Bill closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and inhaled deeply. Ah! Being around Carol was almost like smoking. Her thick hair carried an aura of cigarette smoke.

            “Do you believe this shit?” Carol shook the newspaper in disgust.

            “What’s that?” Keep her talking. Keep her here. God, for a cigarette.

            “This guy won some lottery back east. In Jersey. No, in whatever. He gave it away. Most of it. Just gave it away!”

            “It happens.” She’d let him have one. Smokers love moochers. Mooching means it’s futile to quit.

            “Not in my lifetime.” She stood and began wadding the paper into a stack.

            “I know a fellow,” Bill said as he reached around to the tiny refrigerator and pulled out two bottles of water. He held one out to her, head cocked, eyebrows arched. “Once gave away millions.”

            Carol accepted the bottle and settled back into her chair.

            “Strange duck, Jess was, even as an undergrad. That’s where I first got to know him. UCLA. We were roommates in the dorm our freshman year.” With a quick twist, Bill pulled the cap off his bottle and flipped it into the waste basket in the far corner. Three points! “He always kept me off balance. First time I saw him he was stark naked, standing on his head.”

            Carol looked up from her own bottle. Bill reached over and, placing one hand over hers to secure the neck of the bottle, he twisted the cap off and handed it to her. His hand stayed on hers until she lifted the bottle to her mouth.

            “I walked into the room,” he said, “loaded down with all the stuff your parents think you can’t do without, and there he was, buck naked, upside down against the far wall of the room. I just stood there in the door, gaping at him. Must have looked like a real rube. Then I heard giggles behind me. It was a coed dorm, one of the first. I was so embarrassed I didn’t even look around to see who was laughing. I just went in and closed the door.

            “I apologized and introduced myself, but he just balanced on one hand and his head and pointed to the bed away from the window. ‘Yours,’ he said. He changed arms and pointed at the other one. ‘Mine.’ Then he went back to ignoring me. I unpacked and just sat there on the edge of the bed, the one away from the window, waiting for him to come down and talk.

            “Eventually, he did. He sat cross-legged on the other bed and said, ‘If we’re going to be roomies, we better get the crap out of the way. Where do you stand on the Sartre-Camus split? Is twelve-tone music here to stay? Will the birth-control pill change the American outlook on sex? Is Elvis helping or exploiting Black music?’ And a whole bunch of other things. Not one of which I understood. Later, years later, I realized that he didn’t really expect me to understand. He was showing off. At seventeen, he had an ego.”

            Carol wrinkled her brows and leaned back in her chair. Bill plunged on. “So, after firing off this whole list of esoteric questions, he finishes with, ‘How do you feel about vegetarian meat loaf?’ I said, ‘About the same as I do about the rest of that stuff.’ He cracked up. I didn’t think it was all that funny, but he was laughing so hard he fell off the bed. Then he jumped up and ran over and hugged me.

            “Now, this was 1961, and men didn’t much hug men back then. Especially young men. Especially naked young men. I was terrified. He didn’t seem to notice, though. He grabbed a pair of jeans and a T shirt from under his bed and said, ‘Come on. Let’s get smoking. Go get some pizza, see if we can get laid.’ I sat there, trying to absorb the fact that he hadn’t put any underwear on under his jeans.

            “Then I heard his voice from the hallway. ‘He’s called Wee Willie because he had this traumatic experience in childhood, you see, and his private organs didn’t develop right. There’s this kind of kink in the vas deferens, it’s a condition called inhibited scantosis, and his penis stays just like a child’s unless he’s subject to extraordinary sexual tension and then it pops out just like any man’s, only when that happens, he’s got to get laid or he could die. Honest. Don’t tell him I said anything, though. He doesn’t like people to know.’

            “About half way through the description it dawned on me that he was talking about me. I walked through the door and saw the two girls standing beside him, looking at me. I just took off. I ended up out by the athletic fields and watched the football team work out for a while. Then I went off campus and got myself a burger. I got back to the room just before curfew.

            “Jess wasn’t there. He came in through the window about one in the morning. I pretended to be asleep, but he started talking as though he knew I was awake. ‘What I was doing,’ he said, ‘was setting you up to lose your virginity. It only works once, but it works. Believe me, man.’

            “’What makes you think I’m a virgin?’ I yelled. He just looked at me. Then he shook his head and went to bed. He was right, of course. He was also right about the ploy. Two weeks later curiosity got the best of Angela, one of the girls he’d been talking to. Sort of took the edge off my anger, among other things.” Carol smiled and glanced at him from the corner of her eye.

            “Over the next few years he also got me drunk the first time, stoned the first time, arrested the first time. Well, we weren’t really arrested, just had a bit of a run-in with the cops during a demonstration that I didn’t know I was attending until I got there. He introduced me to Vonnegut and Hesse. The Tao. Zen. Kundalini yoga.

            “It seemed like I was always angry with him. As soon as I began to understand why he was doing something, he did something else. Like, that first year, he sold his football tickets to an alum and made a bundle. The next year, I sold mine, and he gave his away to a kid in Watts. I wanted him to stay put.” Bill stared at the table. Carol shifted in her chair.

            “By the time we were seniors, well, I was a senior. I don’t know what he was. He was always changing majors and dropping classes. He might have been a fourth-year sophomore, except that he was in a couple of grad seminars. Anyway, there was a lot of politics going on and everyone was picking sides. I was trying to ride the fence: walk the picket line but stay focused on graduation. He was trying to get a magazine going.

            “There was a JC in the area that hit the headlines with this student-run journal that took the administration to court for trying to censor what was in it. ACLU got involved and all that. Jess decided that a truly independent journal ought to be free of the campus completely. And free of any dominant influence, or something like that. He was hitting up the John Birch Society and the Americans For Democratic Action and the DAR and whatever for funds for it. Everything from the Panthers to the Klan.

            “We’d both moved out of the dorm by then, and I began to see less and less of him. He was always pushing the journal, and I was planning for graduate school and avoiding the draft. On graduation day I saw him briefly on my way to the ceremony. He was doing T’ai Chi on the lawn by the Art Department. I didn’t have time to stop and talk, but I waved. I don’t know if he saw me or not. I never did learn what became of the journal.

            “I next saw him about three, four years later. I’d joined the National Guard after grad school and was at this special training camp for logistical support, and I bumped into him. He was one of the teachers. That night we went out to a bar and talked for hours.

            “He said, ‘I couldn’t accept the dichotomy involved in being against the war and in favor of the soldiers fighting it. I didn’t want to smoke anybody, but it’s hard to defend that position when you’re in no danger of getting smoked yourself. I realize, of course, that rationally, it’s not a dichotomy. It’s the same position. Realistically, though, it’s a moral problem for me. They were in jeopardy. I wasn’t. So, I joined. I got trained in logistics. Top of my class. They kept me here to train others. They kept me here, and I’m not in jeopardy, but I’m helping the war effort. The worst of both worlds.’

            “I laughed and told him he could always go back to doing nude yoga. That ought to get him out of it quick enough. He smiled but didn’t say anything.

            “Couple of days later, I walked into his class and when he saw me he says, ‘Ready for some vegetarian meat loaf?’ If my memory hadn’t been functioning so slowly, I probably would have gotten out of there immediately. As it was, I stayed for the show.

            “The class went pretty much like normal for a while: lots of bar graphs and pie charts and lists of various kinds. Jess was droning on about whatever, and we were all taking notes by rote, not really listening. You know how it is. He’s going on about how our efforts are a key part of the whole shebang and everything, and we, therefore, have to be constantly alert, just like we were getting shot at. He said we should always be sure to carry a loaded sidearm when on duty. I think that’s when some of us began tuning him back in. Knowing we had to carry a loaded gun was kind of exciting, you know?”

            Bill scooted his chair closer to Carol’s. She didn’t move away. “Then he says we have to always be ready to use it. We should practice weekly at the firing range, because the saboteurs would think we were the weak link in the chain of defense. Then he began telling us about things we had to watch out for. By this time, he pretty well had everybody’s attention. When he suggested we should even be ready and willing to shoot fellow officers when they started acting strangely, someone asked him how he’d define ‘strangely,’ and he starts in on a list of things that included everything from not wearing their uniform correctly to asking too many questions. The same guy laughed and pointed out that that might mean shooting every officer we saw.

            “Jess smiled at him and somehow, at that very moment, I became aware that he was wearing a sidearm. I think everyone became aware of it. It had something to do with the way that all of his gestures from that point on were with his left hand. He asked the fellow if he could speak to him in the hall, and even though the guy started to offer a protest, he went along. They came back in about two minutes, and the guy looked like he’d taken a shower in his uniform. He didn’t ask any more questions.

            “The next time the class met, there was brass in the room. Big brass. All smiles. Jess smiled right back at them and asked to see the papers authorizing them to sit in. They thought he was joking at first, then got pretty upset. Jess stayed real calm and insisted. Now, you understand, Jess was a non-com, standing up to officers. But he was regular Army. They were weekend warriors, like me. One light colonel started getting pushy, and Jess excused himself, left the room, and came back with two MPs. The brass left.

            “Jess picked up right where he’d left off, telling us we had to be constantly on the alert, defend our materials, and so on. We figured it to be a set up. Next class, though, we had a new instructor. No word on Jess. I tried to nose around a bit but got nowhere. A week later, everyone in the class was reassigned.” Bill’s hand dropped down to the table by Carol’s.

            “So, I didn’t run into him again for a long time, but I did hear about him off and on. I was thinking of putting some of my retirement money into computer stocks and was doing a lot of reading on the subject, and his name popped up in a Fortune article on virtual-reality research companies. Then I saw it again in another article on gaming.

            “At first, I thought maybe it was someone else with the same name. Then I figured, what the hell, even if it ain’t him, it’s gotta be a sign, and I bought some of their stock. Not in my IRA, though. Broker wouldn’t hear of it. He says, ‘You want solid stuff in there. Real estate. Bond funds. No cutesy stocks.’ So, I scraped together a thousand bucks or so in my regular account and got 300 shares. Figured, okay, I’m a stockholder now, I got an excuse. Wrote a letter to Jess, care of the company, and asked if he was my old roomie. No word.

            “Six months later, I sold the stock and bought a down sleeping bag with the proceeds. The truth. Of course, it was one of those super bags that weigh three ounces and keeps you warm on Mt. Everest during a blizzard. Not that I ever tried it out. Turns out I’m allergic to down. What the hell, I never camped anyway. Couple years later, real estate is dirt and Jess’s company’s going for ten bucks a share and heading up. I got a letter from him, apologizing for not writing sooner. He’d been in an ‘unperson mode,’ he said, what ever the hell that meant. Said he was glad to hear I had some of his company’s stock and that I should get out. He was.

            “I wrote back, detailing my stock market adventures for him, and two days later I got a special delivery letter with ten hundred-dollar bills in it and a note, ‘stick with real estate.’ I sat down to write him a letter back, saying his sense of humor could get sort of expensive, I’d pay for my own mistakes; all that, but I never did mail the letter. Next day’s financial headlines were about how he’d sold the company for millions, lots of millions. So, instead I wrote and asked if he was going to underwrite the Rosewater Foundation.”

            Carol’s eyes came up, and her fingers stopped tracing designs on his. “Rosewater Foundation?”

            Bill shrugged. “It’s from a book. One he had me read, about moral ways of dealing with too much time and money. Or something like that. Anyway, he came by to answer in person that time. Took me to Perino’s for dinner. You ever eaten there?”

            Carol’s eyes rolled. “Sure, I always get the blue-plate special.”

            “We ought to go there some time,” Bill said. “It’s an arm and a leg, but, God, is it good. And the service; you feel like a movie star or a corporate moneybags.” His face was toward the ceiling, but his eyes were to the side, checking out her reaction. There was none to be seen. Good.

            “He told me that he owed me for my good advice, and I told him he was crazy. He smiled and said the army agreed, but he was talking about the Rosewater suggestion. ‘You’re going to rent a store front with a phone and loan money for car payments? You don’t really seem the type,’ I said. That’s what the guy in the book did.”

            “He laughed and said, ‘No, and I don’t think you are either, or I’d offer the job to you. How’d you like to have a library instead?’ And that’s how we got the library at the school. Only privately financed library in a Ventura County public school, that I know of.”

            Carol’s tongue circled the rim of the water bottle.

            “I’m not sure where the rest of it went. I know Amnesty International got a few mil and the American Friends Service Committee got some. Greenpeace. PEN. ACLU. All the usual suspects. I heard rumors about some private grants. All I know for sure is, he gave it all away.”

            “You still see him?”

            “Sometimes. Saw him by the pier in Hermosa Beach last summer. He was wearing cutoffs, smoking a joint, and selling pretzels. Called me Wee Willie and started to tell one of the beach bunnies walking by about my affliction, but she just laughed him off.”

            Bill jumped when Carol’s hand touched his arm. “I’m sorry. Sort of faded out there.”

            “It’s all right. Look, I gotta go now. You know how early it gets dark this time of year. I always end up parking half a mile from my apartment it seems, and I hate doing that walk after dark. By myself. You know.” She shook the curls out of her eyes.

            Bill stared at her for a moment, placing her. “Well, we certainly can’t have that. Tell you what, we’d never get into Perino’s without a reservation, but I know a place near here that allows smoking. Then I’ll see you safely home. What say?”

            Carol looked him in the eye. “Do you smoke?”

            “Used to. Still do sometimes.”

– M.L. Owen