he two girls said they’d kiss us if only we’d steal them a couple cigarette lighters from Drug Fair. “And not no cheap ass Bics, either,” the blonde one yelled, beneath the street lamp, in the middle distance of the parking lot, as Kev and I pushed through the glass door. I knew Courtney, the cashier, who’d been offered a basketball scholarship, but when I nodded, “Hey, man,” he just watched us walk up the tobacco and candy aisle. Kev busied himself examining the different sizes of peppermint patties—a classic diversion—while I stuffed two brass-looking zippos, enclosed in hard plastic, like batteries, into a specially-torn part of my coat’s lining.
     When we went to pay for the peppermint patties, Courtney said, “What you got in your coat?”
     “Nothing, man.”
     “Oh yeah?”
     “Yeah, man,” I replied, as Kev slid him four baseball-sized candies.
     “Cause I seen you in the mirror,” he said, ringing up a dollar fifty. “Both of y’all.”
     We paid, but Courtney held our change. When the manager came striding up to the register, we booked toward the doors, Kev shooting through the one marked “Exit.” I clattered, full body, into the entry door, then followed Kev into the parking lot, sprinting past the knot of cars parked outside Drug Fair. All the other stores had closed, except Sammy’s and the bowling alley, on the short strip of the L-shaped mall.
     “Does he have the fucking lighters?” said the blonde, who stood defiantly, arms folded underneath her breasts.
     “Yeah, he does,” said Kev. “Y’all gonna kiss us?”
     The blonde said, “I’m gonna kiss you. She’s gonna kiss him. But there ain’t gonna be no kissing until we see the lighters. Does he have the fucking lighters?”
     I reached into my coat for the zippos and both girls went to work tearing open the plastic, and with limber wrists, whipping the small flames to life. Kev and the blonde walked out of the street lamp. A minute later, they broke the quiet only by saying, “mmmm,” or smacking their lips.
     The dark haired one, my girl, finally said “Hi.”
     I said “Hi.”
     We positioned our legs about shoulder width apart, we tried arranging our hands on the other’s body, we both leaned in at the same time, clashing our foreheads. She applied some strawberry lip gloss. We started to kiss, closed-mouth. I felt as if I were on ice, my lips sliding all over hers. Just then, a police cruiser came to a stop outside Drug Fair, its lights flashing.
     “Kev,” I shouted, and the four of us began to run, the girls, their asses in jeans, toward an apartment complex, The Point, Kev and I toward the woods behind the mall.
     “Did she French you?” he cried.
     “Yeah,” I shouted, my breath before me, “yeah, she did.”
     We hunched down as the cruiser drove by, a few times, playing its spotlight across the tree trunks. Eventually, the policeman drove off. A voice behind us yelled, “Get yo’ hands off yo’ puss!” Kev and I both startled, jumping into the air. “Whoo hoo hoo hoo,” said the voice, until I went and found it. The voice belonged to Bobby Mason, a little guy, ninth grade like us, with an older face, like he was thirty-five or forty years old. “Y’all was scared,” he said. “Y’all was like, They’s a Negro in the hedge.” I tried to say, “It’s not like that, Bobby,” but he kept going “Whoo hoo hoo hoo.”
     After he calmed down, he produced a short pipe and a sandwich bag full of brown powder he called hash. We smoked the stuff, one of us lighting the pipe as another toked, even though the pipe’s filter failed, and bits of burning powder caught in our throats. I kept meaning to say, “This ain’t hash. I don’t feel a thing.” I tried to express a correlation between the opposite gender and a police action, but we stood there, the three of us, shivering in our paper-thin shirts, for hours.

ittle Mike chewed me out on the third day of work. “I told you to stand over here,” he said. “Not all the way over there. Can’t you fucking understand?” He might’ve had two or three inches on the tallest midget, and wore a boytoy long-in-the-front haircut. He managed the legislative operations of Washington Federal News Service out of a closet media space in the Rayburn House Office Building. Guys like me set up WFNS recording equipment in subcommittee hearing rooms and recorded the members of Congress, and expert witnesses, during the course of testimony, questions, and answers.
     Little Mike had me train with Rick, a black man with dreadlocks who, during a break, read a book called Monkey on a Stick. When asked, he told me that the book covered the Hare Krishnas. “Are you a Hare Krishna?” I joked, and did a doubletake when he nodded, yes. “I went into the army at 18,” he said. “When I come out, I needed somethin’ to do. So I went into the Hare Krishnas.” He paused. “I mean, I likes my coffee and my beer and my girlfriend. They don’t know about all that.” He paused again. “I seen ‘em whoop a li’l ass. But who don’t? Who don’t whoop a li’l ass these days?”
     I began to sit through all kinds of hearings. The Hollywood brass, smiling cool millions, came before House Commerce, to press for legislation preventing online music downloads. Medical researchers came before House Government Reform to present their long overdue and largely incompetent findings on the effects, on U.S. servicemen, of the defoliant, Agent Orange. The administrator of NASA even yelled at the chairman of House Science, “Get a grip, space is a rugged frontier,” after the members had criticized NASA’s loss of Mars probes due to one engineer calculating important figures in inches and another, the metric system. After a long day on The Hill, I would drop the equipment downstairs at Mike, who sat at a desk in the closet and would say, “The Duma. I’ve got the fucking Duma on the phone.”
     A few weeks into my stint with WFNS, I came into work, and found Rick and a few of the others presiding over Little Mike, who had a fat lip, broken nose, and black eyes. “Pissed off the wrong guy,” I whispered to Rick, who flashed me a “no shit” twist of his face. I’d heard Little Mike, on more than one occasion, chewing out Rick: “What the fuck are you doing, looking over my shoulder half the time? Go outside. Why don’t you go outside.”
     Not long after that, maybe a day or two, even, Mike called me at home. I had just received a reply from my submission to the Antioch Review. “No,” it read on the back of the envelope in neon purple ink. They hadn’t sent my poems back or sealed the envelope. They just said “No.” My girlfriend, Marianne, had thrown me out the night before, for not having said “I love you” after she had. And a rat had gnawed through my neighbor’s wall into my kitchen cupboard, chewed through the cupboard door, chewed through the plastic trash can and into the trashbag, torn up tinfoil into shiny little shards and dragged off a lamb chop bone. All that and a voice on the phone said, “Ohhhh!”
     I said, “Mike, is that you?”
     “Ohhhh!” he said.
     “Are you okay, man?”
     “I got mugged,” said Little Mike.
     “I know, man. I saw you a couple days ago.”
     “No, I got mugged, again.”
     “Do you want to get a beer?” I said.
     “What’re you,” said Little Mike, “some kind of faggot? What I’m going to get, is some pussy.” And he hung up.
     I tried to quit a little while later but Little Mike pleaded with me to stay, begrudgingly praising my work and making small guy jokes in my and Rick’s presence. When we laughed, Mike snapped at us, “Shut the fuck up,” slamming the closet door behind him. We could hear the phone ringing in there. “Federal News,” said Little Mike. Then he said something, it seemed, in Russian.