The Write Place At the Write Time. The writing has been copyrighted, so if you wish to use or quote anything in this story you must properly cite the source, including the author's (Don MacLaren's) name.

          I was generally shy and quiet when I was a student at Saint Stephen Catholic Elementary School, but as the snow melted in the spring of third grade I gradually came out of my shell, just as if the heat from the sun were freeing my soul. I sat in the back of the classroom with two other guys and we tried to disrupt the third grade class as much as we could. The warmer the weather got the more obnoxious we became. We weren't bullies, but we were respected and feared, and thought of ourselves as rebels. It was then, when I was eight years old, that I smoked my first cigarette. One of the other two kids that sat with me in the back of the class said he had some cigarettes and suggested we go somewhere to smoke them. Since I lived less than a block from the school, I led them to the alley behind my house.
          It was in that alley that we smoked, coughed and our heads spun in that dizzy spring of 1968, after the Tet Offensive and just before the assassination of Martin Luther King. We looked at the shards of glass from a broken wine bottle and stepped on them, as if we were trying to destroy the world we inhabited, crush the shards of glass into the sand from whence they came, and wait for a new world to blossom all over again.
          My buddies came over a few more times to smoke. They would bring a few cigarettes they had stolen from their parents and I brought a few that I had stolen from mine. I immediately developed a revulsion for Tareyton 100s, with the charcoal filter, the brand my father smoked. Not that I really loved smoking to begin with when I first started, but I prayed to God that my father would change his brand of cigarettes so that I could rip off something from him I could enjoy smoking.
          The alley behind my house was a psychological border between the two dominant cultures in my hometown of Grand Rapids. There was the white culture that began in the neighborhood I lived in and got whiter and richer the farther east one moved away from the alley, and there was the black culture that got darker and poorer, the farther west one moved. The alley was where they sometimes converged. One of my friends who participated in the cigarette-smoking ritual was black.
          My family lived closer to the stores and restaurants of the middle/working class area at the edge of the ghetto, walking distance away, than we did to the white enclave. When we were kids we often went to the stores, the Tiny Giant ("Tiny things with Giant prices" as we kids used to say) and the Eastown Pharmacy that had a soda fountain we rarely had enough money to sit down and order a drink at. At both the Tiny Giant and the Eastown Pharmacy we would buy candy, MAD magazine, and bubble gum - with the baseball and football cards that went along with it.
          Once in the fifth grade, a friend of mine who resided in the white enclave suggested we rip off one of the stores and I reluctantly went along with him on my first premeditated theft. Up to that time my juvenile delinquency had been confined mostly to stealing cookies from the cookie jar at home or Tareyton 100s, with the charcoal filter. I didn't know what to rip off that day in the store, but when the clerk wasn't looking the first thing that caught my eye was some instant tanning lotion. Since that was the only thing I thought I might be able to use - I think it was between the hemorrhoid ointment and the tampons - I quickly grabbed a bottle, stuck it in my pocket and walked as quickly and unobtrusively as I could out the store, not far behind my friend. I didn't actually need or want suntan oil, but since I stole it I figured I might as well apply it to my skin, which I did that afternoon after I got home. I probably got just about the best suntan I have ever had - in February. This was a suntan lotion full of toxic chemicals that automatically tanned you, without the help of the sun. Later, both my mother and my teacher asked me why I had a suntan. I forget what excuse I used on them but I never did tell them the truth. I tried to wash the tan away, scrubbing and scrubbing as if I were contaminated with radiation, trying to peel the heat off, wishing I could jump out of my skin and run away into the snowy cold of the Michigan winter.
          Another time I went into the Tiny Giant (Tiny things with Giant prices) and ripped off some BBs, figuring I could use them for the BB gun one of my friend’s had. It wasn't a very wise choice since BBs make a loud, shaking sound when you put them in your pocket and try to walk quickly and unobtrusively out the store. Up to that time I'd made wiser choices - candy bars or bubble gum - while enjoying my shoplifting at Tiny Giant during the two or three forays I made there as a young criminal. The clerk of the store stopped me as I was walking towards the door after he heard the "shake-shake" the BBs made in my pocket and ordered me to hand over the contraband. "Don't come in here again," he told me.
          My pre-teen juvenile delinquency never went very far though. My buddies and I lost interest in Tareyton 100s and I learned my lesson about the perils of shoplifting after being caught with the BBs. I was 86'd from the Tiny Giant but several months later I ventured into the store again, hoping the clerk wouldn't recognize me. I picked up a Nestlé’s Crunch bar, sheepishly laying it on the counter. The clerk looked at me and I could tell by that look that he remembered me. But he rang up my purchase and gave me change after I handed him a quarter.
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          A couple years after I smoked my first cigarette, one of the older kids in the neighborhood suggested we go to a large vacant lot one block west of my house we called Farmers' Field, to pick mint and smoke it. Smoking wild mint using notebook paper proved more pleasant than smoking Tareyton 100s. We tried smoking it fresh at first but it was hard to keep lit so we furtively laid some of the leaves out on the roof of my parents' house, which was easily accessible from the window in the room my brother and I shared. We let the mint leaves bake for a day on a section of the roof and smoked them up for a few days in a row after that.
          When we weren't smoking mint that summer we were at Farmers' Field playing baseball. One part of Farmers' Field was a field with wild grass. The Saint Stephen's football teams used it as a place to practice. The grass rarely needed to be cut, because when there wasn't snow on the ground, the field was used so often for football practice and pickup baseball games that the grass didn't have a chance to grow more than a couple inches.
          Another part of Farmers' Field consisted of some woods next to the field itself, where we had picked the mint, and where incongruously there were wasted body parts...of wrecked cars. There was also a rotting log near those body parts that we would walk on, which itself was next to a very small pond - a big puddle actually - about twenty feet in diameter. We would stand on the log and try to walk across it without losing our balance, trying to prevent ourselves from falling into the gross puddle. Cigarette butts surrounded the puddle, and some of them floated on its surface, discarded by some of the older kids from Saint Stephen's, or perhaps by some mysterious stranger we never saw.
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          Like the alley behind my house, Farmers' Field was an unofficial border between the middle class, mostly white neighborhood where I lived and a working/lower class mixed neighborhood at the edge of a ghetto.
          One day we went to Farmers' Field to play baseball, and on the edge of the field - on the ghetto side - we saw a black kid about 15 years. old who held a .22 rifle and eyed us menacingly as we played. There were a few younger black kids about our age surrounding him as he held the gun tightly, marching back and forth, as if he were guarding the entrance to the ghetto. But one of the older kids from my neighborhood called the cops, and the armed black sentry left his post a few minutes later - just before the cops arrived.
          I played in the outfield that day and picked up a line drive that was hit very long by a black kid who lived one street west of mine. It was difficult to judge how a ball would bounce in Farmers' Field because there were so many bumps and holes, but I got it on the second bounce. There was a runner on third, and I just barely threw him out at home plate on one bounce, managing a very long throw, a lot of the kids going "ooh" and "ah," impressed at my skill. To celebrate my accomplishment I took one of the firecrackers I had in my pocket that had been smuggled from someplace (firecrackers were illegal in Michigan) and lit it. Though it had a fuse, the firecracker blew up almost immediately, just as I was releasing it from my hand. My hand stung like hell for an hour or so, and I was probably lucky I didn't lose a finger or two.
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          One evening in late summer when I was about 12 years old, just as the sun was beginning to set, a few friends, my brother and I were hanging out across the street from Farmer's Field, tossing a football back and forth. A couple black guys and a white girl - all of them a couple years older than I - walked to the edge of Farmer's Field and looked across at us. Then, one of the black guys walked across the street and approached us. "Hey, she sellin'," he said, pointing to the white girl. One of the older guys I was with said, "that's OK, we don't need her." It was the first time I had been approached by a prostitute.
          "What's she sellin'?" my brother asked, "marijuana?" We all laughed. "She's sellin' herself," I said, deeply serious, as if I were in religion class, answering a question put to me by one of the nuns. Then, the older kids I was with laughed at me.
          By that time sexual fantasies had begun to occupy a large part of my life. However, I was scared to act them out with the girls I was attracted to. There was a girl who lived across the street who invited me to come over to her basement, but I was too tongue-tied to talk and too physically paralyzed to reach out for her when I finally did make the subterranean journey.
          In eighth grade there was a dance at the end of the school year. I'd had a crush on a girl who sat next to me in Spanish class. After a long debate with myself I finally got the nerve to call her and ask her to the dance, even though I don't think I'd said more than two words to this girl the whole school year. She told me "no," but she was very nice about it. "I'll see you there though," she said. I saw her there while I was standing alone in the corner. She had been asked to the dance by one of the most popular, if not the most popular boy in the class. Ironically, he spent time there with other girls, dancing with them, and I don't think he danced with her once the whole night.
          In my classes I spent time gazing in wonder at the girls budding into puberty. One time, in the 9th grade, a very pretty girl, mature physically beyond her years and part of a very hip clique, noticed me staring at her in English class. She was quite unattainable, and perhaps more appealing because of that. "Stop looking at me," she said, almost, but not quite, under her breath. I did. I was devastated by what she said. But at least she had caught my gaze and we had shared a moment, I reasoned. How nice it would have been if she had smiled at me and we had walked home from school together - alone. I would have been happier than I could have fathomed, but no, instead she metaphorically spit in my face.
          Not long after that I got into the only fight I've ever gotten into during a class. Just as the guy in front of me was about to sit down in Algebra class I pushed his desk and chair away and he fell flat on his butt. I thought it was perfect timing on my part, and I was perversely proud of myself. He quickly got up though, and before I knew it he turned my desk over and I fell backwards, hitting my head hard against the floor. I sprang up and started pushing, punching, and flailing at him. By the time the teacher broke it up I was on the verge of killing him. Thus, the reputation I’d had as a shy, meek kid began to change. The next day someone gave me marijuana (for the first time), and one of the best-looking girls in the school came up to me to congratulate me on winning the fight, and seemed to be making herself sexually available. Meanwhile I sensed that the girl I’d been staring at earlier, was beginning to stare at me.
          By the time I was 14 a lot of kids had started using drugs. I was both curious about drugs and terrified of them at the same time. All the anti-drug propaganda I'd been fed really scared me, and made me feel self-righteous for not doing drugs.
          I threw the marijuana away that I’d gotten after the fight, but later that freshman year in high school a classmate asked me if I wanted to buy some pot. I decided to go ahead and try it. The next day I handed him some of my earnings from my morning Detroit Free Press paper route and bought a bag of marijuana from him.
          A friend of mine from the neighborhood came over the next Friday night. We smoked joints he had rolled in Zig-Zag papers as we stood next to the ice-covered pond in Farmer’s Field, but the marijuana didn’t do anything for me. I slept a few hours that night, woke up at 5:30 to deliver papers, then went to hockey practice.
          The next week though, we rolled the remains of the marijuana I’d bought in notebook paper, just as we had with mint several years before, then made the trek in knee-deep snow to the alley behind my house to smoke it. That time I got high. We walked around outside, laughing after we got buzzed. At one point I jumped head-first into a snowdrift we came to, throwing myself into the cold.
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          A couple years later, when I was playing hockey at Catholic Central High School, one of the girls in the stands noticed me. She was Italian, just slightly overweight, with light brown hair, light skin and a pretty face. A friend of mine told me this girl liked me, and later a meeting was arranged. I remember being in her driveway in the backseat of someone's car in the winter when we began kissing. It was spontaneous - French kissing. I was in heaven - finally after 16 years, I kissed a girl. We saw each other for about a month or so.
          Her dad was a pudgy, balding man with glasses who owned a pizza parlor. He would suspiciously eye me behind the Playboy magazines he read in his den as I entered and left his house. On our second date I entered his house tripping on two hits of purple microdot LSD. My girlfriend didn't have anything to talk about, so she put on an Aerosmith album. I was tongue-tied, looking at the trails coming from her face. Later, she became interested in a Polish guy who went to our cross-town rival school - West Catholic.
          After breaking up with her, a girl stopped me in the hallway at Catholic Central. She told me there was going to be a dance at the high school gym with a good band, and said that she hoped I'd come. I came and she asked me to dance while I was there. Like my first short-lived girlfriend, the girl who asked me to dance was also Italian. It was the first time I'd ever danced with a girl in my life. I thought she was nice. She had olive-skin, black hair and a nice, healthy body. But I was interested in another girl - her fraternal twin sister.
          I told a friend of mine which girl I was interested in, and a week or so later when he and I were sitting in a car in the parking lot, while another dance was taking place in the gym, his girlfriend and the girl I was interested in walked out to the car. They got in and my friend and his girlfriend immediately began making out in the front seat. After a few, uncomfortable seconds my friend's girlfriend turned toward her friend and me, sitting in the backseat. "Do you guys wanna try?" With barely an introduction, we tried. It was great, kissing in the backseat in the Catholic Central parking lot that cold, snowy Michigan night - surrounded by a ghetto and skid row, next to a run-down apartment building inhabited by winos. I felt just about as good as I’d ever felt in my life.
          But Grand Rapids was not the place for me to set down roots and plant my seed. I was destined to run away on fire to someplace like the Golden Gate Bridge, or further, as far away as I could get - and look at the place I'd grown up in from another perspective...like upside down.
          After more than a year together my girlfriend stopped taking my calls and refused to see me after I graduated from high school. I then went through a long, lonely period of acute depression, which I tried to self-medicate my way out of with drugs and alcohol.
          The woman I thought I would marry had disappeared from my life as if she were marijuana smoke I exhaled into the cold air in the alley behind my house.
          Eventually though, after I had quit drugs I found other women, one of whom I nearly married. She and I came from different parts of the country and our skin was different colors – hers black and mine white – but those differences were only superficial. We lived together in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury for a year until fate split us apart when she moved to Europe.
          Later, here in New York City, another woman and I fell in love and lived together, planning to marry. Our native languages were different, but again, there was more we shared than that which separated us, until one day when she told me she had not been destined for me.
          As I write this she is gone. I feel better, however, for having written what I did – tracing pieces of my meandering life’s journey and ending the story with her. I learned long ago that the pain that replaces love after love has run its course does not disappear with drugs or alcohol. Perhaps, having been hurt so deeply when I was a much younger man has inoculated me from the depths of depression I once knew. And anyway, as I complete another chapter in the story of my life I feel that the journeys I have made, which often led me to the depths of pain, were worth the price I was charged when the journeys came to an end.