Belching baked tofu in the morning, tasting the memory of garlic and herb, almost feeling the half-digested protein in your stomach, and you wonder if this shit is really as healthy as its supposed to be, and you remember reading somewhere a study, oriental men in Hawaii who ate so much tofu a week had, it was discovered during postmortems, a shrinkage in the size of their brain and also, maybe, something about early onset of Alzheimer’s or dementia, and you keep thinking that maybe all the soy milk you drink and the tofu you eat is causing the lapses in thought and in creativity, and you wonder if you should just go back to eating dead cow on a bun, or the legs and wings of dead birds, and, although at first the thought sickens you, you’re taken back and remember the cool times you had when younger with friends in high school going through the fast-food drive-thrus in a borrowed car, getting fries and shakes and burgers and cruising the park, secretly looking for barefoot girls sitting on the hoods of muscle cars, maybe even in bikini tops and you remember being so very horny and so very shy and so very self-conscious, and the acne and the greasy hair and the glasses—no girl would ever sleep with you or even talk to you. But the dreams and the fantasies, always the fantasies that could keep you going for almost an hour in the shower if it weren’t for father screaming about gas and water bills and having to someday put your sorry ass through college because, god-damnit, you were going to get the chance he never had—not have to worry about the scrimping here and there to save a buck, making sacrifices, spending many days on the road, week after week, frightened mother at home always worrying if she’ll ever see your father again, wondering what she’ll do if something happened. And you delighted in those times when he’d be gone, even for just a single night, and you were the man of the house, but you still got the slap in the face for fighting with brother, with sister, you should know better being the oldest, got to lead by example, got to be the big brother, the helpful brother, the one who helps with the homework or the chores or the cooking and the cleaning of the dishes and you yearned to get the hell out of there, yearned to be on your own, some day, when you could drive, you’d drive and stay out and make up some excuse and it wouldn’t matter what the punishment was for it was never so bad, and the freedom, the punishment was every bit worth the freedom, even just a little freedom, a few hours gone, playing guitar, badly, in a garage band that would never go anywhere, but it didn’t matter because that was life. Go to school, hang out with friends, eat your dinner, do the homework, play guitar, steal a bottle of booze from your father’s liquor cabinet, puke in your buddy’s shack, never invited again, but you were drunker and cooler than the rest, even with your breakfast and lunch all over your pants, but you cleaned yourself with the wet snow and coolly put a cigarette between your lips, lit it, and asked for the bottle back with a stupid, drunk grin, and you never thought that someday you’d become that alcoholic, that smoker of weed, that snorter of cocaine, oh the cocaine, the pot, the booze, the seduction of corruption, the freeing of the mind, the wasting away of the body and the soul, hocking your stuff (guitar, television, stereos, whatever) for a few hundred bucks towards an eight ball of blow. Hey, it’s the communal spirit that it fosters, hanging out at your dealer’s pad, chatting with the other addicts, just as educated, sophisticated some of them, other’s were sluts and whores and then there was the businessman and the lawyer and the girl who sucked your dick for a few bumps on the bullet and a couple’a joints, but the dealer, man, he was cool, an old black fellow with the education of a fifth grader, used to run ‘shine in Tennessee in the 40s and 50s, never got caught, now he’s got “support your local police” stickers on the back of his shiny white mini-van that he uses to tote around his grandchildren, and he’s got everyone fooled except for us addicts and then, after the visit and the socializing and getting free blow and pot from the man if he was in a good mood and stoned himself and felt like sharing, back to your own pad, roommate next to you, and both of you light it up and jam guitar and play computer games and think that it will never get any better than this and the night goes on and the buzz gets better and you never think about the coming down, figuring it’s hours away yet, so just one more bump, roll a juice joint, light some frosted flakes, suck down the sweet, sweet smoke from your porcelain bong, choke a little, laugh a little, the mushroom cloud blossoming in your mind, opening it to the possibilities, closing it to reality, and you feel alright and you feel just fine and you can’t stop talking about the small shit which seems so goddamned important, and then your buddy heads off to his room, having gone beyond the point, his eyes fluttering, heart racing, flush, feelin’ ill, and you feel it too, but you need to stay up, do a little more, jerk off to porn that you download from the net, wasting away the minutes, the hours, well past bedtime, gotta work the next day—it’s only Monday, you think to yourself, over and over—gotta get to bed, and you finally crash in your own room and you lay your head on the pillow an you shake and you toss and turn, and you take sleeping pills or hit the bong five more times, anything to help you sleep but it takes hours, exactly 2 hours, 30 minutes, before you can actually fall asleep, always 2 hours and 30 minutes, and you never knew why that was, perhaps a few minutes’ variation from night to night, but approximately it’s always the same. And the paranoia sets in and you know you’ll never wake in time for work and you think someone’s out on the porch, someone with a camera just waiting to take pictures, to call the cops, to alert the feds to the debauchery and use of controlled substances; it doesn’t help that you watched two hours of various police reality stories on the 5” color tv that you had to borrow from someone because everything you owned, you remember, is sitting in the pawn shop waiting to be retrieved, and miraculously you always manage to make the payment, to keep your stuff locked up safe, and every once in a while you’ll rescue it from storage and feel a little okay about everything and swear that you’ll never do it again, that you won’t drink, you won’t smoke, you won’t partake of the “recreational” drugs, that this is it, this is the last time, you got your stuff and all is right, and then the day approaches evening and the excitement begins to set in and your body begins the cravings and you gotta go after work, first to the bar for several beers with your buddy, then a call to the man. Is he home? Does he got anything? White, green, code words to be used at the bar on the cell phone. Obvious to you and you think also to anyone in earshot, but your buddy does this each night after work. “Hey dude, what’s up? White? Green? Hey, you wan’ us to pick you up some lottery tickets?” The man always liked that, he loved playing the numbers, the pick three numbers and each night, after weighing our dope he’d check out the numbers, 7:55 every night, and write the pick for the day down in his little black notebook next to the date. We think that was all he ever wrote, that and checks to his kids, and grandkids and the few bill collectors, and his rent.