Lafayette answers the panicked beating on his door with the usual serene profanity; he is wearing amazing pajama pants covered in flames. "She hit me with a fucking liquor bottle," Tara says immediately. "My head is bleeding." He tells her to calm down and stop shouting, because he has a guest. Tara hesitates ("Oh shit") but he waves it off -- he's in the shower. Tara asks if it'll need stitches, and Lafayette takes a look: "You're gonna put some peroxide on that... Then take two Vicodin, with a big glass of red wine. Then smoke some badass ganja, baby. By the time you wake up... mm! All healed." (Well, if you wake up, with that awesomely ill-advised cocktail, but if you do, that would probably work all right.)

Tara continues to whine about her shitty, awful mother, as he fills her full of pills and alcohol and pot. I think we're so used to hearing the chords of doom whenever anybody drinks or takes any drugs that we're conditioned to think that they are literally the worst things in the world, and it's a nice piece of cognitive dissonance -- here and on the prior show -- when people use drugs and aren't immediately destroyed by the narrative gods. Hell, the first half of American Beauty was about the idea that Reefer Madness is usually preferable to Regular Flavor.

Tara asks if she can stay, and confirms that she doesn't really care to hear the answer. A man, white and stately and old, enters and is taken aback by the new person. "Hi!" says Lafayette, totally unselfconscious. "This is my cousin Tara!" He's about to introduce him to her, but the guy jumps in and supplies a fake name: "Duke. Duke Smith," which causes Lafayette to bust out. "Boyfriend, you are so not a duke." This does not put "Duke" at ease, and he stutters in Mad Libs: "I left the _______ in the ______?" Lafayette thanks him kindly for the money he left in the bedroom and offers "Duke" a toke off Tara's joint. "Thank you. Call me when the ______ comes in?" Of course. Lafayette, grandly says ta-ta, with one last hilarious "Take care, Duke."