“There’s a difference, man. ” Joey sternly looks away, admonishing my statement. “How could there be a difference, between a girlfriend sucking someone else’s dick, and a girlfriend fucking someone else? It’s the same fucking thing, penis penis penis going into an orifice on her body. If he fucked her left nostril, it would be the same thing because she let him do it. She’s enjoying it.”
“No, stop right there. That’s the difference.”
“No difference. She gets pleasure out of sucking his dick. You don’t get pleasure out of eating pussy?”
“-Well, that’s different. I mean, some days that shit tastes like the dumpster behind an Italian restaurant, but most days, it can be like fresh morning dew, and even Mountain Dew , if you’re into that kind of thing-”
“And she likes the tastes of cock.”
“NO! Simply unfathomable. You know how guys store their junk. It’s a fucking swamp down there. The fucking jock itch, and fucking cheesy smell-”
“Hey, maybe to girls, that’s like pussy to us. Chemicals, man.”
I look away, breifly, and take a puff of my cigarette, and return fire.
“The difference between fucking and sucking is two fold. One, physical versus psychological. As animals, we have the desire to reproduce, and it is a physical requirement that we have sex on a regular basis. Intercourse, further defined, where a penis and a vagina meet. Physically, we have the need to fuck. But , there is no physical need to suck dick. In terms of reproduction, it’s useless! Swallowing a load is in fact anti-nature, to feed off of one’s living fluids. The desire to suck dick is a psychological need, that stems from the second part of my case.
She is choosing to give pleasure to a man. Acts of kindness have a response on the giver. Chemical reactions in the brain make the body feel good. And chicks want to feel good.
Fucking, on the other hand, can be the most selfish act one can engage in. It can be a total physical and emotonal need, and the other person simply needs to be there. She doesn’t want to give pleasure to the man. She wants to fuck, and fuck something hot. No need to suck his dick, just fuck him. “

Sitting on a rotten wood log in the woods along the beach is not my idea of a Saturday well spent.  The cold, damp mist hanging low from the fog clouds enveloped around the warm cigarette smoke which left our lungs through our mouths.  In the distance, the sound of the Atlantic water crashing upon the beaches, bringing with them collections of straw gathered from the wetlands, and old fishing piers smashed to pieces in a late summer storm.

“It feels like we do this every day, man.  How long we’ve been doing this for?”

I took a drag from my Newport, and exhaled, as I looked to the sky for an answer.

“Well, we haven’t been doing this for too long.  It was only a short while ago that all we did was hang out in your treehouse and play manhaunt.  ”

“That was a while ago dude.”
“Ya, 92 I guess.  Remember that?  Just before we built the treehouse, we carved the names in that tree in your yard.”

“We use to chill there for maaad long.  Didn’t we each have a branch?”
“Yep, and we had our initials on our branches, and then we had the ones of all the members of the group on the trunk, just as you step past the first niche.”

He inhaled some of the dank smoke.  “Yeah, that shit was great.  I mean, back then I didn’t think all this shit would be going down.  We’re the only three kids left that havent been fucked up some how?  Teej is in jail, Ronnie’s pregnant, and with Mario’s kid.  Mario is shooting heroin somewhere, Kathy’s blowing him, and lil Drew is robbing delis.  ”

Lissy chimes in.

“And what the fuck are we?  Kris, you aint graduated high school, and you don’t have no fucking job.  Jay, you fucking spent all that time in school, and now all you do is sit on the beach and write in that fuckin’ notebook, smoking this shit.”

Anne inhaled from the blunt.

“And me?  I don’t have a license, and I get laid off from every job I get.  What the fuck makes us this great chosen three?”

I quickly tried to mellow the situation.

“Baby, honey, look, that’s not what we meant.  We’re just trying to state the complexity that exists in real life, rather than the simplicity of our youths.  And sometimes, you know, it’s ok to wish for those days to return.
“When we were kids, babe, we had it all, and we didn’t even know it.  It was our ideas, our visions, that coulda changed the world, and yet we sat there blind to everything else.  We let those days slip away.  We have to remind ourselves that we can’t let anything slip away from us again.  ”

I took my last couple drags from the blunt, which had reached roach level.  I licked my finger, and put out the ember on the tip.  Anne stood there, with her head tilted, just kinda dumbfounded and such.  Murdazz had already begun spitting rhymes to himself as he sat upon the wood log.

I lifted my cigarette to my mouth, and took a drag, as I turned my head toward the small spot of blue that hung over the horizon as I looked toward the ocean.  For a moment in time, hope seemed possible, and I became determined to ensure that the sunny day ahead gets taken full advantage of.

It’s so cold out tonight.

My landlord watches me from the first floor of the house where my apartment is, down near our beach on the island. He yelled at me the other night when I got home, telling me I was playing my music too loud and stinking up his house with cigarettes.  I told him I no nothing of what he was speaking about, since I smoke my cigarettes every else in the world except my apartment, and that I listened to my music on my headphones.  Besides, I wasn’t even at my apartment during the hours he spoke of, and suggested that he speak with his daughter, claiming that she’s been crushing on me like that chick that scratched up Cary Elwes’ car in The Crush, and that there better not be a fucking carousel in the attic that I don’t know about, or else it’s gonna end up in a bloody showdown where’s she’s gonna hit you over the head with a crow bar, and then comes after me and I’m gonna have to punch her in the face and knock her down like fucking Buster Douglas to Mike Tyson.  He stood back, and paused, and apologized to me, saying that his daughters always get crushes on the guys that rent the apartment, and that two of his older daughter actually started dating the tenents.  I said I did not know that, and acepted his apology, and then went back to smoking my cigarette and waiting for Bill to show up so that we could smoke the blunt I had rolled up just ten minutes ago.

“NIGGASSSSSSSSS!”
The stereo echoed the sound of TuPac out throughout the neighborhood, as we turned down a side street in Midland and parked under the darkness of the low lying trees.
Bill turned to me.
“Light?”
The lights of the streets sparkled bright across the winter sky that stretched and enclosed the lil ol’ world of New York City.  It was no longer cold, and was no longer as deep and harsh as I thought ten minutes ago.

Brown and black damp leaves carpeted the dirt road where streets had been paved at one time.  The mist of the humid winter air had been converted into rain by the branches and the leaves that had survived the early nor’easters and now clung steadfast to the limbs of the tree boughs.  Fifty feet below the canopy, the pungent skunky smoke curled up ahead of the its second hand cloud and dissipated into the early evening fog.  Its chimney was built of five people standing in the cypher, passing a crudely made blunt that Kris had to adjust in order to get it to pull correctly.

There was me, that is Jay, and my three dudes, that is Billy, Murdazz, and Kris.  Anne had come along for the cypher as well, and we stood in the heart of the woods along New Dorp Beach, standing just off of one of the lesser traveled paths that ran perpendicular to the dunes that bound the woods and the beach behind.

It was a time in out lives and a time in the year where we chalked up everything of the past and began to take inventory of what we had accomplished.   Had we grown? Had we become better friends?  Are we having fun?  It’s difficult to even remember what we had talked about, but I know the conversation had meaning and humor behind it.  The content gets clouded by anxiety of waiting for the next two puffs and the pass to the left.

Kris passed to Bill.  Puff.  Hold.  Listen.  Exhale.  Listen.  Repeat.  Pass to Murdazz., who mimics, then me, I follow suit, then Anne, again, and back to Kris.  Now come shotties.   Then we play Chicago, but we call it New York.  Then we are high, and we forget.

I’m paranoid.  The cops are waiting.  Kris is too fucking loud.  So is Bill.  Murdazz is cooperating, but now he’s freestyling and Johnny’s dad could be walking the rottweilers in the woods and catch us any second, and he fucking hates Kris because he blew up that window that one time with an M-80, and the dogs will bite our faces and play with our guts like rubber chew toys.   They’re all fucking with me, every one of them.  I’ve gotta cover up the smoke, someone 500 yards to 5 miles away might smell it.  I light up a Newport.

The woods looks great this time of year.  The rotting smell of organic wet matter.   We’re all done, so we walk out of the woods and onto the beach.  The moon strains to glow, and the ocean sings in crashing waves.  I’m baked.  I love it.

The gray sky met the Lower New York Harbor behind a screen of barren trees along the sand dunes. The diffuse light of the sky reflected back on the blanket of snow covering Miller Field, hiding the divoted soccer fields, the sandlot softball fields, and the Canadian goose shit that started plaguing the field sometime after the ‘92 Nor’Easter. The snow had stopped falling five hours ago; unusual for it to be like this in March just a few days before spring. The airplane hangars were the only man-made objects not obscured by the snow.I had trekked into the heart of Miller Field. No one could find me tucked behind my two foot high snow fort, still under construction, and strategically located in such a remote location that no one dared invade, or else be subjected to a Napoleon-esque defeat thanks to a stockpile of over one hundred snow balls which had turned into stones overnight during a brief rain shower. I took a break from building the igloo barracks and laid down upon the snow. I looked into the sjy and listened only to the ocean waved that played the same song over and over again as long as they had a bit of sand and rock to gently crash upon. The sounds of plows occasionally broke through the muffled silence imposed by a good snow storm, lou enough to pry my attention away from meditation and put me back to my solitary work ahead of me.

I always enjoyed being alone. The solitude allowed for me to meditate on a world that I was 12 years into my scholarly observation of, far advanced from my early work of studying how certain shaped objects can be hammered into particularly shaped holes, how block structures fail due to impacts caused by plastic vinyl figures of muscle men in loincloths, and how insect colonies react under duress caused by sudden flooding. The world became more and more fascinating the longer I took to study it. I worked upon an abstracted Earth, where the snow muted the distraction of the human world enough for me to study the smells of a late Staten Island winter, the feel of a twilight snowy air, the sight of a field that quite possibly ran off into infinity from what my eyes could see, the sound of the wind over snow and harbor waves on brown sand and sea glass, and the taste of frost fallen from the sky. These were things that children spent years studying, including myself, but I needed this one last observational study to remember what it was like to be a kid in winter, in snow, because in one more year, I’d be a teen and I’d just stop caring.

A snowball flew over my head. My fort was under attack. I mustered my troops to their stations, and peered over the wall to see the enemy approaching. I crawled against the fort and gathered several artillery shells in my hand and readied to fire.