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Everyone seems to be pretty high by now, and they all are staring at the television again, too stoned to talk. Rick who has been sitting on the couch since I came in, looks at Jay and raises his eyebrows and nods toward the stairs. They go upstairs with Steve. Ten minutes later, they all come down, and Steve and Rick leave. I look at Jay like I know what’s going on, and he just smiles, sits back down and asks me what else I want to know. I decide to kill the buzz and ask him if his mom knows what he does. She caught him with a quarter pound once, back when he was in high school, he says. “I don’t think she knew I dealt or anything, but she knew I was messing around with a lot. She threatened to kick me out of the house.” His voice drops down to a hoarse whisper. “That wasn’t fun, but everything was cool between us after that. She just kind of dropped it.”

He stops to think for a minute. Then he says, “There’s some days I’d like to tell my mom.” He pauses again, then offers to show me his bong collection.

We walk into the kitchen, and he opens a lower cupboard to the right of the sink. Three shelves are covered with various drug paraphernalia. “This was one of my first bongs,” he says, handing me a cracked glass bong that he says his friend blew for him. “And this was my brother’s original bong,” he says while showing me a fluorescent orange bong with a skull jester sticker with the word “Graffix” underneath it. He pulls out more utensils, including a purple glass bong, two pipes, rolling papers, filters for a pipe, screens for a pipe, hoses for bongs, a “one-hitter” that looks like a car cigarette lighter, and a 3-foot-high plastic bong. “This hits smooth as fuck,” he says.

I survey his collection, and we sit back down at the bar and talk some more. I’ve been here for almost three hours, and I’m about ready to go when Jay adds one last thought.

“You know, if I had it to do all over again, I would do it again,” he says. “I’ve hit the highs and the lows, but I’ve always had fun.”

I ask him if he thinks he will ever get caught, and he laughs.

“They’re not going to come after me,” he says. “Nobody’s going to come after me because it would be so hard for them to get close to me, to get evidence they need to prosecute me, because I only deal with my friends.

“For that matter, it would be a waste of their time to get a couple of ounces. It goes on day in and day out around here. I couldn’t even count up the number of people I know that deal in this area on my fingers and toes. It’s just ridiculous.

“And for every person I know, there’s at least three that I don’t — you know what I mean?”

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