Yeah something like that. Smokes hash by himself, gets sad, is lonely, meets some people at parties, befriends them but ends up lying about his past to garner sympathy, feels guilty about it for a long time, is generally lost/doesn't know what he wants/who he is.
I was never a huge fan, I don't think it's a bad book, there are some really nice images and lines over the course of its 100pages.
“When she reached me she asked gently if I were O.K., what was bothering me. Fine, nothing, I said, but in a way I hoped confirmed incommunicable depths had opened up inside me.”
“My experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and that’s all I’d ever really wanted from my body, such as it was.”
“because the cigarette or spliff was an indispensable technology, a substitute for speech in social situations, a way to occupy the mouth and hands when alone, a deep breathing technique that rendered exhalation material, a way to measure and/or pass the time. More important than the easily satisfiable addiction, what the little cylinders provided me was a prefabricated motivation and transition, a way to approach or depart from a group of people or a topic, enter or exit a room, conjoin or punctuate a sentence. The hardest part of quitting would be the loss of narrative function; it would be like removing telephones or newspapers from the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age; there would be no possible link between scenes, no way to circulate information or close distance, and when I imagined quitting smoking, I imagined “settling down,” not because I associated quitting with a more mature self-care, but because I couldn’t imagine moving through an array of social spaces without the cigarette as bridge or exit strategy.”
but 10:04 is in a different league IMO, it's a great book full of mature prose and moral ambiguity, where Atocha is slight and (smewhat intentionally) awkward and inconsistent and clearly the work of a young person