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Learning to Fall: painters smoke.
After school but before we went to the shop to work on more scraping, Terry dragged me over to Ms. Harriet's house to see if Gill was home yet from work. He wasn't so we went up to the back patio and snuck up close to the sliding door. It was locked and we sat against the door frame and looked through the glass, peeking through the spot where the curtains didn't quite cover the whole door, and in there she was and she was half naked!
I tore out of there just as soon as Ms. Harriet spun around and her big boobs swung with her. She looked right at the door and started walking towards it. Terry was right behind me but I swear she saw us.
When Gill and Dad came into the shop to teach us how to spot prime all their plaster patches and show us what we missed, Terry and I both were afraid Gill would have talked to Ms. Harriet and heard from her we were checking out her peep show and then that would be it and we'd be dead and not have to worry about making it to the major leagues one day. I hated the idea that I wouldn't ever get to play in Yankee Stadium just because the first real live boobs I ever saw belonged to the girl of a hairy french guy.
But that didn't happen and we both breathed a sigh of relief when Gill and Dad were their usual selves telling jokes and farting and laughing at the sounds their butts made.
When Dad and Gill walked up the street for beers, Terry grabbed a cigarette from Gill's pack, one of those weird little cigarillo things, and lit it. He smoked one big puff like tough guys in the movies and then coughed until he cried.
"Painters smoke." He told me, grabbing his brush and stumbling up the tall ladder to where he painted the first strokes of his life, holding the smoky ciggie like it was a brittle piece of glass, afraid to drop it.
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