Volume 01, Story 10
Chino is under a Mexican Tiger blanket working his thumb through photo after photo of Lucy, and it is doing him no good whatsoever. Mary Jane lets herself in with Homeboy behind her, checks whether he’s feeling suicidal, and gets back “Only in the morning”, which Homeboy fact-checks against the clock, corrects to noon, and rules him safe. Chino is not coming to work. Homeboy’s proposed script for calling it in is terminal webbonitis and a heartfelt “I’m gonna miss him too.” Mary Jane overrules him: tell her diarrhea, she’ll be cool with it. Across town, Mr. Dealer and Mrs. Dealer are standing in the wine section of a natural food grocery store with a Paso Robles Cabernet picked out to go with the blue cheese filet mignon he’s making her, and then her phone rings. Mrs. Dealer gives Homeboy the night off, Homeboy insists he can still make his rounds, and Mrs. Dealer, with her husband silently going to pieces beside her, offers to swing by the dispensary and hand over the deliveries. Twenty minutes. Mr. Dealer’s opinion of this arrangement gets loud enough that the other shoppers have their phones up and recording before he’s finished, and two pasty frat boys in LAMBDA LAMBDA LAMBDA sweaters lean into the aisle for a look. They aren’t recording. They’re listening, and they’ve picked out the only two words that interest them: “Did you hear that, Edward? Trees and weed.” Edward and Jacob decide this tree weed guy could be the answer to their problem with those vegan chicks, and fall in behind the Dealers.
An hour past twenty minutes, Mary Jane drops Homeboy off at Mr. Dealer’s Dispensary in a Mrs. Dealer’s Edibles shirt and hat. Mr. Dealer keys in the code: keypad, safe lock, escaping steam. He goes to the back for the bags; Mrs. Dealer drifts in close, fixes Homeboy’s hair, and asks whether the girl in the car is his girlfriend, which reduces him to friends… but with benefits and shit. He leaves loaded double, because there’s only one of him. Deliveries done, arms empty, he’s walking back down the sidewalk when a voice comes out of a dark alley: “Psst… you like herbs?” Yes. “And trees?” “You’re speaking my language, ese. Take me to them!” The house Edward and Jacob take him to is knee-deep in crushed beer cans with a couch lying on its side, and upstairs Homeboy establishes up front that nobody here is going to rape his ass; he’d like to keep his culo as virginal as possible. Reassured, he takes the chair and the glass of water, and empties the whole thing in seconds. Then he goes off the chair and onto the floor. Edward and Jacob take a forearm each, show their fangs, sink them in, and immediately recoil, gagging. He tastes like a skunk that fell into a gasoline tank and died. He must be vegan, then. Don’t drink too much, we have to keep him alive, and don’t drink any more anyway or the roofie in him puts the pair of them on the floor next to him. “Let’s tie him up.” Homeboy comes around some time later roped to a bed in a room stacked with baskets of apples, piles of bananas and bunches of kale, which is the strangest part of the whole business as far as he’s concerned.
Chino, meanwhile, wakes on his own couch to Mary Jane shaking him and reports he was in the middle of a wet dream. Homeboy’s been gone two hours, he figures. He’s been gone since yesterday; Chino slept the whole day, which he attributes to some strong-ass Afghan Kush. At the dispensary Mr. Dealer opens with “You’re fucking late… again” and works through the uniform, the boyfriend and the firing before Mrs. Dealer cuts across him, hands Chino the list of every address Homeboy hit that night, and tells him to take the day off: “they’re my delivery boys, not yours.” The last address puts Chino and Mary Jane back in that alley after dark, which is where a tall blond hippie in sandals and an open Hawaiian shirt flares the shirt out like a cape and announces “Blah, blah… I’m here to suck your blood… dude.” Mary Jane thinks she may have peed herself. He apologizes. He’s been needing quality blood, and nobody around here smokes any quality doobage. He can’t smoke it himself, or eat, or do much of anything else; if he wants to get high he has to take it out of somebody who already is. Then he introduces himself with a full bow: Count Dragula. To demonstrate, he puts his nose to Chino and calls the Afghan Kush, faint, so you must have taken it yesterday, then turns to Mary Jane and gets a very light hint of Durban’s Poison. you write? Nobody can tell him what Homeboy last smoked, which he finds a real shame, but he has something better: it fucking reeks of vampire in this alley. Vampires, he adds, hate ganja-tainted blood; it tastes like what skunks smell like. Somewhere across town, Homeboy has worked his feet loose and is picking grapes off a table with his toes, muttering be one with the monkey. And on a corner a few blocks out, Dragula points at a house. Mary Jane knows it: the old Tri-Lamb place, empty since whatever went on between them and the Alpha Betas got everyone expelled. Chino figures they’ll go ask them if they know where Homeboy is.
The Tri-Lamb house is mid-seduction when they knock: Edward and Jacob have Amy and Tara over, two escorts expecting to get paid, and the evening is already going sideways over a misunderstanding about money, the cabbage, the broccoli, the green, which the boys took for actual vegetables, because they thought the girls were vegan. Dragula clocks Edward’s lie about not recognizing Homeboy’s photo instantly: he squinted at it, and vampires have perfect vision, they don’t need to squint. Vampires?! The girls are out the door: “there’s no way we are going to be used for food”, with Tara pausing just long enough to tell Mary Jane she likes her skirt. Edward folds immediately: go get your friend, he’s upstairs. Dragula takes off after the ladies of the night. Upstairs, Chino and Mary Jane find Homeboy perched on the bed eating grapes with his feet, and Mary Jane unties him while Chino marvels at the whole tableau. Back at the apartment, the night dissolves into a victory blunt: Mary Jane on Homeboy’s lap, Tara on Chino’s, Amy on Dragula’s (Dragula skipping the smoke in favor of Amy’s neck), until Tara takes Chino’s hand and leads him to the bedroom, and Homeboy reaches for what’s left with a grin: more for us.
Featuring Chino, Homeboy, Mary Jane, Mrs. Dealer, Mr. Dealer, Count Dragula, Edward, Jacob, Amy, Tara.
Read the full story in The Adventures of Chino & Homeboy, Volume 01