The Smashed Fags

For those of you who didn't know me from my myspace days, I would like to share a story I wrote back in April 2006. I've been missing my brother a lot lately and this story puts a smile on my face...

The Smashed Fags

It would be another night alone, just Daniel and I to fend for ourselves. Mom and Norman, which is what he was still called at the time, headed off to the Bowling Alley. No, they were not going to bowl. This was Page's bowling alley, where the lanes were merely a backdrop to the overcrowded bar filled with lingering smoke. About two years later I would really get to know the bowling alley- front of house, and back of house- it would become my home away from home, or rather my babysitting space away from the stank trailer but that story is for another time.

What would we do tonight? I was only 6 and already admired my 9 year old brother more than anyone else. How could I not? Without each other the other probably would have died literally. We had no parental role models. Our dad left us just a year earlier and within that time Mom had already found this new man, married him and everything. But being the alcoholics that they were there was no time for child rearing. We didn't really care yet because what kid wouldn't want to be left at home alone at our young ages? We decided that tonight would be movie night- not watch a movie but act out a movie impromptu- one of our favorite games.

Our movies always involved guns and beating people up. I guess it was the days of wrestling and we both had the moves down pat. Back then wrestling was real and the idea of being praised and cheered on for hurting someone seemed irresistible....I too wanted to be a wrestler. But our story line had to be much more deep than just hurting people. We would fly over the alligator infested waters and crawl through sewer lines to rescue the good. That's when Daniel had a brilliant idea. With all the smashed cigarette butts lying around I was surprised he hadn't thought of it sooner. We would smoke.

And smoke we did. With all the in-womb puffing away we did smoking the real thing was cake- went down nice and smooth, cough-free. We actually had fun digging through the black, plastic ashtrays to find the longest ones. Most were smoked all the way down to the filter so we really had to dig. Our little ash stained fingers carefully rummaged through the seemingly endless heap of fags until we found two worthy contenders. We lit them up and smoked the couple drags they were worth. Smoking is probably not something one should be doing at age 6 let alone age 9 but we did and we were cool.