Be Happy, Go Lucky 

Joe Walpole  

Boyhood, if you’ll remember, was performance art. So I traded my youth for a cigarette. At the time, I considered it a good deal. Cigarettes went well with coffee and beer and rock-‘n’-roll, and I never wanted to be young. My youth was shot anyway as I blew through my days in diners and donut shops and dances, then, later, discos and bars and romances. Truth to tell, I was a miserable sonofabitch from eighteen to eternity. My family had collapsed, God had died; I put a sign on my door that said, gone drinking. I hated who I was, and I hated who I was not. Soon, I had a face twice my age. The bitter acrid taste in my mouth from constant smoking was also the bitter acrid taste of my heart. So I smoked like a chimney; I smoked like a train, one damn coffin nail after another. I once counted them up and came up with something like 292,807 cigarettes, conservatively estimated. All this started back when cars had faces and faces had cigarettes and cigarettes had their place as props in the ritual of teenage truculence.