Boys of Life Read Free

couldn't tell whether he thought it was a hoot or not.
    "It wasn't too bad for me," I told him. "Live and let live— that's my motto."
    "It's a good motto," said Carlos. "It's my motto too." He handed me another beer, my fourth or fifth I guess. I remember thinking how
    I ir felt to he talking like I was. I didn't have too many friends,
    K since everybody I knew at high school was so feeble minded 5< i most of the time I didn't s.i V anything much to anybody.
    But Carlos really did seem to want to know about me. It's funnv 1
    i thought th.it w,is weird, it was just something 1 accepted about
    ( .irl<>s from the very first. This 1 never minded telling him amthin
    now, which I wouldn't normally <\^ with somebody. He just let me t.ilk, and lu- listened, and he nevei told me much a himself In retun >u could say thai even ten yean latei I
    still don't hi. w majOl mi him.
    • that majoi facts tell you anything, ["he Carlos I knew was
    erybody i 1m hi^us his m< I his
    hat ill the 11. ! about him Wh.it I kneu
    D H

    BOYSOFLIFE □
    the Carlos who'd sit there and listen to you ramble on about anything and study you like you were the most interesting person he'd ever met.
    It's stupid little things I remember—the way he never ate a slice of pizza till it was cold. I chalked it up to his being so interested in listening to me talk—but later I learned he always did that. He was scared of burning his tongue; I mean, the way other people are scared of drowning, or snakes. Maybe that's bizarre, but it's why Carlos never drank a hot cup of coffee or ate a bite of hot Umk\ straight from the oven.
    That's a stupid little thing, but it's Carlos. It's just as much Carlos as all those movies he made and everything the newspapers said about him after he got famous, or maybe I should call it notorious.
    "So what I want to know, Tony," Carlos asked me, "is what did you think about all that stuff with your mom and dad? I mean, when you sat down and thought about it. That's pretty rough stuff."
    I had to shrug. "I guess I never really sat down and thought about it," I told him.
    "But don't you ever try to put it all together? How one thing leads to another/what it all means?"
    All I could do was make a face.
    "I'm dead serious," he said. "You really should think about these things." He leaned forward, like he had some secret to tell me, and I remembered thinking how he was looking right through me like some maniac, all bright black eyes I couldn't look away from. "Otherwise," he said, "if you don't think, then who're you going to be? How're you going to know anything? Look—try this: every ni^ht before you go to sleep, choose one thing you remember and then think about it. Try to think what came before it, and then what came before that, and try thinking back as far as you can."
    "Okay," I said. "Sure."
    "See where it gets you," he told me. "I guarantee—you'll find out all sorts of things. Useful things. You'll be amazed." He pointed to his head. "It's all in there. You discover you're a totally different person from the one you think you are."
    I'd stuffed myself on pizza and he hadn't had a bite. But his eyes were fired up with a kind of excitement. I was prett) skeptical.
    "The kind of nightmares I have," I told him flat out, I can just see the trouble I'd go getting myself into it I wis to lie there thinking about things before I went to sleep."
    "Exactly," he said. "Exactly. That's why you have- those night-

    □ PAUL RUSSELL
    mares. You're not thinking about those things you need to think about. And they have to get out somehow."
    Maybe if Carlos had left me just with that—gotten up and walked away right there—then that would've been enough. That would've done it. Who knows? Here I am ten years and a few thousand miles down the road, and there's not much else to do except lie around and think. And think and think. Who knows? It hasn't helped the nightmares any—Carlos was wrong about that. But sometimes I get the feeling, if I