Stanley and I hadn’t even made it home from school yet — we’d waited patiently for the cover of darkness before, paradoxically, wandering over and parking ourselves on a bench under a lamppost. (Today, two twelve-year-old boys sitting on a park bench after sunset would be targets for six kinds of perverts, a Reebok robbery, and a couple of good old-fashioned beatings; of course, it could have happened back then, too, but parents and children seemed far less aware of the possibilities.)
So there we sat, totally unaware of what ramifications lay on the other side of the doorway we were about to jimmy open into the future even as we discussed what we thought was the most insightful fact about the impending act.
“If you smoke it right down the filter,” Stanley said,“ you get lung cancer instantly.”
“Wow, are you a fucking moron,” I said. “Cigarettes don’t cause cancer. Both my parents and three of my grandparents smoke and they’re all still alive.”
“Well I guess they never made it to the filter then,” Stanley said, indignantly. “Most people don’t. But go ahead and smoke yours right down, a-hole. I really hope you do. I won’t do any crying at your funeral.”
Stanley had previously informed me that hemorrhoids were nothing more than a painful buildup of shit. A quick check of the Preparation H package in my parents’ medicine cabinet straightened me out, so I no longer deferred to his medical knowledge — but I did tell him never to mistake any anal ointments for Brylcreem lest he lose, or at least substantially shrink, his mind. Still, he’d given me something new to think about on the smoking front — although I wasn’t going to tell him that.
“How about you produce them first, turd breath,” I said, with forced bravado.“ Then I’ll smoke mine right down.”
And so he did, drawing from his jacket two cigarettes that he’d pilfered from his mother’s pack at lunchtime that day. Tobacco had shaken free of their tips, and from their long stay in his pocket they’d bent at the middle in what almost looked like polite, oriental bows; but to me, they looked every bit as straight and full and promising as the television commercials claimed them to be.
We stood and stepped right next to the lamppost. Standing beneath that cone of light, with his collar turned against the autumn wind and an unlit smoke clamped between his teeth, Stanley looked like a young and ugly Humphrey Bogart. And me? Maybe I looked a bit like a youthful Steve McQueen, although Maddy might smirk at that notion. But, hey, apparently Steve had to work at hiding a lisp, and he really wasn’t that good-looking.
It’s all about image. Stanley and I knew this even then as we sparked up his mom’s Virginia Slims.We looked tough, manly.
The taste, the smell, the park, Stanley: memories are made of this. Specks of time that litter your mind, tiny parts of a vast sum that you can never come close to totalling; if I remember correctly, neither of us smoked it right down to the filter, although I can only vouch for my actions and the sheer nausea I felt.
But with the nausea came a delightful lightheadedness that was either a lack of oxygen, instant addiction, or an intoxicating combination of both. And, of course, smoking really did make us look manly.We saw it in each other through tear-filled eyes as we sucked on those nipple-like Slims.We’d come a long way, baby.
How far have I come since then? It’s a trip I can’t measure in time or distance; well, okay, I can. I’m forty-five years old and I’ve moved a couple of hundred miles down the highway from my hometown, but the true measurements lie in accomplishments and relationships.
And in those terms, one year rises above the rest: 1982, the year Maddy and I drifted into the same house on Dalton Avenue through some kind of degree-of-separation unfolding — months apart, both of us replacing a friend of a friend who’d flitted off to some new development in life and left news of a cheap place to live.
The complete roster in that place usually totalled six students — three men and three women, following a sex-preference screening process that Adam Wright, the fourth-year arts major holding the rental agreement, faithfully employed. His official statement was that the fifty-fifty gender split made life less complicated, but six young adults of any gender placed under the same roof made for complications galore.
The house was a big, rundown, five-bedroom monstrosity — a quasi-slum at the edge of the Annex but close to the university’s downtown campus. The tenant turnover rate there depended on semesters, employment status, and other variables — such as who was getting together or breaking up with whom. Much of the thinking and mood in the house was testicular and ovarian in nature.
I’d lived there for five months and had recently dropped out of school (for the second time in four years; as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t grasp the importance of Democracy in America at all, and I thought the existence of Jean Paul Sartre made France’s worship of Jerry Lewis understandable). Still, life was good. Women like their men either brawny or intellectual — although I suppose they’d prefer both, with a dollop of sensitivity thrown in for good measure — and I’d landed a job as a labourer. By June of that year, I was as bronzed as I’d ever been and these strange ridges, triceps, deltoids, and the like, had sprung up all over my body. I was no Arnold, but I was more of me than I’d ever been in the past.
That entire summer, heat pressed down on the city. On weekdays I moved double-axle loads of crushed rock with a Bobcat; and when the front-end loader went off-site, three days minimum of each six-day week, I stood in the sun and battled that eighteen-ton hill with nothing more than a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and orders to move the entire pile during the workday or move on to another, less demanding, line of work. How’d that old Tennessee Ernie Ford song go? “Move sixteen tons and what do you get...” The tune used to burst from my lips in an off-key whistle every once in a while as I flailed away at that crusher run.
In retrospect, how a young dirt digger could feel happy and even the slightest bit bohemian is beyond me, but somehow I managed. On weekends the house didn’t close.A group of people could drop by at any time, toting with them a few grams of hash and a huge haul of beer, with someone in the crowd holding My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the new Eno/Byrne album, or maybe John Cale’s latest release.
One night in particular, Adam stepped into the living room waving a fistful of tickets to an all-night Lina Wertmuller fest at the L.A. Theatre. A uniform and heartfelt groan echoed throughout the room (with the sparse Goodwill furnishings doing little to absorb the sound).
“Why in hell would you expect anybody to go with you to that?” Katie Jansen asked.
She sat beside her sister,Audrey, who, at one year older, held one more year’s worth of opinions; otherwise they were twins. They hailed from somewhere hard and flat and cold in the middle of the country (but lived in a permanently loud state wherever they travelled). Of Nordic decent, strapping and rosy-cheeked, they wouldn’t have looked out of place in pigtails and leather shorts,The fifth tenant at that time, an engineering student by the name of Nick Burke, had pulled his usual weekend disappearing act, flitting to a better part of town and a better calibre of acquaintance — so what we had there (although, mercifully, no one ever said it) was the gang.
“It’s not where you go, it’s how you go,” Adam said, reaching into his pants pocket and removing a baggie. He pulled a length of Thai stick from the plastic and threw the grass onto the coffee table. Composed mostly of flower tops, it was tacky and ripe enough to stick to its skewer unaided; its pungent smell filled the room immediately.
“All right,” Audrey said. “Even Lina’d be funny after a few hits of that.”
“But wait ... there’s more,” Adam said, in his best game show host impression. He dug into his other front pocket; another baggie hit the table. “Mushrooms — the West Coast’s