I showed it to Jules and he stuck it in the cassette player. It was a shock when we turned it on. It was a man singing and shouting in Russian. He screamed at the top of his lungs when he sang. I had never heard a man sing like that. He sounded like an irate drunk screaming at his wife through the bathroom door to hurry the hell up. Instead of sounding like birds singing or pretty ladies, or wind chimes, it sounded more like garbage bags being dropped out windows, or people throwing cups and dishes up against a wall because they were outraged. These were all sounds that you wouldn't think were music. It was exciting. Jules liked the tape as much as I did. It became the tape that we listened to all the time. We simply couldn't get enough of it. I listened to it in the bath, or lying on the carpet doing my homework. Jules and I even listened to it while we watched TV. We tried to figure out what he was singing about because, of course, we didn't know a word of Russian.

"Maybe he's singing about how he isn't speaking to his best friend?" I suggested.

"He probably came home drunk and ran over the family dog. Now he knows his wife is going to kick him out for good. He's feeling real sorrowful."

I thought that Jules became a poet when he interpreted these songs. These days he only seemed to speak to me when I'd done something like leave the bathtub a mess. Then he cursed me and the day I was born so hard that even the neighbors heard. But now, sometimes, when the music was playing, he would say something just regular and thoughtful, as if we were still friends.

Alphonse was a big guy, with dark red hair and big blue eyes. He had a tattoo of a rose right on the top of his spine that would peek out from the top of his shirt sometimes. He had a scraggly beard and his hair was in little dreadlocks that stuck up. It reminded me of the way cartoon cats looked after they'd been blown up. It was beautiful.

"How did your dad die?"

"My dad used to be a bum. After he left one time, he sent my mother some counterfeit money for child support. He got killed falling off a city bus or some shit like that. I think that his ghost talks to me sometimes."

"What does he say?"

"Nothing of any use, actually," he said, sounding blase about the whole thing. "He's just bragging about himself. That's all he ever did. He would come and sit at the kitchen table and talk about how wonderful he was. How fast he could run. How good he could drive a car. How fast he could calculate. One time he excused himself to go to the bathroom, but he just grabbed the television and went out the front door. He is the lousiest bastard who ever lived."

Although I had kissed a lot of other people, that kiss was really my first. For instance, I had a friend named Clare who begged me and begged me to kiss her toe. I'd done it, but that hadn't been my first kiss. A boy named Daniel and I had blindfolded ourselves with sweaters and had tried to kiss. I'd accidentally kissed him on the nose, but that hadn't been my first kiss. I had kissed a boy after losing a coin toss, and even though I had wanted that to be my first kiss, it hadn't been, really. The real first kiss is the one that tells you what it feels like to be an adult and doesn't let you be a child anymore. The first kiss is the one that you suffer the consequences of. It was as if I had been playing Russian Roulette and finally got the cylinder with the bullet in it.

Alphonse never introduced me to his drug dealer because he wanted to make sure that I'd given him all my money to score. People were rediculous about giving up their dealers in general. They acted as though it was an important business partner, or a secretary of state or something. The drug dealers in this neighborhood were all white, and they all had bad haircuts. They tried to look punk but came off looking more like cats with mange. Just like squirrels in certain areas take on certain characteristics, so do heroin dealers. The biggest jackasses in the world dealt heroin in Montreal. The guy who tried to sell you a vowel on Sesame Street was more menacing.