Maybe I’ve been to the music store where I sleep some nights; it belongs to the uncle of a friend—Ray, my latest crush, another unavailable straight boy; is there any other kind out there? His parents are likewise unpredictable, so it gives us both a place to go, stretching out blankets on the floor between the racks of sheet music and the guitars and drum sets that gleam in the neon glow from the front window. Ray sits up in his underpants, all milk and blue-veined shadow, strumming on his guitar the songs he writes; I smoke and listen admiringly. Ray’s in love with Diane, Diane’s in love with me; together we all sit by her parents’ pool, on mescaline, and turn her mother’s collection of art-glass paperweights in our hands, right in front of our eyes: cities of light, seen from high above the earth. It’s the pattern of my teenage nights: my father slips me ten bucks, twenty bucks, says quietly, “Get lost,” and I do. Twenty bucks is a treasure: dinner at the pancake house, a pack of Camels, bottle of patchouli oil, take a friend to the movies, the all-night coffee shop: there, that’s used hours and hours of the night, which smells, in Tucson, like oleanders, like cooled dust, somebody’s sprinkler running on a midnight lawn. Three A.M., four?