You thought you might have better luck with the janitor?
Sure. I mean, four o’clock in the afternoon, the guy goes into an abandoned part of the building. What for? Not to mop floors. And he wasn’t carrying any tools, so he couldn’t be doing repairs. So what’s that leave?
Any number of things, I’d imagine. But I take it you were hoping for vice?
You bet I was. And we’re talking about a young guy with long hair and a Jesus beard. So what kind of vice was he likely to be into?
But it wasn’t what you thought.
No, actually, it was what I thought. It’s just, it was also more than what I thought.
Past the connecting door was a long hallway lined with empty classrooms. The janitor was in the last room on the left, but halfway down the hall I could already smell the pot. Good stuff, too—he obviously knew the right people. So I tiptoed down there, trying to work out how to play this. I figured I could either go in casual and friendly—“Hey, can I get a hit off that?”—or I could be a hard-ass and threaten to turn him in if he didn’t give me his whole stash.
Which approach did you decide on?
I couldn’t make up my mind. I didn’t know the guy at all, right, so I had no idea how easily he’d scare, or share. And meanwhile—I was standing right outside the room, now—I started hearing these monkey noises.
Monkey noises?
Yeah. Literal monkey noises, I thought at first, like maybe he had a pet chimp in there with him. Farfetched, I know, but who can tell with pot-smokers? So I took a peep around the doorframe to see what kind of sideshow I was about to burst in on.
The janitor was over by the windows. He had a telescope set up, and his face was mashed down over the eyepiece like it had been glued there. His left arm was curved above his head, like this, holding a joint in the air, and his right arm was curved down towards his waist, like this, holding…Well, I couldn’t see exactly what he was holding, for which thank God, but from the way his elbow was pumping it wasn’t hard to guess.
As for the monkey noises, that was actually two sounds in one. He was grunting, of course, but also, to sort of brace himself, he’d pulled a pupil’s chair up sideways behind him and planted his butt on the armrest, and the feet of the chair were going squeak-squeak-squeak in time with the grunts: voilà, instant chimp sounds. Which, all things considered, wasn’t too far off the mark.
So I’m watching this, and I’m like, yuck, but at the same time, I still really wanted some dope. I definitely had the goods to blackmail this guy now, but the idea of confronting him in the act was too gross to contemplate, so I decided to wait him out and see if he’d leave the roach behind when he was done with his business. That was something Moon and I used to do at her parents’ parties, go around collecting leftovers out of the ashtrays and recycling them into bong hits. It was a great way to get high without actually having to talk to any freaks.
I hid in another classroom across the hall and prayed for a quick finish. The monkey noises got louder—they were more gorilla than chimp towards the end—and then there was a bang as the desk fell over, then silence, and then, very faint, the zip of a zipper. And then footsteps, going out and down the hall, not running but hurrying, like he’d suddenly remembered an appointment he had to get to.