Hotboxing
We’d jam into the boys’ room on the first floor at St. Mary’s High.
Twenty squirming adolescents in a space made for eight or nine.
We should have renamed that bathroom the cancer ward. With
visibility near zero, the smoke-cloud so thick you could cut it
with a crucifix, someone would light a fag and pass the
gleaming death stick around. The idea was to keep puffing, one
boy to the next, until the gasper turned into a red-ashed lung dart
of unsmokeable heat and finally gave out. We must have smelled,
all of us, like the bottom of an ashtray left to bake in the back of a bar.
The priests and the few male teachers had their own restroom
and rarely ventured into our smoke-cave. Every now and then,
with no predictable frequency, Sister Hendrick, whom we lovingly
called “The Great White Whale” for her girth and pristine
Dominican habit, would open our bathroom door, gag and yell,
“You asses, get out here!” That’s what we loved about her, the only
nun we had who swore. Still, we ignored her entreaties to exit our
pack-generated gas chamber, so obsessed we were, as Ahab with
his fish, determined to feed our addiction to capitalism’s leafy Lethy.