smoke addiction (i-a)

The brown haze is most apparent on mornings like today's, when blue sky fills the windowframe. I can get the physical evidence by wiping the glass with a clean tissue, but I'd rather leave it for now.

I don't know why blue smoke leaves a brown film, but I first noticed that peculiarity after we bought our first car. It was the cheapest new car in the entire auto mall, a basic blue saturn sedan, so basic that the windows rolled by hand and the muscle-assisted steering was sufficient reason not to parallel park on inclines. It was plastic and it wasn't pretty, but it was all we could afford.

We smoked like little devils in that car, especially during the long drives out of the district that became our ritual every weekend. The east coast carved out a nostalgic hollow in our chests that could only be filled by mountains, so we would venture out every Saturday morning, usually west, in search of calming elevation. We kept calm during the drives by smoking and playing dj with the discman, being in the not-here while waiting for the want-to-be-there.

I'm not a real car-washing guy, the kind of guy who buys special waxes and lovingly wipes down his car with his softest towels, so it wasn't until a trip late that first summer that I noticed the diminished clarity of the windshield. We were nearing Shenendoah when I happened to swipe my finger next to the oil-change reminder sticker. The clear ribbon of blue sky through the glass shocked me.

Like any normal dumbass with random OCD tics, I asked my wife to grab a napkin from the glove compartment, and I started wiping down the windshield with my left hand, the right hand still on the wheel with my cigarette vised between two fingers. My wife got irritated and then alarmed as my driving got more erratic, as I darkened the napkin first with side-to-side swipes, and then with up-and-down brushes. I was reaching for the lower left corner of the windshield just as we entered an unbanked left-turning curve. I oversteered across the line--toward the silver grill of a oncoming semi. I quickly swung the wheel clockwise, putting an ashy streak across my lap, and fishtailed a 180 into a fortuitously-placed gravel turnout. We sat trembling for a second before my wife punched my shoulder--hard--and made me drop my cigarette.