We were divided on the best time to settle down. Drugs thought that twenty-five was a good age to get married “as long as your old lady’s twenty-one or younger.” Tommy the Wire said he’d wait until he was thirty-five and then marry a twenty-one-year-old. “That way,” he said, “when you’re fifty, she’ll only be thirty-one. And by the time she starts getting real nasty, with the knotty legs and all, you’ll either be planted or you won’t be able to get it up no more anyhow.”

“You’re both crazy,” DeCenz said. “You marry a twenty-one-year-old chick when you’re twenty-five. Then when you’re thirty-five and she’s thirty-one, you become a Mormon and marry another twenty-one-year-old.”

“Who wants to be a Mormon?” the Wire asked.

“You kidding?” DeCenz said. “Those guys have like fifty wives each. And they’re fucking hot.”

After the Hilltop closed, Mousy, DeCenz, the Wire, and I climbed the water tower. “I’m sick of the East Coast,” Mousy said. “It’s too damn crowded and, what the hell, just because I was born here don’t mean I gotta stay. I’m thinking of heading out West.”

“What’s wrong with Pawtucket?” Tommy the Wire asked.

“Sick of it,” Mousy said. “It’s taking me nowhere, real slow. Just look at all the people who commit side-sui around here.”

“Where?” the Wire asked, indignant.

“Here,” Mousy said, “all over the East.” He lit a butt. DeCenz looked at me. (Of my friends, only he and Mousy knew about my mother.)

“Oh, cut the shit,” the Wire said. “You’d have to be a fucking fruitcake to even consider side-sui.”

“You’d be surprised,” Mousy said. “Anyone could do it. I could. Too much pressure, too little fresh air, too little time. I don’t like taking orders, and I ain’t gonna sell out. A couple years I’ll be twenty and then thirty, and,” he paused, “that could be it.”

Mousy was referring to a pledge he’d made that when he turned thirty he was going to scrutinize his life and, should he not approve of what he saw, it was going to be el leapo from the nearest unoccupied water tower. Called it “beating the bombs.” We always got a kick out of him when he spoke of this event because his eyeballs would bulge, his tongue would hang, and then he’d stretch out his arms and turn them in a circular motion as if falling to his death.

“Gonna be clean living, early to bed and early to rise,” Mousy said. “You can drink right out of the streams and rivers in some of those west states, you know.”

DeCenz said, “Sounds nice. No smog, no black snow, no oil distilleries.”

“Fuck no,” Mousy said. “Just fresh air, mountains, trees, and lots of clean snow. You can avoid being a statistic out there.”