The Farmhouse, Part 11

As we progressed through our junior year, Chas and I noticed how our pledge brother, Ted, had veered away from us. Chas and I were derelict goofs; how else would you describe people who arranged their class schedules so as to be free at 11:30 a.m., when the reruns of “Bewitched” were aired daily? Sure, maybe we would drink a pony bottle or two of Rolling Rock while watching the program, but at least we weren’t constantly high, like Ted, who was rumored to be supplying half the campus with marijuana and who knows what else.

At the end of the second semester, Ted took off for Arizona, returning a month later on a Harley chopper. He moved into the farmhouse, where Maher was already living. Poor Maher didn’t have enough money to return to Lebanon or enough desperation to stay with Uncle Beirut in Detroit.

Unbeknown to his fraternity brothers, Ted started cultivating pot at the farm. I suspected as much when I stopped at the farmhouse in September and found a colander smeared green in the dry sink on the back porch. We also suspected that Ted had himself moved onto far more dangerous drugs. He had become alarmingly thin and was almost never comprehensible.

We knew he was headed for a crash, and we felt helpless to do anything about it.