Ten Stories About Smoking by Stuart Evers Page B

looked up at my half-naked best friend. Slowly a smile took shape across his mouth. His lips were fleshy and wide for his face; the dimples in his cheeks making him seem childlike. He started
to laugh, and I laughed too. His eyes were bloodshot; he’d not been sleeping well.
    O’Neil put his T-shirt back on and collapsed into the sofa. We went back to watching the television. Murder, She Wrote. When it was over, I touched him lightly on the arm.
    ‘If you really do want to lose some weight, I don’t mind helping,’ I said.
    O’Neil cracked a long, contagious smile, as warm as the room and just as comforting.
    ‘That’s why you’ll always be my bitch, Robert Wilkinson,’ he said. ‘You always know exactly the right thing to say.’

    Two days later, dressed in sweatpants and sweatshirts, the two of us wandered the streets of Brooklyn on the way to the gym O’Neil’s uncle owned. It was a
twenty-minute walk through shit-smeared sidewalks and gutters bearded with spent crack vials. The concrete walls and reinforced grilles of the shops were heavy with graffiti. Spindly men and women
hung around doorways and the spaces by dumpsters. Two cop cars drove past, both with their lights and sirens turned off. When the third passed by, I began to regret that I’d offered to help.
Sportswear has never become me and I couldn’t imagine dying dressed like that: an eternity decked out in Nike, Adidas and Fila.
    ‘I haven’t been round here in years,’ O’Neil said, his face shrouded by his hooded sweatshirt. I kept my head down, uncomfortably snug in the soft cotton. In the middle
distance, the sign for Charlie’s Gym swung back and forth. O’Neil pointed it out with enthusiasm.
    ‘This is going to be great, Rob,’ he said, then paused. His hood still up, he leant down to me. ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘I appreciate this, I really do.’

    Charlie’s Gym was above a second-hand electrical goods shop. O’Neil and I went up the back stairs, the smell of piss and disinfectant violent at the bottom, changing
to a more general body smell the closer we got to the gym itself.
    O’Neil pushed open the door into a pigeon-grey space illuminated by harsh strip lighting. In the centre was a ring where Charlie was training a young black kid. Charlie held a pair of
focus gloves up and away from his face and the kid was smashing his fists into them. We watched him punch as we wandered past a knot of ripped, tattooed men, working dumb-bells like lifers. No one
spoke to us, but the light rain of skipping, the grunting abuse of the focus gloves and the shuffle of feet was ample distraction from their silence.
    Charlie called break and O’Neil held up his arm.
    ‘Uncle Charlie!’
    ‘Jackie!’ he said and clambered out of the ring. ‘So you’re finally here, eh? Finally you wanna lose these guts, right?’ He was laughing and holding
O’Neil’s rolls of fat in his hands. O’Neil laughed and raised an eyebrow at me.
    ‘You’re going to be in a whole world of pain for weeks, you know that? You ready for it?’ O’Neil was on the balls of his feet and already dancing.
    ‘I am, Uncle Charlie,’ he said as he aimed a comic punch at his temple. ‘I wanna be a champion not a chump.’
    ‘Good man,’ he said and then the two of them stopped jabbing and dancing and sparring. Charlie was taller than I expected, better looking. He was in his late fifties, lithe, with an
impressive musculature and sharp black eyes. He looked at me then. If he’d worn glasses he’d have peered over the top of them.
    ‘Who’s this?’ he said to O’Neil.
    ‘This is my good friend Robert Wilkinson,’ O’Neil said. ‘He’s from England.’
    Charlie nodded toward me and held out his hand. ‘Nice to meet you.’
    His grip started out limp then got stronger, like he was playing peanuts. His face turned red and I laughed. Eventually he released me.
    ‘With that hair,’ he said, ‘you look like a little girl, you know