were stuffed up or like they were politely burping at the back of their throats. Don’t Bogart that joint, the hippies had said to each other in the movie, but I didn’t know what that meant.
“Jacqueline. My brothers call me Jackie. But I’m changing the spelling to J-A-C-Q-U-E. It’s French.”
“I know. So, Jackie, do you go to college, or what?”
“Not yet. But I’m thinking of getting my GED and then goin’ to ISU. You a student?”
“Art major. Gettin’ ready right now for a big show. In two weeks.”
“Over there in the Art Building?”
“Yeah. Gallery’s in the basement. Kilns are upstairs. We’re doing a raku firing today, but I had to get out of there. Too hot. Yesterday I burned all the hair off my arms.” She held both of her long, bare arms toward me, turning the backs of them up f±or my inspection. I couldn’t really see where they were burned, but there didn’t seem to be any hair on them, so I nodded sympathetically.
Rose took another drag on the joint. “When we finish this,” she wiggled the joint between her thumb and first finger, “we’ll go over and you can help me take the pots out. You’re not doin’ anything, are you?”
“Just waiting for my boyfriend to get home.”
“Oh, yeah? Who’s your boyfriend?”
“Joe Fussarelli. He plays football for ISU. D’you know him?”
Rose didn’t answer right away. She held the remnant of the joint in her left hand and pointed at the silver tweezers with her right. “Pass me that roach clip, will ya?” As I handed her the clip, I noticed that its base was shaped like a naked, kneeling woman. The woman’s arms were stretched high above her head where she held a cluster of marijuana leaves. The silver was heavily tarnished in the crevices between the leaves, but it gleamed smoothly along the woman’s thighs and buttocks, where the clip fit cozily in the palm of my hand. The cluster of leaves ended in a tiny spoon.
Rose fastened the joint in the clip and took a few final drags, puffing quickly. She pinched out the last of the fire and released the extinguished roach onto the plate. She squinted at me through her exhaled smoke. “Yeah, I know Joe,” she said. She unzipped the red leather bag and replaced the Zig-Zag papers, film canister, matchbox, and the silver roach clip. Then she stood and slipped the bag into her front pocket. “How’d you hook up with him? Wait, don’t tell me. Don’t really need ta’ know. Come on. I gotta get back and check the kiln.”
