Episode 2: The Tell-Tale Fart
I thought back to the poker game, as I paced around our apartment in anticipation, fighting to retain a sunny disposition, while I waited for Johnson to return with the object of my obsession.
I tried writing, but my mind was helplessly adrift and restless, so I smoked a joint, sitting on the couch, which was covered with a faded, felt fabric, that was the color of weathered maroon.
We had recently found this sofa on the side of the road to replace the futon which was broken, and which of course, we had also found in the garbage. The ‘new’ couch had unfortunately gotten broken too, and sat wobbly, and unlevel on the floor. Getting the new furniture into our apartment had been a real nightmare, two weeks before.
As Johnson and I had tried to walk the wide load into the living room, it had gotten stuck in the doorway. It wouldn’t budge and the back of the sofa was sticking out and blocking the door of the apartment across the hall.
To add injury, to insult, just at that moment, our neighbor from across the hall, whom we had never met before, attempted to leave his apartment, but his screen door banged up against the end of the couch.
He was trapped!
“I’m so sorry sir,” I bowed humbly to an old, humorless, Asian man, who silently eyeballed me, “we’ll get this unstuck in a second.”
Johnson and I kept pushing with all our might, but to no avail. We tried pulling it back out the way we came in, but it was helplessly locked into place. One of the pegs at the bottom of the frame was wedged and caught in the doorway. The only way to free the entangled-lounger would be to remove the peg, so I grabbed it with both hands and tugged at it, but it was screwed on too tightly.
I frantically climbed over the couch into the apartment in search of tools, but I couldn’t find anything useful or locate the right device or utensil that could help me to saw, unscrew, or break off the peg.
This is an emergency! I worried erratically, what are we going to do? We’ve entombed our neighbor alive, in his apartment!
I looked around the kitchen, and short of any better options, I grabbed a frying pan.
“What the hell is that?” Johnson was dumbfounded, as I returned to the couch-jam.
“It’s a frying pan.” I replied, dryly.
“Are you going to make the sofa, some pancakes?” Johnson asked me skeptically.
“No,” I brought him up to speed, “I’m going use the frying pan, to beat the leg off of the couch.”
“Ok… well, that’s a terrible idea.”
Ignoring Johnson, I proceeded to bang on the peg until it loosened up and I was finally able to screw it off. With the peg removed, Johnson and I were able to successfully squeeze the sofa in through the doorway, and in the process, free our hostage from captivity. In the act of saving our neighbor though, a sacrifice had been made, as I had mangled our frying pan, and from now on, anytime we made pancakes, they were going to be shaped like, Pac-man.
I stared at the smoke that was traveling across the living the room, highlighted in contrast to the black TV screen, and the backlight from the sun, filtering in through the gaps in the sheet, covering the window.
It was already 45 minutes later than Johnson had estimated to me that he would be back. It was always an estimate though, and almost always an ambitious estimate, when driving anywhere in Southern California. Los Angeles in particular, had the worst traffic of any city in America, and it seemed like it was as bad as it could possibly get. Astonishingly though, I had looked it up online, and LA was still statistically something like, 1000% less congested, than the worst cities in China!
I started washing dishes to kill time and to be a good roommate.
Johnson had complained now on several occasions that I was messy, and I had to make my best efforts to keep the peace.
All that Johnson had been willing or able to tell me over the phone earlier, was that his meeting with J2 had, “gone well”.
I was near, 100% certain, that when Johnson had told me that things had gone “well”, that he must have been talking about, finally scoring some trim!
Johnson knew where my head was at, and I had made it redundantly, and nauseatingly clear to him, how much it meant to me to get the trim.
About a half hour later, as I was finishing up sweeping the wooden floor in the living room, I heard Johnson come in through the front door.
I was so excited; I couldn’t wait for Johnson to bring in the goodies!
I emptied out the dustpan, and clipped it to the broom, setting the pair against the wall by the garbage in the kitchen.
I grabbed a beer from the fridge and walked around the counter to the living room, where Johnson was taking off a large hiking backpack, which he set down on the couch. He then peeled off an Adidas gym bag that was strapped across his other shoulder.
I held the beer out for him; an olive branch to show my appreciation.
“Hey, buddy!” Johnson was smiling. He looked like he was in a good mood.
I was in a great mood too.
All this time, all this work, all of the insanity, I reflected, this is what is was all for…
Johnson set the gym bag down and took the beer from me.
“You’re the best,” Johnson cracked open the beer with his lighter, sending the cap flying across the room.
Johnson didn’t bother to go after the cap to pick it up, but instead, walked around to the couch and sat down. He grabbed the TV remote off our old, wooden, coffee stained, coffee table and turned on the television.
“There’s some good games on today,” Johnson started to flip through channels, as he kicked his feet up on the coffee table.
Johnson is fucking with me, I recognized, and laughed out loud.
Johnson looked over at me but didn’t ask any follow up questions and was soon lost in the world of basketball again.
Need help with your game plan?
I walked around to the other side of the sofa and stood next to the TV in front of Johnson.
“So Johnson,” I drew out my words slowly, “before you get into the game… do you want to like… fill me in?”
“Sure,” Johnson responded, as he continued to surf with the controller. I waited for a minute, but he didn’t say anything else.
“Well… how did it go?” I eventually broke the silence.
“It went great,” Johnson grinned, “J2 fronted me five more pounds of flowers, with more to come.”
Johnson is definitely fucking with me, my heart started racing. He wants to make this, as painful as he can.
“That is, great,” I nodded, “So… you know, what, about… the trim?”
“The trim,” Johnson repeated.
“The trim,” I nodded again.
“Right.” Johnson said, nodding as well.
You want to draw this out long as possible and make me suffer. I hate you, Johnson, I hate you so much, right now.
I stepped in front of the television so that Johnson could no longer avoid making eye contact with me.
“Well Johnson?” I questioned him, “why don’t you go ahead and be a pal, and tell me about the trim, then?”
“Yes… the trim…,” Johnson shook his head, looking away from me.
He slowly started nodding.
“I forgot to ask him.” Johnson finally declared.
“What? No, you didn’t?”
I started seeing red spots across my vision, and I heard a rumbling noise, coming from inside of my upper body, that I was concerned might be the sound of my heart starting to boil.
Johnson’s not serious?
After analyzing the situation, I came to the conclusion that Johnson must be having fun with me. I was sure of it.
I chortled like a deranged lunatic, pointing my finger, accusingly at him.
“Ackhahahaha,” I quacked, somewhere in between genuine, and melodramatic, make-believe laughter, “you’re fucking with me… you terrible… troublemaking… demon!”
“Sorry,” Johnson sounded serious, making his first attempt at real eye contact, “I actually did forget.”
“I don’t understand how you could have possibly forgot?” I scolded him.
“My apologies,” Johnson’s voice sounded sincere, “we got caught up, talking about basketball and flowers, and you know…”
Johnson stopped talking, frozen in midsentence by my icy glare.
“Look,” Johnson threw up his arms, getting animated, “I forgot, and I’m sorry… but… moving on… the good news, is that J2 is ready to front us more flowers if we can prove ourselves!”
I stood motionless and silent, but my hatred for Johnson was nevertheless audible; a pulsating, furious rage, beating from deep within my core.
“This is like, great news, dude.” Johnson insisted, “and frankly, this wasn’t really the reaction, that I was expecting from you.”
Squinting intently, I sneered at him, attempting to melt Johnson’s brain with radioactive, death-rays from my mind.
“Well, I didn’t want to spoil the surprise,” I snarked, “but I was planning on throwing a parade in your honor, later today.”
“No thanks.” Johnson pulled his phone out of his pocket and began scrolling through text messages.
“It’s not a big deal,” I continued, “You’ve earned it, not only just for being a great friend to me, and for diligently working to help me start this business, but also for being such an amazing member of society in general.”
Johnson couldn’t help but laugh a little, even as he pulled on as his hair and moaned.
“I don’t want a parade,” Johnson snapped at me, starting to get fed up with my antics, “I just want to be left alone!”
“Well, it’s too late to cancel the parade now,” I folded my arms across my chest, “the float that I had commissioned to celebrate your greatness, is non-refundable.”
“Please stop,” Johnson shook his head, again looking down towards the floor, as if ill.
It was clear that Johnson’s composure at this moment, like mine, was a house of cards, ready to come crumbling down with the slightest breeze.
“I’m sorry,” I apologized, “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Thank you.” Johnson acknowledged.
“it’s just that in my mind,” I kept my foot on the gas, “the only thing that I can compare to your epic return with the flowers from Pasadena, is when the American soldiers were coming home from World War II, after liberating Europe from the nazis.”
Johnson flashed me a dirty look.
“Thus,” I concluded, “I feel like logically… this situation calls for a parade.”
“For the love of God,” Johnson rubbed his eyes, “will you please move out of the way of the television, so that I can watch the game?”
Unmoved by Johnson’s words, I continued to remain physically unmoved as well.
“You promised me, you would ask him,” I continued to prosecute my case, “we can’t start this company, without the trim.”
“I know.” Johnson sighed dramatically, “I forgot. I’m sorry, what else do you want?”
“I’d like to know when? Can you please put a timeline on this?”
Angrily fidgeting, I tapped my foot and impatiently waited in front of the television for Johnson to respond.
Johnson sat in silence.
“Well, do you have an answer for me, Johnson?” I demanded.
Johnson sat still for a moment on the sofa, seemingly contemplating my question, when suddenly, his eyes lit up, and a look of certainty came across his face, as if he had just had, a ‘Eureka’ moment.
I waited for Johnson to speak, as he quietly lifted his left knee up above his lap, and farted loudly.
Johnson isn’t taking this seriously at all, it had become apparent. He thinks this is all just a fucking pipe dream!
“I’ve had it with you, Johnson,” I put him on notice, “you are both figuratively, and literally, gaslighting me, right now.”
If it hadn’t been obvious since Johnson had picked me up in San Francisco the year before, then Johnson had brought his lack of faith and interest into focus in the time since Thanksgiving, when I had thought that the launch of our professional marijuana edibles company was inevitable, and just around the corner.
After our good turn of fortune with J2 and Duane, I was expecting J2 to give Johnson and I $4000 to split, and maybe even throw in some trim to be nice. If not, I was still planning to invest my share of the money on buying trim, and then I was ready to hustle and move some products before my portion of the rent and bills were due.
Instead, Johnson told me that J2 was going to give the money to us in installments. Johnson would receive the money directly, and I would never touch it.
Johnson decreed that the money he received, when he received it, would be allocated to pay for half of our rent and bills for four months, and that was the end of that.
I didn’t think it was fair, but there was virtually nothing that I could do about it, and Johnson was unwilling to budge on his budget. I didn’t even have J2’s contact information or know how to get a hold of him on my own. Not that I thought J2 would even talk to me, if I tried to go around Johnson, so it was essentially a moot point.
J2, like Johnson, was only concerned with selling flowers. That was the real prize they were both after. They didn’t see the big picture of riding the wave of cannabis legalization to mainstream adoption; or if they did, they didn’t care enough, because they had their sights, laser focused on making money today.
If anything, like most of the marijuana industry in California at the time, they wanted the black market to continue forever, so that they wouldn’t have to pay taxes or deal with regulations.
That was frankly, the polar opposite, of the picture that I envisioned in my head, of both where this industry was going, and where we needed to be positioned to take advantage of it.
For two months now, I had asked Johnson to follow up with J2 and/or his other friends up north, to source us some trim. Johnson had perpetually forgotten, neglected to do it, or cited a myriad of other excuses.
Is strangling Johnson, worth going to prison for? I wondered, as Johnson craned his neck, and did his best to peak around my body, to continue watching television.
In my imagination, my hands were around Johnson’s throat, squeezing, as his eyes popped out of his skull.
With dripping, retina tails, Johnson’s eyeballs shot through the room like tiny comets, landing in bloody streaks across the floor, rolling over, until both of Johnson’s detached eyes were pointed upwards in the direction of the TV, so that he could still see the game.
“Can you, stop please?” Johnson’s frustrated voice, raised to a comically heightened pitch.
“I’ll stop when we have trim.” I continued to stubbornly move my body back and forth in sync with his head, playing goalie to his eyes.
“Jesus Christ,” Johnson shouted, and covered his eyes with his hands, before looking up at me.
“Listen,” Johnson opined, “I think that the edibles business is a great idea… I really, truly do, I think it’s great… but… the truth is, neither of us know anything about running a food manufacturing company, or a real business, of any type, for that matter.”
“Well, Johnson,” I cross examined him, “you might not be aware of it, but there’s actually a really great website that you use can use now, to search for information. It’s called, Google… have you heard of it? Apparently, you can just go there, and look stuff up.”
“I know, “Johnson nodded patronizingly, “I know, and I believe that you’re right, but… this just isn’t something we’re going to be able to do overnight. It’s going to take a long time and a lot of money. You get where I’m going with this?”
I fired ice-daggers from my eyes into Johnson’s soul.
“I know it’s going to take time,” I spoke slowly, as if addressing a simpleton, “that’s why, we need to get the trim as soon as possible. We need to get started, before it’s too late!”
“Too late for what?” Johnson seemed to mock me, “what’s your big hurry there guy?”
“Because Johnson, pot is going to be legal soon, and then big business is going to come in and dominate this industry, like they do, everything else. And then guys like you and I, will never have a shot to break in. Right now, only in this transitional phase of the industry, do I believe that we have a once in a lifetime window of opportunity to capitalize on the moment and establish ourselves. And, that’s not going to happen, if you don’t talk to J2 about the trim.”
“Look,” Johnson barked at me, “I already said I’d talk to him, like a thousand times, but in the meantime,” he continued to raise his voice as he spoke, attempting to steal control and reorient the direction of our conversation, “will you please, please, please stop bothering me and go sell some fucking pot? How much have you sold this week? Half an ounce? You’re not going to be able to survive on what you’re getting paid from writing.”
At the beginning of December, J2 fronted Johnson two pounds of weed, which Johnson had then pushed me to help him sell.
He told me that I was going to have to build a customer base, and that he would continue to help me, only so long as I was making progress with the flowers.
The problem with building a customer base in LA though, is that I didn’t know anyone besides Johnson, my buddy Dave, Hanson, and a few other friends from college that didn’t even smoke pot.
I needed to find new networks, and communities of young people that loved to get high.
Maybe I can just show up on a college campus, I thought, and become everyone’s new best friend?
I still didn’t have a car, so Johnson gave me a ride to UCLA at the beginning of the holiday break. The school was a total ghost town, as Johnson and I trolled around the campus, looking for the right students to illicitly solicit.
As we were walking around though, the only young people that we encountered were on sports teams. They looked like serious athletes that were still in training during the break, and probably had to take regular drug tests. The last thing they’d be looking to buy right now, was black-market marijuana.
Nevertheless, I asked a few of them, anyway.
I didn’t even get a response though, just quizzical, puzzled looks, like these students had just caught Johnson and I, climbing out of a flying saucer.
We finally spotted one kid with long hair sitting on a bench. I figured he might be our only shot at hitting the right customer demographic.
“Ok,” I turned to Johnson, “I asked everyone else, it’s your turn. This should be an easy close.”
“You think?” Johnson asked.
“Of course,” I nodded, “just look at his long, flowing locks.” I pointed, as the long-haired kid was emersed in his own world, reading a book and listening to headphones.
“The way he’s wearing his hair like that,” I observed, “It’s like having a green lightbulb above his head, to let drug dealers know, that he needs servicing.”
“Ok,” Johnson shrugged, “I guess you’re right.”
Johnson approached the bench as I followed up, a few steps behind.
“Hey there, fella,” Johnson broke the ice with a jarringly over-friendly voice and a used-car-salesman-smile, plastered to his face.
Startled by Johnson, the kid suddenly jolted upright on the bench, dropping the book he was holding.
Instinctively, I took a few steps further back, and away from Johnson.
The long-haired kid picked up the book from the ground; dusting, and wiping it off. He took headphones out of his ears, looking up at Johnson.
“Didn’t mean to scare you,” Johnson plowed forward with his charm offensive, “Do you mind, if I borrow a minute of your time?”
Right away, I had to start painfully biting down on my tongue inside of my mouth, in order to contain myself from exploding into hysterics.
“What do you want?” The long-haired kid impatiently asked Johnson, as if addressing a fool, that was far beneath him in life.
“Great,” Johnson smiled. Oblivious to his audience, he continued to venture forward, “I was just wondering if you might be interested in a little ganja, you know… mary-jane?”
“Why would you ask me that?” the long-haired, hippie-looking, college kid, fired back at Johnson.
He pointed to the side of his head, “is it because of my hair?”
As Johnson struggled to come up with the right words to responds, I moved even further back, as I was starting to lose the battle to keep my intense laughter under control.
“No,” Johnson attempted to be diplomatic, “of course not. I mean… maybe a little bit because of the hair…”
“You think everyone with long hair, is just sitting around getting high all day?” He interrogated Johnson.
“No… not… all of them.” Johnson gulped.
This time I made a big deal of dramatically moving another five feet away from Johnson as they both paused for a moment to look at me. I hadn’t wanted to intimidate or gang up on the kid to begin with, and now, I just wanted to make it visually and abundantly clear, that I didn’t support Johnson, or have his back in any way.
I could tell from the look on Johnson’s face, that he was also having a hard time keeping it together.
“What is your problem, man?” The kid continued.
“Yeah Johnson,” I shouted from an even further distance now, “What do you have against people, with long hair?”.
Johnson looked back over me, as he struggled to keep a straight face. He turned his head back to the long-haired kid again, and then suddenly burst into laughter.
“You think this is funny?”
Unimpressed, the kid refused to relent in his torture of Johnson, “can you please explain to me, what’s so funny about stereotyping me over my hair?”
After our epic fail on campus, I knew I would have to go back to the drawing board over Christmas. Johnson was about to leave to visit his family for the holidays while I would be stuck in the apartment alone, too broke to go anywhere or do anything.
It felt good to see Johnson sweat and have a good laugh at his expense, but the high only lasted a few minutes, and on the car ride back to our apartment, I was haunted by a conversation I had with Nathan when I was working for him in Manhattan.
“You’d better hurry up and figure out a plan,” Nathan warned me one evening as he was trying to dissuade me from quitting and moving out to California, “you wasted your entire youth, partying and being homeless.”
“I went to college,” I countered my cousin, “I have a degree in creative writing.”
“No one cares that you went to school for creative writing.” Nathan reported to me, as if it were old news.
I remember his words unnerved me, rattling my cage and sparking a fire underneath it.
“How are old are you, you’re almost 30, right?”
“28,” I replied.
“And what have you done with your life that will be relevant on your resume?” Nathan continued to disillusion me in real time. “None of your story matters. You haven’t done anything that registers yet in the real world. You’re going to have to start at the bottom of the entertainment industry, and work your way up, and frankly, I’m not sure if that’s realistic.”
I didn’t say anything, but Nathan kept hammering home his point into the seam that was splitting open in my psyche.
“I’m not trying to be mean,” Nathan savaged me further, “I’m just telling you the truth. No one wants to hire a 30-year-old intern. You have to do something with your life, before it’s too late.”
Nathan had been trying to convince me that the clock was ticking, and that this was evidence for me to stay in NY and continue to work with him, but his words had backfired; and I became more certain than ever, that I had to head out west in pursuit of my dream.
The next day Johnson left for LAX, and I began figuring out how I would find customers, and continue to survive in general.
I was coming up empty handed though, and desperate, so I tried the only idea I had, which was selling weed on Craigslist. I made a ‘420 Friend’ email account and then posted a series of semi-ambiguous ads, until I got a hit.
I took the redline subway to meet up with my first customer at their apartment in West Hollywood and sold them a quarter ounce. My profit on this transaction was only $30, $27 after accounting for transportation fees. It actually even turned out to be a net loss, when factoring in the food I got, on the way back.
Now, if I can only find a few thousand more customers, I calculated, maybe I can get somewhere with this?
I was able to connect with another four clients over the rest of the holidays, and took various subway routes across the city, to deliver them weed.
This was time consuming, and most of the customers only wanted to buy an eighth at a time, which was merely a $15 dollar hit for me, and barely seemed worth the shlep. When I added up the hours that I was wasting on this, I realized that I was making even less than minimum wage!
Fortunately, right after the new year, I finally managed to land a few paid writing posts, even though they wouldn’t have been my first choice of assignments.
The first gig I got, which lasted only a few weeks, was porn copying writing. I was easily able to get this engagement, by sending in samples that I still had from the swinger story. I was responsible for creating the captions and backstories for nude and sexually explicit photo shoots, for a website that billed itself as the internet’s home of classy, x-rated content.
The only way, that I was able to get through this work and maintain any semblance or sense of my artistic integrity, was that I challenged myself to be creative, and to never use the same word for ‘vagina’ twice in the same story. It was actually a lot harder than it sounds, to come up with a wide enough variety of different synonyms and metaphors for ‘vagina’, without getting too vulgar and/or silly.
Concurrently, I got a temporary job doing comedy and prose editing for a publishing company, where I was tasked to rewrite two books on subject matters which were completely foreign to me. One of the books was a humorous collection of women’s weight loss stories, and another was a compilation of comical non-fiction stories, about how cheap women’s husbands were.
My job for each of those books, was to rewrite and punch up the prose, and of course, to contribute to the comedy.
I also got paid one afternoon to go to a studio and make fun of some Disney shows. Several other writers and I, were hired by a Disney production company, to come up with jokes at the expense of Disney’s own programming. They would use our funny comments to populate self-aware, pop-up bubbles, that played on the screen while episodes of different shows were being aired.
Even though these projects weren’t exactly the kind of writing that I wanted to do, at least I was writing, and finally getting paid to do it, even if I still wasn’t getting paid very much.
It was enough for me though, to regain a little bit of footing and confidence, and I became more determined than ever, to get my business idea off the ground.
I resolved that in the meantime though, I wasn’t about to sit around on my hands and wait for Johnson forever. I was hamstrung on obtaining trim for the moment, but I realized there were some other areas where I could start making progress now.
To get things moving, I recruited my buddy Dave, who was a graphic designer, to join us in our endeavor. It seemed like a perfect marriage to me, because neither Johnson nor I, had that skill set.
Working with Dave in his spare time, we were able to get the ball rolling on designing the brand logo, label and product packaging.
That had been almost a month ago already, and I was still waiting for Johnson. I wasn’t an angry person, but my animosity towards Johnson had been building for a while, trending towards an inevitably messy, and explosive outburst of emotions.
I felt fairly confident that Johnson would follow through on his commitment this time, but I really couldn’t take anything for granted anymore.
Because of my uncertainty, it was fairly maddening, as I continued to wait for hours. All Johnson had to do was ask J2 about the trim. It couldn’t possibly, be any easier than that. Just a simple order of operations-
#1. Ask for the fucking trim…
#2. Everything else will fall into place!
After what seemed like an eternity languishing in limbo in the apartment, I thought I heard the sound of Johnson, falling ‘up’ the stairs, to the patio outside of our apartment. It sounded like someone else, was coming in behind him.
The door opened and Johnson ran inside, heading straight through the living room.
“Gotta pee!” Johnson called out with a goofy voice, as he darted into the bathroom.
J2 came inside a moment later, laughing.
“Johnson is so fucking smashed,” J2 cackled, and took a seat on the couch.
J2 was a big guy, about Johnson’s height but twice as thick. He seemed to be just a little older than me, with a thinning crop of short blond hair on his head. His face was covered in a thick, golden, five o-clock shadow, and he was wearing a yellow, LA Lakers jersey, over a white undershirt. He additionally wore athletic shorts and flip-flops.
“What a jackass, Johnson is,” J2 continued to crack up. “Has he always been
such a dufus?”
This is my chance! I decided to seize the moment.
“It seems like Johnson’s getting dumber by the minute,” I dogpiled.
“That’s for sure.” J2 laughed.
“Hey J2,” I walked over to the other side of the living room so that I could see him better, “I was just wondering… did Johnson get a chance to, you know… ask you, about the trim?”
“Trim,” J2 scratched at the blond, stubble on his chin, “what trim?”
My mind was racing. I couldn’t remember if spontaneous combustion was a real thing, and what the probability might be, that something like this, could happen to me.
“Johnson, was supposed to ask you about trim,” I could barely withhold my disdain, as I spoke his name.
“No,” J2 shook his head, “Johnson hasn’t said anything to me about any
trim.”
Just be cool, I told myself, forget about Johnson.
“Oh… ok,” I swallowed hard, “well… do you think, you might be able to help us, find some?”
“Of course,” J2 smiled, “why didn’t Johnson say you needed trim? I have like two hundred pounds of it, just sitting under my bed.”
“That Johnson…” I shook my head slowly, as I snickered, “he’s a real… character.”
“That fucking guy cracks me up,” J2 chuckled, “What a moron. No one’s dumber than ole’ drunken, Johnson.”
J2’s roast of Johnson had me in stiches.
“To be honest,” J2 shared, after we had stopped howling about Johnson. “The trim is just taking up space in my room, you can just have it.”
“That is so amazing!” I beamed, “thank you so much!”
“No problem,” J2 guffawed as the toilet flushed and Johnson stumbled out of the bathroom.
“What’s so funny guys?” Johnson inquired in a dopey voice, as he scrunched his lips up wide over his teeth, and crossed his eyes inward, towards his nose.
“Do I have something in teeth?” Johnson asked, “you guys would tell me, right?”