Loyalty to Hal: the only co-user, the I.-Day-Eve town-painting, the shared duBois

texture · UNDATED (standing); the I.-Day-Eve ritual 7 Nov YDAU

• When: UNDATED (standing friendship); the I.-Day-Eve ritual is 7 Nov YDAU (scene n110)
• What: Pemulis is the one person Hal has ever actually gotten high with in person — "Hal has actually gotten actively high only with Pemulis" (scene 013) — which is exactly why Avril fears him ("absorbing God alone knows what sort of esoteric designer compounds with reptilian Michael Pemulis"). He is loyal and protective in the cohort ("'Leave him alone,' Pemulis says," scene 032). He is Hal's constant companion and running color-commentator (Mario relays Pemulis's match verdicts, scene 010; Pemulis pokes in with "Did you eat yet?", scene 110; the girls report he "did something really funny today" and he is flagged simply as Hal's best friend, scene 138) — and the reliable joke-source whose humor Hal sometimes can't share (the Dial-a-Prayer-for-atheists gag that only Mario laughs happily at, scene 117). For "the past two years, Hal and Pemulis and Struck and Troeltsch and sometimes B. Boone have made a little ritual" of sharing an "obscene cigar-sized duBois" before the Interdependence-Day-Eve blowout supper (n110); Hal buys his marijuana ("the Bob Hope") retail from Pemulis. The friendship's asymmetry — Pemulis's mercantile edge inside genuine devotion — becomes the load-bearing relationship of the DMZ arc (events 13, 19, 21).