In 6th grade, a small group of boys started carrying around little, red laser beams on keyless keyrings. They were small enough to fit in the palm of the boys’ hands. In P.E., the boys held the little lasers by their hip pocket, shot it toward us girls like they were tagging our bodies red. When they did this, we flinched, and when they didn’t stop, we ducked and hid. Red lasers were everywhere, and yet, we could never figure out, who exactly was holding the source of this light in their hand.
Back then, all of us girls knew we were not in love with the laser boys—we were in love with boys from North Middle School. This was the foothills of Appalachia, but we were considered “city girls.” We went to Woodward Middle School, our parents worked in offices, and drove an hour away to take us shopping at Abercrombie & Fitch in Hanes Mall. Our parents wanted us to know life beyond the insular world of Appalachia, and all we wanted was the roughneck boys from North Middle School who were the heart of that world.
Boys who went to North Middle School were not “city boys.” They lived in unincorporated towns. Their families owned chicken houses, made moonshine. They wore Carhart jeans with big, puffer jackets, work boots, and thin, silver chains where a cross should have been. North boys were mythical beings. There were yearly sightings at the county fair. They moved in a pack with comb lines indented so deeply into their gelled hair— how could us girls not think of running our fingertips through the grooves that were left there?
We saw the North boys and thought of skin. We saw them and thought of nails, claws, marks a wild animal leaves on a door, and we did not know whether those marks meant we wanted out or in.
I am 35 years old and getting my nails done in Kansas City. The nail artist wants to know if I’m married.
“No,” I say.
“Boyfriend?” she asks, and I hesitate.
She laughs and says, “How many boyfriends?”
“Two.”
What I really mean: I am talking to two men on Hinge.
“Three is better.” She laughs in a sort of knowing way.
She starts asking about the boyfriends like she is going to help me choose. I play this game with her, even though, I already know what she is going to say. She wants to know how old the boyfriends are, what they do, and whether they rent or own their home. She does not ask me: which one makes you wet when all he texts is hey?
In middle school, we were not supposed to like the North boys. We were not supposed to like the stubble of hair above their lips, the thickness of those lips, the shape of their fingertips. We were not supposed to like the way they ducked their heads inside jackets to block the wind when they lit cigarettes and to think of swans at the community college pond when they did this.
We were not supposed to want them so bad we would hunt them down. Crawl on our bellies through the grass of the fairgrounds. Hide behind trashcans. All to watch the way they pressed their lips around a cigarette’s end.
We were not supposed to like that when they saw us watching them, they seemed afraid, turned their heads, and blew their smoke in the opposite direction. When they did this, we were definitely not supposed to pray, that the wind would blow their smoke back in our face.
We were not supposed to like any of this because our parents were richer than theirs. We were supposed to like the boys who shot lasers at us, because their parents were like our parents, so it was okay to like them, because we could marry them one day, and nothing would change. “City girls” to “city women” of Appalachia.
We were supposed to think of the future, end games, the kind of women we would be one day. A second glance, one wrong boy’s smoke. We were 11 years old, and already supposed to know we were ultimately responsible for the social order remaining in place.
I am 34 years old and have just broken up with another boyfriend. My older sister is 38. She has two kids and has been married to her high school boyfriend, a “city boy,” like her, for 14 years.
Whenever I date someone, my sister tells me, it just always seems, “You’re the catch, you know what I mean?”
I do know what she means. What she means is, to her, I always seem “better” than the men I date. I know this based on her tone and the first two questions she asks.
“Where did they go to school?”
“What do they do?”
The most in love I’ve ever been, was with a man who hadn’t gone to college. I was 30 years old, and my sister was 34.
“Well, what’s he do?” she asked.
“Builds stuff.”
“Huh.” I heard the dismissiveness in her tone. “Well, what do you like about him then?”
What I loved about him: his lips, fingertips, eyelashes, the tenor of his voice, the way he held a steering wheel with one hand between his legs, and this one particular time we were in the desert and a monsoon suddenly hit, and all our camping gear in the back of his truck was getting wet, so he jumped from the sidewalk onto the back of his truck, and landed with both feet on the bed of that truck, and an older man, who had been watching all of this, huffed a little bit, and said, “Young buck.”
I did not tell my sister this.
I told her, “I feel like no matter how close I am to him, I always want to be closer to his skin.”
She said, “Well, that’s romantic, isn’t it?”
In middle school, after the North boys sighting, we searched their names on an AOL database, found their screennames, and started messaging them. We could have gotten away with this, but we wanted their phone numbers. We wanted to call them, listen to their breath, and hear them say our names out loud. We called them late at night and said little. Listened to their breath and imagined their lips pressed against the other end.
One of them called us back. Left voicemails on our home phones that were sweet and polite—stated their full name after the tone. Our parents didn’t care. They punished us by taking away our rights to the phone.
We said we loved the North boys. We were in love with them, and our parents grew angry at us.
“Why?” our parents wanted to know. “Why do you think you are in love with them?”
“Because!” we screamed.
“Because? Just because?!” Our parents crossed their arms, shook their heads, as if there were forces in the world we didn’t understand.
“Because we are!” We screamed louder. “We just are!”
We wailed, cried, convinced there were forces inside our bodies parents had never felt.
I am 35 years old and back home from Kansas City. The boyfriend who owns his home makes dinner reservations; I text Ron, the one who makes me wet.
I wish I was seeing you tonight.
I should be able to make that happen, he writes.
Before the dinner date, my best friend asks, “Why exactly are you going out with this guy if you aren’t attracted to him?”
“He made reservations.”
“But you aren’t attracted to him?” my friend clarifies.
“No, but…”
But the dinner reservations.
“I mean maybe that’s the kind of person I should marry, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think you should marry someone you aren’t attracted to.”
“Well, yeah,” I say. “Obviously.”
“Obviously,” my friend, who is a man, says.
But it seems much more obvious to him.
At dinner, the man who made reservations, asks the waiter his name. The waiter’s name is Ben. For the rest of the night, the man finishes every sentence with, Ben.
“I’ll take the shrimp, Ben.”
“Fantastic wine, Ben.”
“See you later, Ben.”
The date says the waiter’s name like he is very pleased with himself; every time he says “Ben,” the waiter flinches. The waiter doesn’t tell the date to stop. I suppose, in a way, this counts as letting the date call him “Ben.” I watch this and think the date is the kind of person who doesn’t realize wanting and letting are not two different names for the same thing.
I go to the bathroom and text Ron.
Can I see you tonight?
Do you want me to? he asks.
I do.
In Kansas City, the nail artist says she has lived there for 15 years and I’m lucky to be just visiting.
“What do you think?” she asks. “You like it here?”
“I don’t know.” I’ve only just gotten there. “Do you like it here?”
She scrunches up her face, shakes her head, and says “I hate it here.”
The nail artist’s husband grew up in Kansas City and won’t leave. She has been married 15 years and does not speak of her husband fondly.
She says she likes to travel, likes the beach, sun, and mountains. She names things she likes, like she would have liked anywhere, but here.
She wants to know how old I am. I say 35.
“But you don’t have wrinkles there.” She looks at my forehead intently. “That’s why you have two boyfriends, because they don’t know how old you really are.”
She says this like I am running out of time. Says this, and then laughs, and I laugh too, and I have the feeling that we are pretending to laugh about the boyfriends not knowing my age, but really, we are laughing about the idea of running out of time. Laughing at the idea that desire goes away. Laughing like we are actors performing lines written by someone clueless about the thoughts in our minds.
We are laughing, but we say the lines. We say the lines because, we assume, someone, somewhere is listening. This is the thing about shame—it penetrates the skin like a laser never could.
“Go to the casino on Friday.” The nail artist takes my hand. “You’ll find a man who owns a home there!”
She says this, then she smiles up at me sneakily, as if she is telling me, they are still listening.
“Okay, maybe I will.”
We don’t speak for a while, and then, she leans in closer, as if expecting something from me, and I find myself whispering, “Where would you go if you didn’t live here?”
“Florida! Hawaii! Somewhere with the beach, and the sun, of course.” She says this loudly, as if she is performing for them. And then, she goes back to filing my nails.
But after a while she leans into me again, and says much more softly, so softly I almost can’t hear her, so they certainly can’t hear her.
“What about South Dakota? You ever been there?”
In 7th grade, we were all finally old enough, tall enough, to ride all rides at the county fair. The Himalaya went around in a circle. It didn’t go particularly fast or upside down. There were individual carts only two people fit in. It went forward and backward, and jerkily stopped and started, as a carnie stood on the side and played Nelly’s “Ride wit Me” on repeat.
I didn’t understand why it was one of the rides only older kids could go on. There were much scarier rides but in line that first time, us city girls lined up on one side of a metal railing and waited, confused, why was there so much hype about this ride?
We felt the North boys before we saw them. We felt the metal flooring beneath us bend and lift with each step they took. Their steps were not like the boys at our school. They were not fast and rapid and light. They were slow, steady, delicate, and almost apologetic in the way they moved toward us, as if they already knew something we didn’t know.
On The Himalaya, the carts of the ride were filled by choosing one person from each line. One city girl and one North boy. Us girls acted like we didn’t know this, but I think at least one of us did.
I was third in line. I watched Tiffany get paired with a boy in Timberland boots and auburn hair. Stephanie’s boy—camouflage-print pants and dirty dishwater hair. Joseph was mine. Gap-toothed, acne-prone, AXE-drenched, with a Saturn and its rings band-aid covering the stubble of hair above his lip.
The carnie pointed to me, then Joseph. We walked from our respective gates toward The Himalaya like a matrimony line. Joseph held out his hand to suggest I walk in front of him so that I would be on the inside of the ride. When he did this, I followed his cue, and I stepped in first. I felt him watching me. I was aware my body was different than his, different than my friends. There was a spotlight on me. This was not the same feeling as a laser piercing your skin.
Joseph sat down on the hard seat of The Himalaya and the puffiness of his jacket pressed against me. It felt like digging down into the depths of a sleeping bag
“Hands up,” the carnie said. He pressed the metal safety bar over our laps and locked us in. Joseph’s jacket pressed against my bare skin. The outside of my thigh was pressed against his.
“Oh, sorry,” he said, and tried, slightly, to move. I did not want him to move. I wanted to crawl into his skin.
When the ride began, the speed of the turns ripped my body from his. The whole ride, I fought those forces, and tried to make my way back to him.
I am 32 years old and have just moved back to North Carolina. At salsa, I meet a man who has a PhD, and is an engineer at Volvo.
My sister tells her coworkers, “My sister has lived here one week, and she already has a date with an engineer from Volvo.”
She tells me she tells them this, and I feel things I don’t like: I have attracted “a catch” and so I feel I have value.
I feel this, even though, when he asked me on the date, I hesitated. When I danced with him, he sometimes forgot steps, then looked at me, and said, “You forgot the second step.”
He messed up, blamed me, then told me it was okay I had forgotten the step. I had been dancing for much longer than this man. But sometimes, his certainty confused me. I knew I had not forgotten the step. I knew it had been him. And yet, how was he so certain my body was wrong, and his was correct?
On the date with him, dinner is fine. But then, we go dancing, and the Volvo engineer puts his hand on my lower back. When he does this, I flinch.
He asks, “Are you always so jumpy like this?”
In middle school, someone told on us. They told our parents we kept riding The Himalaya because we were letting North boys finger us.
We knew it was the laser boys.
“You can’t let those boys do things to you,” our parents said. “You can’t let them. Do you hear me? You can’t let them do the things they want to do to you.”
If you let boys do things, there were rumors about you.
“I heard she let him finger her.”
“I heard that girl let him touch her.”
“I heard she let him fuck her.”
“I heard she let him put it in her ass and then she sucked his dick after.”
All the rumors were what some girl let some boy do.
They were never what us girls wanted to do.
I am 30 years old and the man I feel I can never get close enough to, starts asking what I want him to do.
“What do you want? What do you like?” he asks. I freeze.
And then, I get angry at him for asking me something I don’t know the answer to.
I am 30 years old, angry at him, but really, I am angry because I am 30 years old, and don’t know what I want. I am angry because I have a vague memory of delicate footsteps on metal flooring, puffy jackets, spotlight warmth on the body. A time of wanting without an explanation. I am angry because I can’t remember where, or why, I buried all of that.
When all us girls said we were still in love with North boys, no matter what our parents said, the laser boys went crazy.
We tried to ignore them. We let them point lasers anywhere they wanted. It was just a laser.
This made them hate us more. They got more lasers. They all got lasers. They stopped pointing them at our bodies, and started shooting them in our eyes, and made us believe this would blind us.
We were afraid. We did not want to lose our vision. We did not want to miss our yearly sighting. To never see the North boys again was something we could not imagine.
The problem was that when the lasers got pointed at our eyes, we couldn’t see it happening. We could see it happening to each other, but we could not see it happening to ourselves. We looked out for each other. At first, we were diligent.
“Close your eyes! Close your eyes now!”
There were constant threats, lasers everywhere, and we were always screaming.
But the lasers boys were relentless.
“Stop. Please just stop!” We begged them.
Lasers everywhere. Always switching hands.
“Stop! Just stop!”
We stopped begging them.
“Stop telling me!”
We turned on each other instead.
I want to find the perfect image for desire. Men have cigarettes, and boys have lasers. They have these perfect symbols everyone can see. They flaunt them around like people who have never needed to bury anything, in the hopes of one day being able to retrieve it safely.
I used to live in New York, and once, I was walking in the West Village with a friend. We passed an empty lot, jarring because it was so clearly where a building should have been. There were little flowers, with yellow and purple petals. The flowers were small, as if they had not been there long, and did not expect to live. Half were tilted to the sun, their pistols open and wide, basking in it. The other half pointed toward the ground. They curled in on themselves as if they were burying their heads into their stems, as if they were afraid to look at the sun, as if, to do so, would only shorten an existence that so surely would end.
“Whoa,” I said to my friend. I had not seen anything wild growing in such a long time, I had forgotten flowers grew in places where someone hadn’t planted them.
“I know, right,” my friend said. She looked at the surrounding lots—erect buildings—then back to the empty space. “What a waste of real estate.”
She did not look at the flowers; I did not tell her they were there.
I meet Ron at a Sheetz on Battleground at 11 p.m. The parking lot is almost empty. I go inside to buy mints. I see Ron in line for the cashier. I don’t buy mints.
I stand behind the self-checkout and watch him. I watch the way he waits in line. His hands crossed in front of him. He is inches taller than anyone else and he holds onto his wrists, his fingers of one hand wrapping all the way around his other wrist. When it is his turn in line, he lets go of his wrist, and caresses a strand of hair on his long beard.
I watch him touch himself. I like watching this.
He approaches the woman at the register. He is a full head and shoulder taller than her but he crouches down, as if on instinct, so that the difference between their height is less. He is one of those very tall people who move delicately, almost apologetically, for how much space they take.
Ron talks to the cashier. I can’t hear, but the cashier keeps leaning into him, and then looking back at the wall of cigarettes, and then, Ron is pointing at the wall, and she is following his fingertips, bending up and down, touching one type of cigarette, then another. She is moving all the way to the end. All the while she is doing this, she is looking back, and smiling at Ron. Her eyes are shining bright, as if there is nothing obstructing her vision.
When Ron turns away from the Sheetz cashier, I turn away too. I realize this is weird of me. I turn back around. When I do, he is walking out, packing his cigarettes. His fingers curl around the pack. The lines of his open palm expands. He smacks the bottom of the pack with an open hand.
I feel, three fingers below my belly button, like there are headlights that have abruptly turned on and are pointed on him.
“Oh. Shit,” he says. He jumps a little bit. Looks scared. I laugh. He smiles slowly, pulls a cigarette out, and rests it between his lips. He smokes a type of American Spirits I have never seen before.
“What color is that?” I move closer to him, as if I were going to inspect what color it is.
“Celadon.”
“What is that, like green?”
He shrugs. “Something like that.” He smiles slowly and easily. His voice is low and unhurried, and I like the way he doesn’t seem interested in being correct. The cigarette rests in his lips. I know I am staring at him, but he holds my gaze.
We step out of Sheetz and into the night. He lifts his jacket up slightly around his face to light the cigarette. He is wearing a burnt orange Marmot jacket, unzipped. There is a denim shirt underneath, and a black Bon Jovi shirt beneath it. I wonder if Bon Jovi is ironic, or if he is really into Bon Jovi like that, but I don’t ask.
“Oh,” he says. He holds his cigarette with his right hand while he makes the okay sign with his left.
Before we met, he told me to give him a sign if it was okay to kiss me. I said he had to give me a sign too. He makes his sign. I forget. I’m too busy watching his fingers. They are long and thin. After he exhales, he brings it back in front of him, holds it between his thumb and pointer finger, rolls it around as he examines it, as if, after each breath, the cigarette might have changed a little bit.
“Oh, right,” I say and laugh. I forgot the step but he doesn’t correct me. Doesn’t ask why, or try to kiss me, without that first step. He stands in the night smoking, and I stand there watching him. I am watching his fingers and I forget to make the sign because I am too wrapped up—realizing he is the type of man who can orchestrate a body with just the ends of his fingertips.
The Sheetz gas station sign is red. It looms over Ron’s head. I have an astigmatism in one eye. Sometimes at night, lights turn to lasers shooting across the sky. I am watching Ron and then, the lights from the Sheetz sign turns to lasers. They obstruct my sight.
I look at the ground and have a thought I don’t like: to be a woman, who goes home with a man from Sheetz at 11 p.m., what to think of a woman like that? To be a woman, who goes home with a man, just because he made dinner reservations, what to think of a woman like that?
To be a woman, there are a lot of things to think.
Ron crouches down and looks at me. He exhales a long stream of smoke, then quickly says sorry. He brushes his hand in the air between us gently.
“It’s okay,” I tell him. He holds the cigarette out toward me as if it is an offering. I keep my head down but take a step toward him. He smells like jasmine and cotton. I want to know how that smell smells on my skin.
The visceralness of this is so immediate my mind wants to dismiss it. As if, attraction is only about sex, and not about, what the body knows, despite how much other forces will try and have you convinced.
What the body knows: I want this. I don’t want that.
I smell him and look up. The Sheetz sign is shooting lasers through the sky.
“Do you see those lights?” I ask.
“The streaky ones?” Ron draws a diagonal line from the red Sheetz sign to the empty parking lot. I nod. He rests a cigarette between his lips, reaches into his pocket, and hands me a bottle of Dry Eyes.
“Sometimes it helps. A little bit.”
The drops make my eyes wet. I blink artificial tears. I know the lasers will come back, but this wetness is a temporary fix.
Winner 2024 EROTIC Contest: Nonfiction
On Mathis’ essay, judge Margo Steines writes, “‘Men Smoking’ is a fucking banger. It threads the needle on the complex felt relationship between desire and class, self and other. In its exploration of how we are taught to manage and repress what our bodies want, and of the euphoria of the spaces where we divest from that responsibility, it asks big questions about security, belonging, wanting, and the various ways masculinity is permitted to bloom under different social conditions. This essay is both smart and hot, and brings together the felt experience of adolescent sexuality and an adult analysis that is as pressing as it is sage. I loved reading it.”
Emily Mathis completed her MFA in fiction at University of North Carolina Greensboro in 2023. In the past year, her nonfiction has been a finalist for Fourth Genre’s Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay contest, North American Review’s Terry Tempest Williams Creative Nonfiction Prize, the Sixth Annual Sewanee Review Nonfiction contest, the 2024 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards, and Epiphany‘s Breakout! Prize. In addition to “Men Smoking,” her essays have recently appeared in, or are forthcoming in, Hunger Mountain, Epiphany, Los Angeles Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and others. She is revising a collection of essays and seeking representation. She lives in North Carolina. Find her at emilymathiswriting.com or on Instagram@emily_a_mathis.