Glen by Bill Tope

Glen by Bill Tope

“He is drop-dead gorgeous,” remarked an otherwise erudite woman of my acquaintance. Physically, the man was a cross between Jim Morrison and a young Jackson Browne. “He undresses you with his bedroom eyes,” murmured one smitten female dreamily, as I consoled her over a love lost. Glen and I were housemates in 1971, as we languished in the sex, drugs and rock & roll motif of our college years. Prior to our becoming roomies, Glen lived in an apartment down the street and I spent a lot of time there. He was heavily into pot: buying, selling, and using.

“I can buy a lid of Columbian for $15, sell it for $40,” he boasted proudly. “Next,” he said, “I’m going to use my BEOG grant to score some blow and then repackage it in dime bags.” He showed me the pharmacist’s scale he’d procured.

At the time I had only a casual relationship with dope: I got high on weekends with my friends. Glen was two years older than me and, consequently, seemingly more sophisticated when it came to drugs. In fact, he facilitated my first LSD trip.

“What is it?” I asked, peering down at the pasteboard card upon which four tiny dots of acid had been appended.

“Purple microdot,” he replied knowingly, dislodging two hits and handing one to me. We both gobbled them up.

“What happens now?” I asked inquisitively.

He shrugged, made for the door of his apartment. I followed him down the street to the bar, That night was a wild one, with traces of vibrant colors streaming luminously through the tavern. I possessed an apparent ability to taste the music generated by the house band. I grooved on tunes from Rare Earth and Canned Heat, and from a fairly new band called Pink Floyd. After a few minutes, Glen disappeared and I didn’t see him till the next day, when he suggested we get high again.

I didn’t always want to get wasted: I had never experimented with drugs in high school and had gravitated toward studies and athletics. It was only after I landed in college that I lost my mind. However, Glen was persuasive, and to decline would have been uncool and, next to manliness, being cool was, for males, the coin of the realm.

“Never turn down the chance to get high,” counseled Glen one afternoon in the fall. The sun peeped through the curtains into his room, casting its golden rays across his mammoth bed. The scene of the crime, I thought.

As our bond of friendship grew, I invited Glen to take a room at the house where I lived. As a new tenant, Glen was consigned to a tiny, hole-in-wall bedroom on the second of three floors. The cubicle was dominated by a king-sized bed, his work space. It had a prodigious wooden frame, with a bed post that he actually notched every time he had a new companion for the evening – which was often. Glen enjoyed his work. Thirty years later he might have been known as a player, a lothario, a cocksman – or perhaps even a sex addict. Glen was devoted to deflowering as many women and girls as was humanly possible. He took his work seriously.

“I mounted her from behind,” he remarked blithely one afternoon, recounting, unbidden, his activites of the previous evening. “I fucked her, Dweet,” he told me in a raspy voice, a smug smile playing over his lips as he scanned my face expectantly for signs of envy. It was my considered impression that Glen hated his mother – perhaps both his parents, and that this was the source of his apparent animosity toward women. (I studied psychology in college.) I discussed it once with the woman I was dating at the time.

“Glen doesn’t like women,” she remarked.

“Huh!” I said, not taking her meaning. “He gets laid more often…”

“I didn’t say he doesn’t like to have sex with women,” Cathy said. “I said he doesn’t genuinely like – respect, regard, value – women, but as a semen repository.” I took her point and I had to agree.

One night when he was in his cups – a frequent occurrence – Glen told me about the time that his birth father, by whom he was not raised, tried to lure him into falling into a deep well. “I was four or five,” he remembered. “And this sonofabitch tried to kill me.” Some kind of child support issue, he explained.

“Why do you hate your mother?” I asked him once.

He said crossly, “She should have protected me. She was weak.” And that, perhaps, explained a lot.

Glen earned most of his money selling drugs. A handsome face and an easy manner inserted him easily into most social situations, which in the 70s generally involved drugs. Glen kept me high most of the time. He didn’t like to smoke dope by himself and so he lit me up at least ten times a day. I became something of a vegetable.

“S’matter, Dweet?” he asked, “can’t you take it?” and he chuckled and proferred yet another joint. Not willing to risk disgrace, I toked my brains out. After a few weeks of this I stopped attending classes and gave up even the pretense of studying. School didn’t seem to hold much interest for Glen, either; he regarded it as a useful dodge, whereby he could seduce the greatest number of nubile coeds in the least amount of time.

He had an interesting personal outlook, with respect to his purpose in life. “You know, Dweet,” he remarked once, “I’ve got it lucky.” I glanced up from a pocket mirror sprinkled with white crystals, which Glen had turned up. “I ain’t a chick. I ain’t a Hebe. I ain’t a beaner, and I ain’t a spook. I’m white,” he went on, “and that’s all right.” He giggled spontaneously at his own cleverness. “In other words, I’m that part of society that gets to be the fucker, and not the fuckee.” I snorted up another line.

Glen and I worked as student janitors in the Student Union 20 hours per week. Finding a mysterious key one day, I fitted it into one of the cafeteria freezers, and eureka! I’d hit the mother lode. We ate high on the hog after that. When I found different job, Glen took possession of the key, a fact which eventually led both of us to our downfall. But, more about that at another time. One day, riding an elevator from the basement janitorial offices to the third floor of the Union, Glen relaxed back against the rail and regarded me. With his arms crossed over his chest, he regaled me with a chronicle of his latest sexual conquests, and in excruciating detail. As was normal, he made elaborate comparisons between the experiences and the techniques he employed. “She had a mole on her ass,” he revealed. “Left cheek,” he remembered with a knowing smirk.

Most of the time, I didn’t particularly want to hear any of this – some of his partners were women whom I knew. Some were even friends. Having them reduced so basely repulsed me. But in those unenlightened times it would have been unseemly – unmanly – to deny him his glory. And manliness and being always on the make was so very important to us mere mortals. So I listened, but with decidedly mixed feelings. I was careful to grin at all the appropriate places.

Glen’s record of seduction was not perfect, however. One night a statuesque, red-headed female housemate, Stephanie, stopped me at the house and asked, “What is it with this Glen guy?”

“What do you mean?”

“He came to my door, in his underwear, and asked if I had change for a five.”

I shrugged. “Maybe,” I ventured, “he just needed change.”

“He was hard inside his tighty-whities,” she said with a scowl. “As though that would impress me.” Stephanie was in a long-term, committed relationship with a man, and wasn’t moved by Glen in the least. Stephanie shook her head with disgust.

One night, attending one of the myriad parties afforded by the college town, I saw Glen across the room, sitting on the floor. Spotting me, Glen grinned wildly and pointed at the girl on the carpet at his side – she was but 17, a high school student, and just barely legal; clearly, she was wasted. She was also the daughter of the college bursar, with whom Glen had a number of run ins. Later in the evening, he came by and said, “I’m going to screw his daughter; that’ll show the old so and so.” he laughed. There’s nothing quite like weaponizing your sexual behavior. Eventually, everyone gets hurt.

Sometime later that evening, presumably after Glen had finished with this girl, she left the house, drunkenly got behind the wheel of daddy’s Corvette and ran down one of my closest friends, on the main street of our town.

A week later, after my friend Diana came out of her coma, she was allowed visitors, I showed up at the hospital, where I pushed her wheelchair across the grounds and asked how she felt. I handed her a beer, which she ignored.

“I feel like shit, Dweet,” she replied, gingerly touching the huge cast encircling her leg. “That bitch hit me and dragged me on the hood of her car for fifty feet before I fell off and she crashed into a street light.” I could see tears of pain and anguish in Diana’s eyes. “Who would get a girl that liquored up and then let her drive?’ she asked incredulously. I shrugged.

Glen never had much to say about that the incident or his part in it. Nor did he ever pay a price for his indiscretion.

I was forever being beseeched by besotted females who were eager to do to Glen what he did to other women – sexually exploit them. They were always trying to enlist my services to “fix them up” with the local satyr.

It was bad enough to listen to his endless boasting, but to find myself as an unwilling conduit between him and other women was just too much. And maybe I was just a bit envious.  I mean, who wouldn’t long to be a libertine when they’re in they’re in the prime of life?

“Can you get me a date with the ‘hunk’,” asked one really pretty, dark-haired woman.

I’d roll my eyes. “I ain’t his social secretary.”

Finally, I’d had enough of it, enough of the badgering, the parasitic women and, decidedly, enough of Glen. Then came the last straw.

Glen’s libido seemed to be bounded by nothing, not even friendship. Emulating my friend, I brought a pretty girl home from the bar one night.

“This is my room, Ellison,” I told her. I cracked the door and she peeped inside. The haunting voice of Blind Faith’s Steve Winwood seeped from the room, setting the amorous mood perfectly, I thought.

“Cool,” she murmured, entering the room.

I had a miniature refrigerator in my room and pulling open the door, I extracted a bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, a favorite libation at the time. I poured.

“Um, this is good,” she purred, taking a sip. The evening was off to a good start. As well it should have been; I had spent most of my meager savings plying blond and shapely Ellison with beers at the tavern. We were sitting atop my bed, gradually edging nearer one another. At last we leaned in and our lips touched. She tasted like apple wine, I thought winsomely, kissing her. Her lips were so soft. Suddenly there was an unexpected rap upon the door.

Unbidden, Glen pushed through the door and said, “Well, hello. Who’s this, Dweet? You been holding out my me. Hi, pretty lady; I’m Glen.”

Ellison eyed Glen appreciatively, and introduced herself. We exchanged small talk for a few moments, then Glen excused himself back to his own room. But, the damage was already done. Ellison, who knew neither of us well, opted for the other one. After I returned from the bathroom, I found Ellison gone and Glen’s door closed. I took a great breath, then released it. The bottle of wine was gone, too. The next morning, as I lay in bed, I was awakened by a voice: Ellison. She was bidding adieu to her lover of the previous evening; she was tittering gaily.

Burdened with these oppressive emotions, I went out that evening to the bars and consumed more alcohol than a man – even a dedicated juicer like me – had a right to do. Returning home, I staggered up the stairs to my bedroom, snapped on the lights and beheld a stark reminder of my new nemesis. 

There I glared at item after item which Glen had over time deposited in my room for safe-keeping: his rocking chair, his pole lamp, his many books, his typewriter – we still used them in the 70s – and lots of other stuff.  He had lent it all to me because he had but a small bedroom, yet insisted, for “professional” reasons, upon a king-sized bed. For no rational reason, I suddenly became incensed and took it out on Glen’s stuff. 

I grabbed everything of his and deposited it loudly on the landing outside my door, between our two bedrooms. The clatter must have wakened the household – it could easily have raised the dead – but I gave it no thought as I angrily slammed my door and fell into a drunken slumber, and dreamt about – what else – Glen and Ellison. The next morning, I learned that our friendship was officially over. What’s the matter, couldn’t he take a joke? Glen tried to enlist our housemates in an effort to boot me from the house, where I’d lived for two years, to his four months.

“Glen wants to exile you from the house,” John, the house manager, informed me later that next day.

I said nothing.

“We’re not going to do it, though,” continued John with a twinkle. He didn’t like Glen.

Thankfully, my other housemates agreed, seeing my former friend as a manipulator, a user and as generally a bad seed. They were rather put off by his apparent thievery at his place of employment. One did wonder how he turned up fifty pounds of steaks, and on a minimum wage salary.

Rebuffed, he decided to move out himself.    

Feeling rather embarrassed by my untimely outburst, I tried to make amends, and asked Glen to stay. But it was not to be: he felt he could no longer trust me, and in light of the depths of his involvement with drugs, perhaps it was logical that he would feel that way. His brother, whom Glen idolized, had funded the purchase of a late-model, second-hand car with an extra-large trunk, so that Glen could ferry drugs from Illinois to his home state of West Virginia and back. For the price of a used car, his loving brother had transformed his adoring sibling into a very disposable mule.

But Glen was not finished with me yet. After his foiled attempt to expel me from my home, he spread rumors amongst our mutual friends.

“Glen said you poisoned Bert,” exclaimed one friend, referencing Glen’s much adored dog. The animal had died from heart worms only a month before.

“He said you hit on his wife,” said another. My head spun.

That’s right, Glen had a long-suffering wife, Sally, whom no one ever saw and who had already graduated from nursing school. She didn’t do drugs or sleep around. How they got together or thought they could make it work, I’ll never understand.

For reasons known only to her, Sally kept him on her insurance policy and paid his tuition. She also larded him with expensive gifts in an effort to win him back. Glen, hands always out and mouth always open, accepted her largesse as his due, but refused to return to the home fires; it would cramp his style. I had met her and she was a perfectly nice, attractive and intelligent woman, with but a single flaw: she was hands down the worst judge of a husband’s character that I ever met.

“I love Glen,” she confided one afternoon at her home – before Glen and my falling out – as I waited for him to return. She had invited her husband and his new housemate for dinner. “But he’s not the easiest man to love.” Suddenly the door opened and Glen came in, dark lines of suspicion creasing his face. After a perfunctory kiss for Sally, Glen led me away, our planned home-cooked meal now forgotten. He was apparently concerned that two people who knew him well might conceivably share information. We never spoke of the incident again.

After Glen moved out, I saw less and less of him. As the pages of time turned over, I graduated from school and got a job and went on with the rest of my life, giving little thought to my erstwhile best friend and housemate. Always, however, my experiences with him occupied a tiny space at the back of my mind. Ellison and I were married two years later and we had three children before divorcing a decade after that. I haven’t seen Glen in decades. I understand that he never took his degree. Instead, he got a job supervising a crew of janitors – most of them young female students, wouldn’t you know it – in an office building somewhere in St. Louis. In the Me-Too era it’s hard to take seriously his prospective job security. At least once a year, I’ll get a call that, when I answer, I encounter only dead air. After a moment of profound silence, I hear a scratchy male voice monotonously repeating my last name, “Dweet, Dweet, Dweet…” ten or fifteen times. I know that it’s Glen; I can tell because I’d recognize that telltale pot-smoker’s voice anywhere.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Bill Tope 2024