Title: To the city that blends and mends and tests
Fandom: Always Be My Maybe
Rating: PG
Length: 1400 w
Content notes: Drugs. It's about marijuana. Spoilers for the whole movie.
Author notes: For #265, Pin or Pen, and "drugs" on my birthday bingo card. Title from Beastie Boys, "An Open Letter To NYC"

Summary: Marcus, just after the move to New York, can't seem to find weed anywhere.


Moving across the continent is the easy part. One morning, Marcus wakes up in the same bed he's had for thirty years. At the end of the same day, he goes to sleep next to Sasha, forty stories over the Hudson River.

He loves New York. He even gets a shirt that asserts that fact and insists on wearing it, much to Sasha's (mostly feigned, he's fairly sure) outrage. He loves walking down Broadway and watching the island contract before him, the buildings get shorter, the streets more crooked. He even loves the subway, though he has yet to master a trip involving more than one transfer. He also develops a persistent fear of "going express", after he ended up in East New York when a C transformed into an A.

Subways are like pumpkins, is the lesson here. He's working on a song about that, where he's Cinderella. He's stuck, however, on whether that means Sasha is his Fairy Godmother or the Prince. Fairy Godprince might be a good compromise.

"Hey," she says late one Sunday morning, poking him with her toes. "Hey, remember that weird gay phase?"

"Which one?"

"Yours."

"Oh," he says and nods. Tenth grade and then the summer after, he wore a lot of black and painted his nails and made out with Ed Choi. "Yeah, that was something, huh?"

Sasha snorts. "Whatever happened to Eddy Choi, anyway?"

"Brand manager at Hollister," Marcus tells her. "And it wasn't a phase."

"Oh," she replies and pokes him again, harder this time. "That's an interesting tidbit I was not expecting."

"It's no big," he says, but slides his hand over the outside of his thigh lest her pokes get meaner. "Just a thing."

"Uh-huh." She's squinting at him now, and she looks adorable, her hair still messy from sleep, her glasses a little smudged. "Anything else I ought to know?"

He exhales as he sets down his pen and sits back. "I think I might be having weed DT's. Is that a thing? I feel like it might be a thing. Maybe I'm Patient Zero?"

Sasha slurps down the last of her coffee, then says, "So smoke up, I don't give a shit."

"I..." He looks at his palms, feels his mouth twist this way and that. This is way more difficult than the Bi Revelation. "I don't know where to get any."

Sasha laughs at him for a long time. He gets up, pees, refills both their coffees, and washes out the French Press, and when he returns to the couch, she's still laughing. Just these great heaving snorting cackles that make her sound like Ursula the Sea-Hag. After a while, Marcus is laughing, too. It's contagious and, anyway, he's ridiculous.

*

He asks one of the nicer busboys at Sasha's restaurant — most of them are way too hip to even notice Marcus, a fact which is equally sad and a relief. Unfortunately, Emil only knows where to get molly and speed. Emil checks with Sanjay in the back, but Sanjay's purely a meth guy.

"Sorry, dude, but isn't it like legal now?" Emil says when they part at the subway entrance. "For old people? Glaucoma and shit?" He sighs and waves his hand dismissively. "Baby boomers get everything."

Marcus thinks of about fifteen different responses to that, but hours later, when it's no use.

*

Back home — he shouldn't call the Bay Area "home", because what does that make where he is now? It makes his head hurt, trying to be fair and thoughtful but also honest — back where he used to live (that's much better), he had the same dealer since high school.

Lainey Fukunaga's pager number became her cell became her Skype handle. Marcus, for one, appreciated the continuity. Lainey was a big Hawaiian lady with bright red hair who claimed to be the only person ever to maintain simultaneous membership in Mensa, the Hells Angels, and the film projectionists' union local. He never had any reason to doubt her.

He misses Lainey.

*

"This is good for you," Sasha tells him as she crawls up the bed, over his body, her hair hanging like curtains. Her smirk gets sharper. "A quest. To get acquainted with the city and..." She dips down to do that evil tongue-swirl around his right nipple. "...maybe yourself."

"The real weed was the herb we missed along the way?" He's grasping her hips, trying to hold on but not be too demanding.

"Something like that."

*

"Pin or pen?" the bartender, Alicia, asks Marcus out of the blue one afternoon. He's hanging around like he tends to do after exploring and adventuring. Today, he scored an original vinyl pressing of 3 Feet High and Rising and he can't stop petting it through the protective archival sleeve.

"Hmm?"

Impatiently, Alicia clicks her tongue stud against her teeth. "Heard word you're having some difficulties in the vegetation department."

Marcus grins as soon as he understands. He loves how ridiculous stoners get in talking around the topic. It's how you recognize your people, he first decided back in high school, and has only grown more convinced of this fact.

"I am, indeed I am," he says. "Can you lend a hand to a poor plantless man?"

"Like I said —" Alicia's kneeling down under the bar now, so he can hear her but not see her. "Pin or pen?"

He leans forward, feeling like his dad in any moderately loud situation. At least he's not cupping his ear yet. "What's that?"

She peeks over the bar like a Dominican lesbian Kilroy. "You dab? Or vape?"

"No," Marcus says. He holds his phone between his knees to google as discreetly as possible. Okay, the vape-pen makes sense, but he's having trouble relating the nail in dabbing to a pin. New Yorkers are just so extra, making up their own language for anything and everything. "Just smoke."

Her glittery eyebrows knit together as she shakes her head. "I can't help you, man, sorry."

"Not the first time someone's said that to me."

She just frowns at that.

*

Hitting the stage sober is not something he wants to ever do again. Everything's so sharp and clear and vivid! Ridiculous. He does an open mic somewhere in Brooklyn, mixes solid Hello Peril material with some of the new rhymes he's been working on for "Cinderfella".

In between songs, he asks, "Anyone know where a newbie could find sweet, sweet weed?"

That gets a lot of laughs, the best response he's had all set.

It wasn't a joke, though.

*

This is New York goddamn City. There must be competing networks of artisanal organic weed! He tries the Union Square Greenmarket, but gives up after a couple discreet questions at various stalls. You'd think he'd asked them to vaccinate their muddy babies or something.

*

He falls asleep, late one night when Sasha's stuck at the restaurant. He had a movie on but it was freakishly violent, and he's just not in a headspace to deal with that sort of thing. He talked to Tony for a while before Tony wandered away, supposedly to get a sweater. Stoners: what can you do?

He wakes up, flailing, when something hits him smack in the face. "What? Dad!"

"Eww," Sasha says. "That is really not my kink."

Marcus knuckles his eyes and pulls himself up off the floor. "What hit me?"

"It's your lucky day, big guy." She kicks a baggie toward him. "Don't say I never gave you anything."

Sleepiness clings to him, slows everything down, and that mixes really weirdly with the jangling adrenaline ringing out through his system.

"Babe," he says, genuinely hurt and worried, "I would never."

"Dork," she replies, pushing him over so she can sit next to him. "Check out your present."

He leans over to pick up the baggie. That is...a very large amount of beautiful, sticky flower. "You didn't."

"Oh, I did." She nods, her glasses sliding down to the tip of her nose, and kisses him soft and quick. "Now you owe me."

He does, he really does.