Adventures in Christmas Tree Burning
Tommy Morris was wiry, sinewy. Gap-toothed and muscle-teed, black hair pomaded-back all gummy and matted. The sort whom you’d call “methy” if you’d’ve known what the term was back then. But being a kid, you didn’t. Being a kid you didn’t know much. That’s what the grownups always said: “That kid, he don’t know shit. He’s just a kid.”
But Tommy Morris, he was strong and scrawny as a birch switch, not an ounce of fat on him, and he rode a BMX like it was a go-cart blasting downhill, taking dirt jumps no other kid would’ve even thought about trying. It’s not that he was that daring or overly stupid about it. He just didn’t care. Fear wasn’t a part of his makeup. He just thrashed his way through adolescence, listening to heavy metal on his walkman, scabbing up his knees and face and elbows, his greasy black mane flailing, and a face like Mick Jagger scarred-up after some botched plastic surgery. He started smoking at age seven, was suspended from elementary school multiple times by age 10, and got arrested for stealing batteries from the local Save-On at 11. He had an older brother, Daniel, who died of cancer when we were teenagers. His mom was an anemic wreck who bundled up in a peacoat and a shawl and wore dark sunglasses in public while she chain smoked through her days, leaving smudges of red lipstick all over the butts.
