XL. How to Steal a Tray (Without Doing Any Drugs).

The tray came out around midnight. "The good stuff," Marcus called it. Hand-cut mirror, beveled edges, brass corners with that particular worn patina that cannot be faked.

I said no to the coke.

I always say no to the coke.

But the tray.

"You sure?" Marcus asked, he was arranging the powder with a kind of solemn attention that I recognized, with some discomfort, as the same attention I gave to the placement of guests at a dinner table.

"I'm good," I said, watching the mirror catch the lamplight. Six hundred dollars, easy. Possibly an estate sale find. Possibly his grandmother's. Someone who had understood, once, what a tray was for... I pictured it in my kitchen, draped in prosciutto, dignified with a wedge of Manchego, redeemed.

"It's really good tonight," he said.

I thought about my own cheese board at home, a sad bamboo rectangle from a department store sale rack, splitting at the seam, smelling permanently of Brie.

I thought about hosting. I thought about compliments, about someone asking "Where did you get this gorgeous tray?" and me, mysterious: "Oh, this old thing."

"Actually," I said, "let me just..."

What followed was not, technically, the doing of a line.

It was a performance of the doing, which is a philosophically distinct act, though I concede the distinction may not survive scrutiny. I pinched one nostril closed with sufficient conviction that the laws of physics handled the rest. Marcus nodded in the way that men nod when they believe a shared understanding has been reached.

"Sick tray, by the way," I said, casual as anything. "Where's it from?"

"No idea. It was just here when I got the apartment."

I have never once in my life stolen anything, but there's a version of ethics where if a man cannot identify the provenance of his own drug paraphernalia, he has functionally already lost custody of it.

I wrapped it in a paper towel at 1 a.m. and cradled it home like a baby.

It currently holds a very nice Camembert. Guests always ask. I always say the same thing.

"Oh, this old thing."

For what it’s worth,

-Charlene Iris

One thought at a time.

One truth at a time. 

Because some epiphanies stay with you.