IF HIS FATHER LEFT a cigarette butt in the toilet bowl he tried to break it up with a stream of urine. He and his friends urinated in arcs to see whose would go higher. Projective devices like bows and arrows, peashooters, and slingshots were banned in his neighborhood, but a boy from another neighborhood would visit with a BB gun and let him use it. Its kick and the sure sound of the BB hitting a bottle, can, or tree, or merely the idea of the BB flying off in the air filled him with satisfaction. His older brother acquired a .22-caliber rifle to shoot in deserted areas around their summer place; he was forbidden to touch it. When no one was home he would play with it, although his brother had removed and hidden the firing pin. He liked to fling clamshells into the wind so that they bucked and stayed aloft, or with the wind, which lengthened their flight two- or three-fold. He scaled flat stones on calm water, watching them hop till spent. In winter he dropped snowballs from his window, sometimes on passers-by. As the weather warmed he stored snowballs in the freezer for later use. Once, after a heavy snow and partial thaw, the temperature dropped again and the surface snow froze into an icy crust. He and his friends went to the roof of their apartment house, broke off foot-square chunks, and heaved them over the edge. One of them hit a convertible and broke through the canvas top. Screaming with fright and joy, they ran down to the street, but the car was gone. From his uncle, who died suddenly, he inherited fine pinch-nosed pliers, with which he cut copper wire into half-inch pieces and bent them into U-shaped pellets, which he shot with a rubber band at objects and people. When there was no snow he dropped marbles from his window; if they didn’t break they bounced high off the sidewalk. When he masturbated, the initial spurt of semen would sometimes form two connected globules, which would swing around one another like twin stars, followed by two or three spurts of diminishing thrust and mass. A rage for water guns took over his freshman high school class, so that students put milk containers filled with water into their desks and through unused inkwell holes drew water to squirt at one another. One day while a teacher was writing on the blackboard he squirted water on the gray slate, which turned black in inverted peaks as the water ran downward. On the Fourth of July the summer he was fourteen he took six skyrockets apart, noting how they were made, and constructed one big rocket with tape and cardboard; it went off in a bright blaze on the ground. Before he reached the age at which his brother had been allowed a rifle he went into the army. The weight, appearance, noise, smell, purpose, and care of the army rifle made shooting it unpleasant for him. After the armistice he and another soldier urinated into the barrels of their rifles the night before the rifles were to be turned in for the last time. He plays tennis now, and once in a while almost every shot of a game seems perfectly hit, the ball springing low and hard from the center of the racket. He will consider keeping a rifle in his apartment against intruders, but the thought that he might become depressed and commit suicide with it will dissuade him. He will throw back to children balls that roll to his feet in the park and ask himself if the children note an eagerness he remembers in the faces of old men returning balls to him when he was a child. Occasionally in the morning he will wonder if he could urinate out the chest-high window above the toilet bowl in his bathroom; he will not try it although he will at times slowly retreat from the bowl to see what thrust is left to him.