Page 14 - WTP VOl. X #3

“The way it happened,” Holmes was saying, telling the story around the table, all eight of them back on campus for their fortieth reunion, “Florio had bought ten pounds of bunko weed, then left it out in his dorm room. Since he was the RA, the housekeeper cleaned his room; she saw six pounds of pot lying around and called the cops.”
He looked around the table. They had gathered in the old double-wide that had served as their dining club: The Compton Independent Dining Association. Just
a hangout for students who didn’t belong to fraterni- ties or sororities, and who didn’t like the food in the upperclass dining hall. The club had closed years ago. A sign over the front door said, “Compton College Institute for Gender Studies.”
“Her boyfriend had been busted a month earlier,” Holmes said. “She was thinking she had a bargaining chip. The college just fired her.”
They were the only ones in the building. The old dining tables had been replaced with an oval con- ference-style table. The kitchen, where Esther, the cook, had fried eggs, cooked omelets on Sunday, conjured darn good dinners six evenings a week, had been gutted, the sink and counters replaced with filing cabinets. There was a refrigerator, though, with double doors and an automatic ice dispenser. When they’d all sat down, they poured drinks and drank a toast: “To Esther.”
“What happened to Florio?” someone said.
No one knew exactly. After the pot charges were dropped, Florio went to osteopathy school, married,
had kids. Holmes heard he’d gone into gynecology, gotten divorced and moved, maybe to Indianapolis. Holmes didn’t know, he hadn’t talked to Florio in years. Florio, maybe an osteopathic gynecologist now, didn’t post on Facebook.
Holmes drank his gin and tonic, listening to the chatter around the table and recalling the particu- lars of the night Florio was busted. Holmes was in his apartment down the hill from the campus, help- ing a friend divide six pounds of the same bunko weed batch into one-ounce bags. The phone rang, a friend calling: “Florio’s busted. Anything you have, get rid of it fast.” Holmes looked at the six pounds of pot spread across his coffee table and said, “We have an emergency.” Then they were scrambling to sweep the pot off the table and into two plastic garbage bags: three pounds each, the way they had arranged the deal. Florio had ten pounds, because he had set up the whole deal and, as an RA, had access to a large market. Holmes’s pal headed out the kitchen door with his bag, and Holmes shoved his own three pounds into a Compton College tote bag and walked out the front door, heading for the college library. He stashed the garbage bag behind a row of oversized books on Greek civilization, including ancient Greek literature that no student was likely to be pulling
off the shelf. Then he settled down in a comfortable chair in the main reading room with a Richard Brau- tigan novel. When the library closed, he checked
out the Brautigan, plus a collection of Somerset Maugham stories. He carried the books in his tote bag back to his apartment, where there were no cops waiting for him. Florio was the unlucky one that night.
“Whatever happened to Charlie Lambert?” Holmes said now.
The conversation around the table stopped, people readjusting, considering the question, then shar-
ing what they knew, which wasn’t much. Someone heard Charlie Lambert had gone to graduate school. Someone thought Lambert moved to New York and worked in the theater business, in technical design. That’s what he had done as an undergraduate. He was a theater major, he built sets for the drama productions. He was a large young man, and Holmes could picture his face clearly: a wide nose; a bushy brown beard; dark brown, beady eyes.
“He was kind of a loner,” someone said.
7
Reunion
Rob PRice