with their stewardship of the Temple’s weekend excesses, added to Wade’s superlative music collection and stereo system, with Adam providing just enough bookish gravitas to keep them from looking like your typical fratboy gang-rape-in-waiting — this, plus an on-site drug connection? They may as well be dipped in gold.
Wade made the connection back in first year. He’d been the only one of them without any kind of scholarship, meaning he had to get a job to see him through. He brooded on this problem as he partied his way through frosh week, when in the middle of a pub crawl it came to him: he could bartend. It so happened that when this occurred to him he was sitting in one of the sketchiest bars in town, a former disco, presently a dive, that nonetheless had retained its Studio-54-era moniker: Goldfinger’s. Wade stood up and staggered over to the bar, tended by a woman wearing a kind of corset-tank top who he’d been looking for an excuse to talk to anyway and asked her, “Where can I apply?”
“Apply for what?” she hollered over the music.
Wade could see from her already-wincing expression that she was expecting a sleazy come-on. He tried for a moment to come up with one: To be your man, beautiful lady.
“To tend bar. You guys need any help?”
“Right now?” she asked.
“No, not right now, I’m hammered right now.”
“That aint stopping me,” she told him, and winked before downing a shot she’d been keeping under the counter.
Wade shivered with pleasure. Not at the shot, or even the wink. It was his first year away from home and he’d never met a woman who said aint without any kind of ironic inflection before.
So Wade tended bar at Goldfinger’s his entire first semester at university and quickly discovered that a) it was disgusting work and he hated it and the woman who said aint looked so serious all the time because she was trying not to smile — she had brown teeth — and b) he didn’t have it in him to spend three nights a week dodging both punches and vomit ’til one in the morning (followed by another grisly hour of clean-up) while maintaining any kind of GPA to speak of.
The upside? There were drugs at Goldfinger’s. But that led to yet another downside of the job — the fact that most of his hard-won tips were going into the baggies he took home with him at the end of every shift.
It took a while for the obvious solution to sink in. In typical Wade fashion, there was no real eureka moment — he simply noticed one day that a great many of his friends — and mere acquaintances even — had come to rely on him for hash and other illicit sundries. His connection at Goldfinger’s, a middle-aged paranoiac coke-addict named Ivor who acted as bouncer in addition to his other, more underground activities, mentioned one evening that if Wade “had any kind of brain on ya,” he might think about charging his friends a percentage.
And the moment he did was the moment he realized he was crazy to keep tending bar three nights a week.
By second year, Wade was in business.
07/31/09, 10:23 p.m.
And so they party that year, our boys. God love the little fellas, how they party. They bond intensely during those pothead philosophy rap sessions — Cheech & Chong meets Plato’s Symposium — and consider one another geniuses. They admire and look up to each other, but at the same time harbour their own secret senses of superiority, which keeps them from being too resentful of the others’ particular gifts. And they intuit this — that they have one another’s respect, but not too much, not enough of it to lead to jealousy or outright emulation. They are each their own man — and, in some kind of shared psychic acknowledgement, each has been deemed worthy of the other’s friendship.
They are often seen together as a group, but they pair off just as often too. Because Wade and Kyle have their shared hometown history, they make up one side of the coin, so Rank and Adam come to be the other. Rank and Adam are one of those superficially unlikely-seeming friend-pairings that eventually make a paradoxical kind of sense — in accordance with the eternal principle of “opposites attract,” one can only suppose. Rank’s big-mouthed bruiser alongside Adam’s introverted aesthete are sort of complementary — they click. They tone down what’s most provocatively stereotypical