All Josh’s friends knew about Marie-Jane; they all knew about the bong with the oversized glass carb.

But no one knew about the salvia. Josh was wrong when he thought the commissioner had told the other teams about why Josh had failed his most recent drug test. Salvia was a wonderful drug, and Roger Goodell did not want other players developing an interest in it.

Because Josh was so afraid of being found out, he had never asked for any of his regular dealers for salvia, or even for suggestions as to where it might be procured. As a result, the drug disappeared from his life without a trace. There was not a scrap of tangible evidence to show that he had spent the most wonderful year of his life with it.

Which only increased his desire to find some more.

Sometimes when he and his roommate Johnny were alone in the apartment together, the shorter man would avert his eyes from the television, throw Josh an inquiring glance, and say, What are you thinking about?

Sitting in his armchair, staring up at the ceiling, Josh always found some plausible response, but in fact he was thinking of salvia.

When Josh published an article in the Players Tribune on how it was hypocritical for the league to ban a substance that had been made legal in several states, Johnny was the first to read it and discuss it with him. But all Josh could think of was what it would have been like if he’d smoked some salvia before writing it.  Everything he did, he wondered what it would be like if he’d done it while under salvia’s influence.

It was a perfectly innocent form of rebellion against the league’s drug policy and one eminently suited to Josh, who would never have done his former teammates any harm and genuinely wanted to see the rules reformed. Despite that, he privately nourished the cult of salvia more as religion than as love.

Indeed, according to the theology of that religion it was salvia who had sent him a companion in Johnny. Between Johnny’s perpetual quest for stronger and more effective narcotics and Josh’s periodic lapses into depression, there was perfect peace amongst them as roommates. And if Josh’s unearthly yearning for altered states of consciousness (for theological reasons) contain a strong dose of the inexplicable and incomprehensible (we have only to recall the dictionary of misunderstood words and the long lexicon of misunderstandings!), their brotherhood rested on true understanding.