The Battle Lines are Drawn

At first, we drank late at night in locked bathrooms, behind a wall of impenetrable caution. We smoked in nylon coats that never held the stench of stolen drags. We huddled by fans cribbed from old computers that pushed our fumes outside. At first. But now that I had regained the marginal trust of the dorm parents, I began abusing that trust with aplomb. We drank in the bars of the forbidden parts of town, we smoked over-sized cheap Cuban cigars on streets that the authorities used, we played the nickel-slots in the casino right next to the most popular mall in town.

My dorm was split into two floors, I had duped the authorities on my floor but those on the other floor increasingly questioned my continued good behaviour. They made their feelings known more and more, giving me looks of suspicion, probing questions, circumscribed allowances. Here we had it, adults two levels removed from biological imperatives who still lorded paternal authority over me. They suspected I was drinking, I knew they suspected, the danger was there, their glances and aspersions were justified. Christ, I hated that.

But even so, we ate our meals; smiles and cordialities. I inclined my head in prayer's repose. My Potemkin Village, my self-conscious hypocrisy.

So we reached an impasse, a detente which stood as I ended the tenth grade. I had enrolled early in AP Lang (a college-level English class) and picked up a group of books to take back to Peru to get ahead. My personal revolution, fueled by hidden cigarettes, stolen swigs of cheap liqour, and whispered blasphemies now found its heroes in my youthful misapprehensions of French existentialists, Russian radicals, and German social theorists. God, and the dorm parents who were his representatives, now had an ideological enemy.