He looks tired, a kind of coffee stain of fatigue under his placid brown eyes. He wipes flecks of dried spit off the corners of his mouth before speaking. His eyes are always flitting, flitting, even as he is always flicking, flicking his rich, noxious cigarette.

"There are few things in life," he tells me, "that I enjoy more than a cigarette and a working MP3 player." Flick, flick. His eyes look at me briefly, and then at some other place, over my left shoulder and then under my armpits, before they settle on a shivering leaf on the cold cement. "I come home from a hard day at - well, not really a hard day. Just a long one. One unseparated string full of beads - beads of school, beads of work, beads of dealing with my butthole friends. I come home from a day of beads and I just want to smoke a stupid cigarette and listen to, I don't know, contemplative guitar music or something. Is that so wrong?"

He looks at me now, as if daring me to tell him that is so wrong. I don't say anything. I'm content to wait. He is pressing his hair flat, because it goes everywhere even when he wants it to stay down. And hair gel just makes it looks greasy. Flicking, flicking infinitely.

"There are cities, whole cities, trying to outlaw me smoking a cigarette in my goddamn car," he says. "How can a whole city tell me what I can or cannot do in my car? Something as obviously juvenile and self-sustaining as a nicotine fix. I would understand if I was under the age of legal consent. But I am not. I can, and I will." He tugs at his sleeves now, because he wears shirts with sleeves long enough to tug at, or maybe they just stretched out that way, Abercrombie tends toward comfortable habits.

"I got stuck behind a bus yesterday," he tells me, and he becomes a living monologue of a really bitchy person stuck behind a bus, which when you are, is your default personality. "And I couldn't even light a goddamn cigarette while I was waiting for it to..." Wording escapes him. Tug, press, flick, flick, tug, flit. "... gestate."

"Gestate?" I say.

"Like, spit out its kids."

"There's actually a term for that, I think. Birth? The bus would give birth."

"Buses don't give birth, that's stupid."

"No, that's true," I agree.

He pauses and sits down, heavily, like Atlas is shrugging his luggage onto him. Onto a stool that rocks back and forth with a special fourth leg that isn't quite the length of its three cool older brothers. He stares out at his backyard, which has not been cut in some months, resembling an uncouth and frigid place where happy plants come to die. He stares at the golden mess the sun is leaving on his lawn as it wanes in the early digits of the six o'clock hour. Stares so long, he must be doing so for some purpose; all the while tugging, and flicking, and shifting his toes around in his smelly socks. I can see them bumping up against the damp suede of his old, out-of-work Pumas, like an unfortunate person who wakes up in a body bag.

In staring, his eyes go unfocused, and his voice drops a few octaves.

"It seems so much like a horse pill to swallow," he says, and then stamps out the embers of his cigarette. The filter comes apart with the force of it, and the cotton comes yawning out from a long nap. He pulls out a squat cardboard box that rattles with its emptiness. A pack of full-flavored coffin nails, dwindling down from a frequent affair with his respiratory system. And if he stares at the overgrown twine of his backyard any longer it might just cut itself.

"Just another fucking bead," he comments, and shakes the pack with a sound like a death rattle. "I need another one. Just one more, then we'll go in. You want?"