Ive seen first hand the despondent cries of families weeping over a lost child who has succumbed to the giant drizzling smoke stack of death. The shadow of a spirit tiptoeing down a hospital hallway, out of touch, out of reach, alone in a world all its own entire. A 44 year old woman taken away with a snap of the grim reapers hand, the soft chuckling in the outer territory of existence.
Ive seen first hand the lung cancer death, the demon of nicotine, the caricature of coolness evading all responsibility until it can no longer be avoided, and then its too late.
Yet still I light up a good one, out on the porch, shivering in the tomb of late night light, the sliver of the moon like a grinning jealous brother. I’ve stood out alone in the spotted freckled dusting of dusk, listening to my friends laugh inside, warm and holy, enjoying their drinks, sharing fellowship together while I puff away on these tiny little cannons of addiction.
It’s even harder because I know what happens.
I’ve wrapped up bodies in rooms full of the silent vindication that is final death. I’ve helped to transcribe the orders of physicians struggling to save a life that is about to flash out because of the years spent smoking. I have watched the families weep with injustice, shattered in that utter finality, and yet I can do nothing to stop myself.
Sometimes it seems that almost anything would be a better addiction than this current one.
I curse to myself, speaking aloud to no one through the clouds of frisky smoke that wash along the balcony and out into the night, telling myself that this time, this time it will be the last time, I’m going to quit, I’m going to find shelter in the creaking haziness of The Patch or in the strange translucent dreams of Chantix.
Yet nothing.
Everything.
My friend 360 tells me to write what I know.
“You can’t just make up a story,” he says. “You need to understand it from existence.”
“But my life is so regular, so familiar and regular,” I say.
“Write what you know,” he says.
A story that I know:
A young man buys a pack of cigarettes everyday from a butch female shopkeeper on the corner of Slaughton and First. He peels back the thin layer of plastic over the tiny cardboard box and tosses the trash of it out into the street. This man is my friend. I have known him. We have laughed together. We have shared hour of conversation.
This man, he walks along the stiletto heel shapes of avenues that make up the downtown district, wandering along alleyways where junkies sleep under the thin protective layers of trashbags and discarded cow hide carpets. This man smokes as he goes. He smokes all the time.
Until one day, many years later, he decides that he feels sick. Shaking hands try to find solace along the railings, yellow teeth cackle out slurs to his collective of friends who have joined him in the bar-fronts.
He decides he is sick because he is coughing up rivulets of blood that come dangling from his mouth, dangling down into the stained chrome of a toilet bowl. He has decided he is sick because every day upon waking he is moved by some strange urge into the pantry, where he tosses up old meals amidst a stained rusty color puddle.
This man goes to the doctor and tells him that he thinks he might be dying, and the doctor concurs and nods his head slightly and with the saddest of smiles reassures him that he has a shot in the future of this world.
“Lung cancer can be beaten,” says the doctor.
But the man doesn’t beat it: the man is dead. He was my friend. And the cigarettes took him.
Yet still I light up, each Newport like a personal private party where I alone am the guest of honor. My lungs are simply black plastic bags made for the collecting of leaves. My skin the haunted scent of old dying magnolia, or furniture collected from the old abandoned sides of the highway.
Regardless of the morning alarm, it’s the craving that wakes me each morning. This yearning for death, this need to come closer to the hillside where the black robed vigilante wanders, this exchange of my life-moments for the hot polluted cloud of affliction that carries me off.
It saddens me to say that the majority of fluorescent dawns I have witnessed have been watched alongside the thin white stem that is the little death chimney of my hand. I have watched clouds float silently across the colorful fortifications of the sunrise; I have witnessed the moon like a pirates eye hanging gently in the hours of twilight; I have been beaten by the afternoon sun, sweating beneath the gut-wrenching towers of summer.
I have showered only to step out into the barricades of cold, searching for a new scent.
I have inhaled the best blast concussion, i have been wounded by the fragments of a different kind of exploding shell, my lungs like rafts for sinking.
I have left family and friends alone to seek out my peaceful piece of pleasure.
I have wrapped up bodies and then excused myself to the avenues outside of the hospitals gates, my eager hand clutching my crutch in my pocket.
I have stood along the shorelines of this world.
And always with a cigarette.
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