soft pack
by Jack Timko
I have this mental image of Sanders wearing an oversized long-sleeve shirt, a baggy mock turtleneck, and he’s stretching out his limbs, flapping the extraneous fabric beneath his arms like a flying squirrel; or maybe he’s wearing a ratty flannel over a Billabong t-shirt or something, and he’s making that habitual gesture where he draws air through his teeth producing a sucking sound.
The boy’s shirtsleeves would have hung down past his hands if he didn’t bunch them up and grasp the cuffs between his fingers. His hair was unkempt and cowlicked in a perennial state of bedhead. He was preceded by his older brothers whose reputation as stormy petrel prejudiced teachers and parents alike, pegging his entire bloodline as fractious stock. The eldest Sanders was in jail or rehab or California, depending on who you believed, while the middle child was renowned as the best skateboarder in town and played drums in a punk band, often the topic of raucous local folklore despite no one having ever seen or heard them play a single chord.
Sanders sat next to me in social studies class, frequently arriving late, creating disruptions, Ms. Longo at the front of the classroom idly threatening disciplinary action in one of her signature track suits with asymmetrical geometric patterns, gaudy costume jewelry, lash-to-lid eyeshadow beneath thick-rimmed glasses, smudges of lipstick adorning her incisors.
“Fenstermacher’s walking home with me today,” he said to me one day in class. “Meet us at the corner by the crossing guard.”
After school we convened at the meeting spot, Jim Fenstermacher wearing a dog collar around his neck, his hair dyed some ambiguous shade of dark by a makeshift colorant, his wide smile exposing metal braces and pink gum tissue, a hoop earring in his left ear. In seventh grade if you either convinced your parents to let you get your ear pierced at the mall kiosk or, alternatively, if you were rebellious enough to stick a needle through your own lobe, you were revered, albeit silently for the most part, by your jealous peers. Fenstermacher claimed the latter, citing a ritual involving a safety pin, a lighter, and a potato.
We walked to the cul-de-sac around the corner and trampled through a stranger’s yard, Fenstermacher dragging his bicycle through the pachysandra. Once we reached an area in the woods secluded from view, Sanders opened his backpack and pulled out a soft pack of Kool lights, approximately one-half full, which he had previously swiped from his mom’s purse. He distributed a mentholated cigarette to each of us and passed around a Bic lighter. I held the cigarette between my fingers at chest level and sparked the flame beneath it before bringing it to my lips. I puffed on the filtered end but nary any smoke was present when I exhaled.
“Put it in your mouth and breathe in while you light it,” Sanders said.
The leaves rustled beneath our feet as we ambled along, each of us replicating observed behavior of familiar adults or movie actors, balancing a Kool between the tips of our middle and forefingers, the cherries burning vermilion. Fenstermacher dropped his bike next to a tree, and we hopped along mossy stones over the murmuring creek. His dad kept cartons of Winstons in the fridge, he said. It keeps them fresh. He wouldn’t notice a pack missing.
I was about three-quarters of the way to the cotton when Sanders instructed us how to properly inhale. “You puff and then breathe in deep so you can feel it your lungs.”
I drew in the smoke and erupted in a spontaneous fit of violent, breathless coughing before the sweet nicotine hit my bloodstream. I tried to cover my mouth with my fist. My friends laughed as my chest rattled and flecks of spittle flew.
*****
Now, I’m too young to die but old enough to worry about the cumulative impact all the horrible decisions I’ve made has had on my body and spirit. Fenstermacher was the first person my age whom I had known that was relegated to the past tense in a permanent manner, his life having been cut short behind the wheel of a Chrysler Town & Country shortly after his nineteenth birthday. Sanders and I hadn’t communicated much since high school, though he would sporadically reemerge on social media every year or two with an unflattering selfie taken from an obtuse angle or an old photograph from the glory days recaptured by his phone camera, the subjects partially blurred by the glare from an indoor light source. A picture of a picture uploaded to a digital app. But two winters ago, he appeared in the sinewy flesh like a bolt from the blue, pale red and droning, ringing up an energy drink and a pack of Newports in front of me at a convenience store. Time had dyed his substance pale. He was doing that thing where he picks at his fingernails with the thumb of the same hand, the stickiness of sweat and bourbon lingering beside him like a shadow.
“Holy shit,” he uttered. “How you doing?”
“I’m pissing clear,” I said. “I sleep like felled timber.”
He was going through a divorce, he said, and made a vague reference to being back in the area until certain things got situated.
We exchanged numbers. “The old crew is getting together this weekend,” he said. “It will be just like old times.” And he made this declaration like it was an endorsement and not, say, a dire warning delivered in the tone of an old townie telling a tourist to stay away from a haunted house.
I bummed a smoke for nostalgia’s sake.
Photo of Jack Timko
BIO: Jack Timko is coming to the realization that his greatest ambition is to be what he already is. His work has appeared in ExPat Press, Bruiser Magazine, and Apiary Magazine.