Spreading the skin across the table, he makes a line of tobacco across the thin paper, pausing for a moment to make sure it's thick enough to meet his standards, before rolling it with a practiced skill he's been repeating and fixing for the past three years. Dallas likes rolling his own cigarettes, loves it, if only because it makes him feel like a man, whatever that meant.
A man. Not like Mr. Curtis, broad shouldered and starry eyed, going to work every morning and earning a paycheck for his three brats and baby maker. And not quite like his father, a ghost that lingered in his childhood, war hungry, best remembered when he got so angry the veins in his thick neck popped.
No, it just made him feel like a man. A cowboy in a western, a gangster from New York. It made him feel nice, whatever that meant.
It meant a lot. Pressing it to his lips, he fumbled with his lighter, one of those Jewish stars carved into the refillable metal. A spoil of war, another thing he stole from his father that wasn't looks, or 'charm.'
The flame finally flickered on, a flaring orange that casted light on his poorly lit apartment, it tenderly licking the end of his cigarette and disintegrating the edges of the yellow paper, burning a bright neon that made him grin. Taking a drag, remarking inside himself that the taste was fresher than anything a store could grant, he blew the smoke in a steady stream that twisted towards and carved at the air.
He'll be out of this apartment in less than a week. Places he called his own never lasted more than a few months, he knew it well and he never tried to deny it. Rodeo wasn't a job, selling illegals wasn't a job, jerking off wasn't a job. Dallas wasn't a type of man to have a job and he never questioned it.
Jobs wore people ragged. Jobs made boys men. He never needed a job to make himself a man, he did that for himself. A stolen lighter, an air of superiority, that made him a man. More of a man than Mr. Curtis, than his father. More man than anyone.
Rolling cigarettes for himself made him a damn man. It was a damn shame his father had taught him how.