Diez Anos con Jim Thomson (Chapter 2)

Chapter (2) Wine and Cheese

I didn’t care about anything, but I wanted to. I smoked a lot of tea and that didn’t help. I was married but didn’t want be. I was all wrong. I wanted to be wrong. Sometimes we go through those periods, when we don’t choose to be right or good or consistent. I strayed from truth. But truth stayed, as much as I wanted it to leave.

Jim loved wine and cheese. And sometimes he mixed them before he went to work as a professional driver. One gallon of wine plus a one pound block of cheddar.
“Don’t go to work Jim,” I said, “you can hardly stand.”
“I’m fine,” Jim said.
We’d spent the day being most of worthless, with Mario golf, the video game. I was truant from work as most days, from my job as an outside sales rep for an advertising agency. Mike and Jim both worked for tips as delivery drivers in the evening.
On a normal day I’d show up to Mike’s trailer at around ten in the morning, after I checked in at my job. Then, Jim would come over not long after I showed. We’d smoke and play a while, until hunger took over. I’d take us all to lunch on company money, and later we dedicated hours to burning days.
This day Jim brought a gallon of Carlo Rossi Sangria and an orange brick-sized block of extra sharp cheddar. He only ate free chips and salsa, while Mike and I mowed large plates of Mexican food for lunch at Tierra Blanca restaurant. Jim never stopped working on that gallon of Sangria. He snuck a plastic coke bottle in his pocket full of wine and drank between scoops of tomato salsa.
After lunch Jim was peeking. He was loud and proud and in your face. He was up and down but mostly up with his hands shaking toward the sky like a revival dancer.
“Don’t you love cheese?” Jim said.
“Not like that,” I said.
Jim used a kitchen knife to peel thick cords of extra sharp. I wouldn’t say he ate quickly, but he ate steadily, with a purpose. At around four that afternoon, I noticed Jim was holding a remnant of the former orange brick, a mere third of the block.
“This is the best way to eat it. The best.”

Although Jim went to work, he wasn’t gone for long. He came back to Mike’s after his first delivery and stayed for more than an hour. He was determined. He bit large hunks of the cheese right off the block and tipped the whole gallon of wine in his curled right arm, no class and no glass. He was completely out of it, but still going, stumbling and finding humor in every direction. Mike and I tried to help.
“Hey Jim,” I said, “You want a hit?” as I handed him the apparatus.
“Oh yeah,” Jim said.
I had loaded a big lidded pipe with cannabis seeds and nothing else. Jim took big meaningful lung pulls through the cracks and snaps of dozens of beans popping. He tried passing it to Mike, but Mike explained that we had just smoked before he had arrived, and that we packed that one just for him. So Jim smoked on and on, toke after toke of crackling, nutty smelling, seeds. And we let him do it, and didn’t tell him till days later.