Take the example of Nate who never had any weed or almost never but showed up whenever Walter did. As if Nate had some secret insight into the world, knew who had weed and when, and within minutes of Walter returning from harborside (Walter had, in his freshman year of high school, gotten a medical marijuana card from an Egyptian doctor with his father. The doctor’s office was on the second floor of a small dilapidated strip mall in Emeryville. They sat in a makeshift waiting room with half a dozen others, the whole doctor’s office being a medium-sized room, no larger than a two-car garage, partitioned with floor-to-ceiling screens that were in no way soundproof, with Warren Zevon playing on some unseen sound system, the whole thing felt as if it had been set up in half a day, like a sort of travelling medical marijuana doctor’s office, and every few minutes a heavyset middle-aged woman wearing an excess of blue eyeshadow would pop her head out from behind the examination screen and call out a name and three names later she called out Walter’s father’s name and when she finished his examination and sent him on to the doctor’s screen-room he must have asked her if his son could come too so Walter, after a two minute examination, ended up in the screen-office listening while his father talked to the Egyptian doctor for some twenty-five minutes, which mostly consisted of a back and forth of old-man stories, with the Egyptian doctor describing his time working as an ER doctor in Cairo and seeing the bullet-ridden body of Anwar Sadat wheeled into his ER, and Walter’s father going on about his time in SDS taking part in various anti-war protests including the time in Buffalo in 1969 when a cop beat the shit out of the protester in front of him, hitting him on the arm and then head and the guy bleeding there on the sidewalk)—and so an hour or less after Walter returned from harborside Nate would be at his front door ringing the doorbell.

Every once in a while Nate, who rarely had any money, would show up with a few grams of weed and then for the next few weeks he’d remind Walter of that time he brought him weed and wasn’t that the best he’d ever smoked? Nate, a manufacturer of memories, who, in his first year of college, would pretend he had a British accent at parties, which with his 6’2 stature, and not-at-all bad looks combined with an endearing persistence allowed him to stay both drunk and genial for hours, all the features of his face softening, almost drooping into this sort of teddy-bearish look, all these good pseudobritish qualities being more than enough for him to end up sleeping with nearly a dozen sorority girls in his first semester and stealing, when he could, their sorority pillow cases, purple and pink pillow cases with greek letters and hearts, and he tacked them to the wall above his bad, the artifacts of his conquests. But anyways, Nate was a weed mooch and what could Walter do? Ignore him? Tell him to fuck off? See the problem was Nate was actually a good friend, besides all the inveterate weed mooching. He’d back Walter up, he’d take his side against any third party, even when Walter was absolutely in the wrong. The apposite example being the time in fifth grade when he and Nate and a few others took sandwich sized ziploc bags out onto the field at recess and gathered up as many honeybees as they could and then brought the buzzing bags to an out-of-the-way water fountain where they watched as the cold water rose and bees buzzed and drowned. Walter could never say exactly why he did this, he felt neither good nor bad about it, he really just liked catching the bees, and one day, some thousands of bees later, when a teacher caught them by the water-fountain, Nate blamed it all on some weird-ass kid named Vincent, who was a well-known sociopath-in-training and a relatively easy person to blame and so they avoided whatever punishment the mass murdering of bees might have gotten them. Nate lied for his friends without thinking. His was the sort of friendship that preceded thought, existed on some deeper level, some fundamental plane where all that mattered was the axiom that Walter was his friend and Nate was his and this Other was not. And all that kindred history, years of it, were such that Walter felt beholden to Nate, and shared his weed with him, even if it was incredibly irritating, not to mention financially-draining, to do so. Though in the last two years of high school Nate would realize finally that the way to an endless supply of weed lay in selling, if not growing, and in the early fall of his junior year became the high school’s go-to dealer, courtesy of last year’s dealers having by whatever coincidence all matriculated into out-of-state universities and Nate, who was first cousins with one of them, got access to that cousin’s supplier up north in Mendocino. He’d drive around their city in a gray toyota previa his parents gave him after he passed his driver’s test, mostly, Walter figured, to get rid of him.