late nights and shallow graves

We sat around a wooden table in a bungalow in the suburbs. 

I don't know how many glasses of red I had, but there were four bottles on the table and only three of us. The Doors played through the speakers while I topped us up using the the careful precision of a drunk. My friends rolled cigarettes as the grey light brightened through the window. Like the glasses of wine, I've no idea how much they smoked but the room looked as though a low fog had rolled in. The cat joined us for awhile, but left when our chat got bad. 

I sipped the nth glass and we spoke about the future and old times and explained just what we were all doing wrong to each other. Beads adorned the doorways whilst old beermats adorned the doors themselves. A lifetime or two's accumulation filled the house with bygone trinkets and energy efficient bulbs cast it all in a sepia light. 

Day arrived and still we drank and chatted, though the pauses became longer and themes shifted with rambling fluidity. The ashtray filled with the scrunched ends of rollups. 

We finished the wine and gathered our things. I was in the kitchen when she discovered the cat. It had died on the porch, in a pool of its own urine. Less than an hour before it had sat on my lap as I scratched its ears. Shortly after that it lapped fresh milk from its bowl. And then it died, ears scratched and full of milk. It wasn't her cat. It was her flatmate's cat. Her flatmate was on holiday in Portugal. 

The other guy and I offered to dig a grave. It was the least we could do. She was upset. He and I were trying not to laugh. It was horrible and hysterical, and there was nothing more we could do than dig a grave and try not to laugh. 

We found a spot shaded by trees and set about it with a shovel and spade. There were roots everywhere, and we were drunk. It was slow going. I nearly took my toes off a fair few times. The earth wouldn't break. Before long we were sweating. The hole didn't seem to get any deeper. Birdsong rang out and the odd car drove by. Eventually we got it dug.

She put the body in a bag and noticed that rigour mortis had set. She lay it in the hole and while we helped to fill it in, she did most of it herself. Then she disappeared inside for a moment, returning with a bottle of silver tequila. Her eyes were red on her pale face. We swigged straight from the bottle and took a moment to pour some over the freshly-filled grave. 

a partial history of personal hangovers

I used to think the guy who owned the baseball card store was Chinese. Only now do I second-guess it. Now I wonder if maybe he was Korean.

I never asked him.

He was tall, hair slicked in a side-parting with thick glasses. He wore pale blue or white button down shirtsleeves. Around his considerable girth stretched a gun belt, and attached hung a holster of pale leather. The gun was always polished, shining. Not foreboding gun-metal, but instead almost silver; nickel-plated perhaps. He had two guns: an automatic, possibly a .45, and a short-barreled .357 Magnum revolver. He only wore one at a time. I don't know how he decided, each morning, which to wear. Which to arm himself with for the day.

I remember asking if they were real. His answer was curt, impatient.

'Yes, they're real.'

And then he went back to whatever he was doing.

I would stand in fear and fascination, curious as to the hidden violence within the collector trade. I remember his most expensive card at the time was Babe Ruth, valued at $5000. I can't remember what year it was. I wondered if he'd shoot someone over a $5000 baseball card.

It never occurred to me that the cards had nothing to do with the guns.

I wore stonewashed jeans and a denim jacket, high-tops (pre-Jordan) and my 'Sweet Sixteen for the Green Machine' 1986 NBA Championship t-shirt. I fought my first pimples. I tried in vain to make my hair 80's, though it curled too naturally and refused attempts to tame it. I would go on my first date that Spring.

I was young and jumped off the 'T' a stop early to go look for cards to add to my collection. Canseco, Boggs, Clemens, Bonds, Jackson, they were prizes to be hoarded. Sometimes I even chewed the gum. That was a mistake. I pestered the poor guy for hours, and when I got a choice card out of a pack he'd look up and, for a split-second, seem less than bored.

I don't even know if he liked baseball.

I loved baseball. Wade Boggs was my hero at the time: my generation's great Red Sox hitter. I had his rookie card - a 1983 Topps. I probably still have it somewhere. The guy gave me one of those less-than-bored looks when I pulled it out of a six-year-old pack I'd just bought from him.

After the card shop, trying in vain to chew the awful gum, I'd cross the street to Jack's Joke Shop. The baseball card shop was just the baseball card shop, but the joke shop was Jack's. I don't know if there really was a Jack, but there were guys behind the counter whose boredom lessened with the knowledge that whatever my friends and I bought in there would get us into trouble.

Sometimes lots of trouble.

I bought cigarette loads.

My mother smoked and I loathed it. Loathed the smell, loathed the notes she gave me to show the guy at the drug store, telling him to give me two packs of her brand (Merit Ultra Light 100s), even though I was only 10, 11 or 12. Loathed how angry she got if I complained about it.

I used to hide them. Sometimes I'd simply destroy a pack or two. It enraged her. She probably smoked more because of it. In the constant wars between a parent and a child on the verge of their teens, my mother's cigarettes played the role of hostage, battlefield and ammunition all at once.

Cigarette loads were my form of escalation. They were about quarter the length of a matchstick and half the width, sharpened at both ends. With great care, you inserted them deep into the tobacco of the target. When it caught light, it would explode. With a loud fucking bang. It would echo through the apartment followed immediately by my mother shrieking my name and a litany of profanities. I would hide in my room, laughing and petrified, hoping that when it all blew over I could see the tattered remains of the booby-trapped cig. They split from the end in all directions, just like a cartoon. Sometimes I was in the room when it happened.

I had to run fast those times.

My mother got very good at spotting tampered cigarettes.

I got even better at tampering with them, leaving no trace.

The loads came in five-packs. I would only use two or three per pack of Merits. I tried to space them, make sure there weren't two together. Occasionally it would be the very first and very last cigarettes in the pack. Those were the best, the most unexpected, the most likely to enrage. Especially if the last blew after the drug store closed for the night.

The explosions petrified my mother's pet lovebird. This was an added bonus. The cat didn't like them either, but then the cat didn't like much.

I never apologised. I never capitulated. I knew, in a strange way, that what I was doing was right. I still believe that. My mother knew it too. Aside from ruining the enjoyment of her vice, that's what pissed her off so much. That what I was doing was, in a gleefully mischievous way, the right thing to do.

It never made her quit. That came later, and without explosives.

And I started. Four or five years later, I started smoking. Marlboro Lights. I don't really analyse it too much, but to note the chasm between me at 12 and me at 16. It coincided with starting to drink on a regular basis. I preferred drinking to smoking. The latter always left a twist of pitted guilt in my stomach. Moments and mornings of reflection, waking in a stinging haze and not wanting to taste my mouth. Feeling my lungs and wanting new ones. Hangovers felt like life had been temporarily removed, dripping in both physical pain and some manner of spiritual remorse. Showers and clean clothes didn't help, the miasma clung and lingered and before long I sparked my first of the day.

I'm pretty sure I'd started smoking when I found out Wade Boggs was playing for the Yankees.

I don't think I was meant to smoke. I think those memories of delicately sabotaging my mother's cigarettes lay too deep in my mind to shake. The echoes of our shouting matches shuddered too long in my head.

So I quit. I run and keep in decent shape. I feel healthier. The hangovers aren't quite as painful.

And I don't really care too much anymore that Boggs went to the Yankees for a few years.

I miss sabotaging the cigarettes. I miss the joke shop. I still wonder about those guns, and whether he'd shoot me over a $5,000 baseball card.

I kind of think he would.