It was summer, seventh grade loomed, and I had just turned 12. Several of us sat around the firepit in the woods behind our new housing development. A boy had brought a pack of Camel cigarettes. He lit one, took a drag, and passed it on. I watched, excited and amused as it made its way around the circle, each kid in turn taking a puff and trying not to gag. It was passed to me and I held it between my fingers. It felt natural and looked good.
"Inhale," one of the veteran smokers instructed. "Take a big drag and breathe it in." I did and choked. Coughing violently, I couldn't imagine how anyone could like this. The butt made it's way around the circle a second time.
"Are you going to try it again?" Everyone was looking at me. This time the smoke went down smoothly, and produced an immediate rush. I felt dizzy and my head swam. I slipped down off the log onto my back. Treetops circled over me against the sky. Wow! I could hardly wait for the second cigarette to come around. I was a smoker.
From that day on, our little treehouse table sported a regular, well-used ashtray. Now we smoked while we read comics and sang "Roll Me Over, Lay Me Down and Do It Again", or, "Casey got hit with a bucket of shit / And the band played on ... / He mopped up the floor with a red-headed whore And the band played on ..." or, "They are shifting father's grave to build a sewer ... " with our cockney imitations. We told dirty stories: "Did you hear the one about Johnny Fuckerfaster?" we'd ask each other in between puffs. "Wanna hear a dirty joke? A boy fell in the mud."
A pack of Luckies cost 25 cents, "for my mother," I informed the clerk at Lynnewood Drugs who hadn't asked. The neat look and snug feel of the pack in my pocket radiated worldliness; a seamless adult fusion of independence and self-indulgence.
In the darkening light of the afternoon I walked north up the long blocks of Penrose Avenue, where one afternoon an unappealing boy from my class had offered me a quarter if I pulled my pants down to let him pull my hairs. Yes, a few hairs had appeared, and although dimly suggestive of sex ( always worth noting ) the proposition was stupid, not sexy, might hurt, and was definitely not worth a quarter.
I looked past him thinking, "That bastid," the way Pete Seeger said it in "Talking Union." The spelling, when I learned it later, seemed wrong. "Bas-tard" sounded inept and stupid, and so did "prick," although "dick" didn't.
I glanced to my left at the sun fading behind the recreation field and the steep, tree-covered hills, good for breathtaking sledding on crisp, snowy nights. Lynnewood Gardens stretched in front of me, long blocks before the left turn, away from the campus of the Stella Elkins Tyler School of Fine Arts of Temple University.
The school's grounds bordered those of an equally well-tended convent: neighboring estates, bequeathed to art and religion by widows of tycoons. Despite their proximity these institutions, protected by a dignity too intimidating to breach, had escaped our rambles. In the dark of the evening I walked the remaining block home, and hid the pack of cigarettes carefully in a box on the top shelf of my closet.
Toby, a girl at school, attracted my interest by telling me that she was cousins with Jerry Lewis. "Yeah, Patty's my aunt. I just saw them last month. He took me around the studio." I was impressed. Maybe she'd introduce us. Our friendship lasted for several weeks, until she confessed to the lie. Furious that she'd duped me, I'd slip the rubber band off her braid every afternoon in history class where I sat directly behind her. Finally she complained to her mother who called Mom who confronted me, insisting that I apologize and quit picking on her.
"Dear Mom, I know I have been selfish and mean. I have made up with Toby ( the girl in school ) and we are pretty good friends now. I'm sorry I yell at the kids and will try to stop. I really appreciate what you're doing for me and will try to make myself a better person. I don't want you to feel sorry for me or take the punishment off me, but for the last couple of weeks, I have been thinking over this fault very seriously. I mean it."
XXAlix@aol.com