It’s hard to admit, but at this point, I liked funerals. You see who people are. The sorry speeches about high school football. The aunts and uncles who check their watches and phones. But my favorite part: all the smokers. There was no pretense about it. No tic-tac before you walk into work. No crouching next to a dumpster on a lunch break so no one sees you. At a funeral, if you’re a smoker, you smoke. And no one bats an eye when you ask to bum a cigarette. After the service, I’d keep my pack in my pocket and just walk around bumming freebies. People practically threw them at me.

Is it wrong to say the party after Max’s funeral was an all-time best? I mean, no offense to Max, but it beat the piss out of his basement parties or parking lot booze sessions. We did a church theme because Max was the spiritual type. He learned yoga in rehab.

The girls dressed as slutty nuns and pumped keg beer into plastic cups. There was something holy about a priest snorting coke off the kitchen counter. Like all that moralistic bullshit at the church was put to rest. And you could breathe for a minute.

Me, Fred, Larry, and Chris were the pallbearers. As the party got going the four of us were standing on the screened-in porch, arms slung around each other in a line and swaying back and forth like drunk soccer fans in a pub. We were singing “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba. We’ll be singing, when we’re winning. We were singing alright. And we loved it.

Finally, Fred broke free from the chain and examined the orange ember of his cigarette.'

“Put this out on me,” he said and slipped it between my fingers.

Now I had a cigarette in each hand. Fred’s shirt was lifted, exposing his crucifix chain—the real catholic kind with an actual depiction of Jesus’s body. The gold body of Jesus hung there between his nipples over the stubble of his shaved chest.

The cigarette sizzled when I pressed it to his skin. Then the smell of burnt hair. His laugh was sad at first, but then sang like music—like all that pain fled through the seared hole. I rolled up my sleeve and handed Fred my cigarette and he seared it out on my arm. Someone turned up the music as the chorus kicked in and for a second I could hear the melody of Max’s voice.

I get knocked down. But I get up again. You’re never gonna keep me down. We sang the song in triumph as I glanced down at the raw blister on my burn.