I-Day-eve: the tow-truck crew; medicinal/touristic drug use; he knows Hal gets high

texture · 7 Nov YDAU

• When: 7 Nov YDAU (Interdependence-Day eve)
• What: Stice is a sometime member of the upperclassmen's Interdependence-Day-eve blowout crew — the town-painting run in Pemulis's tow truck — where he and Schacht warm the truck while the others share a duBois behind the dumpsters. He is one of the small circle who "in a sort of medicinal or touristic way" occasionally gets high, and one of the few who knows Hal gets covertly high. He is also slated to be in on the planning penumbra of the DMZ experiment only by exclusion — the group decides "there's no real reason to involve Boone or Stice or Struck or Troeltsch." Same-note texture: Hal warns Orin that any Moment-magazine profiler had better be kept away from "this kid Ortho Stice up here, because he really is a Rubensophile" — after P.M.s he'll "go on and on about enormous breasts and melon bellies and quivering laps" until the table is pinching its nose-bridges (endnote n110, p. 1015).