Adventures in Smoking pt. 2

A cigarette machine was magic because maybe you could sneak away from Mom and Dad just long enough to plonk in three quarters, pull that plastic puller and hear the whoosh of the cellophaned pack shooting down the chute to land right there for the taking by your illegal, little hands. You’d grab it furtively, looking over your shoulder, and tuck it in the waist of your pants, above your cock, so your shirt would drop down to hide the bulge.

Now you’re home and the thing is more or less safely in your possession, in your bedroom, right there on your bed. You didn’t have much time to think when you bought ‘em but here’s what you chose: Camels, unfiltered. Camels because there’s something about them, the pyramid on the front, the letters. Not like Winstons or Kents. Unfiltered because why would you to let anything come between you and this experience?

When to smoke was another problem. You couldn’t light up in your room, blow it out your window. For sure they’d know. You know someday you’ll take them to a friend’s house and share them in the woods, something like that. But you want one now. It’s snowing outside, piling up.

You offer to shovel the back porch and the stairs down to the yard. Mom’s a bit surprised, but pleased. And in the glow of her gratitude, almost as though she gave her blessing, you bring out a pack of matches and a cigarette. You hold them in the bottom of the pocket of your coat, not afraid they’ll fly away really but just wanting to hold them. To feel the pulse of their illicit power in your hand.

Outside you shovel, shovel, shovel, long enough to establish that you’re really shoveling and then you stop. Down a step or three on the stairs, mostly out of view. You pull one out and put it between your lips and take out the matches, tremblingly, and make two false starts before a spark flies and the thing is lit, and you protect the nascent flame, you bring it to the tip, and draw in the fire then the smoke. Glorious, sweet, poisonous smoke. You discard the match and it hisses in the snow.

Adventures in Smoking pt. 1

Across the pub the green sloped down gently and there were benches where you could bring your pint, and possibly a little pond. My sister and brother-in-law sat there with theirs as I approached with my shandy. He wore his biker leather jacket and lit a cigarette.

“Here. You want to try it?” he said. Like a father offering his baby a new food.

I took it between my fingers, by the filter, like I knew I was to do. I drew in the smoke, cautious but determined. I was proud to see the ember glow, and then to see it dim, all by my doing; to exhale the smoke that had been in my body back out into the air.

TROOPS

We moved on. A lark or finch called as I planted my tired feet into the dust.

In the apartment where we lived after they sold the house my mom and dad slept on a mattress on a box spring in the living room. There was a fifth of Jack Daniels and two glasses upside-down on the bedside table—actually an old door on cinder blocks that held books, the stereo, the 12-inch, black-and-white family TV. Every night they’d have a nightcap like this was a motel and they’d bought the bottle from a liquor store on the other side of the highway on-ramp. But it was home.

A woman down at the end of the subway car was ranting and raving. She was enormous and wore voluminous, loose-fitting cotton clothes, thin fabrics that looked like they’d tear or fall away like something molting off a beast. In fact her arms were inside her pants legs, stretching the gauzy material like she wanted to explode. I wondered if she was going to spill her giant breasts out of her top as an affront, a provocation. And then what?

TROOPS

He could see I was in a vulnerable position.

We collect coins and bills, worth next to nothing, from the places we’ve been and they haunt us  we die and force our descendants to throw them away. We keep them not because we’ll use them again but because we never will.

At the appetizing store in the big long line two girls began to sing in harmony. Their voices chimed against the din of numbers called, orders recited, delivery guys coming through. A third girl, younger, sang along a little but then stopped, self-conscious. The song picked up and stopped from time to time. A little while later, and suddenly, the third girl began to cry. I watched her face, wet with tears. “Nothing’s gonna ever make me feel better,” she wailed at her mom.  I imagined what kind of heartbreak, what deep despair might cause someone to feel this way. Her mother knew, and said so: she was hungry.

When we see words on a page, we believe the words are there, but we can’t quite be sure.

As I waited in line at the food truck I turned to watch the passersby. Workers, nondescript. I tried to read their faces for anything of note. All wore the same slightly grim expression. The street mask. Even someone talking to his companion. The same look of mild concern. What’s on our minds?

I awoke with a groan from the dreadful dreams I’d had, not nightmares, but dreams about work—a colleague staying at our apartment for some reason. Urgent work that needed to get done, that wasn’t getting done, that couldn’t get done. That I had to do.

When the wind really blows in the city it’s a wonder things aren’t falling, tumbling, spinning everywhere, furniture off roofs, construction supplies, haphazardly fastened signs. We should all be battered by debris, impaled even. But no.

It’s spring training, the meaningless games playing lazily on the diner TV.

TROOPS

When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question

When I emerged from the Seventh Avenue stop the winter chill had returned, with that flat, white sky that makes you think it’s about to snow. An older couple walked by me on the crosswalk. She seemed exhausted as she towed him by the arm, his mouth idiotically agape.

I awoke in the middle of the night with a hangovery headache and asked myself: did I really drink a lot? And I remembered the big drink and the next one while I waited and the big glass of wine and thought, maybe yes. Then I fell back asleep and felt almost fine when the jazz station rang at 6:15.

We caught a Lyft to JFK. The driver said he was from Uzbekistan.

“How old is Nighted States?” he said in his nearly impenetrable accent.

I gave an answer, dumbly, lazily neglecting to really do the math. “Two-hundred, uh. Two-hundred fifty,” I said. “Two-hundred forty-five. Or something.”

It’s like when someone asks you for the time and you’re afraid to be precise. Three-thirty, you say. Maybe three thirty-five. But you feel like an asshole saying three thirty-two. Even if it’s the truth. But everyone knows what time it is. Everyone knows 1776.

He didn’t seem to hear me anyway. He gave me the age of Uzbekistan in a statement that seemed prepared. Two-thousand something, except it wasn’t something of course, it was as precise as mine was vague: two-thousand six-hundred eighty-two. Or something.

“That’s old,” I said. Of course.

We were just now getting on the Belt Parkway, five o’clock in the morning. Maybe four fifty-nine.

TROOPS

these instruments will serve your children and your grandchildren in the future.

TROOPS

and he was in such pain that he was unable to swallow or take any food.

TROOPS

I was doing research in Colorado when I heard the news.

I had terrible heartburn in bed last night and as it has before it scrambled up my mind. The pain came in waves, as usual, but even when it receded I couldn’t think a decent, calming thought. At times I perceived a crazy zigzaggy pattern of meaningless activity in my brain, a web of colored lines like laser beams. I thought I was the character in those old folk songs where you lay down your head but you can’t get your rest. Maybe they had heartburn too.