The Critic

[a bit of flash fiction, may flesh it out when I have time]

Their Manhattan vacation was fairly ruined -- Ruined! The weathermen were predictably wrong, and a second Canadian stormfront made Ruin! of relaxed strolls through Central Park and explorations down the long avenues. But even worse, their host--and presumed trail guide--was called away on business at the last minute. "Of course you should still stay here while I'm gone! Just don't forget to feed the cat!"

This was their first visit to The City, and the twin disasters left them confounded and lethargic. They were shy and not terribly adventurous on their own, and the departure of their energetic and city-savvy friend soon saw them falling into old rituals. They watched endless hours of television (cable!), drank endless cups of coffee, and wine, cooked dinner and read books, and passed the cat from lap to lap. It was like they had never left home.

By Thursday he had had enough. That night they would go see a movie and then eat dinner at some obnoxiously-priced world-class restaurant.

"Yes, I knew it--tons of cancellations with the weather!"

"Are you sure you want to do this? That's an awful lot of money for one dinner. And it's still just nasty outside."

"C'mon, honey, I'm going to go all Shining if we stay cooped up here any longer. And yes to the dinner--why not if this is the only restaurant we hit all week?"

In the end she was persuaded by his repeated references to psychosis and Psycho. Clearly he needed to get out and blow off some steam.

The movie was a critically-acclaimed Hong Kong export, but it was inexplicably subtitled in English, Japanese, French, and Malay. The rosetta stone of text often obscured half the screen, and the film sometimes changed the order of text, leaving the couple frustrated and unable to follow either the action or the dialogue. He was livid. "Can you believe that shit? How the fuck could anyone follow that? I can't believe we wasted our money on that garbage!"

He wouldn't stop ranting as they exited the theater, continuing to bitch with ever-increasing ferocity as they huddled closely by the curb, under the cheap umbrella he had purchased that morning. His frustration reached fever pitch as taxicab after taxicab flew by, all occupied and seemingly eager to re-douse their already-wet legs. "Fuck! We're gonna miss our reservation, you fucking assholes!"

Finally a cab appeared with a lit sign, slowing to a stop in front of them. Just as he reached for the door handle, another man's hand cut out in front of his.

"Excuse me young man, but I believe this cab as mine."

The old man stood there with an imperious scowl on his face, his considerably younger wife standing distant and pretty under her own umbrella.

This man was famous.

But the young husband was past the point of deference. "I don't think so. Asshole." He shoved past the older man and almost threw his wife into the cab. As they pulled away he lowered his window and shoved out his middle finger. "Fuck you, Salman! Your last book sucked!"

smoke addiction (ii-a)

Under the awning of the smokers' section, we were all thinking the same thing: Where are the damn police and ambulances? A virginia slims had already dialed it in, but there were still no sirens.

Aston-martin was still oblivious to the rain and diluted blood that spider-webbed across his face as he slowly weaved down the hill. His shirtfront had blossomed into a menacing and slick black bib, the once-pink tulip in his breast pocket now just wilted black petals.

The chaos piled up on California behind him, as a cable car sat immobilized uphill from the little two-seater, unable to swerve off the tracks and around the sportscar's open door. It wasn't long before passengers sprung to the street on both sides of the firmly planted cable car. A patch of black and plaid umbrellas sprouted above the frustrated passengers abandoning ship and floated downhill with the stormwater. The cable car soon added its bell in accompaniment to the motherfucker sonnet.

"Someone should go close that door," said a miss parliaments, smartly.
"Yeah, someone," answered a young marlboro red. "Someone not me."
We all laughed. It was true. None of us wanted to walk out there when the entire point of being here was to keep dry while feeding the addiction. Besides, aston-martin was still barely fifty feet down the hill, and the guy was clearly in a bad state--who knew what he would do if you touched his car?

The rain picked up its tempo, the torrents now coming down in silky waves, undulating like syrup off a spoon. Aston-martin was now on his third stanza of motherfuckers, and we knew he had to wrap it up soon because his cigarette was now down to a little nub. He was almost to the last couplet when he was halted by another wet suit, this one belonging to a passenger hanging off the side of an overpacked cable car making its way uphill. Aston-martin's cigarette hand hit the outrigger's drenched knee with a sloppy thunk and that was that.

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.

smoke addiction (iv)

One of the sensory pleasures of smoking not often discussed is the visual quality of the smoke. I particularly like cigarette smoke because of its subtle blue tint. Sorry, I'm not one of those writers who will track down the pantone number for you; it's just blue, maybe like a matte metal grayish-blue, maybe like a blue anodized aluminum tube with a satin finish that's rubbed over with a gray crayon, something like that. Anyway, it's blue, whereas cannabis smoke is about as white as a cloud in a kid's painting done on white paper, where the kid just leaves the cloud space and watercolors the sky around it. Cigars? Swear to god, the smoke is actually brown, just like the wrappers, although admittedly I haven't smoked enough cigars or observed enough cigars being burned to say I'm confident in that generalization.

Although, now that I've finished that paragraph and my high is starting to fade, my memory reminds me that not all cigarettes have blue smoke. When I was considerably younger and considerably more self-consciously pretentious than I am now, I smoked these really black tar and asphalt-tasting little numbers called sobranies. The paper was actually this dark, rich mahogany and the filter a metallic gold. (Gold! I felt like a bond villain smoking them in our small-town cafe. Maybe more like the son of oddjob in a witness relocation program.) Anyhow, those things were like angry dragons or coal-fired trains, pumping out a thick, velvety charcoal haze. The smoke strangely smelled nice, but it was not a pretty sight.

smoke addiction (iii)

We stood outside the medical center looking out across the dull layers of gray, white, white, and gray. I bummed a smoke from Ricky, which was fine because he bummed from me all the time. There is a special smokers' ethos--gotta share if you've got one to spare. We're all in this addiction together, so denying a brother or sister in need... well, there's a special place in hell for those bastards, and it probably looks like an infinite queue of happy smokers, none of whom has an extra cigarette to spare.

Anyhow, this was one of those really cold days, the kind where we did the let's-try-to-hold-a-cigarette-while-it's-thirty-below dance. Like most Inupiat dances, there wasn't much foot movement--it was more like a one-cigarette juggle: right hand in pocket, left holds the smoke, right holds the smoke, left hand in pocket (at that point I wasn't skilled enough to do the Clint-style no-handed cig-hanging-from-the-lip maneuver--the smoke in my eyes got too irritating).

We danced and smoked looking like two michelin men, me because of all the extra clothing and Ricky because, well, because he was Ricky: typical Inupiat, 5'7" in all directions. Unlike me he also had a good shield of wind-blocking facial hair and a quality, hand-made Inupiat parkee, real seal in the body, and a thick beaver-fur hat. He also never tired of the same old eskimo joke, pointing across the Bering: "It's the damn Russians making it so cold. Be warmer if we nuked them."

A third and a fourth smoke came out of his pack as he told me why he quit drinking the previous spring.

"I took my pfd check to KIC and got the fastest snow-machine they got. Arctic Cat, racing one, thousand cc. Got real drunk and then rode toward Noatak. Real fast, there was a big big hole in the ice, I jumped off but the cat--" he made a loud *click*-- "I cried all week. My wife got pissed too, said she'll beat me if I do it again. So I stopped. I only drink beer now."

smoke addiction (ii)

A previous Tuesday, I was huddled with some fellow addicts under an awning by Kearny and California, as the clouds drowned San Francisco. It was the normal scene, an assembly line of one-cigarette characters. The marlboro men have the least endurance. Next come the women with lady smokes, virginia slims and somesuch, some longer than... some other dude's penis. Me and my kind last the longest, american spirits, organic, which means they burn slow and it's like guaranteed to give you less cancer.

I'd shepherded a couple acts already when a loud SCREECH-THUMP did a two-step between the raindrops. All the necks turned like wheat in a shifting wind, directing eyes to the white aston martin that had just planted its nose into a massive pothole. The bald driver got out, he was in a light gray three-button with a pink napkin in his pocket, and he started stumbling down the hill, shouting MOTHERFUCKER!, as his suit quickly darkened from rain and the blood dripping down from his forehead. The napkin was soon black like the asphalt.

We in the smokers' gallery were most impressed: his fingers still gripped a cigarette and he had the sense or practice to shield it from the downpour by cupping it backwards in his hand. After every third or fourth motherfucker he took a powerful and dramatic pull, before exhaling the smoke of the fourth or fifth motherfucker.

smoke addiction

My windows are filmed with the grayish-brown haze of six months of american spirits. I'm sure it's from the smoke because the panes are darkening on the inside. I try to quit the habit, but like most addictions it will likely only happen if the cigarettes literally get up and leave me.

Oliver Sacks, the neurologist, wrote a great description of addiction. I chopped it up into a poem:

Addiction
Is
A self-induced catatonia
A repetitive
Action Action
Bordering on hysteria.

It's pretty dead on. It's most apparent on rainy days when me and my fellow addicts huddle under every available awning, shuffling, shuffling to keep our catatonic feet out of the wet. We pass forth lighters and dark wit, trying to forget how fucking retarded we are, staying dry to kill ourselves. Hysterical.