Volume 01, Story 6
Chino is on the couch, dumped again, this time by his little Asian rucita, who told him her parents made her do it because he wasn’t Asian enough. Their verdict on him: the “Mexican of Asia.” He’s Filipino, ese. Homeboy, who forgot his key again, opens with the standard prescription (let’s go find you a new girl) and, when Chino passes, produces plan B: a joint wrapped in deep blue paper that Uncle Rob gave him, supposedly good for the Fourth and Fifth Dimension, the cross-section of space-time where quantum mechanics and string theory exist in harmony and all of time can be viewed at once. Neither of them has any idea what that means. Chino decides they’d better train for this first: get swole, push and move heavy shit, run for recreational purposes instead of from the cops, get Rudy Reyes’d up. Estimated preparation required: twenty to thirty minutes, with some stretching. So the two of them head for the park with Chuy the Sasquatch installed as coach, and leave the joint sitting on the coffee table.
Enter Mary Jane, who lets herself in looking for them and finds nobody home. What she does find, in a kitchen cupboard, is the ornate box. What’s in the ornate box is not weed. Rolling papers, a lighter, a long red-black demonic pipe, and a folded note reading We owe you one stash of weed. Signed, Chino and Homeboy. “They never have any fricking weed.” Then she spots the blue joint. It smells like rum. It tastes like raspberries. She smokes the whole thing, and somewhere after the last hit she holds up her hand and watches it stop being reliably solid. She has just enough time to observe that she’s disappearing, and then she has disappeared, leaving her clothes on the couch.
Back at the park, Chris, Mary Jane’s tall, fit, extraordinarily handsome friend, jogs past and stops to say hello. He knows Chino from the party, and this is the first time he’s actually met Homeboy, which obliges Chino to account for the enormous fur-covered figure supervising their push-ups. “Chuy?! That’s no costume. He’s really a Bigfoot.” Chris absorbs this, asks why a Bigfoot is wearing shorts and whether the government knows, then joins them for the run. By the time all four get back to the apartment there’s a pile of women’s clothing on the couch with no woman in it, and a voice coming from nowhere that wants to know whether she’s dead. Homeboy identifies the clothes by smell; Chris retrieves her ID from her pants pocket and asks whether that wasn’t easier. Then Homeboy notices the Interstellar joint is missing from the table, Mary Jane confesses she smoked all of it, and Chino calls in Uncle Rob. Rob arrives, insults everyone’s door-locking discipline, orders Homeboy off the couch (that’s where Mary Jane says she is, and he has just enough of a soft spot for these two twats not to watch her rematerialize inside Homeboy), interrogates Chris about what he studied in school, and then delivers the plan: they wait for the weed to wear off. Chris figures that shouldn’t take long. Uncle Rob does some math in the air and figures four or five months, give or take a day or two. Until then, Mary Jane gets to watch the birth and death of the universe, on loop, from one fixed spot in Chino’s living room.
So they play Monopoly. Six hours of it, with Mary Jane calling the car from the Fourth Dimension and Chris rolling for her, badly, including straight to jail without passing Go, which gets the single best line of the afterlife out of her. Uncle Rob hits the wall around hour six and tries to walk out; Chino tells him to sit the fuck down. Then it gets interesting: Mary Jane starts seeing the room a half-second before it happens, nudges the board, and finally reaches all the way through: the dice vanish off the table and come back a perfect seven, her car piece flickers forward space by space, and she phases back into the apartment mid-move, naked, to a room-wide eruption. Chris, gentleman to the last, gets his jogging hoodie around her before she can ask. Uncle Rob declares the game sucks and goes home for a drink; Chris begs off for work. Which leaves Chino, Homeboy, Mary Jane, and Chuy with beers and the demonic pipe and one unresolved mystery (where the weed came from, since the box was empty), which Homeboy solves with the only tool available: blame the tear in the space-time continuum. The night’s final image belongs to Chuy, lounging in his shorts with an erection like an unstoppable force of nature, which Homeboy observes makes him a grower.
Featuring Chino, Homeboy, Mary Jane, Uncle Rob, Chuy, Chris.
Read the full story in The Adventures of Chino & Homeboy, Volume 01