Chapter XIV: Hook Hands and Doobie Get High

I loved Kendra and The Professor, and I miss them every day. When I think about them, I can’t help but feel especially sad when I remember what they brought to our lives and what they meant to each other. But whenever I think about Hook Hands and Doobie, the only tears that I shed are from the laughter that they brought to me during the short time I knew them.

It was hard to laugh some times at Morgenthau, and I always felt that too many people didn’t appreciate their sense of humor. They smoked way too much pot and were too lazy to really worry about the abject squalor they lived in. They had somehow amassed a harvest of marijuana and they paid their rent easily by selling it to the residents, many of whom complained that it was bogus. But for the most part, they smoked their own stash, frequently baking out the third floor, which angered The Professor to no end.

Hook Hands and Doobie moved into the third floor of the Main Residence Hall with The Professor the spring after Winston had come to Morgenthau, around the time the snakes had escaped from the science building and had begun to colonize the jungle of weeds that had once been the quadrangle. At first, The Professor was ambivalent about the two dopes that had moved down the hall. At the time, the ceiling didn’t leak and the third floor wasn’t a bad place to call home. It only took a few weeks for The Professor to completely lose his patience with the middle-aged bastards.

Herschel Levy and Paul Doogan came to Morgenthau because they had become persona non-grata all over the men’s shelters in the Tri-Towns. Herschel, who had developed the nickname Hook Hands because most of the fingers on his right hand were permanently recoiled into a fist, with the exception of his index finger, always curved like a hook. He always smoked with his bad hand, carefully holding the joint or pipe with his thumb and his semi-functional index finger. Hook Hands was about as creepy as his name suggested. He over six feet tall, but he was lucky if he weighed more than 150 pounds. He was in his early to mid forties, but he looked much older. His hair was a wild mess of gray and light brown, loosely tucked under a thick winter cap that he wore regardless of the season or temperature.

As for Doobie… well, you can guess how he got his nickname. Doobie, an Irish-Italian mutt from The Bronx, New York had never finished school, avoided jail because of a talented family attorney, got involved in every hair-brained scheme and worked with mobbed-up contractors who got him construction jobs where he sat around on his ass all day.

Eventually, Doobie’s apathy got the best of him. He had made a few bad deals, embezzled from his bosses and got his kneecaps broken. Without the mob lining his pockets, he started hustling on the street, conning old ladies and unsuspecting dopes into giving him large sums of money. He ran phony charities and accepted donations in the name of foundations that didn’t exist. He did all of this while living out of the back of a station wagon he had stolen from his sister-in-law.

Herschel was always a few pennies short of a dollar. He lived with his elderly mother in one of the quiet suburban homes on the outskirts of the town where his duties included making sure that his mother’s pack of wild neighborhood cats were fed on a regular basis. Hook Hands’ was as creepy as he was dim, and when his hand crippled up, his usefulness as an employee began to wane.

His most rewarding job had been a night watchman at Morgenthau during the university’s final years. He worked the graveyard shift from Monday to Friday checking student IDs and making sure that nobody like him tried to get onto the campus. Of course, Hook Hands abused his position to a certain degree. He was known to take long walks during his breaks around campus. His security guard’s uniform gave him the appearance of an authority figure, so he did not startle the young women they walked back from late-night study group sessions, or taking the walk of shame from some frat house party. He would approach them and ask if they wanted an escort back to their rooms, mostly on the off-chance that one of them might be drunk enough to invite him up. But even freshman rushes don’t get that drunk, and as a result, the girls usually stated that they felt much more comfortable without the escort and quickly scampered back.

When Morgenthau closed, he got a similar job at a local county park, but felt that the job’s location and perks were far less rewarding.

He met Doobie one night when the conman was hiding out from the authorities by leaving his car parked overnight inside the park. On a routine walk across the property on an early fall evening, Hook Hands came across a car with fogged windows that gave off the unmistakable scent of marijuana. He was ready to radio into the cops before hearing the sensual moans of a woman inside the car. Having not seen any action this hot since the days when he followed young co-eds around the darkened streets of Morgenthau, Hook Hands crouched beside the car and tried to peer through the windows and have himself a free peep.

It was only a matter of minutes before the sexy ruckus was interrupted by the girl’s loud scream at the sight of the lascivious loon sporting a wide, horny grin peering through the backseat windows. A half-naked, half-staffed Doobie burst out of the car, ready to attack Hook Hands before he saw his Rent-A-Cop uniform and briefly mistook him for a cop.

Hook Hands, upset that the fling had ended so abruptly and without him, was ready to alert the police and have this bum taken downtown before Doobie offered to get Hook Hands high in exchange for letting him go. A reluctant Herschel accepted and ended up spending the rest of the night with the couple, although the events of that evening depended on which one of them was telling the story.

For reasons known only to those two, a budding friendship began. With Herschel’s mother practically comatose in her house, Doobie convinced the lanky creep to help him jumpstart his pot-dealing venture by growing the plants hydroponically in the basement, as well as naturally in his mother’s backyard. They made quick cash, but it was only a few months before a spark set the growing lights ablaze and burned down Hook Hands’ mother’s house.

Hook Hands was now homeless, but he continued to follow around Doobie because he always had an answer for every question and a sure-fire plan that would get them out of any situation. They kept trying to sell pot to whomever they could, and they found a growing market within the homeless men’s shelters in the Tri-Towns. In addition, Hook Hands started a mini-forest of pot plants in a clearing in the park where he worked, but it was only a matter of time before some lucky teenagers discovered the clearing and harvested the plants.

After the men’s shelter kicked the both of them out permanently, Hook Hands brought Doobie over to Morgenthau where they would spend the rest of their lives.

Within a few months of their arrival, the duo began selling pot to the hopeless, drugged-out rejects at the university. Nobody quite knew how they grew they obtained the drugs, but the rumor around campus was that they had to be growing it somewhere because the smoke had a real herbal, natural kick to it. There was nowhere on campus that wasn’t completely overgrown by tall weeds and infested with those evil snakes that had escaped from the science building. They could have possibly grown their stash somewhere in the woods, but there was no way that the addicts would let Hook Hands and Doobie get away with it.

However they obtained it, the duo made a descent business at Morgenthau, and ended up smoking most of what they had themselves. In the winter—presumably when the growing season had ended—their supply was in short stock, forcing them to rely on their reserves to get high. As soon as the temperatures began to climb back to normal, they would be flush with new product once again.

The last time I saw them was on the night that Alistair burned down the fieldhouse in a stunning, awe-inspiring spectacle. As Alistair danced around his creation singing and waving his hands in the air, Herschel and Doobie traded asthmatic laughs with deep, bellowing coughs. The night after the fieldhouse fire, that brief burst of spring was brought back to reality by an icy blast from the north and it caught just about everyone off-guard. With no weatherman to warn us about the warm spell’s brevity, we had no idea that the night would suddenly dip below freezing. I had left my window open to take in what felt like a spring evening, but shortly before dawn, I awoke to the sound of my own teeth chattering, as an arctic high set in above the campus.

I managed to close the windows and put on a couple layers of clothes, insulating myself under the heavy tarp that served as my blanket. Herschel and Doobie were not so lucky. The duo had been battling a flu bug that they kept giving back to each other, and even with the jubilation that came along with the fieldhouse going up in flames, they just didn’t have enough energy or sense to get up and close their windows.

Their ugly room—filled with old pairs of clothes, dirt, a couple homemade bongs and two garbage-salvaged mattresses—suddenly had turned into a meat locker. It was a couple days before they were finally found, and by then, they were almost completely frozen.

Willie buried the two in the Gardens without any real ceremony. The great precession and silent eulogy we gave The Professor about seven months later was very uncharacteristic of most Morgenthau residents, and spoke more about The Professor than it did about us. Even after Kendra’s murder, there were people who visited her grave, but even she had not been granted a proper funeral. Hook Hands and Doobie were not nearly as revered as Kendra, and some residents quietly celebrated their passing. I’m probably the only one who ever really missed them.

I miss their late night stories when Grover would cook us soup over a makeshift stove in the second floor common room. They were always the first ones to sit down with Grover and always the last to leave, always greedily asking for seconds and thirds before everyone had a chance to have firsts. I missed their constant berating of the residents, most notably, that of The Steve.

“Doesn’t it bother you, Chinese Steve?” Hook Hands asked The Steve one night as Grover reheated a tin of chicken noodle. The Steve refused to acknowledge the remarks from the lumbering pothead across the circle. “You walk around in the city and all ya see is these smokin’ hot Chinese bitches, and they’re always holding hands with some asshole white kid.” The Steve started eating his soup faster, hoping to get out of this conversation as soon as possible.

“But it’s really gotta piss you off that you never see any smokin’ hot white girls grinding up against a Chinese guy,” concluded Hook Hands. The Steve looked up at him with an uneasy, perturbed glare and proceeded to slurp down the rest of the bowl so that he could leave abruptly. Not satisfied with silence, Hook Hands continued. “I mean, what’s the matter with you guys? White girls date black guys and Mexican guys… shit, I’ve even seen white girls with Pakistani men… but you never see them with Chinese guys. What’s the matter with your people? Not enough cream of sum-yung-guy?”

The last line brought a chuckle from Doobie and a few others, including myself. The Steve lowered his head and simply exited the room, not giving Hook Hands the pleasure of knowing that he had gotten to him.

My other favorite story was one of Doobie’s tales from his career as a plumber for a Mob-run company. His most famous tale involved a job at the New York School for the Blind, where a blind and deaf student had accidentally walked into a closed-off bathroom where Doobie was working and proceed to unzip his pants, unaware that there was a plumber in the room taking care of a backed up pipe.

“So he bursts into the door and I’m yellin’ at the kid, but he don’t hear me, cuz he’s deaf on top of bein’ blind,” said Doobie on another one of Grover’s soup nights. “Next thing I know, the kid is unbucklin’ his belt and starts pulling down his drawers.”

“Why didn’t you tap him on the leg and let him know you were there?” asked Alistair.

“I couldn’t, I was working behind the throne and I couldn’t reach him. I freaked out, I didn’t know what to do. So, just before he was about to let it all fly, I reacted and just kicked him right in the ass. He screamed and ran out the stall door and crashed into the sinks.” With this, a mix of disgusted gasps and laughs broke out among the residents.

“How could you do that to a poor blind kid?” bemoaned a disgusted Kendra.

Despite the accusations of being heartless, Doobie stayed firm. “Hey, not for nothin’, but the kid tried to shit on me.”

After their death, soup night was a lot quieter, but it lacked a certain element that had made the gatherings truly meaningful. Hook Hands and Doobie weren’t really anybody’s friend. They were more like the inconsiderate, inappropriate uncle that showed up at Thanksgiving and told jokes about blowjobs and herpes at the dinner table. Everybody’s got somebody like that in their family. We had two of them.

After their deaths, spring eventually came to Morgenthau, and with it, a long, rainy season, including the tumultuous rainstorm where Kendra marched through the downpour to confront Nolan about the subject of his illegal rent. Around that time, The Professor’s room on the third floor had started to leak. The Professor passed the problem off as a nuisance brought on by the lack of maintenance done to the building since it’s closure. However, many other buildings had not been maintained, yet similar problems did not persist. The Professor—who always had to get to the bottom of even the smallest of conundrums—started to figure out why the roof was leaking when a root started growing through the ceiling and dripping water into his room.

Herschel and Doobie had been growing their pot on the roof of the Main Residence Hall, and the roots of the plants had found a way to dig through the cracks in the ceiling and into The Professor’s room. Of course, by the time The Professor discovered this, it was too late to fix it. Even in death, those sons of bitches had found a way to piss him off.

For two idiots, the plan was brilliant. On the roof, the plants had access to plenty of sunlight, water and most importantly, privacy. Nobody ever went up to the roof, and somehow, they knew it. Growing the drugs on the roof allowed them to keep the source of the stash a secret.

When I thought about it, I had once caught Doobie climbing out of his third floor window on my way to get some pipe tobacco for The Professor.

“What the hell are you doing up there?” I asked the pudgy lunatic as he climbed onto a small ledge.

“I’m… taking a shit.” He said.

“On the roof?”

“Yeah, why not.” He said, and climbed up to the roof. What a conman! How else could he know that that was the one phrase that would make me never want to go up onto the roof? And boy, could I have used a good smoke after Kendra was killed. By that point, the secret was out and the desperate lowlifes had yanked out every plant, stalk, seed and bud from the rooftop pot garden. After that, it always seemed to be raining on The Professor, both figuratively, in his mind and literally, from the ceiling of his leaky room.