Cigarette Boy Quotes

When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.

And I want to play hide-and-seek and give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes and sit on the steps while you take a bath and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food and meet you at Rudy's and talk about the day and type up your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoia and give you tapes you don't listen to and watch great films and watch terrible films and complain about the radio and take pictures of you when you're sleeping and get up to fetch you coffee and bagels and Danish and go to Florent and drink coffee at midnight and have you steal my cigarettes and never be able to find a match and tell you about the tv programme I saw the night before and take you to the eye hospital and not laugh at your jokes and want you in the morning but let you sleep for a while and kiss your back and stroke your skin and tell you how much I love your hair your eyes your lips your neck your breasts your arse your and sit on the steps smoking till your neighbour comes home and sit on the steps smoking till you come home and worry when you're late and be amazed when you're early and give you sunflowers and go to your party and dance till I'm black and be sorry when I'm wrong and happy when you forgive me and look at your photos and wish I'd known you forever and hear your voice in my ear and feel your skin on my skin and get scared when you're angry and your eye has gone red and the other eye blue and your hair to the left and your face oriental and tell you you're gorgeous and hug you when you're anxious and hold you when you hurt and want you when I smell you and offend you when I touch you and whimper when I'm next to you and whimper when I'm not and dribble on your breast and smother you in the night and get cold when you take the blanket and hot when you don't and melt when you smile and dissolve when you laugh and not understand why you think I'm rejecting you when I'm not rejecting you and wonder how you could think I'd ever reject you and wonder who you are but accept you anyway and tell you about the tree angel enchanted forest boy who flew across the ocean because he loved you and write poems for you and wonder why you don't believe me and have a feeling so deep I can't find words for it and want to buy you a kitten I'd get jealous of because it would get more attention than me and keep you in bed when you have to go and cry like a baby when you finally do and get rid of the roaches and buy you presents you don't want and take them away again and ask you to marry me and you say no again but keep on asking because though you think I don't mean it I do always have from the first time I asked you and wander the city thinking it's empty without you and want what you want and think I'm losing myself but know I'm safe with you and tell you the worst of me and try to give you the best of me because you don't deserve any less and answer your questions when I'd rather not and tell you the truth when I really don't want to and try to be honest because I know you prefer it and think it's all over but hang on in for just ten more minutes before you throw me out of your life and forget who I am and try to get closer to you because it's beautiful learning to know you and well worth the effort and speak German to you badly and Hebrew to you worse and make love with you at three in the morning and somehow somehow somehow communicate some of the overwhelming undying overpowering unconditional all-encompassing heart-enriching mind-expanding on-going never-ending love I have for you.

My eyes were closed and his mouth tasted like marzipan flowers and clove cigarettes, and in ten seconds the whole of my life was wrapped up in that one kiss, that one wish, that one secret that would forever divide my life into two parts.

When we get out of highschool we'll look back and know we did everything right, that we kissed the cutest boys and went to the best parties, got in just enough trouble, listened to our music too loud, smoked too many cigarettes, and drank too much and laughed too much and listened too little, or not al all.

Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming--God grant me the grace to live them-- in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night's impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head.

He sang “I wish I weren’t me” over and over again just flat of the key of love until he forgot the words and could only hum along. Everyday was the same. The same stupid smile on the same stupid boy. Until the days blurred into a haze and the boy dropped into a depression. Not a cool dark room and cigarette depression like the songs he loved, but one that felt like he was being smothered by a safe, suburban, monotonous blanket. Everything felt like a headache to the boy. Every face, every stupid stuttered sentence all wrapped up into the biggest headache ever. So the boy took an aspirin. And another and another and then went to sleep, lullabyed by hopes he would never wake up to.

Clay, did you ever love me?" I'm studying a billboard and say that I didn't hear what she said. "I asked if you ever loved me?" On the terrace the sun bursts into my eyes and for one blinding moment I see myself clearly. I remember the first time we made love, in the house in Palm Springs, her body tan and wet, lying against cool, white sheets. "Don't do this, Blair," I tell her. "Just tell me." I don't say anything. "Is it such a hard question to answer?" I look at her straight on. "Yes or no?" "Why?" "Damnit, Clay," she sighs. "Yeah, sure, I guess." "Don't lie to me." "What in the fuck do you want to hear?" "Just tell me," she says, her voice rising. "No," I almost shout. "I never did." I almost start to laugh. She draws in a breath and says, "Thank you. That's all I wanted to know." She sips her wine. "Did you ever love me?" I ask her back, though by now I can't even care. She pauses. "I thought about it and yeah, I did once. I mean I really did. Everything was all right for a while. You were kind." She looks down and then goes on. "But it was like you weren't there. Oh shit, this isn't going to make any sense." She stops. I look at her, waiting for her to go on, looking up at the billboard. Disappear Here. "I don't know if any other person I've been with has been really there, either ... but at least they tried." I finger the menu; put the cigarette out. "You never did. Other people made an effort and you just ... It was just beyond you." She takes another sip of her wine. "You were never there. I felt sorry for you for a little while, but then I found it hard to. You're a beautiful boy, Clay, but that's about it." I watch the cars pass by on Sunset. "It's hard to feel sorry for someone who doesn't care." "Yeah?" I ask. "What do you care about? What makes you happy?" "Nothing. Nothing makes me happy. I like nothing," I tell her. "Did you ever care about me, Clay?" I don't say anything, look back at the menu. "Did you ever care about me?" she asks again. "I don't want to care. If I care about things, it'll just be worse, it'll just be another thing to worry about. It's less painful if I don't care." "I cared about you for a little while." I don't say anything. She takes off her sunglasses and finally says, "I'll see you later, Clay." She gets up. "Where are you going?" I suddenly don't want to leave Blair here. I almost want to take her back with me. "Have to meet someone for lunch." "But what about us?" "What about us?" She stands there for a moment, waiting. I keep staring at the billboard until it begins to blur and when my vision becomes clearer I watch as Blair's car glides out of the parking lot and becomes lost in the haze of traffic on Sunset. The waiter comes over and asks, "Is everything okay, sir?" I look up and put my sunglasses on and try to smile. "Yeah.

We both disliked rude rickshwalas, shepu bhaji in any form, group photographs at weddings, lizards, tea that has gone cold, the habit of taking newspaper to the toilet, kissing a boy who'd just smoked a cigarette et cetra. Another list. The things we loved: strong coffee, Matisse, Rumi, summer rain, bathing together, Tom Hanks, rice pancakes, Cafe Sunrise, black-and-white photographs, the first quiet moments after you wake up in the morning.

During the day she carried her boy, bandaged and fed the wounded, leaving her own festering wounds until night-time when she licked them and nursed them, and remembered the pines and the fish and the river and the ase and the woods and the fire and the blueberries and the smell of cigarette smoke and the loud laughter coming from one male throat.

Until i die there will be these moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming--God grant me the grace to live them--in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night's impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head.

I didn't tell her about the free-for-alls on the school yard, muggings on the bus. A girl burned a cigarette hole in the back of another girl's shirt at nutrition right in front of me looking at me as if daring me to stop her. I saw a boy being threatened with a knife on the hallway outside my spanish class. Girls talked about their abortions in gym class. Claire didn't need to know about that. I wanted the world to be beautiful for her. I wanted things to work out. I always had a great day no matter what.

You'll have a hard time getting any Alchemist to admit that. But I can say you're okay for an irreverent party boy with occasional moments of brilliance." "Brilliant? You think I'm Brilliant?" He threw his hands skyward. "You hear that world? Sage says I'm brilliant." "That's not what I said!" He dropped the cigarette and stamped it out, giving me a devil-may-care grin. "Thanks for the ego boost. I'm going to go and tell Clarence and Lee all about your high opinion." "Hey, I didn't-" But he was already gone.

Girls took to dressing like boys, and though women had obtained the vote, we had swiftly moved on to pursuing flashier freedoms: necking in cars and smoking cigarettes and walking down city streets in flesh colored stockings.

Over the years I’d surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian drugs, but marijuana and I remained steadfast companions.

– in the kind of town where coyotes chew on stray cigarette butts and packs of boys go howling at the moon.

You taste like the last drop of whiskey at 3 am after a lousy day like the first gulp of coffee on a Monday sipped behind a desk hot and bitter like the burning at the back of the throat after the first cigarette You taste, boy oh boy, like my next mistake.

Then Augustus Waters reached into a pocket and pulled out, of all things, a pack of cigarettes. He flipped it open and put a pack between his lips. “Are you serious?” I asked. “You think that’s cool? Oh, my God, you just ruined the whole thing.” “Which whole thing?” he asked, turning to me. The cigarette dangled unlit from the unsmiling corner of his mouth. “The whole thing where a boy who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literality and compares me to actresses and asks me to watch a movie at his house. But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that, oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER. Oh, my God. Let me just assure you that not being able to breathe? SUCKS. Totally disappointing. Totally.” “A hamartia?” he asked, the cigarette still in his mouth. It tightened his jaw. He had a hell of a jawline, unfortunately. “A fatal flaw,” I explained, turning away from him.

I breathed in for a moment, letting his scent of leather and cigarettes and boy calm my ragged breathing.

He's the boy who smokes Marlboro cigarettes and I'm the girl who makes theater puppets. Dreams and ashes—two things in the universe that should never meet because they are opposites, right?

and pulled out, of all things, a pack of cigarettes ”Are you serious?” I asked. “You think that’s cool? Oh, my God, you just ruined the whole thing.” “Which whole thing?” he asked, turning to me ”The whole thing where a boy who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literally and compares me to actresses and asks me to watch a movie at his house. But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER…

The first week of school they spotted him using a tortoise-shell cigarette holder. When he'd overheard some of the boys whispering that he looked like a queer he'd gazed down his long nose at them and said he regarded that as a compliment since so many of the world's great men had been homosexual. Alas I've been sentenced to a life of mundane heterosexuality. I can only hope a few of you will be more fortunate.

There's a gang of boys on bikes blocking the road ahead. They've got their hoods up, cigarettes shielded. The sky's a really strange colour and there's hardly anyone else about. I slow right down. "What shall I do?" "Reverse," Zoey says. "They're not going to move." I wind down the window. "Oi!" I yell "Move your arses!" They turn languid, shift lazily to the edge of the road and grin as I blow kisses at them. Zoey looks stunned, "What's got into you?" "Nothing- I just haven't learned reversing yet.

He struck a light and for just a moment as cigarette smoke raftered up she clearly saw a man and a boy fighting for control of the same face.

That was how I met Giovanni. I think we connected the instant that we met. And remain connected still, in spite of our later separation de corps, despite the fact that Giovanni will be rotting soon in unhallowed ground near Paris. Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming - God grant me the grace to live them: in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night's impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head.

The room has Nic’s smell—not the sweet childhood smell he once had, but a cloying odor of incense and marijuana, cigarettes and aftershave, possibly a trace of ammonia or formaldehyde, the residual odor of burning meth. Smells like teen spirit.

If all boys could be made to know that with every breath of cigarette smoke they inhale imbecility and exhale manhood ... and that the cigarette is a maker of invalids, criminals and fools—not men—it ought to deter them some. The yellow finger stain is an emblem of deeper degradation and enslavement than the ball and chain.

It’s not like when we were little and everything was magic. Now, it seems like so few things in this life are awesome. The truest moments are scarce and instantaneously gone, so you should maybe try to appreciate them, not squash their fiery beauty into the ground like cigarette butts.

In this entre-nous spirit, then, old confidant before we join the others, the grounded everywhere, including, I’m sure, the middle-aged hot-rodders who insist on zooming us to the moon, the Dharma Bums, the makers of cigarette filters for thinking men, the Beat and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the chosen cultists, all the lofty experts who know so well what we should or shouldn’t do with our poor little sex organs, all the bearded, proud, unlettered young men and unskilled guitarists and Zen-killers and incorporated aesthetic Teddy boys who look down their thoroughly unenlightened noses at this splendid planet where (please don’t shut me up) Kilroy, Christ, and Shakespeare all stopped – before we join these others, I privately say to you, old friend (unto you, really, I’m afraid), please accept from me this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((()))).

I slowly came to recognize individual monks within the crowds of interchangeable orange robes and shaved heads. There were flirtatious and daring monks who stood on each other's shoulders to peek over the temple at you and call out "Hello, Mrs. Lady!" as you walked by. There were novices who snuck cigarettes at night outside the temple walls, the embers of their smokes glowing as orange as their robes. I saw a buff teenage monk doing push-ups, and I spotted another one with an unexpectdely gangsterish tattoo of a knife emblazoned on one golden shoulder. One night I'd eavesdropped while a handful of monks sang Bob Marley songs to each other underneath a tree in a temple garden, long after they should have been asleep. I'd even seen a knot of barely adolescent novices kickboxing each other - a display of good-natured competition, that like boys' games all over the world, carried the threat of turning truly violent at a moment's notice.

Fifteen years. Fifteen goddamn years is the amount of time I’ve been subjected to Dean’s teasing, ridicule, and bad attitude. He’s the stereotypical ‘bad boy’—surly, well-muscled, always reeking of cigarettes and leather. Pathetically good-looking.

We’re all good when we want to be, otherwise we’re fucking animals. There’s no VIP room in reality, and there is no reality in this city. You can’t Google the answers. People talke about being on the ride of your life—THIS IS YOUR LIFE. Whatever you need to know, you already know. Imagine what it is to be in another country, another landscape—heat, insects, fear. Imagine watching someone right in front of you trip on a wire, step on a mine, blow their body to shreds, in mid-sentences, mid-cigarette. Imagine yourself splattered with human flesh. Imagine talking to that boy for the five minutes when he is profoundly conscious of the fact that he is not goingt to make it home. Imagine the difference between that and being in upstate New York, drinking beer, trying to get laid, and spending the summer as lifeguard at Lake George. Imagine zipping your friends into body bags. Tell me why anyone ever thought this was a good idea. How could anyone not be angry? You’d have to be insane.” --Nic Thompson

and for just a moment as cigarette smoke raftered up she clearly saw a man and a boy fighting for control of the same face.

that child, I ain’t waste no tears on him. But that poor boy. The kind of pain they put him through, the hatred they poured into him all in the name of what they called church, well, I don’t think one killing would be enough for him, do you? That kind of hurt stays hungry.” Griselda stubbed out her second cigarette. She said softly, “That kind of hurt has to eat.

We entered the cool cave of the practice space with all the long-haired, goateed boys stoned on clouds of pot and playing with power tools. I tossed my fluffy coat into the hollow of my bass drum and lay on the carpet with my worn newspaper. A shirtless boy came in and told us he had to cut the power for a minute, and I thought about being along in the cool black room with Joey. Let's go smoke, she said, and I grabbed the cigarettes off the amp. She started talking to me about Wonder Woman. I feel like something big is happening, but I don't know what to do about it. With The Straight Girl? I asked in the blankest voice possible. With everything. Back in the sun we walked to the edge of the parking lot where a black Impala convertible sat, rusted and rotting, looking like it just got dredged from a swamp. Rainwater pooling on the floor. We climbed up onto it and sat our butts backward on the edge of the windshield, feet stretched into the front seat. Before she even joined the band, I would think of her each time I passed the car, the little round medallions with the red and black racing flags affixed to the dash. On the rusting Chevy, Joey told me about her date the other night with a girl she used to like who she maybe liked again. How her heart was shut off and it felt pretty good. How she just wanted to play around with this girl and that girl and this girl and I smoked my cigarette and went Uh-Huh. The sun made me feel like a restless country girl even though I'd never been on a farm. I knew what I stood for, even if nobody else did. I knew the piece of me on the inside, truer than all the rest, that never comes out. Doesn't everyone have one? Some kind of grand inner princess waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses to get a glimpse. I gave Joey my cigarette so I could unlace the ratty green laces of my boots, pull them off, tug the linty wool tights off my legs. I stretched them pale over the car, the hair springing like weeds and my big toenail looking cracked and ugly. I knew exactly who I was when the sun came back and the air turned warm. Joey climbed over the hood of the car, dusty black, and said Let's lie down, I love lying in the sun, but there wasn't any sun there. We moved across the street onto the shining white sidewalk and she stretched out, eyes closed. I smoked my cigarette, tossed it into the gutter and lay down beside her. She said she was sick of all the people who thought she felt too much, who wanted her to be calm and contained. Who? I asked. All the flowers, the superheroes. I thought about how she had kissed me the other night, quick and hard, before taking off on a date in her leather chaps, hankies flying, and I sat on the couch and cried at everything she didn't know about how much I liked her, and someone put an arm around me and said, You're feeling things, that's good. Yeah, I said to Joey on the sidewalk, I Feel Like I Could Calm Down Some. Awww, you're perfect. She flipped her hand over and touched my head. Listen, we're barely here at all, I wanted to tell her, rolling over, looking into her face, we're barely here at all and everything goes so fast can't you just kiss me? My eyes were shut and the cars sounded close when they passed. The sun was weak but it baked the grime on my skin and made it smell delicious. A little kid smell. We sat up to pop some candy into our mouths, and then Joey lay her head on my lap, spent from sugar and coffee. Her arm curled back around me and my fingers fell into her slippery hair. On the February sidewalk that felt like spring.

There are some guys sitting at tables who all look at this one gorgeous girl, longingly, hoping for at least one dance or a blow job in Daddy’s car and there are all these girls, looking indifferent or bored, smoking clove cigarettes, all of them or at least most of them staring at one blond-haired boy standing in the back with sunglasses on. Julian

Latchkey! I mean . . . I want to talk to you . . .' He fell silent, glancing behind him and shifting from foot to foot, his waterproof trousers rattling like the bulls' bladders that boys use to learn swimming. Sterlingov angrily spat out his cigarette. 'Well? What about?' 'A . . . about a secret matter ,' Alyoshka whispered. Dozens of ears floated around them in the dust waves; the whisper was heard, and it ran on like a spark along a gunpowder wick. Alyoshka's secret message, the mysterious special clothing, the deacon's catastrophe-all this was too much. The atmosphere was charged with thousands of volts, and something was needed to discharge the electricity, to clear the air. ("X")

Maybe I had had an illusion, I thought. I stood there a long time, gazing at the rainswept streets. Once again, I was a twelve-year-old boy staring for hours at the rain. Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize. But this had been no illusion. When I went back into the bar, a glass and an ashtray remained where she had been. A couple of lightly crushed cigarette butts were lined up in the ashtray, a faint trace of lipstick on each. I sat down and closed my eyes. Echoes of music faded away, leaving me alone. In that gentle darkness, the rain continued to fall without a sound.

Jim watched them eat, his eyes fixed on every morsel that entered their mouth. When the oldest of the four soldiers had finished he scraped some burnt rice and fish scales from the side of the cooking pot. A first-class private of some forty years, with slow, careful hands, he beckoned Jim forward and handed him his mess tin. As they smoked their cigarettes the Japanese smiled to themselves, watching Jim devour the shreds of fatty rice. It was his first hot food since he had left he hospital, and the heat and greasy flavour stung his gums. Tears swam in his eyes. The Japanese soldier who had taken pity on Jim, recognising that this small boy was starving, began to laugh good-naturedly, and pulled the rubber plug from his metal water-bottle. Jim drank the clear, chlorine-flavoured liquid, so unlike the stagnant water in the taps of the Columbia Road. He choked, carefully swallowed his vomit, and tittered into his hands, grinning at the Japanese. Soon they were all laughing together, sitting back in the deep grass beside the drained swimming-pool.

In real life, I looked at my father and mother and understood dimly that it was harder to be a girl, that boys had it easier. Here, boys could buy and ride motorcycles and come and leave when they wanted to and exude a kind of cool while they stood shirtless at the edge of the street, talking and laughing with one another, passing a beer around, smoking cigarettes. Meanwhile, the women I knew were working even when they weren’t at work: cooking, washing loads of clothes, hanging them to dry, and cleaning the house. There was no time for them to just relax and be. Even then I dimly knew there was some gendered differences between my brother and me, knew that what the world expected of us and allowed us would differ.

I didn’t hear anything as my gaze went through the open door, and down to the boy dressed all in black who was leaning against the railing of our porch. The boy in a leather jacket who was casually bringing a cigarette to his mouth, all the time watching me. His crystal-blue eyes not once straying from mine.

Dark myths and suburban legends roam like living things through the halls of Leeds High School, whispered in stairwells over bubblegum-tinted tongues ; scrawled on the wall of the secret room above the auditorium stage ; argued over in the shaded courtyard adjacent to the cafeteria, buoyed on grey-brown clouds of cigarette smoke. There’s the Weird House up on Tremens Terrace, haunted by a trio of cannibalistic fiends with a taste for wayward boys. And the coven of teachers, including Mr. Gauthier (Chemistry) and Miss Knell (English), who cavort with a charred-skin devil in the glass-walled natatorium after dark.

A gang of teenage boys had gathered on the steps of the Odeon. Boys Collin knew, from the fourth and fifth year, boys with braying laughs and sudden, falsetto giggles, boys who stood on street corners and watched girls walk past, who punched each other with painful tenderness, who cultivated small moustaches that broke down, when shaved, into crusts of acne thicker than the moustaches had ever been, who lit cigarettes behind cupped hands, narrowing their eyes in pretended indifference to the smoke.

it. It’s in the way the Dixie cups and crumpled cigarette packs blow across the tarmac in the pre-dawn wind. It whispers from the sign on the gas pumps, the one that says PAY FOR GAS IN ADVANCE AFTER SUNDOWN. It’s in the teenage boy across the street, sitting on a porch stoop at four-thirty in the morning with his head in his arms, a silent essay in pain. The secret highways are out close, and they whisper to him. “Come on, buddy,” they say. “Here is where you can forget everything, even the name they tied on you when you were nothing but a naked, blatting baby still smeared with your mother’s blood. They tied a name to you like a can to a dog’s tail, didn’t they?

He smelled of beer and leather and cigarettes and trouble. Like a bad boy.

I take another drag on the cigarette, certain that they’re stolen, positive that they taste better because they were obtained with crafty fingers and tomfoolery.

He was one of the bad boys the smoldering kind that smokes cigarettes and drinks whiskey right out of the bottle - the kind you can't keep past sunrise and you don't really care.

I remember how, as a boy, I used to collect the cork tips of my father's cigarettes and stick them in my stamp albums. I believed they contained his unspoken words, which one day would explain everything. I have not changed. Now I explore my memories, trying to discover the substructure hidden beneath my past actions, searching for the link to connect them all.

Yes, she was the girl playing basketball with all the boys in the park, collecting cans by the side of the road, keeping secret pet kittens in an empty boxcar in the woods, walking alone at night through the rail yards, teaching her little sister how to kiss, reading out loud to herself, so absorbed by the story, singing sadly in the tub, building a fort from the junked cars out in the meadow, by herself in the front row at the black-and-white movies or in the alley, gazing at an eddy of cigarette stubs and trash and fall leaves, smoking her first cigarette at dusk by a pile of dead brush in the desert, then wishing at the stars--she was all of them, and she was so much more that just just her that I still didn't know.

And so these people gathered and smoked cigarettes and talked and Enoch Robinson, the boy from the farm near Winesburg, was there. He stayed in a corner and for the most part said nothing.

something so single-minded. Never has he felt such a hunger to belong. In the rows of dormitories are cadets who talk of alpine skiing, of duels, of jazz clubs and governesses and boar hunting; boys who employ curse words with virtuosic skill and boys who talk about cigarettes named for cinema stars; boys who speak of “telephoning the colonel” and boys who have baronesses for mothers.

Do you know, master book-lover,” he asked me, “this line of Paul Desjardins? Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue. Is not that a fine rendering of a moment like this? Perhaps you have never read Paul Desjardins. Read him, my boy, read him; in these days he is converted, they tell me, into a preaching friar, but he used to have the most charming water-colour touch — Now are the woods all black, but still the sky is blue. May you always see a blue sky overhead, my young friend; and then, even when the time comes, which is coming now for me, when the woods are all black, when night is fast falling, you will be able to console yourself, as I am doing, by looking up to the sky.” He took a cigarette from his pocket and stood for a long time, his eyes fixed on the horizon.

She knew she should be happy the girls were outside riding their very expensive horses. Girls who rode became interested in boys and makeup and cigarettes much later than their nonriding counterparts.

Lana started to make sounds, like the imprecations of a priestess, over the bills that the boy had given her. Whispered numerals and words floated upward from her coral lips, and, closing her eyes, she copied some figures onto a pad of paper. Her fine body, itself a profitable investment through the years, bent reverently over the Formica-top altar. Smoke, like incense, rose from the cigarette in the ashtray at her elbow, curling upward with her prayers, up above the host which she was elevating in order to study the date of its minting, the single silver dollar that lay among the offerings. Her bracelet tinkled, calling communicants to the altar, but the only one in the temple had been excommunicated from the Faith because of his parentage and continued mopping. An offering fell to the floor, the host, and Lana knelt to venerate and retrieve it.

You’re too old to be open-minded and tolerant,” said Rosie. “I’m too old not to be.” She sucked coolly on her cigarette again, then waved it at Rosie to punctuate her point. Not for the first time, Rosie envied smokers their rhetorical device. “I’ve lived life. I know what’s important. I’ve seen it all by now. You think he’s the first boy I ever saw in a bikini? He’s not. You think your generation invented kids who are different?

Please do not shoot us in the balls, EJ Elgin. It is only me, Robby Brees, and my friend, Austin Szerba, who is your next-door neighbor, and we are not rat boys from Mars. We come in peace, and smoking cigarettes.” “Benson

Then Augustus Waters reached into a pocket and pulled out, of all things, a pack of cigarettes. He flipped it open and put a cigarette between his lips. “Are you serious?” I asked. “You think that’s cool? Oh, my God, you just ruined the whole thing.” “Which whole thing?” he asked, turning to me. The cigarette dangled unlit from the unsmiling corner of his mouth. “The whole thing where a boy who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literality and compares me to actresses and asks me to watch a movie at his house. But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER. Oh, my God. Let me just assure you that not being able to breathe? SUCKS. Totally disappointing. Totally.

Sometimes, in the days which are coming—God grant me the grace to live them—in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night’s impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head.

An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound… I well remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed close to me, pointed to herself and said: “twenty-three years old.” I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette.

Café Flore is packed, shimmering, every table filled. Bentley notices this with a grim satisfaction but Bentley feels lost. He’s still haunted by the movie Grease and obsessed with legs that he always felt were too skinny though no one else did and it never hampered his modeling career and he’s still not over a boy he met at a Styx concert in 1979 in a stadium somewhere in the Midwest, outside a town he has not been back to since he left it at eighteen, and that boy’s name was Cal, who pretended to be straight even though he initially fell for Bentley’s looks but Cal knew Bentley was emotionally crippled and the fact that Bentley didn’t believe in heaven didn’t make him more endearing so Cal drifted off and inevitably became head of programming at HBO for a year or two. Bentley sits down, already miked, and lights a cigarette. Next to them Japanese tourists study maps, occasionally snap photos. This is the establishing shot.

The freckle-faced corporal from Iowa grinned. "Geez, Major, whatever you gave that German broad last night sure got her talking. Was it some new Russian drug? Something from HQ?" "That's my affair." Major Rosemary Wilson ignored the grinning boy and lit a cigarette, blowing out smoke as she gazed through the one way mirror. The German girl, Waller, looked pale and lost under the interrogation lights, but she was still exceptionally pretty. No doubt last night had been her first time with a woman. Still, Greta had been an enthusiastic learner, responsive and eager to please. The Major had every intention of continuing the girl's education -- once Werewolf and his Nazi pack were back behind bars.

Educated, idealistic men began our revolution, but every time I looked into this boy soldier’s face and he spoke his chipped Arabic, with his cigarettes yellowing his teeth, I knew the uneducated would have the final say in my country’s future.

Light, old boy?" said Beatrice, tilting her cigarette at him. He bent forward to her to light his cigarette at hers. She was winking at him as he did so. Miriam saw his eyes trembling with mischief, and his full, almost sensual mouth quivering. He was not himself, and she could not bear it. As he was now, she had no connection with him, she might as well not have existed. She saw the cigarette dancing on his full red lips. She hated his thick hair for being tumbled loose on his forehead.

At first Alexander could not believe it was his Tania. He blinked and tried to refocus his eyes. She was walking around the table, gesturing, showing, leaning forward, bending over. At one point she straightened out and wiped her forehead. She was wearing a short-sleeved yellow peasant dress. She was barefoot, and her slender legs were exposed above her knee. Her bare arms were lightly tanned. Her blonde hair looked bleached by the sun and was parted into two shoulder-length braids tucked behind her ears. Even from a distance he could see the summer freckles on her nose. She was achingly beautiful. And alive. Alexander closed his eyes, then opened them again. She was still there, bending over the boy’s work. She said something, everyone laughed loudly, and Alexander watched as the boy’s arm touched Tatiana’s back. Tatiana smiled. Her white teeth sparkled like the rest of her. Alexander didn’t know what to do. She was alive, that was obvious. Then why hadn’t she written him? And where was Dasha? Alexander couldn’t very well continue to stand under a lilac tree. He went back out onto the main road, took a deep breath, stubbed out his cigarette, and walked toward the square, never taking his eyes off her braids. His heart was thundering in his chest, as if he were going into battle. Tatiana looked up, saw him, and covered her face with her hands. Alexander watched everyone get up and rush to her, the old ladies showing unexpected agility and speed. She pushed them all away, pushed the table away, pushed the bench away, and ran to him. Alexander was paralyzed by his emotion. He wanted to smile, but he thought any second he was going to fall to his knees and cry. He dropped all his gear, including his rifle. God, he thought, in a second I’m going to feel her. And that’s when he smiled. Tatiana sprang into his open arms, and Alexander, lifting her off her feet with the force of his embrace, couldn’t hug her tight enough, couldn’t breathe in enough of her. She flung her arms around his neck, burying her face in his bearded cheek. Dry sobs racked her entire body. She was heavier than the last time he felt her in all her clothes as he lifted her into the Lake Ladoga truck. She, with her boots, her clothes, coats, and coverings, had not weighed what she weighed now. She smelled incredible. She smelled of soap and sunshine and caramelized sugar. She felt incredible. Holding her to him, Alexander rubbed his face into her braids, murmuring a few pointless words. “Shh, shh…come on, now, shh, Tatia. Please…” His voice broke. “Oh, Alexander,” Tatiana said softly into his neck. She was clutching the back of his head. “You’re alive. Thank God.” “Oh, Tatiana,” Alexander said, hugging her tighter, if that were possible, his arms swaddling her summer body. “You’re alive. Thank God.” His hands ran up to her neck and down to the small of her back. Her dress was made of very thin cotton. He could almost feel her skin through it. She felt very soft. Finally he let her feet touch the ground. Tatiana looked up at him. His hands remained around her little waist. He wasn’t letting go of her. Was she always this tiny, standing barefoot in front of him? “I like your beard,” Tatiana said, smiling shyly and touching his face. “I love your hair,” Alexander said, pulling on a braid and smiling back. “You’re messy…” He looked her over. “And you’re stunning.” He could not take his eyes off her glorious, eager, vivid lips. They were the color of July tomatoes— He bent to her—

Reiko deepened the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and looked at me for a time. “You’ve got this funny way of talking,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re trying to imitate that boy in Catcher in the Rye?” “No way!” I said with a smile. Reiko smiled too, cigarette in mouth. “You are a good person, though. I can tell that much from looking at you. I can tell these things after seven years of watching people come and go here: there are people who can open their hearts and people who can’t. You’re one of the ones who can. Or, more precisely, you can if you want to.

It’s strange, I don’t miss her, it’s strange I don’t feel much of anything,” said Montag. “Even if she dies, I realized a moment ago, I don’t think I’ll feel sad. It isn’t right. Something must be wrong with me.” “Listen,” said Granger, taking his arm, and walking with him, holding aside the bushes to let him pass. “When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was an individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.” Montag walked in silence. “Millie, Millie,” he whispered. “Millie.” “What?” “My wife, my wife. Poor Millie, poor, poor Millie. I can’t remember anything. I think of her hands but I don’t see them doing anything at all. They just hang there at her sides or they lie there in her lap or there’s a cigarette in them, but that’s all.

Cass snorted with laughter. “She’s a real beast with a bellyful of bedsprings. Wouldn’t wanna be the one to break her in,” he said in his thick Irish brogue. “Reminds me of that hot-blooded redhead in Omaha.” He nudged Sully with a salacious wink. “What was her name again?” Sully chuckled. “Molly.” “Oh yeah, Molly.” A broad grin of reminiscence showed on Cass’s face. “Was a real beauty, that one, wasn’t she? We should name this filly after her.” “We should,” Sully agreed, scratching the adolescent red fuzz on his chin. “Was she your horse, Cass?” Willie asked, giving the young Irishman a curious stare. “Hmm?” Not paying the boy much attention, Cass took a long drag on his cigarette. His slanted green eyes followed the mare’s nervous movements attentively. “Well, Molly?” Willie blinked with impatience. “Was she?” Cass gave him a baffled look, as if he didn’t understand the question. Then, a wide grin blazed across his angular face while smoke came drifting out of his mouth. “Yeah, she was,” he nodded, smirking, and exchanged a brief, meaningful look with Sully. “Had fire and was classy, too, like this one.” Sully hooted with laughter, and Cass joined in. “What happened to her?” Something was funny, but Willie didn’t grasp what it was. Cass took another puff, then smirked again. “Well, I kinda had to get rid of her, kid. A filly like that can take ya to an early grave, y’know. She wears ya out so utterly you’re barely able to walk afterwards.

Hanne is stretched out on her back. Faces hover in a circle above her. A boy with big blue eyes. A woman whose front teeth rest on her lower lip. An old Chinese woman wearing all gray, her face expressionless, as if she’s seen this before, and much worse. Suddenly a man’s face zooms toward her. Beads of sweat on his upper lip. Dark sideburns. Dark nose hairs. His eyes are close-set, unnervingly so. “Don’t move,” he says, his breath reeking of garlic and cigarette smoke. An imperative. She tries to sit up, and when she can’t, attempts to understand why she’s on the floor. This is not where she should be. She knows that. What is she doing here? “She’s bleeding . . . Hurt. A woman.” But nothing hurts. Liquid streams from her nose, down her cheek, pools into her ear. The circle of faces still above her. But she can’t right herself. The world is tilting. The man with sideburns is squatting beside her. What does he want? He’s saying something to her. Telling her something, his horrible breath assaulting her. Get back. She can’t get her mouth to shout, Move back! She hunts for that perfect moment again, the water, her children when they were young, Hiro, but it is gone.

Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells and waited for a sign from another S.S. man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes that I stood near the pit I heard no complaint or plea for mercy… An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound… I well remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed close to me, pointed to herself and said: “twenty-three years old.” I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people, completely naked, went down some steps and clambered over the heads of the people lying there to the place to which the S.S. man directed them. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded people; some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching or the heads lying already motionless on top of the bodies that lay beneath them. Blood was running from their necks. The next batch was approaching already. They went down into the pit, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot. And so it went, batch after batch. The next morning the German engineer returned to the site. I saw about thirty naked people lying near the pit. Some of them were still alive… Later the Jews still alive were ordered to throw the corpses into the pit. Then they themselves had to lie down in this to be shot in the neck… I swear before God that this is the absolute truth.47

Others dangled cigarettes from their lips, and as they paged through the day’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer they could take satisfaction in a half-page ad that trumpeted the latest proof of the health benefits of smoking: “21 of 23 Giants World’s Champions Smoke Camels. It Takes Healthy Nerves to Win the World Series.

When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all the hings he did. I cried becase he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten millions fine actions the night he passed on. IMy wife, my wide. Poor Millie, poor, poor Millie. I can't remember anything. I think of her hands but I don't see them doing anything at all. They just hang there at her sides [watching TV] or lie there on her lap or there's a cigarette in them, but that's all.

An “alternative” to the mainstream frat boys and premed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats dominated the more creative departments. As an art history major, I couldn’t escape them. “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats or army green parkas, New Balance sneakers, knit hats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep. They rolled their own cigarettes, didn’t brush their teeth enough, spent a hundred dollars a week on coffee. They would come into Ducat, the gallery I ended up working at, with their younger—usually Asian—girlfriends. “An Asian girlfriend means the guy has a small dick,” Reva once said. I’d hear them talk shit about the art. They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror. They were all on Klonopin, was my guess. They lived mostly in Brooklyn, another reason I was glad to live on the Upper East Side.

Right after Matt died, I was afraid to do basically everything. I couldn’t even bite my nails or sniff my shirt to see if I needed deodorant without feeling like he was watching me. I willed and prayed and begged him to give me a sign that he was watching, that he was with me, so I would know. But he never did. Time moved on. And I stopped being afraid. Until right now, vulnerable and insecure and a little bit drunk. Lying in the sand and falling in crazy love with someone I just met. Matt is watching me. Observing. Possibly judging. And the worst part of it is, I don’t want to wake up under his landslide of sad rocks anymore. I don’t want to taste the marzipan frosting and the clove cigarettes. I don’t want to think about the blue glass necklace or the books he read to me on his bed or the piles of college stuff or some random boy in the grocery store wearing his donated clothes. I don’t want to be the dead boy’s best-friend-turned-something-else. Or the really supportive neighbor friend. Or the lifelong keeper of broken-hearted secrets.

Maybe I had had an illusion, I thought. I stood there a long time, gazing at the rainswept streets. Once again, I was a twelve-year-old boy staring for hours at the rain. Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize. But this had been no illusion. When I went back into the bar, a glass and an ashtray remained where she had been. A couple of lightly crushed cigarette butts were lined up in the ashtray, a faint trace of lipstick on each. I sat down and closed my eyes. Echoes of music faded away, leaving me alone. In that gentle darkness, the rain continued to fall without a sound.

a face that is the façade of a man, hiding a boy who has had to grow up far too fast. I have seen that faux tough look on boys as they pushed shopping carts, walked siblings to school, bought cigarettes for their parents who waited in their cars. It breaks my heart now, to see that face, to recognize the lie of masculinity sitting atop the shoulders of a young child.

Are you serious?” I asked. “You think that’s cool? Oh, my God, you just ruined the whole thing.” “Which whole thing?” he asked, turning to me. The cigarette dangled unlit from the unsmiling corner of his mouth. “The whole thing where a boy who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literality and compares me to actresses and asks me to watch a movie at his house. But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER. Oh, my God. Let me just assure you that not being able to breathe? Sucks. Totally disappointing. Totally.

• “Are you serious?” I asked. “You think that’s cool? Oh, my God, you just ruined the whole thing.” “Which whole thing?” he asked, turning to me. The cigarette dangled unlit from the unsmiling corner of his mouth. “The whole thing where a boy who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literality and compares me to actresses and asks me to watch a movie at his house. But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER. Oh, my God. Let me just assure you that not being able to breathe? Sucks. Totally disappointing. Totally.

Perhaps I had always known they would disappear one day, and so I had kept them at a distance, laughed at their jokes and listened to their plans but never really trusted their existence. I had learned how to protect myself. When the police took my father, I had been a dumb boy, unable to understand how a man-- that willful, brilliant man-- could cease to exist at the snap of an unseen bureaucrat's fingers, as if he were nothing but cigarette smoke exhaled by a bored sentry in a watchtower in Siberia, a sentry who wondered if his girlfriend back home was cheating on him, who stared over the wintry woods, unaware of the great blue maw of the sky above him that waited to swallow the curling smoke and the sentry and everything on the ground below.

So where is it?” Harry asked suspiciously. “Unfortunately,” said Scrimgeour, “that sword was not Dumbledore’s to give away. The sword of Godric Gryffindor is an important historical artifact, and as such, belongs—” “It belongs to Harry!” said Hermione hotly. “It chose him, he was the one who found it, it came to him out of the Sorting Hat—” “According to reliable historical sources, the sword may present itself to any worthy Gryffindor,” said Scrimgeour. “That does not make it the exclusive property of Mr. Potter, whatever Dumbledore may have decided.” Scrimgeour scratched his badly shaven cheek, scrutinizing Harry. “Why do you think—?” “—Dumbledore wanted to give me the sword?” said Harry, struggling to keep his temper. “Maybe he thought it would look nice on my wall.” “This is not a joke, Potter!” growled Scrimgeour. “Was it because Dumbledore believed that only the sword of Godric Gryffindor could defeat the Heir of Slytherin? Did he wish to give you that sword, Potter, because he believed, as do many, that you are the one destined to destroy He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named?” “Interesting theory,” said Harry. “Has anyone ever tried sticking a sword in Voldemort? Maybe the Ministry should put some people onto that, instead of wasting their time stripping down Deluminators or covering up breakouts from Azakaban. So is this what you’ve been doing, Minister, shut up in your office, trying to break open a Snitch? People are dying—I was nearly one of them—Voldemort chased me across three counties, he killed Mad-Eye Moody, but there’s been no word about any of that from the Ministry, has there? And you still expect us to cooperate with you?” “You go too far!” shouted Scrimgeour, standing up; Harry jumped to his feet too. Scrimgeour limped toward Harry and jabbed him hard in the chest with the point of his wand: It singed a hole in Harry’s T-shirt like a lit cigarette. “Oi!” said Ron, jumping up and raising his own wand, but Harry said, “No! D’you want to give him an excuse to arrest us?” “Remembered you’re not at school, have you?” said Scrimgeour, breathing hard into Harry’s face. “Remembered that I am not Dumbledore, who forgave your insolence and insubordination? You may wear that scar like a crown, Potter, but it is not up to a seventeen-year-old boy to tell me how to do my job! It’s time you learned some respect!” “It’s time you earned it,” said Harry.

Smokers exist in every kitchen. It kills a tastebud or two but we all die, and no one knows better than those who club the fish, clean the guts from the meat, and serve for your delectation a plate from which all blood has been wiped. We cook despite bad pay and sore backs and inadequate sleeps in apartments we can't afford and we wake up choosing again that most temporary of glories that is made, and then consumed: we know. We all die. Whether it comes after thirty years of hard labor or sixty at a desk, whether we calculate or plan, in the end we have only the choice of what touches the lips before we go: lobster if you like it or cold pizza if you don't, a sip of smoke, a drink, a job, a reckless passion, raw fish, the beguilement of mushrooms, cheese luscious beneath its crown of mold. What sustains in the end are doomed romances, and nicotine, and crappy peanut butter, damn the additives and cholesterol because life is finite and not all nourishment can be measured. When I learned to smoke behind a restaurant, my breath curling toward an inconsolable sky, I learned what it means to live by the tongue, dumb beast, obedient to neither time nor money, past nor future, loyal to a now worth living. I took my cigarette to the filter, and for the first time I appraised my employer back. He claimed to have evolved past fear. He lied. Behind the mask was a damp, scared boy. Fear of toxins, fear of carcinogens, tear of flood and smog and protest and entropy and all that could not be optimized, controlled, bought and held behind glass. Fear fueled a country so intent on perfection that they would give up the world.

I remember Liz, her face white, delicate as an ash on the wind; her red lips staining the cigarette; her full breasts under the taut black jersey. She said to me, "But think how happy you can make a man someday." Yes, I'm thinking, and so far it's all right. But then I do a flipover and reach out in my mind to E., seeing a baseball game, maybe, perhaps watching television, or roaring with careless laughter at some dirty joke with the boys, beer cans lying about green and shiny gold, and ash trays. I spiral back to me, sitting here, swimming, drowning, sick with longing. I have too much conscience injected in me to break customs without disasterous effects; I can only lean enviously against the boundary and hate, hate, hate the boys who can dispel sexual hunger freely, without misgiving, and be whole, while I drag out from date to date in soggy desire, always unfulfilled. The whole thing sickens me.

You wouldn’t recognize this land back then. Over thousands of years, the plants and animals worked with wind and fire until the land was covered in a sea of grass that was home to many relatives. The bison gave us everything, from thadó, our meat, to our clothing and thípi hides. His dung fertilized the soil. The prairie dogs opened up tunnels that brought air and water deep into the earth. Grasses that were as tall as a man set long roots that could withstand drought. When my grandfather was a boy, he woke each morning to the song of the meadowlark. The prairie showed us for many generations how to live and work together as one family. “And then the settlers came with their plows and destroyed the prairie in a single lifetime,” my father said. What I remember most, now, is his voice shaking with rage, his tobacco-stained fingers trembling as they held a hand-rolled cigarette, the way he drew smoke deep into his lungs.

Authority does not have to be a person or institution which says: you have to do this, or you are not allowed to do that. While this kind of authority may be called external authority, authority can appear as internal authority, under the name of duty, conscience, or super-ego. As a matter of fact, the development of modern thinking from Protestantism to Kant's philosophy, can be characterized as the substitution of internalized authority for an external one. With the political victories of the rising middle class, external authority lost prestige and man's own conscience assumed the place which external authority once had held. This change appeared to many as the victory of freedom. To submit to orders from the outside (at least in spiritual matters) appeared to be unworthy of a free man; but the conquest of his natural inclinations, and the establishment of the domination of one part of the individual, his nature, by another, his reason, will or conscience, seemed to be the very essence of freedom. Analysis shows that conscience rules with a harshness as great as external authorities, and furthermore that frequently the contents of the orders issued by man's conscience are ultimately not governed by demands of the individual self but by social demands which have assumed the dignity of ethical norms. The rulership of conscience can be even harsher than that of external authorities, since the individual feels its orders to be his own; how can he rebel against himself? In recent decades "conscience" has lost much of its significance. It seems as though neither external nor internal authorities play any prominent role in the individual's life. Everybody is completely "free", if only he does not interfere with other people's legitimate claims. But what we find is rather that instead of disappearing, authority has made itself invisible. Instead of overt authority, "anonymous" authority reigns.It is disguised as common sense, science, psychic health, normality, public opinion. It does not demand anything except the self-evident. It seems to use no pressure but only mild persuasion. Whether a mother says to her daughter, "I know you will not like to go out with that boy", or an advertisement suggests, "Smoke this brand of cigarettes--you will like their coolness", it is the same atmosphere of subtle suggestion which actually pervades our whole social life. Anonymous authority is more effective than overt authority, since one never suspects that there is any order which one is expected to follow. In external authority it is clear that there is an order and who gives it; one can fight against the authority, and in this fight personal independence and moral courage can develop.But whereas in internalized authority the command, though an internal one, remains visible, in anonymous authority both command and commander have become invisible.It is like being fired at by an invisible enemy. There is nobody and nothing to fight back against.

While being intensely observed, I was forced to watch as the boy was first tortured with cigarette burns and threats of death, then forced to kill his dog with a knife. Afterward, sobbing and terrified, he was tied to the chair. I was told he was weak and therefore unworthy to live. As a tribute to me, I was ordered to kill him and release him from his life bonds. Saying “no” under such circumstances, especially as a child, was not an option, but even so I found myself unable to commit such an act. I complained that I couldn’t do it because he was looking at me, my hope being that my excuse would excuse me from committing murder. The men were not to be daunted. Grabbing hold of the boy’s head, proclaiming they were doing it in my honor, they removed his eyes with a scalpel. I still hear the boy’s screams. Once they realized that the screams were bothering me, they removed his tongue. The sounds of his gurgling screams were finally enough; I plunged the knife handed to me into his chest.

Life in the years between 1993 and 1998 went on as life in places like Derry always does: the buds of April became the brittle, blowing leaves of October; Christmas trees were brought into homes in mid-December and hauled off in the backs of Dumpsters with strands of tinsel still hanging sadly from their boughs during the first week of January; babies came in through the in door and old folks went out through the out door. Sometimes people in the prime of their lives went out through the out door, too. In Derry there were five years of haircuts and permanents, storms and senior proms, coffee and cigarettes, steak dinners at Parker's Cove and hotdogs at the Little League field. Girls and boys fell in love, drunks fell out of cars, short skirts fell out of favor. People reshingled their roofs and repaved their driveways. Old bums were voted out of office; new bums were voted in. It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in awhile exhilarating. The fundamental things continued to apply as time went by.

Daniel." He looked up. "El-la.I was wondering if you'd catch me." He offered me a cigarette. I gave him a shame-on-you look;he grinned. "This is your band?" I asked. Visible piercings aside, no one looked like that went by the name Ax. "Nope,but I go to school with the lead's sister. Regular guy got food poisoning at a Christmas party last night.I've played with them before." "Weddings?" It wasn't quite how I'd pictured him performing. "Usually clubs, but the last one was a bar mitzvah. Musicians have to eat, too," he added, a little sharply. "Sorry." I wanted to wave the smoke away, but figured that might be adding insult to inury. "I thought you played the guitar." "Guitar, piano, a little violin, but badly, and I'll have to garrote you ith one of the strings if you tell anyone." That's the thing about Daniel. Obviously-the violin being a case in point-I don't know him very well,but he seems to hold a grudge for even less time than Frankie. "Secret's safe with me." He shrugged, telling me he didn't really care. Then, "Nice dress." "Just when I start liking you a litte.." He made his vampire-boy face. I could see why it usually worked. "You like me,Ella. Wanna do something when this is over?" "Tempting," I said. "No, I mean that. But no,thanks. I'm not at my best these days." "You're good," he said quietly, blowing out a stream of smoke. "You'll be fine." "Yeah." I shivered. It was bitter outside. "I should go in." "You should." The cold didn't seem to be bothering him at all, and he wasn't even wearing a jacket over his white dress shirt. I turned to go. "Oh, I think I figured it out, by the way." "Figured out what?" "The question.The one everyone should ask before getting involved with someone. Not 'Will he-slash-she make me happy?' but 'Does it bring out the best in me,being with him?'" "Him-slash-her," Daniel corrected, clearly amused. Then, "Nope. No way. Wasn't me who posed the question to you, Marino.I would never be so Emo." "Of course not.But it was one smart boy." I waved. "Hug Frankie for me." "Will do. Hey.Any requests for the band?" "'Don't Stop Believin'," I shot back. He rolled his eyes. "I'm curious, in that last song-are the words really 'I cut my chest wide open'?" "Yup.Followed by, "They come and watch us bleed.Is it art like I was hoping now?" Avett Brothers. Too gruesome for you?" "You have no idea," I told him. How much I get it.

The issue of the mysterious power of transmission arises here. What do you transmit to your child? Blonde hair, blue eyes, very small feet? But also a taste for cigarettes, panettone, boys with guitars? Is this foetus’s life destined to be filled with suitcases packed in the middle of the night, suitcases that will always return to their point of departure some weeks later? In other words, is this foetus destined to relive, again and again, emotions encoded in a fossilized region of its brain and thus, almost simultaneously, experience love and the end of the world, hope and lightning, a romantic comedy and a horror film?

Happy birthday,” he whispered, his breath landing warm and suddenly close to my lips, making my insides flip. And just as quickly as he’d surprised me with the cake, he kissed me, one frosting-covered hand moving from my hair to the back of my neck, the other solid and warm in the small of my back, pressing us together, my chest against his ribs, my hip bones just below his, the tops of our bare summer legs hot and touching. I stopped breathing. My eyes were closed and his mouth tasted like marzipan flowers and clove cigarettes, and in ten seconds the whole of my life was wrapped up in that one kiss, that one wish, that one secret that would forever divide my life into two parts. Up, down. Happy, sad. Shock, awe. Before, after. In that single moment, Matt, formerly known as friend, became something else entirely. I kissed him back. I forgot time. I forgot my feet. I forgot the people outside, waiting for us to rejoin the party. I forgot what happens when friends cross into this space. And if my lungs didn’t fill and my heart didn’t beat and my blood didn’t pump without my intervention, I would have forgotten about them, too. I could have stayed like that all night, standing in front of the sink, Matt’s black apple hair brushing my cheeks, heart thumping, lucky and forgetful…

The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!' We were very hungry but we didn’t want to leave, so we ate there. We had chicken sandwiches; boy, the chicken of the century. Dry, wry, and tender, the dryness sort of rubbing against your tongue on soft, bouncy white bread with slivers of juicy wet pickles. Then we had some very salty potato chips and some olives stuffed with pimentos and some Indian nuts and some tiny pearl onions and some more popcorn. Then we washed the whole thing down with iced martinis and finished up with large cups of strong black coffee and cigarettes. One of my really great meals.

I love you!” he bellowed at me and his eyes turned black. “Happy now? I love you, okay? I love you so fucking much that it hurts! It’s driving me insane! I loved you from the moment I saw you doing your Miss Marple impression in those woods back at The Ragged Cove. But I could tell you were sweet on Luke and hey, why not? He’s the good-looking one, right? I mean, I’m just the hired muscle. I’m the one who gets everyone else out of the shit. But I couldn’t help my feelings, I’d never felt like that before. So yeah, okay I stole a kiss from you in the gatehouse – big fucking deal! But you know what? That was the biggest mistake of my life, because that one kiss from you drove me out of my tiny freaking mind! So, I’m sorry if I give the boy a hard time and ain’t too gentle with the girl, but I’m not going to sit back and watch you risk your life just so you can blow their noses and wipe their arses!” I looked at Potter and he seemed almost out of breath after his rant. Once he had finished, he put out his cigarette and lit another one. Standing, I looked at him and said, “Potter, I had no idea…” “Ah, forget it,” he said, waving me away with his hand. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Besides, I’ll be moving out at first light in search of Luke. Once I’ve rescued him, I’ll bring him to you in The Hollows and you won’t have to see me again.

I had abandoned Elana; I deserved her uncertainty. I closed my eyes and focused on her touch. Perhaps she wouldn't have understood had I tried to explain it to her, but to me Elana was not only Elana--she was the sad-eyed love of mine who used to bag groceries at Woodley's in Buffalo; she was the sweet one who always sat across from me on the city bus in Niagara Falls; she was the girl I'd picked up hitchhiking in Mobile and dropped off in New Orleans, brash, full of sarcastic humor, but truly lonely and scared; she was the one I'd nabbed pinching Newports for her dad from the Marathon station I'd worked at in Bakersfield (I'd softened and paid for the pack myself); yes, she was the girl playing basketball with all the boys in the park, collecting cans by the side of the road, keeping secret pet kittens in an empty boxcar in the woods, walking alone at night through the rail yards, teaching her little sisters how to kiss, reading out loud to herself, so absorbed by the story, singing sadly in the tub, building a fort from the junked cars out in the meadow, by herself in the front row at the black-and-white movies or in the alley, gazing at an eddy of cigarette stubs and trash and fall leaves, smoking her first cigarette at dusk by a pile of dead brush in the desert, then wishing at the stars-she was all of them, and she was so much more that was just her that I still didn't know.

Schweik inspected the provost-marshal's office. The impression which it produced could scarcely be called a favorable one, especially with regard to the photographs on the walls. They were photographs of the various executions carried out by the army in Galicia and Serbia. Artistic photographs of cottages which had been burned down and of trees, the branches of which were burdened with hanging bodies. There was one particularly fine photograph from Serbia showing a whole family which had been hanged. A small boy with his father and mother. Two soldiers with bayonets were guarding the tree on which the execution had been carried out, and an officer was standing victoriously in the foreground smoking a cigarette.

The boy wasn't beautiful. Not even handsome in this gentle, dusky light. It was only that they were the same age, and that they worked there, shoulder touching through the steaming, aching hours, passing cigarettes back and forth in this lot, the filter's taste changing: slick and slightly sweeter from the blue Gatorade Russia sipped through his shift. Can camaraderie - the bond of working in unison - be eno0ught to make you want to put your mouth to a kid with a busted face, to find him somehow more complete despite his unrecognizable beauty, the smell of his armpits seeping through his work polo, that garlicky, vinegary scent of humanness canceling the drugstore deodorant he wore to hide it? Yes, Hai realized now - it was.

Privacy was like cigarettes. No single puff on a cigarette would give you cancer, but smoke enough of the things and they’d kill you dead, and by the time you understood that in your guts, it was too late. Smoking is all up-front pleasure and long-term pain, like cheesecake or sex with beautiful, fucked-up boys. It’s the worst kind of badness, because the consequences arrive so long after—and so far away from—the effects. You can’t learn to play baseball by swinging at the ball with your eyes closed, running home, and waiting six months for someone to call you up and let you know whether you connected. You can’t learn to sort the harmless privacy decisions from the lethal ones by making a million disclosures, waiting ten years, and having your life ruined by one of them. Industry was pumping private data into its clouds like the hydrocarbon barons had pumped CO2 into the atmosphere. Like those fossil fuel billionaires, the barons of the surveillance economy had a vested interest in sowing confusion about whether and how all this was going to bite us in the ass. By the time climate change can no longer be denied, it’ll be too late: we’ll have pumped too much CO2 into the sky to stop the seas from swallowing the world; by the time the datapocalypse is obvious even to people whose paychecks depended on denying it, it would be too late. Any data you collect will probably leak, any data you retain will definitely leak, and we’re putting data-collection capability into fucking lightbulbs now. It’s way too late to decarbonize the surveillance economy.

When he was gone the men on the bench began to laugh. One of them rose to better see the map. Es un fantasma, he said. Fantasma? Sí, sí. Claro. Cómo? Cómo? Porque el viejo está loco es como. Loco? Billy stood looking at the map. No es correcto? he said. The man threw up his hands. He said that what they beheld was but a decoration. He said that anyway it was not so much a question of a correct map but of any map at all. He said that in that country were fires and earthquakes and floods and that one needed to know the country itself and not simply the landmarks therein. Besides, he said, when had that old man last journeyed to those mountains? Or journeyed anywhere at all? His map was after all not really so much a map as a picture of a voyage. And what voyage was that? And when? Un dibujo de un viaje, he said. Un viaje pasado, un viaje antigun. He threw up one hand in dismissal. As if no more could be said. Billy looked at the other three men on the bench. They watched with a certain brightness of eye so that he wondered if he were being made a fool of. But the one seated at the right leaned forward and tapped the ash from his cigarette and addressed the man standing and said that as far as that went there were certainly other dangers to a journey than losing one's way. He said that plans were one thing and journeys another. He said it was a mistake to discount the good will inherent in the old man's desire to guide them for it too must be taken into account and would in itself lend strength and resolution to them in their journey. The man who was standing weighed these words and then erased them in the air before him with a slow fanning motion of his forefinger. He said that the jovenes could hardly be expected to apportion credence in the matter of the map. He said that in any case a bad map was worse than no map at all for it engendered in the traveler a false confidence and might easily cause him to set aside those instincts which would otherwise guide him if he would but place himself in their care. He said that to follow a false map was to invite disaster. He gestured at the sketching in the dirt. As if to invite them to behold its futility. The second man on the bench nodded his agreement in this and said that the map in question was a folly and that the dogs in the street would piss upon it. But man on the right only smiled and said that for that matter the dogs would piss upon their graves as well and how was this an argument? The man standing said that what argued for one case argued for all and that in any event our graves make no claims outside of their own simple coordinates and no advice as to how to arrive there but only the assurance that arrive we shall. It may even be that those who lie in desecrated graves-by dogs of whatever manner-could have words of a more cautionary nature and better suited to the realities of the world. At this the man at the left who'd so far not spoke at all rose laughing and gestured for the two boys to follow and they went with him out of the square and into the street leaving the disputants to their rustic parkbench tertulia.

I touched my hairline. Maybe she was right. Maybe it had receded somewhat. Or was it my imagination? Something new to worry about. “What do you mean?” I asked. “How can I be careful?” “You can’t, I guess. There’s nothing you can do. There’s no way to prevent baldness. Guys who are going to go bald go bald. When their time comes, that’s it: they just go bald. There’s nothing you can do to stop it. They tell you you can keep from going bald with proper hair care, but that’s bullshit. Look at the bums who sleep in Shinjuku Station. They’ve all got great heads of hair. You think they’re washing it every day with Clinique or Vidal Sassoon or rubbing Lotion X into it? That’s what the cosmetics makers will tell you, to get your money.” “I’m sure you’re right,” I said, impressed. “But how do you know so much about baldness?” “I’ve been working part time for a wig company. Quite a while now. You know I don’t go to school, and I’ve got all this time to kill. I’ve been doing surveys and questionnaires, that kind of stuff. So I know all about men losing their hair. I’m just loaded with information.” “Gee,” I said. “But you know,” she said, dropping her cigarette butt on the ground and stepping on it, “in the company I work for, they won’t let you say anybody’s ‘bald.’ You have to say ‘men with a thinning problem.’ ‘Bald’ is discriminatory language. I was joking around once and suggested ‘gentlemen who are follically challenged,’ and boy, did they get mad! ‘This is no laughing matter, young lady,’ they said. They’re so damned seeerious. Did you know that? Everybody in the whole damned world is so damned serious.

A one-armed bunk master sets forth rules in a belligerent torrent. “This is your parade uniform, this is your field uniform, this is your gym uniform. Suspenders crossed in the back, parallel in the front. Sleeves rolled to the elbow. Each boy is to carry a knife in a scabbard on the right side of the belt. Raise your right arm when you wish to be called upon. Always align in rows of ten. No books, no cigarettes, no food, no personal possessions, nothing in your locker but uniforms, boots, knife, polish. No talking after lights-out. Letters home will be posted on Wednesdays. You will strip away your weakness, your cowardice, your hesitation. You will become like a waterfall, a volley of bullets—you will all surge in the same direction at the same pace toward the same cause. You will forgo comforts; you will live by duty alone. You will eat country and breathe nation.” Do

Tina woke to a thin beam of afternoon sun. She lay still for a moment, revisiting, reliving, trying to get comfortable with the events of the night before. The sound of rustling paper got her up and the smell assaulted her again. Lockie was eating a burger, trying for slow, but failing.He had his back to her as he perched in a corner, secretively stuffing his mouth. ‘Hey, Lockie,’ said Tina. Lockie turned, wild-eyed and fearful. He stopped mid-chew and pushed his tongue through his teeth to spit the gooey mess out. ‘Gross, kid, just swallow for fuck’s sake.’ ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Sorry for touching, sorry for eating, sorry for being a bad boy.’ ‘You’re not being a bad boy,’ Tina said. She hated how pathetic the kid sounded. ‘The food is for you, do you understand? It’s all for you.’ Lockie stared. He was still and silent, as if waiting for what would happen next. Tina hated the idea that he was afraid of her, that he would have to be afraid of everyone he ever met from now on. ‘Say it, kid. Say, “It’s all for me.” Go on, say it.’ Lockie stared. ‘Say it, Lockie.’ ‘It’s all . . .’ He faltered. “It’s all for me.” 'Say it, I mean it.’ ‘It’s all for me.’ ‘Say it again, Lockie.’ ‘It’s all for me. All for me, all for me.’ ‘Okay, kid, you can shut up now. Get back to your breakfast. I might have a cigarette.’ ‘The food is all for me,’ said Lockie. His voice was determined. He was telling her, but mostly he was telling himself. ‘That’s right, kid, it’s all for you.’ ‘But you can share it with me,’ he said, and he gave Tina a small smile.Someone had taught Lockie all the right rules. Someone who didn’t even know if he was alive right now. ‘I bet you’ve got the best mum and dad somewhere.' Lockie nodded and chewed. ‘I bet I do.’ He didn’t talk anymore after that. The memory of his parents had obviously been put somewhere far away so thoughts of them wouldn’t hurt. He wasn’t ready to take them out again.

There must, she thought, be a number of people outside her own world who were well qualified to be drawn into it; the shame was that she must seek them. Not for her the cruel, delicate luxury of choice, the indolent, cat-and-mouse pastimes of the hearth-rug. No Penelope she; she must hunt in the forest. She had made a preposterous little picture of the kind of man who would do: he was an English diplomat of great but not very virile beauty, now abroad, with a house smaller than Brideshead, nearer to London; he was old, thirty-two or three, and had been recently and tragically widowed; Julia thought she would prefer a man a little subdued by earlier grief. He had a great career before him but had grown listless in his loneliness; she was not sure he was not in danger of falling into the hands of an unscrupulous foreign adventuress; he needed a new infusion of young life to carry him to the Embassy at Paris. While professing a mild agnosticism himself, he had a liking for the shows of religion and was perfectly agreeable to having his children brought up Catholic; he believed, however, in the prudent restriction of his family to two boys and a girl, comfortably spaced over twelve years, and did not demand, as a Catholic husband might, yearly pregnancies. He had twelve thousand a year above his pay, and no near relations. Someone like that would do, Julia thought, and she was in search of him when she met me at the railway station. I was not her man. She told me as much, without a word, when she took the cigarette from my lips. All this I learned about Julia, bit by bit, from the stories she told, from guesswork, knowing her, from what her friends said, from the odd expressions she now and then let slip, from occasional dreamy monologues of reminiscences; I learned it as one does learn the former — as it seems at the time, the preparatory — life of a woman one loves, so that one thinks of oneself as part of it, directing it by devious ways, towards oneself.

Mohammed started telling me about some of the most horrific stories he encountered in Mosul during the ISIL years, including when he worked at a local NGO as a caseworker. ‘How can you not be traumatized and suffer sleepless nights when dealing with a story of a 13-year old boy who was escaping for safety with his parents and sister from the right to the left side of Mosul, while it was being liberated by the Iraqi army?’ Mohammed paused, lit a cigarette, rolled down the car window, and continued, ‘as they were running, the father wanted to make sure the road was clear, so as soon as he ventured out, he got a bullet in his head from a sniper. The mother ran to him crying and screaming. She, too, got a bullet in her head. As the little boy and his sister tried to escape, the girl was shot, but she didn’t die. After hiding in a nearby building for a while, they came out and took their parents’ bodies to bury them in that same empty building they took as a shelter. Once done, as they were leaving, the little girl got yet another bullet and died this time. The 13-year old boy survived, but did he really survive? Can even a person who hears this story survive it?

I think of Baghdad years ago, when I met Professor Al-Rawi for the first time to discuss The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his favorite book by his favorite American. He awarded me the task of reading it in the off-term, when the other students of English relaxed at home. Each day, I went to his office on the Karada campus and he explained to me things which I could not have possibly understood then. Truly, I did not comprehend a single thing at first. How Mark Twain wrote. How these Americans spoke, so ignorant and rough. Why Americans today thought of this story of terribly behaved children as high art. "Kateb, you must understand the context," Professor Al-Rawi said. "What the American reader knew then, what Americans today do not remember, and what you certainly cannot understand. These were not just boys making silly plans in caves. These were boys growing up just in time for their war. Sitting there, making plans to start this robber's gang, this was quite humorous to Americans reading the book in the nineteenth century." "But not Americans of today?" He lit a cigarette. "Humorous, yes. But for other reasons. You see, Americans today...forget. Ten years after these boys met to scheme in caves, their civil war fell upon them. These boys, these Missouri boys, they would have cut each other's throats in that war. And the sides they would pick? This was determined in their youth, you see." We were silent for a moment as I considered this. "Have you thought about Huck Finn cutting Tom Sawyer's throat?" he asked. "No." "You should, Kateb. You should think about that." Then he smiled, like he knew all along what would come for us.

Chris- the one who wrote the halfway creepy thing about missing me so much when I didn't post and thinking I was dead- found it mind-boggling that before the Julie/Julia Project began, I had never eaten an egg. She asked, "How can you have gotten through life without eating a single egg? How is that POSSIBLE???!!!!!" Of course, it wasn't exactly true that I hadn't eaten an egg. I had eaten them in cakes. I had even eaten them scrambled once or twice, albeit in the Texas fashion, with jalapeños and a pound of cheese. But the goal of my egg-eating had always been to make sure the egg did not look, smell, or taste anything like one, and as a result my history in this department was, I suppose, unusual. Chris wasn't the only person shocked. People I'd never heard of chimed in with their awe and dismay. I didn't really get it. Surely this is not such a bizarre hang-up as hating, say, croutons, like certain spouses I could name. Luckily, eggs made the Julia Child way often taste like cream sauce. Take Oeufs en Cocotte, for example. These are eggs baked with some butter and cream in ramekins set in a shallow pan of water. They are tremendous. In fact the only thing better than Oeufs en Cocotte is Ouefs en Cocotte with Sauce au Cari on top when you've woken up with a killer hangover, after one of those nights when somebody decided at midnight to buy a pack of cigarettes after all, and the girls wind up smoking and drinking and dancing around the living room to the music the boy is downloading from iTunes onto his new, ludicrously hip and stylish G3 Powerbook until three in the morning. On mornings like this, Oeufs en Cocotte with Sauce au Cari, a cup of coffee, and an enormous glass of water is like a meal fed to you by the veiled daughters of a wandering Bedouin tribe after one of their number comes upon you splayed out in the sands of the endless deserts of Araby, moments from death- it's that good.

Alexander has nearly completely forgotten what it’s like to play, except when he’s in the water, but there had been no water in Texas, barely any in New Mexico, and now they’re in Arid Zona. Anthony tries land games with his father. He perches on Alexander’s lap, holds the tips of his index fingers together, and says, “Daddy, want to see how strong I am? Hold my fingers in your fist, and I’ll get free.” Alexander stubs out his cigarette. He holds Anthony’s fingers lightly, and the boy wriggles free. The delight of freeing himself from his daunting father is so great that he wants to play the game again and again. They play it two hundred times. And then the reverse. Alexander holds his index fingers together while Anthony clenches his tiny four-year-old fist over them. When Alexander is unable to get free, Anthony’s joy is something to behold. They play that two hundred times while Tatiana either prepares lunch or dinner, or washes or tidies, or just sits and watches them with a gladdening heart. Alexander takes Anthony off his knee and says in a throaty, nicotine-stained voice, “Tatia, want to play? Put your fingers into my fist and see if you can wriggle free. Come.” Not a muscle moves on his face, but her heart is no longer just gladdening. It’s quickening, it’s maddening. She knows she shouldn’t, Anthony is right there, but when Alexander calls, she comes. That’s just how it is. She perches on his lap and touches together the tips of her slightly trembling index fingers. She tries not to look into his face, just at her fingers, over which he now places his enormous fist, squeezes lightly, and says, “Go ahead, wriggle free.” Her whole body weakens. She tries, of course, to get free, but she knows this: while as a father Alexander plays one way with Anthony, as a husband, he plays the opposite way with her. She bites her lip to keep from making a single sound. “Come on, Mommy,” says the uncomprehending child by her side. “You can do it. I did it! Wriggle free.” “Yes, Tatiasha,” whispers Alexander, squeezing her fingers tighter, looking deep into her face as she sits on his lap. “Come on, wriggle free.” And she glimpses the smiling soul peeking out.

The rules are so different in the World Outside Synanon. The answers come in pieces, bit by bit as we explore the neighborhood around the house on Breys Avenue: bullets explode if you hit them with a hammer, there is no Santa Claus, do not cry in front of other boys, cats land on their feet no matter how close to the ground they are when you drop them, dog food tastes bad, don’t say what you’re thinking, kids can buy cigarettes from vending machines, gasoline will burn on water, candy bars can be stolen, Mom has read over a thousand books, a Labrador can beat a German shepherd in a fight, parents are supposed to protect you, bullies are mean, we’re bad at baseball, we’re good at reading, we’re latchkey kids, we’re poor, we’re special, we’re smart, we’re different, we’re alone.

There were still more guards, different uniforms again, more men, more papers, more arms held stiffly behind backs, shoulders pushed back, saluting each other, nodding to each other, talking to each other in a secret language, relaxing and taking out a cigarette when they heard some magic password. How ridiculous they all are, wherever you go, Anna thought, here are more boys dressing up in costumes, playing at a game, thousands, millions of them everywhere, all playing a long stupid game, and here we are again trying to find out the rules and the magic words.

Far away in another realm where pianos ought to be played and little boys should dance, they stood, the two like painted cutout figures against the swimming light of the room, merely gazing at me, he the little desert rogue with his fancy black cigarette, puffing away and smacking his lips and raising his eyebrows, and she merely floating it seemed, resolute and thoughtful as before, unshocked, untouched perhaps.

Eyes shrivelled by cigarettes and alcohol. Potbellies full to bursting with roundworms, amoebas, earthworms, and assorted mollusks. Heads shaved with knives. Arms and legs stiff with digging graves from morning till morning. They were close to ten, maybe twelve years old. They toted the same justifications: “We’re doing this to pay for our studies. Dad’s already gone with the locomotives. He doesn’t write no more. Mom’s sick. The uncles and aunts and grandmothers say we’re sorcerers and it’s because of that dad got married a third time and that our sorcery comes from our mom and that we should go to see the preachers who will cut the ,inks by getting us to swallow palm oil to make us vomit up our sorcery and prevent us flying round at night.” They lived off a multitude of rackets, like all the kids in town. They worked as porters at the Northern Station, and on the Congo River and at the Central Market, as slim-jims in the mines, errand boys at Tram 83, undertakers, and gravediggers. The more sensitive ones stood guard at the greasy spoons abutting the station, whose metal structure recalled the 1885s, in exchange for a bowl of badly boiled beans.

The hot bright afternoon and the gleaning birds and the mowing men and this beautiful boy, paused in front of his sketch, rolling a cigarette, his charcoal-covered fingertips blackening the paper, and he licked across the edge of the cigarette paper with his bright tongue and put the cigarette between what Bridget noticed with a slight rush of breath were his full lips and took a kitchen match from the back pocket of his pants and struck it against the little wooden box he kept his charcoal sticks in and touched it to the end of the cigarette and deeply inhaled smoke into his lungs and held it and crossed his arms and stood back from the drawing and contemplated it and let the smoke from his lungs in a sustained relaxed torrent that made a matted blue cloud in the sunlight and smelled sweet and made her want to smoke. This boy before her, smoking his cigarette and looking at the sketch deciding it was done, seemed like a ghost, not because he was otherworldly or like a hallucination but because Bridget knew that she would remember this moment for however long she lived in its perfect entirety—the grass, the sunlight, the blue cloud of smoke, the tedder and the windrows and the mowing men, this boy she found more and more beautiful—and she could already feel what it was going to be like to look back on it and remember the young girl she’d once been and the young boy who’d stood right in front of her and whisked a stick of charcoal around and nearly miraculously rendered the grass, the light, the mowers, the windrows, the huge, heavy, volumed, shadowed, sunny, swarming, monolithic stacks of hay— everything she saw and anticipated remembering—onto a white pane of paper exactly as it looked to her own eyes.

Party time Part 1 After school, we go to Maddie’s. When we were little, like freshman year and even some of the sophomore year, we would sometimes stay in her room and put on x-out and pluck out eyebrows into that fine little line, and color our hair with highlights, and order pizza, cramming down as much as we could eat. Those days are going, we can’t get fat. Now Jenny hardly eats anything, and if she does, she can hardly keep it down. I think maybe that’s what I get so lightheaded, I only eat like once a day now. Jenny back then had a little extra around the middle, and now you can see her ribs, she even has that two-defined line on her tummy that goes into her underwear. I remember sneaking around late at night in her hose stealing a cookie from the jar on the top shelf in the old wood cabinet, that is also where her mom would hide her cigarettes that Jenny loved also, and the condoms were in a trinity box on top of the fridge, I sorry but I find that hilarious. At that time, we would stretch out on one of her, old enormous worn-out couches and watch, TV or movies until we fell asleep in our nightshirts’-the TV in Maddie’s living room is like 80 inches it’s like being in a movie theater our legs tangled together under an enormous fleece blanket. Maddie and liv are always entangled more passionately than Jenny and me on the loveseat! Maddie has an ancient TV in her room from the 1990s. It sucks and is small, it’s one of those with the big back on it, and the color is green, like looking into a fish tank. It’s funny her mom and dad don’t have money blinds on the windows, yet they have a big ass TV. You can sometimes see the people in the next condo overlooking us like we can see them get busy in their room! Yet nothing beats the hot guy taking a leak in room 302, he looks to be in his late twenties. He takes the boxes off at 10 pm and we get a free show. He knows we can see him because he makes it look inflexible and you are no more personable. Jenny and we girls love to press upon the glass, and just have fun and be a little crazy, like lifting our nighties and flashing the goods. Facebook stocking gets boring quickly anymore, so some nights the webcam comes out too. After her mom and dad are asleep… I like it’s more fun to be bad! Like we all have profiles and fake names because none of us are eighteen yet. Any- how’s mine is ‘Angel Pink Wings 01’ Maddie goes by: ‘Mad kitty 69’ Jenny goes by: ‘Ms. Little Lover 14’ Liv goes by: ‘Olivia O 123’ Yet everyone knows her by Liv so that name is okay- I guess. We make good money- ‘Double Clicking the Mouse.’ You would not believe all the pervs on this cam. the site, just wanting to see us doing it. Like old guys like our PE teacher! Man- that I didn’t even think about how to turn on a computer. Just like him, I guess they need too to see more of us close up. We have our checks mailed to Jenny's college boyfriend’s PO Box. Me this is what I do and yes- I come for you all, I just put in fake blue hair dye in, and have fake long lashes, and put in my blue contacts, and you don’t even know me. And then pen in more eyebrows. Fake, fake, fake, fake FAKE! Boys don’t like it when you fake it or do, they look at me, that's why I am Bi.

Party time Part 1 After school, we go to Maddie’s. When we were little, like freshman year and even some of the sophomore year, we would sometimes stay in her room and put on x-out and pluck out eyebrows into that fine little line, and color our hair with highlights, and order pizza, cramming down as much as we could eat. Those days are going, we can’t get fat. Now Jenny hardly eats anything, and if she does, she can hardly keep it down. I think maybe that’s what I get so lightheaded, I only eat like once a day now. Jenny back then had a little extra around the middle, and now you can see her ribs, she even has that two-defined line on her tummy that goes into her underwear. I remember sneaking around late at night in her hose stealing a cookie from the jar on the top shelf in the old wood cabinet, that is also where her mom would hide her cigarettes that Jenny loved also, and the condoms were in a trinity box on top of the fridge, I sorry but I find that hilarious. At that time, we would stretch out on one of her, old enormous worn-out couches and watch, TV or movies until we fell asleep in our nightshirts’-the TV in Maddie’s living room is like 80 inches it’s like being in a movie theater our legs tangled together under an enormous fleece blanket. Maddie and liv are always entangled more passionately than Jenny and me on the loveseat! Maddie has an ancient TV in her room from the 1990s. It sucks and is small, it’s one of those with the big back on it, and the color is green, like looking into a fish tank. It’s funny her mom and dad don’t have money blinds on the windows, yet they have a big ass TV. You can sometimes see the people in the next condo overlooking us like we can see them get busy in their room! Yet nothing beats the hot guy taking a leak in room 302, he looks to be in his late twenties. He takes the boxes off at 10 pm and we get a free show. He knows we can see him because he makes it look inflexible and you are no more personable. Jenny and we girls love to press upon the glass, and just have fun and be a little crazy, like lifting our nighties and flashing the goods. Facebook stocking gets boring quickly anymore, so some nights the webcam comes out too. After her mom and dad are asleep… I like it’s more fun to be bad! Like we all have profiles and fake names because none of us are eighteen yet. Any- how’s mine is ‘Angel Pink Wings 01’ Maddie goes by: ‘Mad kitty 69’ Jenny goes by: ‘Ms. Little Lover 14’ Liv goes by: ‘Olivia O 123’ Yet everyone knows her by Liv so that name is okay- I guess. We make good money- ‘Double Clicking the Mouse.’ You would not believe all the pervs on this cam the site, just wanting to see us doing it. Like old guys like our PE teacher! Man- that I didn’t even think about how to turn on a computer. Just like him, I guess they need too to see more of us close up. We have our checks mailed to Jenny's college boyfriend’s PO Box. Me this is what I do and yes- I come for you all, I just put in fake blue hair dye in, and have fake long lashes, and put in my blue contacts, and you don’t even know me. And then pen in more eyebrows. Fake, fake, fake, fake FAKE! Boys don’t like it when you fake it or do, they look at me, that's why I am Bi.

You're familiar with Cinderella, of course? Like Rachel and Jacob--another fairytale." Rachel glared. "The Bible isn't a fairytale." Mr. Schubert pulled his cigarette from his lips, and stared. "Mein Gott, you really are good," he said at last. "I bet you leave the boys sore, as good as you are.

Books were a place to go even on the harshest of days, but even though she restricted herself the same way she did with her cigarettes, they were still finished too soon.

I lit my last cigarette and said my little prayers. Clare, here’s one for you. Susan, here’s one for you. Jeanette, here’s one for you. Paula, they’re all for you. And the unborn. I sat there, singing along to The Little Drummer Boy, with those far off days, those days of grace, coming down. Waiting for the blue lights. Ninety miles an hour.

As fucking annoying as she is—” I glared in the rearview mirror at her and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of my pocket, needing one now—“Landon would torch my fucking car if I touched her.” “Will you be—” “I’ll be fine.” Imani turned away from me. “If he tries to kill me, I’ll kick him in the balls.

You wonder why Imani doesn’t like you,” Landon said, one hand on the roof of my car, the other flicking on a lighter to light the cigarette hanging out of his mouth. “It’s because you’re a moody piece of shit.

Well… I know what I want from you.” João leaned back, rubbed a hand over his face, and groaned. “Can’t this wait?” “No.” “What is it?” “A date.” João chuckled and pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket. “You’re fucking with me, right?” he asked, sticking a cigarette between the corner of his lips and lighting it. “Out of everything you could possibly want, you want me to bring you on a date.” “Yes, I do.” “I’m not fucking bringing you out on a date.” “You have to.” “I watched Ana for you.” Instead of coming at me twice as hard with an insult, João tossed his barely smoked cigarette onto the ground, stomped it out, and stood, studying me. “Don’t get any fucking ideas, I’m only going to do it for Ana, not because I like you.” “I don’t like you either, dickhead,” I said, but maybe I did a little. “I just want to go out.” “Why can’t you ask Landon?” João snapped. “Because I want to go out with you.” João stared at me for a few long moments again until he finally turned on his heel and walked past me toward the hospital doors. “Be ready. Tuesday night. Eight p.m. And don’t fucking expect it to be a nice date. I don’t do that shit.

I rubbed a hand over my face and pulled the cigarette from my mouth, unable to believe that Imani had talked me into taking her on a date. I don’t date. I don’t care. I… Imani hurried out the front door in a silky pink dress that hugged her petite body and complemented her dark skin. I slow blew the smoke out of my mouth and stared at her, unable to pull my gaze away. Fuck.

The Bright Lights of Sarajevo After the hours that Sarajevans pass queuing with empty canisters of gas to get the refills they wheel home in prams, or queuing for the precious meagre grams of bread they’re rationed to each day, and often dodging snipers on the way, or struggling up sometimes eleven flights of stairs with water, then you’d think the nights of Sarajevo would be totally devoid of people walking streets Serb shells destroyed, but tonight in Sarajevo that’s just not the case The young go walking at stroller’s pace, black shapes impossible to mark as Muslim, Serb or Croat in such dark, in unlit streets you can’t distinguish who calls bread hjleb or hleb or calls it kruh. All take the evening air with stroller’s stride no torches guide them, but they don’t collide except as one of the flirtatious ploys when a girl’s dark shape is fancied by a boy’s. Then the tender radar of the tone of voice shows by its signals she approves his choice. Then match or lighter to a cigarette to check in her eyes if he’s made progress yet. And I see a pair who’ve certainly progressed beyond the tone of voice and match-flare test and he’s about, I think, to take her hand and lead her away from where they stand on two shell scars, where, in ‘92 Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue and blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread lay on this pavement with the broken dead. And at their feet in holes made by the mortar that caused the massacre, now full of water from the rain that’s poured down half the day, though now even the smallest clouds have cleared away leaving the Sarajevo star-filled evening sky ideally bright and clear for bomber’s eye in those two rain-full shell-holes the boy sees fragments of the splintered Pleiades, sprinkled on those death-deep, death-dark wells splashed on the pavement by Serb mortar shells. The dark boy-shape leads dark girl-shape away to share one coffee in a candlelit café until the curfew, and he holds her hand behind AID flour-sacks refilled with sand

The Bright Lights of Sarajevo After the hours that Sarajevans pass queuing with empty canisters of gas to get the refills they wheel home in prams or queuing for the precious meagre grams of bread they’re rationed to each day, and often dodging snipers on the way, or struggling up sometimes eleven flights of stairs with water, then you’d think the nights of Sarajevo would be totally devoid of people walking streets Serb shells destroyed, but tonight in Sarajevo that’s just not the case – The young go walking at stroller’s pace black shapes impossible to mark as Muslim, Serb or Croat in such dark in unlit streets you can’t distinguish who calls bread hjleb or hleb or calls it kruh. All take the evening air with stroller’s stride no torches guide them, but they don’t collide except as one of the flirtatious ploys when a girl’s dark shape is fancied by a boy’s. Then the tender radar of the tone of voice shows by its signals she approves his choice. Then match or lighter to a cigarette to check in her eyes if he’s made progress yet. And I see a pair who’ve certainly progressed beyond the tone of voice and match-flare test and he’s about, I think, to take her hand and lead her away from where they stand on two shell scars, where, in 1992 Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue and blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread lay on this pavement with the broken dead. And at their feet in holes made by the mortar that caused the massacre, now full of water from the rain that’s poured down half the day, though now even the smallest clouds have cleared away leaving the Sarajevo star-filled evening sky ideally bright and clear for bomber’s eye in those two rain-full shell-holes the boy sees fragments of the splintered Pleiades, sprinkled on those death-deep, death-dark wells splashed on the pavement by Serb mortar shells. The dark boy-shape leads dark girl-shape away to share one coffee in a candlelit café until the curfew, and he holds her hand behind AID flour-sacks refilled with sand.

He wants to know more about Magda. He imagines her in a dirt yard, surrounded by a picket fence and a dozen yelping children, smoking a cigarette and glowering at a detective novel. He sees the youngest boy tugging at her skirt, saying, Mama, Mama, look at this, look what I can do, Mama, look at me. He sees her refusing to see him, reserving her beautiful, solemn attention for the fake paper world in her hands. He sees her in a Grim Reaper costume. It

We exchange a long look, one shared by lovers in the dead of night. It says I know your body aches the way mine does; I know your heart pounds. It’s a look that can be summed up with dark chocolate, black vodka, and clove cigarettes. It’s a look that, for me, tastes like the blackest night of the year when there’s no moon, only stars across a velvet sky.

Imani sat at the table beside João, tugged the cigarette out of his mouth, and stomped on it. “I told you to stop that. It’s bad for your health. You’re going to get lung cancer and die.” She frowned. “On second thought… why don’t you smoke all of them at once to speed it up a little bit?

Six minutes,” Thatcher says. “Each cigarette takes six minutes off your life, did you know that?

Maybe she'd been sent on an errand that day. She was walking and freezing. She was mad, she remembered suddenly. She was mad, not sad. There was no errand. Then she saw three people walking towards her in the swirling snow. They had to get close to her before she could really see them. They were an old grandma and her two grandsons. The old grandma had a lit cigarette sticking straight out of her mouth. It wasn’t dangling. The little boys were wearing one mitten each. They held popsicles in their other hands, the ones without mittens on them. They were licking their popsicles. And they were all happy. They were all smiling. It was minus thirty degrees. The wind was howling. It was a prairie blizzard. Nobody was around. Grandma got close to them on the sidewalk. The old grandma said to Grandma, who was young then and not a grandma, Not too bad out, eh? Her cigarette stuck straight out of her mouth even when she talked. I asked Grandma why she’d had that memory right now. Not too bad out, eh? said Grandma. She said she often had that memory. It was just a regular flash.

We’ve never shared any girl,” Aaron adds, and I feel my focus on Vic snap. Wow. Blinking, I try to clear my head and focus on them both at the same time. They pull me in opposite directions; I’ll have to be strong enough to pull them toward me instead. “Not once.” My body flushes with heat, but I turn quickly back toward the backyard, finishing my cigarette. I’ve never heard anything more romantic in my entire life. My Havoc Boys. Mine.

Black vodka and clove cigarettes, now that’s Halloween

The aspartame sweetener in that drink is a known carcinogen. Hell, it’ll probably kill you before my cigarettes do me, but you don’t see me shoving that shit down your throat. Get fucked and have a nice day.

My friend, you’re too hard on yourself,” Josep said. “Yes, you made a mistake. But consider all you’ve done. You’ve come all this way for him. I would call that extraordinary. Brave, in fact.” He extinguished his cigarette. “As for making love, what choice do we have, in these times? If you don’t mind my saying so, you did it grievously, almost as if you were seeking an exorcism. And that, I think, is something he would understand.” Josep left soon after that. I never saw him again. I can’t tell you if he died in battle, or survived and married, if he’s a famous poet now, or a laborer, or a judge. So why is it that he survives so vividly in my memory – this boy I knew only for a night?

Well, if isn’t my favorite bran muffin.” She was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a Lucky Strike. “If it isn’t my favorite dinosaur.” I teased back. She stuck her tongue out at me like an errant child. “Roar!” I sat at the table and stole one of her cigarettes. How she smoked those things I would never know. “Looks like I’m off on another adventure. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone this time.” I said somewhat sulking. “Where to this time?” She raised a brow. “We’re off to New York carting around some rock star.” I waited for her reaction. Granny loved rock stars. “Who is it?” She prodded. “Jake Parker.” I said with disgust. “Oh, I’d like him to come clean out my cobwebs.” She beamed. I did not need the mental picture that followed. “Granny, that’s disgusting!” I shrieked. “Whatever, it’s true. That boy is a tall drink of water if I’ve ever seen one.” “Alright, I’m outta here. Thanks for the nightmares.

I have written some very strict University rules that I plan to stick to: 1. No Alcohol 2. No cigarettes 3. No Boys 4. No Going Home

Some bratty boys from the neighborhood decide to make a secret clubhouse in my skull. They don't ask me about it, but I have no argument against the plan. So, every afternoon getting home from school they occupy my head. The kids laugh loudly, and crack their chip bags. Sometimes smoke flies out of my ear. I suspect they are experimenting with their first cigarettes. Of course, I was just like them when I was their age, so I'm not going to tell on them; that’s for sure. If only they wouldn’t leave such a mess every time. It can be really awkward, when having a conversation with someone I begin to shake or nod my head and suddenly a crumpled porn magazine falls out from my ear. Soon, the parents get wind of the secret clubhouse, and they step into my apartment swinging a bone saw. They insist on looking in my skull; telling me they have the right to know what their boys are up to behind their backs. Now, the kids and I are both punished – they are grounded in their rooms, as for me, the parents won't give back my skullcap. It's quite embarrassing. Going to work in the mornings some cheeky brats on the bus are having a great time pushing spitballs and chewed bubble gum between my brain wrinkles when I'm not looking. That’s enough, I decide one morning, I have rights too. So I knock on the mother's door, who has my upper head. She just stands there in the door, smoking, holding my skullcap in her hand, which looks like a half hairy coconut, and she flicks the ash into it. After I’m done with my speech about human rights, she slams the door in my face. I have no time for a second round I must leave to work. Scratching out a used ticket from my brain wrinkles I catch the next bus. A young couple whispers and chuckles behind me. I quickly get off at the next stop, before they could plan a secret date in my occipital lobe.

After I took Lisa's braces off, we climbed out of my bedroom window onto the roof of the porch below, smoked cigarettes in our nightgowns, and talked about boys. If I had tried that summer to imagine what my future would look like, it would have been as much a mystery to me then as my own reflection in those cutoff shorts. This is what I understand now that I could not have seen then: When you grow up in a home where nobody goes to work, where nobody is married, in a place where there are few jobs and few opportunities, you do not stay up late whispering about weddings and college and careers. You live in that moment, or maybe in the next; you do not make decisions that will impact a future that you do not let yourself imagine; you do not make a plan beyond your next pack of cigarettes.

End June 2012 In response to Dr. Arius’ questions for his research, I wrote: Dr. A.S., As always it is a delight to receive your emails. I’ll be more than happy to answer your questions. I’ll respond to them one at a time. Please bear with me if my answers are lengthy at times. If I veer off into a tangent, please feel free to eliminate or edit my response. I’m eager to find out the results your research will yield when you are done with the survey. I’m ready to begin. Question one: * In “Initiation,” you said that as far as you can remember, even as a baby, you disliked your father. What was it that you didn’t like about the man? Did he have a certain smell that repelled you or something conscious or subconscious that blocked your connection towards him? Answers: Although I cannot provide you with definitive answers, I’ll do my best to remember how I felt when I was with my dad. a) Mr. S.S. Foong was a heavy smoker since the day I was born. I presume as a baby, the cigarette smell on his person repelled me. His aggressively loud booming voice did nothing to my gentle ears, either. Although he never shouted at me when I was a child, his stern demeanor deterred me from wanting to be near him. Moreover, his angry reprimands toward his subordinates when they had done nothing wrong challenged my respect for the man I called Father. b) Maybe unconsciously I was imbued with a glamorized portrayal of the “ideal” family from western magazines, movies, and periodicals of the mid-20th century. I wanted a father whom I could look up to: a strong, kind man who understands the needs of his family and children. But this was a Hollywood invention. It doesn’t exist, or it exists empirically in a small sector of the global population. c) Since my dad was seldom at home (he was with his mistress and their children), it was difficult to have a loving relationship with the man, especially when he roared and rebuked me for my effeminate behavior over which I had no control. I was simply being who I was. His negative criticisms damaged my ego badly. d) I could not relate to his air of superiority toward my mother. I resented that aspect of my father. I swore to myself that I would not grow up to be like my old man.

And she told me I deserved a merit badge for it ... which was such a particularly funny, particularly uncanny thing for her to have said, because when I was about eight years old and I was a Cub Scout, all the boys in our den were sitting around in the kitchen of our den mother one afternoon, and she lit a cigarette bending over the flame from the front burner of the stove, and she set her hair on fire, and I put it out—I don't remember if I just smothered it with my hands or doused it with some Sprite or what—but she stared at me with this sort of demented look of gratitude on her face (she drank) and she said, 'I'm going to recommend that you get a merit badge for this,' and sure enough I did, I actually got a merit badge for extinguishing the fire in our den mother's hair.

Just as I’ve reached that conclusion, and am smiling at my own observation, something happens that is the oddest thing I’ve ever experienced. There’s no way to explain it but by some sort of extrasensory theory, and as a rationalist I don’t believe in any of that stuff. Well, not much. Because while the most charming boy I have ever met in my life is holding my hand, staring into my eyes, his mouth warm and moist on my skin, I have that particular, prickling sense between my shoulder blades that tells me, inevitably and unmistakably, that someone is staring at me. And instead of ignoring it and smiling back as seductively as I can at the charming boy, as any remotely sensible girl would do under the circumstances, I’m compelled to turn my head in the direction of the stare. There are plenty of boys clustered around the wall, laughing, shoving each other playfully, yelling, competing for the attention of the girls. But somehow I know that the one who’s staring at me is the boy leaning against the post holding up the canopy, his shoulders square to it, his head ducked over the cigarette he’s holding, a tiny red point flaring in the shadow as he pulls on the filter. I shake my head and say firmly to myself, Smoking’s disgusting. I’m still looking, though.

Her relationships were more about shared memories and common values than about strategic partnerships to help each other succeed. That one killed me. I’d ask why we were getting together with so-and-so and she’d say something about how they hadn’t seen each other in a long time and one time they’d stayed up all night smoking cigarettes on the lawn and talking about boys. I had no mental category for that kind of friendship. I wasn’t sure how that kind of friendship profited anybody anything. What were they trying to build? Who were they trying to beat? What were the rules of the game, and how were they going to win? These are the questions in life that matter, right? “Staying up all night smoking cigarettes and talking about boys seems to me a waste of time,” I said sweetly. Betsy rolled her eyes. “Sometimes the real bonding happens in conversations about nothing, Don,” she said. “Sometimes being willing to talk about nothing shows how much we want to be with each other. And that’s a powerful thing.” She might be right. I’m unwilling to say at this point. God knows I’m not staying up all night to sit on a lawn and talk about nothing. Betsy said if we have children I’ll do it and I suppose I will. It’s funny what happens to you when part of your heart gets born inside somebody else. I trust I’ll do the crazy things parents do and they won’t seem crazy.

Excuse me,” I call to his retreating back. I sound like I swallowed Kermit, so I clear my throat. “Excuse me,” I call again. I run to catch up with him and tug on his backpack. He looks back over his shoulder, but then he keeps right on walking. “Wait!” I say, trying to keep up. “Damn it, would you stop?” He stops very quickly and I slam into his back. He rocks forward and I grab onto his pack to stay upright, feeling like I have two left feet. I am usually more graceful than this. My mother would kill me if she saw me right now, making a public spectacle of myself in the quad. He turns, grabs me by the shoulders and steadies me, then he bends down to look into my eyes. His are bright blue and full of questions. “Are you all right?” he asks, his voice gruff. I’ve never heard him do more than grunt in class, so hearing him make a full sentence, albeit a short one, is startling. “I’m fine,” I gasp, a little winded from chasing him. “You’re really fast.” He grins. “Sweetheart, you haven’t seen fast.” My heart skips a beat. I am in such big trouble. I don’t know why I thought I could approach a man like this, but I did, and now I don’t know how to ask for what I want. “Cat got your tongue?” he asks. A grin tips one corner of his lips. He’s pretty enough to take my breath away. His blond hair flops across his forehead and he shakes his head to swing it back from his eyes. I open my mouth to speak, but only a squeak comes out. He looks around the quad, looking behind me like he’s trying to figure out where the hell I came from. When he sees that no one is chasing me, he takes my shoulders in his hands and gives me a gentle squeeze, bending so he can stare into my eyes. “Hey,” he says softly, like I’m a stray dog he’s trying to trap. “Are you okay?” I thrust out my hand. “Madison Wentworth,” I say. “I just wanted to introduce myself.” His eyes narrow and he stares at me, but he doesn’t stick his hand out to shake mine. I let mine hang there in the air between us until it becomes so heavy with disappointment that I have to tuck it into the pocket of my jeans. “Guess not.” I sigh. “I’m very sorry for taking up your time.” “Which one of those fuckers put you up to this?” he asks. He grinds his teeth as he waits for my response. “What?” “Those frat boys you hang out with, the ones with more money than sense. Which one put you up to this?” He glares at me. “No one put me up to this,” I say. “Listen, sweetheart,” he says, his face very close to mine. I can smell the cigarette he just smoked and the coffee he must have had before it. “You don’t want to mess with a man like me.” “Okay,” I whisper. I clear my throat. “Fine. Have a nice day.

Many of the old taboos were about sex; many of the new ones are about the mother-child relationship, unfortunately for children and their mothers. For example, we use the word “vice” in a completely different way from our great-grandparents. Almost everything that was then considered a vice (drinking, smoking or gambling) is now treated as an illness (alcoholism, tobacco addiction, compulsive gambling), so that the sinner has become an innocent victim. Masturbation (the “solitary vice” that so concerned doctors and educators) is now thought of as normal. Homosexuality is simply a lifestyle. To speak of vice in any of these cases would be considered a serious insult. Today, only a few inoffensive habits of children are considered “vices”, and in English they are spoken of as nothing more than “bad” habits: “He has the ‘bad’ habit of biting his fingernails.” “He has got into the ‘bad’ habit of crying.” “If you pick him up, he will develop a ‘bad’ habit.” “He has got into the ‘bad’ habit of breastfeeding and won’t eat baby food.” If you still have any doubts about what our society’s real taboos are, imagine going to see your GP and describing one of the following scenarios: 1. “I have a little boy of three and I want to have an AIDS test because I had sex with several strangers this summer.” 2. “I have a little boy of three and I smoke twenty cigarettes a day.” 3. “I have a little boy of three; I breastfeed him and he sleeps in our bed.” Which of these three scenarios do you think would elicit a reproach from your GP? In

Paul Dark lit a cigarette and raised it to his mouth. The moment the tip glowed, he inhaled deeply and leaned back on his elbows. He squinted in the afternoon sunshine, taking in the view that stretched out before him. The hillside was dotted with squares of brightly coloured blankets, each of which was home to a Swedish family with young children – like small islands of social democratic prosperity, he thought. A few feet away, Ben was running around pretending to be an aeroplane with another boy, while Claire was seated cross-legged next to him on their blanket, one finger entwined in her hair as she browsed the arts section of Dagens Nyheter , a pair of sunglasses perched on her head. He leaned over and found his own pair, which he pushed tight against the bridge of his nose. So here it is, he thought. Fifty. Half a century.

Yes, he had survived, he had outlived Father, he had fallen in love and started a family. But he was still a man on the run, and he always would be. He had no right to smoke cigarettes in the sunshine, watching a boy who called him ‘Pappa’ and giggled when he rustled his head against his stomach. He should be dead, or rotting in a cell, or at the very least pissing his days away in a frozen little flat in Moscow. He remembered Donald Maclean’s sad long face, the expression of bitterness he’d had in his eyes . . .

A very tall bearded guy was standing in a doorway, smoking a cigarette. “Hey”, he said. “Hi,” I said. “Excuse me, do you rehearse here?” “Yeah,” he said, extending his hand and saying, almost formally, “Gibby Haynes. I’m in the Butthole Surfers.” I shook his hand. “Moby,” I said. “I just moved upstairs.” “Are you an artist?” “No, a musician.” “Oh, cool. Welcome to the building.” “Do you know who else has spaces here?” I asked. “Well, there’s us and Iggy and Sonic Youth and Helmet and Sean Lennon and the Beastie Boys and some other people,” he said as someone behind him started making a wall of feedback.

There are plenty of boys clustered around the wall, laughing, shoving each other playfully, yelling, competing for the attention of the girls. But somehow I know that the one who’s staring at me is the boy leaning against the post holding up the canopy, his shoulders square to it, his head ducked over the cigarette he’s holding, a tiny red point flaring in the shadow as he pulls on the filter. I shake my head and say firmly to myself, Smoking’s disgusting. I’m still looking, though.

There are plenty of boys clustered around the wall, laughing, shoving each other playfully, yelling, competing for the attention of the girls. But somehow I know that the one who’s staring at me is the boy leaning against the post holding up the canopy, his shoulders square to it, his head ducked over the cigarette he’s holding, a tiny red point flaring in the shadow as he pulls on the filter. I shake my head and say firmly to myself, Smoking’s disgusting. I’m still looking, though. He’s tall and slim, I can tell that much. And his hair, dropping over his forehead, is jet-black, as if he were a hero in a manga book, drawn with pen and ink, two or three thick glossy strands separating into perfect dark curves. I snap my head back from the lurker in the shadows to the actual boy still holding my hand, only to see that Leonardo is looking over my shoulder in the same direction. “Luca!” he exclaims, dropping my hand to wave at someone. “Finalmente!” I am determined not to turn. Just in case it’s the same boy. I don’t want to look too interested, or too eager. Besides, he might be really ugly. Or spotty. Or have some silly chinstrap shaved onto his face-- “Eccolo!” Leonardo’s saying happily, and it would be silly of me, by now, not to turn to face the person who’s strolled over and is leaning against the side of the table. I look up at him, and my heart stops for a moment. “Luca!” Andrea says, echoing Leonardo. “Finalmente!” “This is Luca, our friend,” Leonardo says happily as I think: Luca. Finally. “Ciao,” Luca says, nodding at us, his long legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles. He’s wearing a dark blue shirt tucked into black jeans, and silver rings on a couple of his long fingers, the cigarette held loosely between them. His inky hair tumbles over his forehead, and I see, with a shock like a knife to the chest, that his eyes, heavily fringed with thick black lashes, are the midnight blue of sapphires or deep seawater. I can’t speak.

I am Sebastiano, and your name?” he asks. “Violet,” I say as we step over the threshold. “Violetta!” he says, throwing his arms wide. “English girl, Italian name!” And across the room, I see a dark head turn in our direction. That much taller than the rest of the boys, he stands out, his straight black silky hair falling over his face, his blue eyes as bright and cold as the water of the fjord next to my grandmother’s summer rental cottage. I was looking for him before and couldn’t see him anywhere; now that I’ve been distracted by dancing and a Chianti-drinking donkey, he’s spotted me. His gaze flicks like a knife between me and the boy, who’s at the gigantic wine bottle now, filling cups and handing me one. “Salute!” Sebastiano says, touching his cup to mine, and I glance up at Luca, seeing that he’s taking this in, too. A rush of confusion fills me as I toast. I’m glad that Luca’s seen me with someone else, that I haven’t been a wallflower at this party, that I’ve proved him wrong, even a little bit, because there’s a boy here who seems to like me, who’s talking to me, anyway, getting me a drink. In films, in books, flirting with a boy is a surefire way to get the one you actually like interested in you, draw him over to your side. They’re supposed to like competition, the challenge of going after a girl who’s popular. But maybe real life doesn’t quite work that way. Because Luca arches one black eyebrow, his mouth quirks up on one side in a sneer, and he turns pointedly away sliding a cigarette into his mouth, and lighting it with a flip of his Zippo. Disgusting habit, I think as firmly as I can. I’m glad he’s not coming over, smoking a nasty stinking cancer stick. It’s awful when you lie to yourself. I do think smoking is foul, but I’m also more than aware that if Luca strolled over to talk to me, with that cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, I wouldn’t walk away, complaining about the smoke; I’d stand there staring up at him, trying not to grin as widely as a five-year-old meeting Cinderella at Disneyland.

You shouldn’t pay any attention to what she says,” Kendra says firmly, nodding at Elisa sprawled out on the terrace chair. “She’s just a nasty bitch. Ignore her.” Elisa hears this, as she’s meant to. “And you,” she calls to Kendra, swiveling on her chair to face inside the dining room, “you think you are so pretty, so beautiful, because all the boys want you. Well, they only want you because you are different. They think you are esotica. Exotic.” Kendra looks as if Elisa just slapped her in the face, and Paige draws in her breath sharply. “Are you kidding me?” Paige snaps at Elisa. “What did you just call her?” Her hands clenched into fists, Paige marches around the table in Elisa’s direction; skinny Elisa flinches at the sight of 140 pounds of super-confident, sporty, protein-fed American girl heading toward her with fury in her eyes. I nip around the table from the other side and head Paige off before she backhands Elisa like Serena Williams hits a tennis ball, and sends her flying across the terrace and into the olive grove beyond. I’m not an etiquette expert, but I can’t help feeling that knocking our hostess’s daughter over a stone balcony might not be considered the most appropriate way to celebrate the first full day of our summer course. “Paige, leave it! She’s just jealous,” I say swiftly. “Ignore her. She’s having a go at us because she’s pissed off that Luca likes foreign girls--he doesn’t want her.” Elisa grabs her cigarettes and her phone, jumps up, and, sneering at us all, storms off the terrace, muttering, “Vaffanculo!” as she flees the wrath of Killer Barbie. That’s right--run away. To me, “exotic” sounds nice, like a compliment: out-of-the-ordinary, glamorous, exciting. But Kendra clearly hasn’t taken it that way, nor did Paige. I want to ask them why, but it’s Kelly, of all people, who saves the moment by saying meditatively: “You know, we should make a note of all the mean things Elisa says to us in Italian. That way, we’ll learn all the best swearwords.

Richter refused to let Alexander go with Ha Si to capture Moon Lai. “That’s an order. That’s final. No. We have nine other guys who can go. You’re not going. One of the Yards will go. They’re still like death.” Alexander was barely listening to Richter, as he was getting his ammunition ready. “Colonel,” he said, “I’m also still like death.” “You haven’t stopped pacing for five days!” exclaimed Richter. “You can’t sit for five minutes without a cigarette. I said no.” “And yet,” said Alexander, “I managed to survive six days with six men in one foxhole. And months in the woods. And in a cell in isolation for eight months. I’ll be fine.” “That was twenty years ago! And in the meantime, sneaking up and scaring your mouse of a wife half to death on Halloween does not count as honing your recon moves.” “Anthony told you that?” said Alexander, disgusted. “I don’t think that boy can keep his mouth shut about anything,” said Richter, staring at Alexander in a peculiar way that made Alexander look away.

Almost as sensational as the black mob beating up a pregnant teenager is the case of the Seattle teenager, who in 2011 was assaulted and tortured for several hours because he was white. And “they started bringing up the past—like slavery—being like, white people did this,” said the victim. “They started bringing up the past - like slavery - being like, white people did this,” Shane said. The attackers stripped off McClellan’s belt and started whipping his back. “They said, ‘This is for what your people did to our people.’ They were like whipping me with my belt, my studded belt,” Shane recounts. “They’re like, ‘Aw, white boy, what are you doing? You can’t hang out this late. What are you doing around here?’ They’re like, ‘White boy has no belonging - being out here at 2 a.m.’ “They targeted me for being white, and they made it very clear that’s why they were assaulting me,” Shane said. The victim’s father said the attack was nothing short of hours of torture. “Put a gun to the back of his head and told him if he said anything they were going to blow his head off while they sat there and burned him with cigarettes on the back of the neck,” he says.7

Strict Time There's a hand on a wire that leads to my mouth I can hear you knocking but I'm not coming out Don't want to be a puppet or a ventriloquist 'Cause there's no ventilation on a critical list Fingers creeping up my spine are not mine to resist Strict time Chorus: Toughen up, toughen up Keep your lip buttoned up Strict time Oh the muscles flex and the fingers curl And a cold sweat breaks out on the sweater girl Strict time Oh he's all hands, don't touch that dial The courting cold wars weekend witch trial Strict time All the boys are straight laced and the girls are frigid The talk is two-faced and the rules are rigid 'cause it's strict time Strict time You talk in hushed tones, I talk in lush tones Try to look Italian through the musical Valium Strict time Thinking of grand larceny Smoking the everlasting cigarette of chastity Cute assistants staying alive More like a hand job than the hand jive Strict time

In real life, I looked at my father and mother and understood dimly that it was harder to be a girl, that boys had it easier. Here, boys could buy and ride motorcycles and come and leave when they wanted to and exude a kind of cool while they stood shirtless at the edge of the street, talking and laughing with one another, passing a beer around, smoking cigarettes. Meanwhile, the women I knew were working even when they weren’t at work: cooking, washing loads of clothes, hanging them to dry, and cleaning the house. There was no time for them to just relax and be.

A guy and his date are parked on a back road some distance from town. They are messing around when the girl stops the boy abruptly. “I really should have mentioned this earlier, but I’m actually a hooker and I charge twenty dollars for sex.” The boy reluctantly pays her, and they carry on. After the obligatory cigarette, the boy sits in the driver’s seat, staring out the window. “Why aren’t we going anywhere?” asks the girl. “Well, I really should have mentioned this earlier, but I’m actually a taxi driver, and the fare back to town is twenty-five dollars.

I said get out, damn it,” Dad repeated, spittle flying from his mouth. “I won’t have a sixteen-year-old boy bawl’n like a little girl all the way home. Man up or walk.” Too much wine had left Dad’s teeth and lips stained red, and Shane could smell the alcohol, even over the foul stench of Jackie’s cigarette. His aunt had whispered an apology to Shane at the funeral reception, saying she’d only put wine out because she didn’t think his dad would drink it. What she didn’t realize was Dad had become such a raging alcoholic that he would’ve

Cigarettes are called coffin nails for a reason, Billy Boy," I remembered telling him. "Be careful with those things. You're risking your life.

The girl who asked me the time lights yet another cigarette. I’m sure it’s not so much the pleasure of the nicotine that makes these girls smoke so much – they hardly puff at their cigarettes – it’s having the thing in their hand to complete the pose. They all smoke with practised ease and naturalism, yet this girl has the gestures off more perfectly than most. How to define it? Some equation of extended fingers and wrist bend, lip-pout and head-tilted exhalation. She smokes with great sexual grace: her body is brown and lean and she’s pretty with long milk-chocolate brown hair. And somehow she knows that her perfect manipulation of that perfect white cylinder of packed tobacco sends a subliminal signal to the boys – all their eyes are flicking like lizards’ – that she is ready.

By dawn, the ship was off Le Havre, and by eight thirty, Wells found himself, swaddled in his newly issued greatcoat, following Sergeant Stubb through the chaotic harbor scene. Hieronymus Bosch could not have done it justice—twisting avenues lined by bales of barbed wire the height of houses, teetering mountains of crates and barrels, whinnying horses and skittish mules, a thousand shouting voices, little French boys begging for a cigarette or a bit of the breakfast the swarms of soldiers had just been issued: tins of bully beef, along with a biscuit as hard and thick as a fist.

Ever since he returned from the war, he'd felt as if part of him were still back in China, but he wasn't there anymore. Those army hospitals had long been dismantled; those boys he treated had returned to their homes- or at least they were beyond suffering. And here he was now: in this gaily colored and dramatically lit nightclub in America, sitting across from his American wife. The music was loud and brash; the smell of perfume and cigarettes lay heavy on the air. He lifted his mai tai to his lips and took another sip of his drink, the condensation dripping down the side of his hand like an electric shock. Wake up. You are here.

Oscar Villadolid, a boy at the time, remembers a familiar scene from the aftermath of Manila’s “liberation.” A GI came down his street handing out cigarettes and Hershey bars. Speaking slowly, he asked Villadolid’s name. When Villadolid replied easily in English, the soldier was startled. “How’d ya learn American?” he asked. Villadolid explained that when the United States colonized the Philippines, it had instituted English in the schools. This only compounded the GI’s confusion. “He did not even know that America had a colony here in the Philippines!” Villadolid marveled. Take a moment to let that sink in. This was a soldier who had taken a long journey across the Pacific. He’d been briefed on his mission, shown maps, told where to go and whom to shoot. Yet at no point had it dawned on him that he was preparing to save a U.S. colony and that the people he would encounter there were, just like him, U.S. nationals. He thought he was invading a foreign country.

I loved the air around this boy. It was mixed with the strong cigarettes of the men and the flowery perfume of the ladies and the lemons in the trees.

I Woke Up and it was political. I made coffee and the coffee was political. I took a shower and the water was. I walked down the street in short shorts and a Bob Mizer tank top and they were political, the walking and the shorts and the beefcake silkscreen of the man posing in a G-string. I forgot my sunglasses and later, on the train, that was political, when I studied every handsome man in the car. Who I thought was handsome was political. I went to work at the university and everything was very obviously political, the department and the institution. All the cigarettes I smoked between classes were political, where I threw them when I was through. I was blond and it was political. So was the difference between “blond” and “blonde.” I had long hair and it was political. I shaved my head and it was. That I didn’t know how to grieve when another person was killed in America was political, and it was political when America killed another person, who they were and what color and gender and who I am in relation. I couldn’t think about it for too long without feeling a helplessness like childhood. I was a child and it was political, being a boy who was bad at it. I couldn’t catch and so the ball became political. My mother read to me almost every night and the conditions that enabled her to do so were political. That my father’s money was new was political, that it was proving something. Someone called me faggot and it was political. I called myself a faggot and it was political. How difficult my life felt relative to how difficult it was was political. I thought I could become a writer and it was political that I could imagine it. I thought I was not a political poet and still my imagination was political. It had been, this whole time I was asleep.

The truth of a house was this: It became a home when someone lived there, more so when many had lived there, their lives adding a kind of texture, sometimes invisible, in layer after layer. It was present in the way a house smelled: like the food of family dinners, the stink of cigarettes on the wall, the ripe pickled rank of body odor in a teen boy’s room. It was there in little dings and scratches, in the drywall dent of a fist someone threw, in the loving and loved dents found in a child’s playroom, in claw marks from pets scrabbling around hardwood floors. A house was just a place. A home had soul. It lived many lives, had many ghosts. Maybe they were happy ghosts. Maybe they were sad. Maybe it was a home filled with laughter—or one wet with blood and tears.

My Mormon family had turned our eyes from the billboard Marlboro cowboys above the Kanawha River Railroad, peeling and stained with coal dust. We shuddered and said, “Be simple concerning things that are evil.” And boy, was I. The girl raised Mormon declined the joint but tried a cigarette, and I put the wrong end in my mouth.

Ranger continues, taking out a notebook and writing this all down. I notice it's a pink notebook with gold edges, and a unicorn on the front. For a guy who tromps around in combat boots yelling at people all the time, smoking cigarettes, and sporting a chest tat, he sure likes cute things.

Margot is a good girl, and I guess Kitty and I have followed her lead. I've never cheated or gotten drunk or smoked a cigarette or even had a boyfriend.

As a boy, I admired Humphrey Bogart in a big way. I coveted the homburg and trench coat. I wanted to pack heat and smoke unfiltered cigarettes and give them long-legged dames in mink stoles the squinty-eyed once-over. I longed to chase villains, right wrongs, and restore the peace. Upon surviving into manhood, I discovered the black and comedic irony that is every gumshoe’s existential plight, the secret that dime novels and black-and-white movies always elide: each clue our intrepid detective deciphers, each mystery he unravels, each crime he solves, makes the world an unhappier place. I got smart and became a gangster instead. More money, more women, and better clothes. Much less in the way of mystery. As for the misery quotient? Basically a wash.

Once, on the train from Washington to Philadelphia, I found myself seated next to an African-American man who had worked for the State Department in India but had quit to run a rehabilitation program for juvenile offenders in the District of Columbia. Most of the youths he worked with were gang members who had committed homicide. One fourteen-year-old boy in his program had shot and killed an innocent teenager to prove himself to his gang. At the trial, the victim’s mother sat impassively silent until the end, when the youth was convicted of the killing. After the verdict was announced, she stood up slowly and stared directly at him and stated, “I’m going to kill you.” Then the youth was taken away to serve several years in the juvenile facility. After the first half year the mother of the slain child went to visit his killer. He had been living on the streets before the killing, and she was the only visitor he’d had. For a time they talked, and when she left, she gave him some money for cigarettes. Then she started step-by-step to visit him more regularly, bringing food and small gifts. Near the end of his three-year sentence she asked him what he would be doing when he got out. He was confused and very uncertain, so she offered to set him up with a job at a friend’s company. Then she inquired about where he would live, and since he had no family to return to, she offered him temporary use of the spare room in her home. For eight months he lived there, ate her food, and worked at the job. Then one evening she called him into the living room to talk. She sat down opposite him and waited. Then she started, “Do you remember in the courtroom when I said I was going to kill you?” “I sure do, ma’am,” he replied. “Well, I did,” she went on. “I did not want the boy who could kill my son for no reason to remain alive on this earth. I wanted him to die. That’s why I started to visit you and bring you things. That’s why I got you the job and let you live here in my house. That’s how I set about changing you. And that old boy, he’s gone. So now I want to ask you, since my son is gone, and that killer is gone, if you’ll stay here. I’ve got room, and I’d like to adopt you if you let me.” And she became the mother of her son’s killer, the mother he never had. Our own story may not be so dramatic, yet we have all been betrayed. We must each start where we are. In large and small ways, in our own family and community, we will be offered the dignity and freedom that learns to patiently forgive over and over.

the tobacco smell reminded him as it always did of his departed father, who would listen with him on his record player to audio recordings of science fiction adventures, and would pack and puff on his pipe, as sea creatures attacked a great submarine, the sounds of the wind and waves in the recording mixing with the sounds of the rain on their window, and the elderly man who was then a boy had thought, when I grow up I too will smoke, and here he was, a smoker for the better part of a century, about to light a cigarette

Six and a half hours later, the market closed. Zoran had no idea whether the market as a whole had finished up or down for the day. Ten minutes after that he could be found, alone, pacing outside the 9/11 memorial, smoking a cigarette. “This is like the first day of the battle against complacency,” he said.

Watch out for Rafe,” Corey said. “I saw him in the smoking pit.” “Phony,” I muttered. “She thinks he’s not a real smoker,” Daniel explained. “He’s not. Half the time he doesn’t light his cigarette. The other half he takes a couple of puffs and puts it out. It’s part of the bad boy package.” Corey grinned. “Been paying attention, have you?” “Maya always pays attention,” Daniel said. “She notices everything and has an opinion on it, which she’s not afraid to share as frequently and as loudly as possible.” Corey laughed. “Watch it,” I said as I walked away, “or I’ll share my opinions on what happened last night.

Life has always seemed to me like a restaurant,' said Peter. 'When you’re born, you come in and sit down...' 'Oh, my God,' said Brenda. '...and they show you the menu,' went on Peter, frowning at Brenda. 'And it’s a swell menu. It’s got everything on it. And they tell you that you can have anything you want, the rarest and tastiest and most wonderful dishes imaginable.' 'Who’s they?' asked Brenda. 'They is a sort of waiter-cum-proprietor,' said Peter, 'and he represents organized society in the parable.' 'It’s a parable, is it?' 'Yes. So you study the menu and you pick out the dishes that appeal to you most. Some people pick more exotic viands than others, but everybody picks out something he thinks is swell and the waiter-cum-proprietor pats him on the back and says it’s an excellent choice. And you sit back and wait to be served. That represents the period of adolescence. ... Damn it, where was I?' 'You were adolescent.' 'So you sit and wait to be served your fondly chosen dish,' resumed Peter, 'and pretty soon the waiter comes in and what does he bring you? He brings you hash! "Hey," you say, "this isn’t what I ordered." "Oh isn’t it?" says the waiter who is no longer friendly. "Well, it’s what you’re gonna get." Now this is the important part. Some people meekly eat their hash. Some drown it with catsup and try to enjoy it.' 'I get it,' said Brenda. 'Those are the drunks.' 'But there are a few who say, "Goddamn it, I didn’t order hash and I don’t want hash and I won’t eat hash." They get out of their chairs and the waiter tries to push them back, but they say, "Get out of my way, who the hell are you?" And they fight their way into the kitchen while the waiter hollers and protests and there they find mountains and mountains of hash. But they keep looking around and pretty soon in odd corners of the kitchen they find the dishes they ordered, the rare and costly viands they had their hearts set on. And they eat ’em and they enjoy ’em and then they go out of the restaurant the same as the hash eaters do, but boy, they’ve dined!' He threw down his cigarette and stamped on it. 'That’s all,' he said. 'Thank you for your attention.' 'Who pays the bill?' asked George with interest. 'I don’t know,' said Peter irritably. 'That would complicate the parable to the point of chaos.' 'Who did you say the waiter was?' asked George. 'Organized society?' 'That’s right. A pale flabby guy with a walrus mustache.' 'I don’t quite see it,' said George. 'I do,' said Harriet, sitting up on the day bed. 'I see it. It’s beautiful.' 'It isn’t so bad at that,' said Brenda. 'You’re damn right it’s not.

Girls. Boys. Falling in love. Smoking cigarettes as if your life depended on it. Girls driving in cars with boys. Everybody deserves to believe that youth will last forever.

Sometimes these guns were actually audible, or we fancied they were; every weekday there was a rush to the newspapers, every Sunday a batch of names read out to stilled listeners. The careful assessments of schoolmasters were blotted out by larger and wilder markings; a boy who had been expelled returned as a hero with medals; those whose inability to conjugate avoir and être seemed likely in 1913 to imperil a career were to conquer France’s enemies better than they did her language; offenders gated for cigarette-smoking in January were dropping bombs from the sky in December. It was a frantic world; and we knew it even if we did not talk about it. Slowly, inch by inch, the tide of war lapped to the gates of our seclusion; playing-fields were ploughed up for trenches and drill-grounds; cadet-corps duties took precedence over classroom studies; the school that had prepared so many beloved generations for life was preparing this one, equally beloved, for death.

Others dangled cigarettes from their lips, and as they paged through the day’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer they could take satisfaction in a half-page ad that trumpeted the latest proof of the health benefits of smoking: “21 of 23 Giants World Champions Smoke Camels. It Takes Healthy Nerves to Win the World Series.

She assembled wafers as thin as cigarette paper, crisped, crimped, creased in a thousand different ways; she played with flakes of chocolate, orange peel, candied fruit, arabesques of coulis and marrons glacés. The pastry boy watched her, clapping his hands together. "You're an artist! This is one artist!" he said, over and over. The chef viewed such extravagance differently" "Well, okay, because it's this evening, but making things look pretty isn't the point. We don't cook to make things look pretty, for Christ's sake." Camille smiled as she topped the crème anglaise with a red coulis. Alas, no, it wasn't enough just to make things pretty. Something she knew all too well.

The Ford A got stuck behind a yellow Berlin city bus, which was blocking the already narrow temporary access route. Berlin smokes Juno cigarettes an advertisement revealed. Wolter cursed. A boy in his Sunday best stood on the steps leading to the upper deck, cocking a snook at them.

See! Told you!” Paige sings out, pointing up at a wooden tower, on top of which a lifeguard is lounging, smoking a cigarette, talking on his mobile phone, his skin tanned so dark he might be Indian, wearing nothing but a tiny, shiny pair of red Speedos. “But Paige, his swimsuit!” I object. Paige tosses her head. “Actually, Violet,” she says, “I think you’re being really sexist. Why should girls be able to wear bikinis if boys can’t wear Speedos? Boys like to tan too!” “My dad calls them budgie smugglers,” Kelly volunteers, and I snigger at this. So does Paige, when she figures it out.

We emerge into the warm night air and I smell the honeyed wisteria, hear an owl hooting across the fields on the far side of the river. I’m eager to dive in; I love to swim. I’m picking my way down the little slope when, behind me, I hear a commotion, and look back to see Paige braced between Evan and Leo; she’s tripped on her wedge heels and is cackling like a banshee. Kendra looks at me and rolls her eyes. “Hopefully the cold water’ll sober her up a bit,” she says resignedly. I don’t answer, even though I completely agree. Because, leaning against the wall of the club on our left, long legs crossed at the ankles, shoulders propped square to the stone, black hair falling over his face, is a silhouette that looks eerily familiar, like a ghost that haunts my dreams. There’s a book called The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, that I found in the villa’s library, and I’ve been reading it. I don’t quite understand it all; to be honest, I pulled it off the shelf because the title spoke to me, made me think of him. Luca. Definitely beautiful, and the damned part fits too, because he’s so dark, so brooding, so sad; it feels sometimes as if he doesn’t want to reach for happiness, as if he actually pushes it away-- But he saved me when I saw in danger, I remind myself. He saved my life. And then he told me he thought I might be his half sister. Which meant we couldn’t see each other anymore, in case that was true… A red dot flashes in the blue-black night as the figure raises a cigarette to his lips. It can’t be Luca, I tell myself. We’re beyond Siena, miles and miles from Chianti, where he lives. It can’t be him. Everyone’s already passed me, brushing by as I stopped to stare at the lean boy draped against the roadhouse wall. “Violet!” Kelly calls, her voice high and thrilled. “Come on! Wait till you see this!” I turn back toward the river and plunge down the little path as if I were being chased by the hounds of hell. Away from a silhouette that’s making me think of things--want things--that I can never have.

Well, come on in for crying out loud. How long you gonna stand here and study this door? He ain’t in here, so you can’t will him to walk out of it.” Beau wasn’t here, either, but maybe she knew where he was. I hurried after her as she spun around and headed back inside. The bar was different at three o’clock in the afternoon. The curtains were pulled open, letting sunlight inside, and the windows were open too, allowing a fresh, cool breeze to waft through the place, almost taking away the stench of stale beer and cigarettes…almost. “He left yesterday. Ain’t been home, neither. You messed those two boys up good, girl.” Honey shook her head as she wiped glasses off and hung them back up above the bar. “I know. I need to fix it.” She shook her head and let out a hard laugh. “I reckon that would be nice, but the damage is done. Those boys about beat the shit outta each other in here yesterday. You’ve made them both crazy. Never thought I’d see a girl come between them two, but then I never figured you’d ever look Beau’s way either. Once you started showing him some interest, I knew this was all going to Hell in a handbasket real quick. You’ve always been my boy’s weakness.” I sank down onto a stool across the bar from her. My stomach churned with guilt. What had I done to Beau? How could I say I love him and hurt him so badly? Love wasn’t selfish. “I’m an awful person. I’d take it all away if I could. I can’t believe I’ve done this to him.” Honey paused and raised an artfully sculpted brow. “Him who?” “Beau,” I replied, frowning. A sad smile touched her lips and she shook her head. “Well, I guess he ain’t as stupid as I thought he was. I figured the boy’d thrown everything away for some little gal looking to have a good time. I didn’t think you’d actually care about him, too.

Here’s the thing. My one piece of advice to you. You have to let yourself be fully present in every moment. Just be awake for it, do you know what I mean? Go all in and wring every last drop out of the experience.” “So do you not have any regrets, then? Because you always went all in?” I’m thinking of her divorce, how it was the talk of the neighborhood. “Oh God, no. I have regrets.” She laughs a husky laugh, the sexy kind that only smokers or people with colds get to have. “I don’t know why I’m sitting here trying to give you advice. I’m a single divorcée and I’m forty. Two. Forty-two. What do I know about anything? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.” She lets out a sigh filled with longing. “I miss cigarettes so much.” “Kitty will check your breath,” I warn, and she laughs that husky laugh again. “I’m afraid to cross that girl.” “‘Though she be but little, she is fierce,’” I intone. “You’re wise to be afraid, Ms. Rothschild.” “Oh my God, Lara Jean, will you please just call me Trina? I mean, I know I’m old, but I’m not that old.

None of them could have traced the Voice’s exact provenance; most of the parents could but guess at the things that the Voice alluded to in its inimical diphthongs and non-rhotic nouns (charactah): the spankings and the cigarettes and the gin and tonics you didn’t waste the good gin on; the Mercedes 280 D with the matching hubcap plates, the sickly sweet smell of its perforated leather interior, Dick and the boys (now grown) joking about the “voodoo stick” on the long drive up to Maine, during which, out of principle, you never took a rest stop (and why would you, seeing as no one “hydrated” in those days).

I went a day. Spent that evening standing at the window lighting one cigarette off the last, after she’d gone, to keep myself from sitting and writing out the scene as freshly recalled. One week, thirty packs of cigarettes. Weeks. Without spooling out more of a tale, creating more to burn, knitting away at the front of the long knotted scarf that will have to be unraveled at the back. How helpless I feel before this flood of words, how ridiculous. A hundred times trying to shut off the flow. Under orders from Mother. From Frida and Diego, arms crossed, feet tapping, stop it. In the name of the law. Stop writing down everything, it makes me nervous. And something inside the boy cries out, Those are the only two choices: read, or dead.

Maggie, for her part, is impressed. He looks super nice. His car is a man’s car. It smells of air freshener and more of the same cologne. She thinks of the boys in Fargo, who never light her cigarettes. Mateo opens the car door for her. They drive to Applebee’s. She orders her favorite, the blackened chicken. He cares whether or not she is full. He makes sure she isn’t just pretending to be done eating. Are you sure you’re all set? he asks. Don’t act all princess-like. Besides, I eat so damn fast. She nods, her mouth full of food. She smiles as soon as she’s able.

She drained the pasta and looked out the window over the sink. In the middle of the street, paying no attention whatsoever to oncoming cars, two little boys were jousting with hockey sticks while riding bicycles, their mother observing through a fog of cigarette smoke and a beer. Human beings, Janet thought, were a disappointment.

How long?” Alistair asks as he walks onto the patio, with Thatcher and Silas close behind. “Nine inches.” I pull the cigarette from my lips. “That’s hard. Do you need to know soft measurements, too, or…?

all anyone ever does around here is / grow weed and stare / into burnt-out houses / into the rabbit hole / into the cards / into the skin / and roll their cars / their eyes / their r’s / their cigarettes / and kick snow / kick rugby balls / kick each other / kick bad habits / only to find another / like an eel / in the creek / in the backyard / in the dark / in winter / and try to kill it on the rocks / chase the girls / in a shed / a bathtub / a bed / with wet fingers / eyes / tongues / and T-shirts / from spilled beer / spilled cum / spilled blood / spilled secrets / bad boys / with bad skin / bad tattoos / and bad reputations / because here / all anyone ever does is / swear / across their hearts / at referees / at other drivers / taking to the road / cos all anyone ever wants around here is / out / of home / of the closet / of the relationship / of the sixth-storey window / open it / to the cold / to the clouds / to the sky / cos all anyone ever does around here is / dive /

Riding to New York" "Well, I met him in Minnesota He was dark and overcast With long, grey hair and eyes that stared through me like I was glass I asked "Where are you going to?" He said, "I'm the wind I'm just blowing through." He lit up a cigarette and began to talk "See the doctors told me that my body won't hold me My lungs are turning black Been a lucky strike's fool since I was at school and there ain't no turning back They can't tell me how long I've got Maybe months but maybe not So I'm taking this bike and riding to New York 'Cause I wanna see my grand-daughter one last time Wanna hold her close and feel her tiny heartbeat next to mine Wanna see my son and the man he's become Tell him I'm sorry for the things I've done And I'd do it if I had to walk Oh, I'm taking this bike and riding to New York Through the forests of Wisconsin that I knew as a boy Past the sky line of Chicago Round the lakes of Illinois I lay my head in a motel bed where my back is sore and my eyes turn red Listen to the trucks roll past my door Through the fields of Ohi as the sunshine paints them gold I run just like a river runs, rapid, quick and cold And fly through Pennsylvania and the Jersey turnpike tolls And I won't stop 'til I get to New York 'Cause I wanna see my grand-son one last time Wanna see his eyes sparkling and stare back into mine Now my time is shorter I wanna see my daughter Tell her all the things that I should have taught her And I'd do it if I had to walk Oh, I'm taking this bike I'm riding to New York And I'd go up to the churchyard one last time Lay flowers down for the woman who gave me the best years of my life And I'd do it if I had to walk Yeah, I'd do it if I had to walk I'm taking this bike and riding to New York

Oh yes,’ agreed Smokey. ‘That’s what us screenwriters call a complication, you see. It can’t just be boy meets cigarette machine, falls in love, the end, can it? I mean, who would want to see that? No, you’ve got to have obstacles – like how Romeo and Juliet are from warring families, or how Meg Ryan’s character in Sleepless in Seattle is already engaged when she falls for Tom Hanks, or how she runs a little bookshop in You’ve Got Mail and he runs a big one, or how he’s trapped on a desert island with a volleyball and she isn’t even in that movie. Obstacles, you see. Obstacles.

The one on the left—a tall, muscular guy with a piercing in his lip and brow and tattoos all over—casually leans back into the couch as he takes a whiff of his cigarette right through the mask, his painted brown, medium-length hair loosely tucked into a bun, along with those black ear tunnels giving away who he is—Heath Preston, a notorious heartbreaker of Spine Ridge University, and the eldest of the three. The one on the right, with his lanky but muscular frame and dark-brown hair swooping above his mask has a girl on his lap who’s suckling on his knife earring, but his head is tilted over the couch and his eyes are fixated on Heath as he bites his lip. Max Fletcher is the youngest of the boys, an eternal dreamer, and definitely the odd one in the crowd. But the one that really makes all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up is the one in the middle. The shortest of the three, but the one who’s the most fucked up—Silas Rivera.

The Gambler" "On a warm summer's evening On a train bound for nowhere I met up with the gambler We were both too tired to sleep So we took turns a-starin' Out the window at the darkness The boredom overtook us And he began to speak He said, "Son, I've made a life Out of readin' people's faces Knowin' what the cards were By the way they held their eyes So if you don't mind my sayin' I can see you're out of aces For a taste of your whiskey I'll give you some advice" So I handed him my bottle And he drank down my last swallow Then he bummed a cigarette And asked me for a light And the night got deathly quiet And his face lost all expression Said, "If you're gonna play the game, boy You gotta learn to play it right You've got to know when to hold 'em Know when to fold 'em Know when to walk away And know when to run You never count your money When you're sittin' at the table There'll be time enough for countin' When the dealin's done Every gambler knows That the secret to survivin' Is knowin' what to throw away And knowin what to keep 'Cause every hand's a winner And every hand's a loser And the best that you can hope for Is to die in your sleep" And when he'd finished speakin' He turned back toward the window Crushed out his cigarette Faded off to sleep And somewhere in the darkness The gambler he broke even But in his final words I found an ace that I could keep You've got to know when to hold 'em Know when to fold 'em Know when to walk away And know when to run You never count your money When you're sittin' at the table There'll be time enough for countin' When the dealin's done

Everyone at this party knew the circuitous track Finley had taken to adulthood. From earliest memory, he had been a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften. People laughed at his jokes; girls followed him everywhere. Everyone loved Finley, but most agreed that he was a handful. He had been held back in fourth grade, more for constant mischievousness than anything else. He was sometimes disrespectful in church, and he liked the kind of girl who wore short skirts and carried cigarettes in her purse. When the laughter ended, Dad went on: “A toast to Finley and his grand adventure. We are proud of you, son!” Servers appeared with bottles of Dom Pérignon and poured more champagne; the tinkling sound of glass on glass filled the air. Guests

from the Ministry, has there? And you still expect us to cooperate with you!” “You go too far!” shouted Scrimgeour, standing up; Harry jumped to his feet too. Scrimgeour limped toward Harry and jabbed him hard in the chest with the point of his wand: It singed a hole in Harry’s T-shirt like a lit cigarette. “Oi!” said Ron, jumping up and raising his own wand, but Harry said, “No! D’you want to give him an excuse to arrest us?” “Remembered you’re not at school, have you?” said Scrimgeour, breathing hard into Harry’s face. “Remembered that I am not Dumbledore, who forgave your insolence and insubordination? You may wear that scar like a crown, Potter, but it is not up to a seventeen-year-old boy to tell me how to do my job! It’s time you learned some respect!” “It’s time you earned it,” said Harry. The floor trembled; there was a sound of running footsteps, then the door to the sitting room burst open and Mr. and Mrs. Weasley ran in. “We — we thought we heard —” began Mr. Weasley, looking thoroughly alarmed at the sight of Harry and the Minister virtually nose to nose. “— raised voices,” panted Mrs. Weasley. Scrimgeour took a couple of steps back from Harry, glancing at the hole he had made in Harry’s T-shirt. He seemed to regret his loss of temper.

The draconian spirit at Chicago Junior produced a variety of bans. No incoming phone calls were permitted; the one phone in the place was locked up in the laundry room. Entertainment consisted of an occasional bonfire in fall and an occasional swim in summer, plus carefully monitored television once a week (the boys were allowed to watch only I Remember Mama and Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, and the set was turned off during commercials for fear the cigarette and beer ads might prove too appealing). And any boy being punished for any reason was automatically denied his monthly visiting day—which meant Craig sometimes didn’t get to see Marion for months at a time.

Neither his mother nor a child psychiatrist who is called in can comfort him, and they finally send for his father (the father was Bing Crosby and the little boy his son Lindsay in the Burns tale, because Crosby was also a Kraft entertainer at the time). The father tells his son that he will place the small turtle in a silver cigarette case, and bury it in a special private grave, complete with tiny headstone, just under the boy’s bedroom window, and arrange to have it light up when the child flicks a switch beside his bed at night. And so the father and his son went out into the kitchen to get the turtle, but they found it swimming about in its pan, not dead at all, but healthy as life itself. And the little boy looked up at his father and said, “Let’s kill him.” America’s one immortal written fable, I think, is Mark Twain’s episode of the two boys and the fence that has to be whitewashed. This situation pops up here and there in the literature of ye olde apologues, but Samuel Clemens did it better than any of the old professional fable writer. There have been other American fabulists, of course, and everybody of my advance years knows about George Ade’s experiments in putting fables into slang. The best of recent native fabulists was the late, neglected William March,

The boy nods and pulls sugar from his pocket, no bag, just loose granules. He reaches into the other pocket and pulls out somewhat-melted pieces of chocolate. "I have cigarettes and candles in my socks.

Mom looks up, asking the ceiling why I couldn't just be going around sneaking cigarettes and sneaking boys up to my room like a normal girl. I say nothing. Johnny asks my parents what decade they're from. Dad states the year he was born and asks what that has to do with anything. Mom says Johnny needs to shut up right now.

Mom looks up, asking the ceiling why I couldn't just be going around sneaking cigarettes and sneaking boys up to my room like a normal girl. I say nothing. Johnny asks my parents what decade they're from. Dad states the year he was born and asks what that has to do with anything. Mom says Johnny needs to shut up right now.

My room was at the end of a carpeted hall and over the garage. How many times I would psychoanalyze the moonlit branches outside my window and imagine an adult lover whose lust-o-meter could detect even at a distance that behind that precise window was a thirteen-year-old boy with a hard dick and a yearning to be abducted. In one of James Merrill’s poems, he hears as a child about rich kids being kidnapped and he hopes he’ll be taken away by “Floyd.” I had the same desire and wrote a sonnet that began, “Because I loved you before I met you …” Although I was worried about the inconvenient trochees, the verse expressed a real sentiment I had. I’d discovered masturbation (which will always be associated with the smell of a mildewed washcloth in my mind, since I must have first jerked off in my bathroom, the only room with a door that locked) and my fantasies were all about a lord, an English lord, not a backcountry Floyd with a cigarette behind his ear, a lord whose heart would guide him up the branches and into my waiting arms and then spirit me away in the waiting Rolls. My fantasies were all prologue, as if even then I suspected the third act would inevitably be a disappointment and need not be imagined.

Dad smoked cigarettes and told me about how it was when he was a boy in the year 1997.