Out of nowhere I developed this lump. I think it was a cyst or a boil, one of those things you associate with trolls, and it was right on my tailbone, like a peach pit wedged into the top of my crack. That’s what it felt like, anyway. I was afraid to look. At first it was just this insignificant knot, but as it grew larger it started to hurt. Sitting became difficult, and forget about lying on my back or bending over. By day five, my tailbone was throbbing, and I told myself, just as I had the day before, that if this kept up I was going to see a doctor. “I mean it,” I said. I even went so far as to pull out the phone book and turn my back on it, hoping that the boil would know that I meant business and go away on its own. But of course it didn’t.
All of this took place in London, which is cruelly, insanely expensive. Hugh and I went to the movies one night, and our tickets cost the equivalent of forty dollars, this after spending sixty on pizzas. And these were mini-pizzas, not much bigger than pancakes. Given the price of a simple evening out, I figured that a doctor’s visit would cost around the same as a customized van. More than the money, though, I was afraid of the diagnosis. “Lower-back cancer,” the doctor would say. “It looks like we’ll have to remove your entire bottom.”
Actually, in England he’d probably have said “bum,” a word I have never really cottoned to. The sad thing is that he could remove my ass and most people wouldn’t even notice. It’s so insubstantial that the boil was actually an improvement, something like a bustle only filled with poison. The only real drawback was the pain.
For the first few days I kept my discomfort to myself, thinking all the while of what a good example I was setting. When Hugh feels bad, you hear about it immediately. A tiny splinter works itself into his palm, and he claims to know exactly how Jesus must have felt on the cross. He demands sympathy for insect bites and paper cuts, while I have to lose at least a quart of blood before I get so much as a pat on the hand.
One time in France we were lucky enough to catch an identical stomach virus. It was a twenty-four-hour bug, the kind that completely empties you out and takes away your will to live. You’d get yourself a glass of water, but that would involve standing, and so instead you just sort of stare toward the kitchen, hoping that maybe one of the pipes will burst and the water will come to you. We both had the exact same symptoms, yet he insisted that his virus was much more powerful than mine. I begged to differ, so there we were, competing over who was the sickest.
“You can at least move your hands,” he said.
“No,” I told him, “it was the wind that moved them. I have no muscle control whatsoever.”
“Liar.”
“Well, that’s a nice thing to say to someone who’ll probably die during the night. Thanks a lot, pal.”
At such times you have to wonder how things got to this point. You meet someone and fall in love; then umpteen years later you’re lying on the floor in a foreign country, promising, hoping, as a matter of principle, that you’ll be dead by sunrise. “I’ll show you,” I moaned, and then I must have fallen back to sleep.
When Hugh and I bicker over who is in the most pain, I think back to my first boyfriend, whom I met while in my late twenties. Something about our combination was rotten, and as a result we competed over everything, no matter how petty. When someone laughed at one of his jokes, I would need to make that person laugh harder. If I found something half decent at a yard sale, he would have to find something better — and so on. My boyfriend’s mother was a handful, and every year, just before Christmas, she would schedule a mammogram, knowing that she would not get the results until after the holidays. The remote possibility of cancer was something to hang over her children’s heads, just out of reach, like mistletoe, and she took great pleasure in arranging it. The family would gather and she’d tear up, saying, “I don’t want to spoil your happiness, but this may well be our last Christmas together.” Other times, if somebody had something going on — a wedding, a graduation — she’d go in for exploratory surgery, anything to capture and hold attention. By the time I finally met her, she did not have a single organ that had not been touched by human hands. Oh, my God, I thought, watching her cry on our living room sofa, my boyfriend’s family is more fucked-up than my own. I mean, this actually bothered me.
We were together for six years, and when we finally broke up I felt like a failure, a divorced person. I now had what the self-help books called “relationship baggage,” which I would carry around for the rest of my life. The trick was to meet someone with similar baggage and form a matching set, but how would one go about finding such a person? Bars were out; I knew that much. I’d met my first boyfriend in a place called the Man Hole — not the sort of name that suggests fidelity. It was like meeting someone at fisticuffs and then complaining when he turned out to be violent. To be fair, he had never actually promised to be monogamous. That was my idea, and though I tried my hardest to convert him, the allure of other people was just too great.
Most of the gay couples I knew at that time had some sort of an arrangement. Boyfriend A could sleep with someone else as long as he didn’t bring him home — or as long as he did bring him home. And Boyfriend B was free to do the same. It was a good setup for those who enjoyed variety and the thrill of the hunt, but to me it was just scary, and way too much work — like having one job while applying for another. One boyfriend was all I could handle, all I wanted to handle, really, and while I found this to be perfectly natural, my friends saw it as a form of repression and came to view me as something of a puritan. Am I? I wondered. But there were buckles to polish and stones to kneel upon, and so I put the question out of my mind.
I needed a boyfriend as conventional as I was, and luckily I found one — just met him one evening through a mutual friend. I was thirty-three, and Hugh had just turned thirty. Like me, he had recently broken up with someone and had moved to New York to start over. We had a few practical things in common, but what really brought us together was our mutual fear of abandonment and group sex. It was a foundation, and we built on it, adding our fears of AIDS and pierced nipples, of commitment ceremonies and the loss of self-control. In dreams sometimes I’ll discover a handsome stranger waiting in my hotel room. He’s usually someone I’ve seen earlier that day, on the street or in a television commercial, and now he’s naked and beckoning me toward the bed. I look at my key, convinced that I have the wrong room, and when he springs forward and reaches for my zipper I run for the door, which is inevitably made of snakes or hot tar, one of those maddening, hard-to-clean building materials so often used in dreams. The handle moves this way and that, and while struggling to grab it I stammer an explanation as to why I can’t go through with this. “I have a boyfriend, see, and, well, the thing is that he’d kill me if he ever found out I’d been, you know, unfaithful or anything.”
Really, though, it’s not the fear of Hugh’s punishment that stops me. I remember once riding in the car with my dad. I was twelve, and it was just the two of us, coming home from the bank. We’d been silent for blocks, when out of nowhere he turned to me, saying, “I want you to know that I’ve never once cheated on your mother.”
“Um. OK,” I said. And then he turned on the radio and listened to a football game.
Years later, I mentioned this incident to a friend, who speculated that my father had said this specifically because he had been unfaithful. “That was a guilty conscience talking,” she said, but I knew that she was wrong. More likely my father was having some problem at work and needed to remind himself that he was not completely worthless. It sounds like something you’d read on a movie poster: sometimes the sins you haven’t committed are all you have to hold on to. If you’re really desperate, you might need to grope, saying, for example, “I’ve never killed anyone with a hammer” or “I’ve never stolen from anyone who didn’t deserve it.” But whatever his faults, my dad did not have to stoop quite that low.
I have never cheated on a boyfriend, and, as with my father, it’s become part of my idea of myself. In my foiled wet dreams I can glimpse at what my life would be like without my perfect record, of how lost I’d feel without this scrap of integrity, and the fear is enough to wake me up. Once I’m awake, though, I tend to lie there, wondering if I’ve made a grave mistake.
In books and movies infidelity always looks so compelling, so right. Here are people who defy petty convention and are rewarded with only the tastiest bits of human experience. Never do they grow old or suffer the crippling panic I feel whenever Hugh gets spontaneous and suggests we go to a restaurant.
“A restaurant? But what will we talk about?”
“I don’t know,” he’ll say. “What does it matter?”
Alone together, I enjoy our companionable silence, but it creeps me out to sit in public, propped in our chairs like a pair of mummies. At a nearby table there’s always a couple in their late seventies, holding their menus with trembling, spotted hands.
“Soup’s a good thing,” the wife will say, and the man will nod or grunt or fool with the stem of his wineglass. Eventually he’ll look my way, and I’ll catch in his eye a look of grim recognition.
We are your future, he seems to say.
I’m so afraid that Hugh and I won’t have anything to talk about that now, before leaving home, I’ll comb the papers and jot down a half-dozen topics that might keep a conversation going at least through the entrees. The last time we ate out, I prepared by reading both the Herald Tribune and The Animal Finder’s Guide, a quarterly publication devoted to exotic pets and the nuts who keep them. The waiter took our orders, and as he walked away I turned to Hugh, saying, “So, anyway, I hear that monkeys can really become surly once they reach breeding age.”
“Well, I could have told you that,” he said. “It happened with my own monkey.”
I tried to draw him out, but it saddens Hugh to discuss his childhood monkey. “Oh, Maxwell,” he’ll sigh, and within a minute he’ll have started crying. Next on my list were the five warning signs of depression among captive camels, but I couldn’t read my handwriting, and the topic crashed and burned after sign number two: an unwillingness to cush. At a nearby table an elderly woman arranged and rearranged the napkin in her lap. Her husband stared at a potted plant, and I resorted to the Herald Tribune. “Did you hear about those three Indian women who were burned as witches?”
“What?”
“Neighbors accused them of casting spells and burned them alive.”
“Well, that’s horrible,” he said, slightly accusatory, as if I myself had had a hand in it. “You can’t go around burning people alive, not in this day and age.”
“I know it, but —”
“It’s sick is what it is. I remember once when I was living in Somalia there was this woman . . .”
“Yes!” I whispered, and then I looked over at the elderly couple, thinking, See, we’re talking witch burnings! It’s work, though, and it’s always my work. If I left it up to Hugh, we’d just sit there acting like what we are: two people so familiar with each other they could scream. Sometimes, when I find it hard to sleep, I’ll think of when we first met, of the newness of each other’s body, and my impatience to know everything about this person. Looking back, I should have taken it more slowly, measured him out over the course of fifty years rather than cramming him in so quickly. By the end of our first month together, he’d been so thoroughly interrogated that all I had left was breaking news — what little had happened in the few hours since I’d last seen him. Were he a cop or an emergency room doctor, there might have been a lot to catch up on, but like me Hugh works alone, so there was never much to report. “I ate some potato chips,” he might say, to which I’d reply, “What kind?” or “That’s funny, so did I!” More often than not, we’d just breathe into our separate receivers.
“Are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“Good. Don’t hang up.”
“I won’t.”
In New York we slept on a futon. I took the left side and would lie awake at night, looking at the closet door. In Paris we got a real bed in a room just big enough to contain it. Hugh would fall asleep immediately, the way he’s always done, and I’d stare at the blank wall, wondering about all the people who’d slept in this room before us. The building dated from the seventeenth century, and I envisioned musketeers in tall, soft boots, pleasuring the sorts of women who wouldn’t complain when sword tips tore the sheets. I saw gentlemen in top hats and sleeping caps, women in bonnets and berets and beaded headbands, a swarm of phantom copulators all looking down and comparing my life with theirs.
After Paris came London, and a bedroom on the sixth floor with windows looking onto neat rows of Edwardian chimney tops. A friend characterized it as a “Peter Pan view,” and now I can’t see it any other way. I lie awake thinking of someone with a hook for a hand, and then, inevitably, of youth, and whether I have wasted it. Twenty-five years ago I was a young man with his whole sexual life ahead of him. How had 9,125 relatively uneventful days passed so quickly, and how can I keep it from happening again? In another twenty-five years I’ll be doddering, and twenty-five years after that I’ll be one of the figures haunting my Paris bedroom. Is it morally permissible, I wonder, to cheat after death? Is it even called cheating at that point? What are the rules? Do I have to wait a certain amount of time, or can I just jump, or, as the case may be, seep right in?
During the period that I had my boil, these questions seemed particularly relevant. The pain was always greater after dark, and by the sixth night I was fairly certain that I was dying. Hugh had gone to sleep hours earlier, and it startled me to hear his voice. “What do you say we lance that thing?” he said.
It’s the sort of question that catches you off guard. “Did you just use the verb to lance?” I asked.
He turned on the light.
“Since when did you learn to lance boils?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “But I bet I could teach myself.”
With anyone else I’d put up a fight, but Hugh can do just about anything he sets his mind to. This is a person who welded the plumbing pipes at his house in Normandy, then went into the cellar to make his own cheese. There’s no one I trust more, and so I limped to the bathroom, that theater of home surgery, where I lowered my pajama bottoms and braced myself against the towel rack, waiting as he sterilized the needle.
“This is hurting me a lot more than it’s hurting you,” he said. It was his standard line, but I knew that this time he was right. Worse than the boil was the stuff that came out of it, a horrible custard streaked with blood. What got to me, and got to him even worse, was the stench, which was unbearable and unlike anything I had come across before. It was, I thought, what evil must smell like. How could a person continue to live with something so rotten inside of him? And so much of it! The first tablespoon gushed out on its own power, like something from a geyser. Then Hugh used his fingers and squeezed out the rest. “How are you doing back there?” I asked, but he was dry-heaving and couldn’t answer.
When my boil was empty, he doused it with alcohol and put a bandage on it, as if it had been a minor injury, a shaving cut, a skinned knee, something normal he hadn’t milked like a dead cow. And this, to me, was worth at least a hundred of the hundred and twenty nights of Sodom. Back in bed I referred to him as Sir Lance-a-Lot.
“Once is not a lot,” he said.
This was true, but Sir Lance Occasionally lacks a certain ring.
“Besides,” I said. “I know you’ll do it again if I need you to. We’re an aging monogamous couple, and this is all part of the bargain.”
The thought of this kept Hugh awake that night, and still does. We go to bed and he stares toward the window as I sleep soundly beside him, my bandaged boil silently weeping onto the sheets.
Part I (Before)
One
The first time someone hit me up for a cigarette I was twenty years old and had been smoking for all of two days. This was in Vancouver, British Columbia. My friend Ronnie and I had spent the previous month picking apples in Oregon, and the trip to Canada was our way of rewarding ourselves. We stayed that week in a cheap residence hotel, and I remember being enchanted by the Murphy bed, which was something I had heard about but never seen in person. During the time we were there, my greatest pleasure came in folding it away and then looking at the empty spot where it had been. Pull it out, fold it away, pull it out, fold it away. Over and over until my arm got tired.
It was in a little store a block from our hotel that I bought my first pack of cigarettes. The ones I’d smoked earlier had been Ronnie’s — Pall Malls, I think — and though they tasted no better or worse than I thought they would, I felt that in the name of individuality I should find my own brand, something separate. Something me. Carltons, Kents, Alpines: it was like choosing a religion, for weren’t Vantage people fundamentally different from those who’d taken to Larks or Newports? What I didn’t realize was that you could convert, that you were allowed to. The Kent person could, with very little effort, become a Vantage person, though it was harder to go from menthol to regular, or from regular-sized to ultralong. All rules had their exceptions, but the way I came to see things, they generally went like this: Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren’t. One should never loan money to a Marlboro menthol smoker, though you could usually count on a regular Marlboro person to pay you back. The eventual subclasses of milds, lights, and ultralights would not only throw a wrench into the works, but make it nearly impossible for anyone to keep your brand straight, but that all came later, along with warning labels and American Spirits.
The pack I bought that day in Vancouver were Viceroys. I’d often noticed them in the shirt pockets of gas station attendants, and no doubt thought that they made me appear masculine, or at least as masculine as one could look in a beret and a pair of gabardine pants that buttoned at the ankle. Throw in Ronnie’s white silk scarf, and I needed all the Viceroy I could get, especially in the neighborhood where this residence hotel was.
It was odd. I’d always heard how clean Canada was, how peaceful, but perhaps people had been talking about a different part, the middle maybe, or those rocky islands off the eastern coast. Here it was just one creepy drunk after another. The ones who were passed out I didn’t mind so much, but those on their way to passing out — those who could still totter and flail their arms — made me afraid for my life.
Take this guy who approached me after I left the store, this guy with a long black braid. It wasn’t the gentle, ropy kind you’d have if you played the flute, but something more akin to a bullwhip: a prison braid, I told myself. A month earlier I might have simply cowered, but now I put a cigarette in my mouth, the way one might if he were about to be executed. This man was going to rob me, then lash me with his braid and set me on fire — but no. “Give me one of those,” he said, and he pointed to the pack I was holding. I handed him a Viceroy, and when he thanked me, I smiled and thanked him back.
It was, I later thought, as if I’d been carrying a bouquet, and he’d asked me for a single daisy. He loved flowers, I loved flowers, and wasn’t it beautiful that our mutual appreciation could transcend our various differences and somehow bring us together? I must have thought too that had the situation been reversed, he’d have been happy to give me a cigarette, though my theory was never tested. I may have been a Boy Scout for only two years, but the motto stuck with me forever: Be Prepared. This does not mean “Be Prepared to Ask People for Shit,” but “Think Ahead, and Plan Accordingly, Especially in Regard to Your Vices.”
Two
When I was in the fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the American Tobacco plant in nearby Durham. There we witnessed the making of cigarettes and were given free packs to take home to our parents. I tell people this, and they ask me how old I am, thinking, I guess, that I went to the world’s first elementary school, one where we wrote on cave walls and hunted our lunch with clubs. I date myself again when I mention the smoking lounge at my high school. It was outdoors, but still, you’d never find anything like that now, not even if the school was in a prison.
I recall seeing ashtrays in movie theaters and grocery stores, but they didn’t make me want to smoke. In fact, it was just the opposite. Once I drove an embroidery needle into my mother’s carton of Winstons, over and over, as if it were a voodoo doll. She then beat me for twenty seconds, at which point she ran out of breath and stood there panting, “That’s . . . not . . . funny.”
A few years later, while sitting around the breakfast table, she invited me to take a puff. I did. Then I ran to the kitchen and drained a carton of orange juice, drinking so furiously that half of it ran down my chin and onto my shirt. How could she, could anyone, really, make a habit of something so fundamentally unpleasant? When my sister Lisa started smoking, I forbade her to enter my bedroom with a lit cigarette. She could talk to me, but only from the other side of the threshold, and she had to avert her head when she exhaled. I did the same when my sister Gretchen started.
It wasn’t the smoke but the smell of it that bothered me. In later years I wouldn’t care so much, but at the time I found it depressing: the scent of neglect is how I thought of it. It wasn’t so noticeable in the rest of the house, but then again, the rest of the house was neglected. My room was clean and orderly, and if I’d had my way it would have smelled like an album jacket the moment you removed the plastic. That is to say, it would have smelled like anticipation.
Three
At the age of fourteen I accompanied a classmate to a Raleigh park. There we met with some friends of his and smoked a joint by the light of the moon. I don’t recall being high, but I do recall pretending to be high. My behavior was modeled on the whacked-out hippies I’d seen in movies and on TV, so basically I just laughed a lot, regardless of whether anything was funny. When I got home I woke my sisters and had them sniff my fingers. “Smell that?” I said. “It’s marijuana, or ‘grass,’ as we sometimes call it.”
I was proud to be the first in my family to smoke a joint, but once I had claimed the title, I became vehemently antidrug and remained that way until my freshman year of college. Throughout the first semester, I railed against my dorm mates: Pot was for losers. It pickled your brain and forced you into crummy state universities like this one.
I’d later think of how satisfying it must have been to them — how biblical, almost — to witness my complete turnaround. The reverend mother becomes the town slut, the prohibitionist a drunkard, and me a total pothead, and so quickly! It was just like you’d see in a made-for-TV movie:
FRIENDLY FELLOW FROM DOWN THE HALl: Oh, come on. One puff’s not going to hurt you.
ME: The heck it won’t! I’ve got some studying to do.
HANDSOME ROOMMATE OF THE FRIENDLY FELLOW DOWN THE HALL: Just let me give you a shotgun.
ME: A shotgun? What’s that?
AGAIN THE HANDSOME ROOMMATE: You lie back while I blow smoke into your mouth.
ME: Where do you want me to lie?
I remember returning to my room that night and covering my lamp with a silk scarf. The desk, the bed, the heavy, misshapen pottery projects: nothing was new, but everything was different; fresh somehow and worthy of interest. Grant a blind person the ability to see, and he might have behaved the way I did, slowly advancing across the room and marveling at everything before me: a folded shirt, a stack of books, a piece of corn bread wrapped in foil. “Amazing.” The tour ended with the mirror, and me standing in front of it with a turban on my head. Well, hello there, you, I thought.
I let a college kid give me a shotgun, and for the next twenty-three years my life revolved around getting high. It was pot, in fact, that led me to smoking tobacco. Ronnie and I were by the side of the highway, making our way to Canada, and I was whining about having no marijuana. The sameness of everything was getting on my nerves, and I asked if cigarettes made you feel any different.
Ronnie lit one and thought for a minute. “I guess they leave you sort of light-headed,” she told me.
“You mean, like, nauseous?”
“A little,” she said. And I decided that was good enough for me.
Four
As with pot, it was astonishing how quickly I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life was a play, and the prop mistress had finally shown up. Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill and then empty. My hands were at one with their labor, the way a cook’s might be, or a knitter’s.
“Well, that’s a hell of a reason to poison yourself,” my father said.
My mother, however, looked at the bright side. “Now I’ll know what to put in your Christmas stocking!” She put them in my Easter basket as well, entire cartons. Today it might seem trashy to see a young man accepting a light from his mom, but smoking didn’t always mean something. A cigarette wasn’t always a statement. Back when I started, you could still smoke at work, even if you worked in a hospital where kids with no legs were hooked up to machines. If a character smoked on a TV show, it did not necessarily mean that he was weak or evil. It was like seeing someone who wore a striped tie or parted his hair on the left — a detail, but not a telling one.
I didn’t much notice my fellow smokers until the mid-eighties, when we began to be cordoned off. Now there were separate sections in waiting rooms and restaurants, and I’d often look around and evaluate what I’d come to think of as “my team.” At first they seemed normal enough — regular people, but with cigarettes in their hands. Then the campaign began in earnest, and it seemed that if there were ten adults on my side of the room, at least one of them was smoking through a hole in his throat.
“Still think it’s so cool?” the other side said. But coolness, for most of us, had nothing to do with it. It’s popular to believe that every smoker was brainwashed, sucked in by product placements and subliminal print ads. This argument comes in handy when you want to assign blame, but it discounts the fact that smoking is often wonderful. For people like me, people who twitched and jerked and cried out in tiny voices, cigarettes were a godsend. Not only that, but they tasted good, especially that first one in the morning, and the seven or eight that immediately followed it. By late afternoon, after I’d finished a pack or so, I’d generally feel a heaviness in my lungs, especially in the 1980s, when I worked with hazardous chemicals. I should have worn a respirator, but it interfered with my smoking, and so I set it aside.
I once admitted this to a forensic pathologist. We were in the autopsy suite of a medical examiner’s office, and he responded by handing me a lung. It had belonged to an obese, light-skinned black man, an obvious heavy smoker who was lying on a table not three feet away. His sternum had been sawed through, and the way his chest cavity was opened, the unearthed fat like so much sour cream, made me think of a baked potato. “So,” the pathologist said. “What do you say to this?”
He’d obviously hoped to create a moment, the kind that leads you to change your life, but it didn’t quite work. If you are a doctor and someone hands you a diseased lung, you might very well examine it and consequently make some very radical changes. If, on the other hand, you are not a doctor, you’re liable to do what I did, which was to stand there thinking, Damn, this lung is heavy.
Five
When New York banned smoking in restaurants, I stopped eating out. When they banned it in the workplace I quit working, and when they raised the price of cigarettes to seven dollars a pack, I gathered all my stuff together and went to France. It was hard to find my brand there, but no matter. At least twice a year I returned to the United States. Duty-free cartons were only twenty dollars each, and I’d buy fifteen of them before boarding the plane back to Paris. Added to these were the cigarettes brought by visiting friends, who acted as mules, and the ones I continued to receive for Christmas and Easter, even after my mom died. Ever prepared for the possibility of fire or theft, at my peak I had thirty-four cartons stockpiled in three different locations. “My inventory,” I called it, as in, “The only thing standing between me and a complete nervous breakdown is my inventory.”
It is here that I’ll identify myself as a Kool Mild smoker. This, to some, is like reading the confessions of a wine enthusiast and discovering midway through that his drink of choice is Lancers, but so be it. It was my sister Gretchen who introduced me to menthol cigarettes. She’d worked at a cafeteria throughout high school and had gotten on to Kools by way of a line cook named Dewberry. I never met the guy, but in those first few years, whenever I found myself short of breath, I’d think of him and wonder what my life would be like had he smoked Tareytons.
People were saying that Kools had fiberglass in them, but surely that was just a rumor, started, most likely, by the Salem or Newport people. I’d heard too that menthols were worse for you than regular cigarettes, but that also seemed suspect. Just after she started chemotherapy, my mom sent me three cartons of Kool Milds. “They were on sale,” she croaked. Dying or not, she should have known that I smoked Filter Kings, but then I looked at them and thought, Well, they are free.
For people who don’t smoke, a mild or light cigarette is like a regular one with a pinhole in it. With Kools it’s the difference between being kicked by a donkey and being kicked by a donkey that has socks on. It took some getting used to, but by the time my mother was cremated, I’d converted.
Six
Over the years, I’ve had quite a few essays reprinted in textbooks. When the students are high schoolers or younger, the editors will sometimes ask if they can replace or eliminate a certain filthy word or phrase, which makes sense, I suppose. What didn’t make sense, at least to me, was a similar request to eliminate a cigarette, to essentially blank it out. The same is done with photographs now, and the effect is disconcerting. Here is Marlene Dietrich in repose, her fingers spread apart for no reason, her eyes staring at the burning tip of nothing.
This particular textbook was for tenth graders. Horizons, it was called, or maybe Perspectives. The line that the editors wanted to erase did not glamorize smoking. In fact it was just the opposite. The cigarette in question belonged to my mother and was referred to as an irritant, something invasive that had given me a headache. I suppose I could have replaced the irritating Winston with an irritating Roman candle, but the story was supposed to be true, and my mother never sat around with fireworks in her mouth. The point I argued is that certain people smoke. It’s part of what makes them who they are, and though you certainly don’t have to like it, altering someone’s character seems a bit harsh, especially when that someone is your mother, and picturing her without a cigarette is unimaginable. “It’s like she was a windup toy and that was her key,” I said.
It seems crazy to cut smoking mothers out of textbooks, but within a few years they won’t be allowed in movies either. A woman can throw her newborn child from the roof of a high-rise building. She can then retrieve the body and stomp on it while shooting into the windows of a day care center, but to celebrate these murders by lighting a cigarette is to send a harmful message. There are, after all, young people watching, and we wouldn’t want them to get the wrong idea.
We’re forever being warned about secondhand smoke, but if it’s really as dangerous as they claim it is, I’d have been dead before my first birthday. My brother and sisters would be dead as well, or maybe we’d never have lived to begin with, our mother having been snuffed out by her own parents’ cigarettes.
My grandparents on my father’s side didn’t smoke, but as owners of a newsstand and tobacco shop, they profited from other people doing it. My dad started smoking when he went to college, but he quit when my older sister and I were still young. “It’s a filthy, stinking habit.” He said this fifty times a day, not that it did any good. Even before the warnings were printed, anyone could see that smoking was bad for you. My mother’s sister, Joyce, was married to a surgeon, and every time I stayed at their house I was awoken at dawn by my uncle’s hacking, which was mucky and painful-sounding and suggested imminent death. Later, at the breakfast table I’d see him with a cigarette in his mouth and think, Well, he’s the doctor.
Uncle Dick died of lung cancer, and a few years later my mother developed a nearly identical cough. You’d think that being a woman, hers would be softer, a delicate lady’s hack, but no. I remember lying in bed and thinking with shame, My mom coughs like a man.
By the time my embarrassment ripened to concern, I knew there was no point in lecturing her. I had become a smoker myself, so what could I say, really? Eventually she dropped her Winstons in favor of something light and then ultralight. “It’s like sucking on a straw,” she’d complain. “Give me one of yours, why don’t you?”
My mother visited twice when I lived in Chicago. The first time was when I graduated from college, and the second was a few years later. She had just turned sixty, and I remember having to slow down when walking with her. Climbing to the elevated train meant stopping every fifth step or so while she wheezed and sputtered and pounded her chest with her fist. Come on, I remember thinking. Hurry it up.
Toward the end of her life, she managed two weeks without a cigarette. “That’s half a month, practically,” she said to me on the phone. “Can you believe it?”
I was in New York at the time and tried to imagine her going about her business: driving to the bank, putting in a load of laundry, watching the portable TV in the kitchen, nothing in her mouth besides her tongue and her teeth. At that time in her life, my mother had a part-time job at a consignment shop. Easy Elegance, the place was called, and she was quick to remind me that they didn’t take just anything. “It has to be classy.”
The owner didn’t allow smoking, so once every hour my mother would step out the back door. I think it was there, standing on gravel in the hot parking lot, that she came to think of smoking as unsophisticated. I’d never heard her talk about quitting, but when she called after two weeks without a cigarette, I could hear a tone of accomplishment in her voice. “It’s hardest in the mornings,” she said. “And then, of course, later on, when you’re having your drink.”
I don’t know what got her started again: stress, force of habit, or perhaps she decided that she was too old to quit. I’d probably have agreed with her, though now, of course, sixty-one, that’s nothing.
There would be other attempts to stop smoking, but none of them lasted more than a few days. Lisa would tell me that Mom hadn’t had a cigarette in eighteen hours. Then, when my mother called, I’d hear the click of her lighter, followed by a ragged intake of breath. “What’s new, pussycat?”
Seven
Somewhere between my first cigarette and my last one, I became a business traveler. The business I conduct is reading out loud, but still I cover a lot of territory. At first I was happy to stay in any old place, be it a Holiday Inn or a Ramada near the airport. Bedspreads were usually slick to the touch, and patterned in dark, stain-concealing colors. Parked here and there on the hallway carpets were any number of cockeyed trays, each with a hamburger bun or a crust of French toast on it. Room service, I’d think. How fancy can you get?
It didn’t take long to become more discriminating. It seems that when you’re paying for yourself, any third-rate chain will do. But if someone else is footing the bill, you sort of need the best. The places that made me the insufferable snob I am today ranged from the fine to the ridiculously fine. Sheets had the snap of freshly minted money, and there was always some little gift waiting on the coffee table: fruit, maybe, or a bottle of wine. Beside the gift was a handwritten note from the manager, who wanted to say how pleased he was to have me as a guest. “Should you need anything, anything at all, please phone me at the following number,” he would write.
The temptation was to call and demand a pony — “and be quick about it, man, this mood of mine won’t last forever” — but of course I never did. Too shy, I guess. Too certain that I would be bothering someone.
More than a decade into my snobitude, I’m still reluctant to put anyone out. Once someone sent a cake to my room, and rather than call downstairs and ask for silverware I cut it with my credit card and ate the pieces with my fingers.
When I first started traveling for business, it was still possible to smoke. Not as possible as it had been in the eighties, but most places allowed it. I remember complaining when, in order to have a cigarette, I had to walk to the other end of the terminal, but in retrospect that was nothing. As the nineties progressed, my life grew increasingly difficult. Airport bars and restaurants became “clean-air zones,” and those few cities that continued to allow smoking constructed hideous tanks.
The ones in Salt Lake City were kept in good condition, but those in St. Louis and Atlanta were miniature, glass-walled slums: ashtrays never emptied, trash on the ground, air ducts exposed and sagging from the caramel-colored ceiling. Then there were the people. My old friend with the hole in his throat was always there, as was his wife, who had a suitcase in one hand and an oxygen tank in the other. Alongside her were the servicemen from Abu Ghraib, two prisoners handcuffed to federal agents, and the Joad family. It was a live antismoking commercial, and those passing by would often stop and point, especially if they were with children. “See that lady with the tube taped to her nose? Is that what you want to happen to you?”
In one of these tanks, I sat beside a woman whose two-year-old son was confined to a wheelchair. This drew the sort of crowd that normally waves torches, and I admired the way the mother ignored it. After hot-boxing three quarters of her Salem, she tossed the butt in the direction of the ashtray, saying, “Damn, that was good.”
As nasty as the tanks could be, I never turned my back on one. The only other choice was to go outside, which became increasingly complicated and time-consuming after September 11. In a big-city airport, it would likely take half an hour just to reach the main entrance, after which you’d have to walk ten, then twenty, then fifty yards from the door. Cars the size of school buses would pass, and the driver, who was most often the only person on board, would give you that particular look, meaning, “Hey, Mr. Puffing on Your Cigarette, thanks a lot for ruining our air.”
As the new century advanced, more and more places went completely smoke-free. This included all the Marriott hotels. That in itself didn’t bother me so much — Screw them, I thought — but Marriott owns the Ritz-Carltons, and when they followed suit I sat on my suitcase and cried.
Not just businesses, but entire towns have since banned smoking. They’re generally not the most vital places on the map, but still they wanted to send a message. If you thought you could enjoy a cigarette in one of their bars or restaurants, then think again, and the same goes for their hotel rooms. Knowing that a traveler would not be smoking while sitting at his desk at the Palookaville Hyatt: I guess this allowed the townspeople to sleep a little easier at night. For me it marked the beginning of the end.
I don’t know why bad ideas spread faster than good ones, but they do. Across the board, smoking bans came into effect, and I began to find myself outside the city limits, on that ubiquitous commercial strip between the waffle restaurant and the muffler shop. You may not have noticed, but there’s a hotel there. It doesn’t have a pool, yet still the lobby smells like chlorine, with just a slight trace of French fries. Should you order the latter off the room service menu, and find yourself in need of more ketchup, just wipe some off your telephone, or off the knob to the wall-mounted heating and air-conditioning unit. There’s mustard there too. I’ve seen it.
The only thing worse than a room in this hotel is a smoking room in this hotel. With a little fresh air, it wouldn’t be quite so awful, but, nine times out of ten, the windows have been soldered shut. Either that, or they open only a quarter of an inch, this in case you need to toss out a slice of toast. The trapped and stagnant smoke is treated with an aerosol spray, the effectiveness of which tends to vary. At best it recalls a loaded ashtray, the butts soaking in a shallow pool of lemonade. At worst it smells like a burning mummy.
The hotels I found myself reduced to had posters hanging in the elevators. “Our Deep Dish Pizza Is Pantastic!!!” one of them read. Others mentioned steak fingers or “appeteazers,” available until 10:00 at Perspectives or Horizons, always billed as “The place to see and be seen!” Go to your room, and there are more pictures of food, most in the form of three-dimensional flyers propped beside the telephone and clock radio. If it’s rare to find a really good photograph of bacon, it’s rarer still to find one on your bedside table. The same is true of nachos. They’re just not photogenic.
When my room is on the ground floor, the view out my window is of a parked eighteen-wheel truck, but if I’m higher up I can sometimes see the waffle restaurant parking lot, and beyond that the interstate. The landscape is best described as “pedestrian hostile.” It’s pointless to try to take a walk, so I generally just stay in the room and think about shooting myself in the head. In a decent hotel there’s always a bath to look forward to, but here the tub is shallow and made of fiberglass. When the stopper is gone — and it usually is — I plug the drain with a balled-up plastic bag. The hot water runs out after three minutes or so, and then I just lie there, me and a bar of biscuit-sized soap that smells just like the carpet.
I told myself that if this was where I needed to stay in order to smoke, then so be it. To hell with the Ritz-Carltons and the puritanical town councils. I’d gone without decent sheets for close to forty years, and now I would do so again. My resolve lasted through the autumn of 2006 but was never terribly strong. By the time I found a wad of semen on the buttons of my remote control, I had already begun to consider the unthinkable.
Eight
If the first step in quitting was to make up my mind, the second was to fill my eventual void. I hated leaving a hole in the smoking world, and so I recruited someone to take my place. People have given me a lot of grief, but I’m pretty sure that after high school, this girl would have started anyway, especially if she chose the army over community college.
After crossing “replacement” off my list, I moved on to step three. According to the experts, the best way to quit smoking is to change your environment, shake up your routine a little. For people with serious jobs and responsibilities, this might amount to moving your sofa, or driving to work in a rental car. For those with less serious jobs and responsibilities, the solution was to run away for a few months: new view, new schedule, new lease on life.
As I searched the atlas for somewhere to run to, Hugh made a case for his old stomping grounds. His first suggestion was Beirut, where he went to nursery school. His family left there in the midsixties and moved to the Congo. After that, it was Ethiopia, and then Somalia, all fine places in his opinion.
“Let’s save Africa and the Middle East for when I decide to quit living,” I said.
In the end, we settled on Tokyo, a place we had gone the previous summer. The city has any number of things to recommend it, but what first hooked me was the dentistry. People looked as if they’d been chewing on rusty bolts. If a tooth was whole, it most likely protruded, or was wired to a crazy-looking bridge. In America I smile with my mouth shut. Even in France and England I’m self-conscious, but in Tokyo, for the first time in years, I felt normal. I loved the department stores too and the way the employees would greet their customers. “Irrasshimase!” They sounded like cats, and when a group would call out in unison, the din was fantastic. When I looked back on our short, three-day visit, I thought mainly of the curiosities: a young woman dressed for no reason like Bo Peep, a man riding a bike while holding a tray. It had a bowl of noodles on it, and though the broth went right up to the rim, he hadn’t spilled so much as a drop.
I’d thought of Japan as a smoker’s paradise, but, like everywhere else, it had gotten more restrictive. In most areas of Tokyo, it is illegal to walk the streets with a lit cigarette in your hand. This doesn’t mean that you can’t smoke, just that you can’t move and smoke at the same time. Outdoor ashtrays have been set up, and while they’re not as numerous as one might wish, still they exist. Most are marked with metal signs, the Japanese and English messages accompanied by simple illustrations: “Please mind your manners.” “Don’t throw butts into the street.” “Use portable ashtrays in consideration of others around you.”
At a smoking station in the neighborhood of Shibuya, the messages were more thought-provoking, as were the pictures that accompanied them: “I carry a 700-degree fire in my hand with people walking all around me!” “Before I pass gas, I look behind me, but I don’t bother when I’m smoking.” “A lit cigarette is held at the height of a child’s face.”
All of the messages were related to civics. Smoking leads to litter. Smoking can possibly burn or partially blind those around you. There was none of the finger wagging you see in America, none of the “shouldn’t you know better?” and the “how could you?” admonitions that ultimately ignite more cigarettes than they extinguish.
When it came to restrictions, Japan was just the opposite of everywhere else. Instead of sending its smokers outdoors, it herded them inside where there was money to be made. In coffee shops and restaurants, in cabs and offices and hotel rooms, life was like a black-and-white movie. Compared to the United States, it was shocking, but compared to France it seemed fairly normal, the most telling difference being the warning labels on the sides of the packs. In France they read, “SMOKING WILL KILL YOU,” the letters so big they can be read from space. In Japan both the writing and the message were more discreet: “Be careful of how much you smoke so as not to damage your health.”
There was no mention of cancer or emphysema and certainly no pictures of diseased organs. They do that in Canada, and while I don’t know that it encourages people to quit, I do know that it makes for one ugly package.
What with all the indoor smoking, Japan was something of a throwback. It might seem the place to start rather than stop, but when I finally thought of quitting, I thought of Tokyo. Its foreignness would take me out of myself, I hoped, and give me something to concentrate on besides my own suffering.
Nine
We decided on Tokyo in early November, and before I could back out, Hugh found us an apartment in the neighborhood of Minato-ku. The building was a high-rise, and most of the tenants were short term. The real estate agent sent pictures, and I viewed them with mixed feelings. Tokyo I was excited about, but the idea of not smoking — of actually going through with this — made me a little sick. The longest I’d ever gone without a cigarette was twelve hours, but that was on an airplane so it probably didn’t count.
On an average day I’d smoke around a pack and a half, more if I was drunk or on drugs, and more still if I was up all night, working against a deadline. The next morning I’d have what amounted to a nicotine hangover, my head all stuffy, my tongue like some filthy sandal crammed into my mouth — not that it prevented me from starting all over again the moment I got out of bed. I used to wait until I had a cup of coffee in my hand, but by the early 1990s, that had gone by the wayside. The only rule now was that I had to be awake.
In preparing myself to quit, I started looking at this or that individual cigarette, wondering why I’d lit it in the first place. Some you just flat-out need — the ones you reach for after leaving the dentist’s office or the movie theater — but others were smoked as a kind of hedge. “Only if I light this will my bus appear,” I’d tell myself. “Only if I light this will the ATM give me small bills.” There were cigarettes lit because the phone was ringing, because the doorbell was ringing, even a passing ambulance was an excuse. There would certainly be bells and sirens in Tokyo, but I doubted that anyone would come to our door. What with the time difference, I wasn’t expecting many calls either. When not panicking, I could sometimes congratulate myself on what was actually a pretty decent plan.
Ten
In the summer of 2006, shortly before our three-day trip to Tokyo, I bought a Japanese-language CD. It was just the basics: “Good morning,” “May I have a fork?” that type of thing. The person giving the English translation spoke at a normal pace, but the one speaking Japanese, a woman, was remarkably slow and hesitant. “Koooonniiiichiii waaa,” she’d say. “Ooooohaaaayooooo goooooo . . . zaimasssssuuu.” I memorized everything she said and arrived in Japan feeling pretty good about myself. A bellman escorted Hugh and me to our hotel room and, without too much trouble, I was able to tell him that I liked it. “Korrree gaaa sukiii dessssu.” The following morning I offered a few pleasantries to the concierge, who politely told me that I was talking like a lady, an old, rich one, apparently. “You might want to speed it up a little,” he suggested.
A lot of people laughed at my Japanese on that trip, but I never felt that I was being made fun of. Rather, it was like I’d performed a trick, something perverse and unexpected, like pulling a sausage out of my ear. When I first came to France, I was afraid to open my mouth, but in Tokyo, trying was fun. The five dozen phrases I’d memorized before coming served me in good stead, and I left the country wanting to learn more.
This led me to a second, much more serious instructional program — forty-five CDs as opposed to just one. The speakers were young, a guy and a girl, and they didn’t slow down for anybody. The idea here was to listen and repeat — no writing whatsoever — but that, to me, sounded too good to be true. It wasn’t advised, but at the end of each lesson I’d copy all the new words and phrases onto index cards. These allowed me to review, and, even better, to be quizzed. Hugh has no patience for that sort of thing, so I had my sisters Amy and Lisa do it. The two of them came to Paris for Christmas, and at the end of every day I’d hand one or the other of them my stack of cards.
“All right,” Lisa might say. “How do you ask if I’m a second-grade reading teacher?”
“I haven’t learned that yet. If it’s not written down, I don’t know how to say it.”
“Oh, really?” She’d then pull a card from the stack and frown at it. “All right, say this: ‘As for this afternoon, what are you going to do?’”
“Gogo wa, nani o shimasu ka?”
“‘What did you do this afternoon?’ Can you say that in Japanese?”
“Well, no —”
“Can you say that you and your older sister saw a bad movie with a dragon in it? Can you at least say ‘dragon’?”
“No.”
“I see,” she said, and as she reached for another card, I felt a mounting hopelessness.
It was even worse when Amy quizzed me. “How do you ask someone for a cigarette?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you say, ‘I tried to quit, but it’s not working’?”
“I have no idea.”
“Say ‘I’ll give you a blow job if you’ll give me a cigarette.’”
“Just stick to the index cards.”
“Say ‘Goodness, how fat I’ve become! Can you believe how much weight I’ve gained since I quit smoking’?”
“Actually,” I said, “I think I’ll just do this on my own.”
Eleven
In the months preceding our trip to Tokyo, I spoke to quite a few people who had either quit smoking or tried to. A number of them had stopped for years. Then their stepgrandmother died or their dog grew a crooked tooth, and they picked up where they’d left off.
“Do you think you were maybe looking for a reason to start again?” I asked.
All of them said no.
The message was that you were never really safe. An entire decade without a cigarette, and then . . . wham! My sister Lisa started again after six years, and told me, as had others, that quitting was much more difficult the second time around.
When asked how they made it through the first few weeks, a lot of people mentioned the patch. Others spoke of gum and lozenges, of acupuncture, hypnosis, and some new drug everyone had heard about but no one could remember the name of. Then there were the books. The problem with most so-called quit lit is that there are only so many times you can repeat the words “smoking” and “cigarettes.” The trick is to alternate them, not to reach for your thesaurus. It bothers me to read that so-and-so “inhaled a cancer stick,” that he “sucked up a coffin nail.” I don’t know anyone who refers to tobacco as “the evil weed.” People in the UK genuinely say “fags,” but in America it’s just embarrassing and self-consciously naughty, like calling a cat a pussy.
The book I was given used all of these terms and more. I read the first hundred pages and then offered Hugh the following summary: “The guy says that choking down lung busters is a filthy, disgusting habit.”
“No it’s not,” he said.
After years of throwing open the windows and telling me I smelled like a casino, it seemed that Hugh didn’t want me to quit. “You just need to cut back a little,” he told me.
Not being a smoker himself, he didn’t understand how agonizing that would be. It had been the same with alcohol; easier to stop altogether than to test myself every day. As far as getting wasted was concerned, I was definitely minor league. All I know is that I drank to get drunk, and I succeeded every night for over twenty years. For the most part, I was very predictable and bourgeois about it. I always waited until 8:00 p.m. to start drinking, and I almost always did it at home, most often at the typewriter. What began at age twenty-two as one beer per night eventually became five, followed by two tall Scotches, all on an empty stomach and within a period of ninety minutes. Dinner would sober me up a little and, after eating, I’d start smoking pot.
Worse than anything was the dullness of it, night after night the exact same story. Hugh didn’t smoke pot, and though he might have a cocktail, and maybe some wine with dinner, he’s never seemed dependent on it. At 11:00 you could talk to him on the phone, and he’d sound no different from the way he would at noon. Call me at 11:00, and after a minute or so I’d forget who I was talking to. Then I’d remember, and celebrate by taking another bong hit. Even worse was when I placed the call. “Yes,” I’d say. “May I please speak to . . . oh, you know. He has brownish hair? He drives a van with his name written on it?”
“Is this David?”
“Yes.”
“And you want to speak to your brother, Paul?”
“That’s it. Could you put him on, please?”
Most often I’d stay up until 3:00, rocking back and forth in my chair and thinking of the things I could do if I weren’t so fucked up. Hugh would go to bed at around midnight, and after he’d fallen asleep I would have dinner all over again. Physically I couldn’t have been hungry. It was just the pot talking. “Fry me an egg,” it would demand. “Make me a sandwich.” “Cut a piece of cheese and smear it with whatever’s on that shelf there.” We couldn’t keep a condiment for longer than a week, no matter how horrid or ridiculous it was.
“Where’s that Nigerian tica-tica sauce Oomafata brought us from Lagos last Tuesday?” Hugh would ask, and I’d say, “Tica-tica sauce? Never saw it.”
In New York I got my marijuana through a service. You called a number, recited your code name, and twenty minutes later an apple-cheeked NYU student would show up at your door. In his knapsack would be eight varieties of pot, each with its own clever name and distinctive flavor. Getting high on Thompson Street was the easiest thing in the world, but in Paris, I had no idea where to find such a college student. I knew a part of town where people lurked in the shadows. The way they whispered and beckoned was familiar, but as a foreigner I didn’t dare risk getting arrested. Then too, they were most likely selling moss, or the innards of horsehair sofas. The things I’ve bought from strangers in the dark would curl your hair.
You don’t withdraw from marijuana the way you do from speed or cocaine. The body doesn’t miss it, but the rest of you sure does. “I wonder what this would look like stoned.” I said this to myself twenty times a day, referring to everything from Notre Dame to the high-beamed ceiling in our new apartment. Pot made the normal look ten times better, so I could only imagine what it did to the extra-ordinary.
If I survived in Paris without getting high, it was only because I still had drinking to look forward to. The bottles in France are smaller than they are in the States, but the alcohol content is much higher. I’m no good at math but figured that five American beers equaled nine French ones. This meant I had to be vigilant about the recycling. Skip a day, and it would look like I’d had Belgium over.
In time I knew that my quota would increase, and then increase again. I wanted to quit before that happened, but practical concerns kept getting in the way. When drinking and working went hand in hand, it was easy to sit at your desk every night. Without it, though, how could a person write? What would be the incentive? Then there was the mess of quitting: the treatment center with the chatterbox roommate, the AA meetings where you’d have to hold hands.
In the end, I stopped on my own. One night without a drink became two nights, and so on and so on. The first few weeks were kind of shaky, but a lot of it was just me being dramatic. As for the writing, I simply changed my schedule and worked in the daytime rather than in the evening. When other people drank, I tried to be happy for them, and when they got drunk and fell down, I found that I didn’t have to try. My happiness was genuine and unforced. Look at what I’m missing, I’d think.
Turn down a drink in the United States, and people get the message without your having to explain. “Oh,” they say, ashamed of themselves for presuming otherwise. “Right. I should probably . . . quit too.” In Europe, though, you’re not an alcoholic unless you’re living half-naked on the street, drinking antifreeze from a cast-off shoe. Anything shy of this is just “fun-loving” or “rascally.” Cover your glass in France or Germany — even worse, in England — and in the voice of someone who has been personally affronted, your host will ask why you’re not drinking.
“Oh, I just don’t feel like it this morning.”
“Why not?”
“I guess I’m not in the mood?”
“Well, this’ll put you in the mood. Here. Drink up.”
“No, really, I’m OK.”
“Just taste it.”
“Actually, I’m sort of . . . well, I sort of have a problem with it.”
“Then how about half a glass?”
I was at a French wedding a few years back, and when it came time to toast the couple, the bride’s mother approached me with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.
“That’s all right,” I told her, “I’m happy with my water.”
“But you have to have champagne!”
“Really,” I said, “I’m fine the way I am.”
“But . . .”
Just then the toast was delivered. I raised my glass into the air, and as I was bringing it to my lips someone jabbed a champagne-soaked finger into my mouth. It was the bride’s mother. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but those are the rules. You’re not supposed to toast with Perrier.”
In America I’m pretty sure you could sue somebody for this. But the woman had meant well, and at least her nails had been short. In the years since the wedding, I’ve learned to accept the glass of champagne. It’s easier to take it, then quietly pass it to Hugh, than it is to make a big deal about it. Other than that, I don’t give much thought to alcohol anymore. I don’t think about drugs, either, not unless something new comes along, something I never got a chance to try. The point, I guess, is that I was able to quit. And if I was able to quit drinking and taking drugs, perhaps I’d be able to quit smoking as well. The trick was not to get all sensitive about it, lest you give abstinence a worse name that it already has.
Twelve
My last cigarette was smoked in a bar at Charles de Gaulle Airport. It was January 3, a Wednesday morning, and though we would be changing planes in London and would have a layover of close to two hours, I thought it best to quit while I was still ahead.
“All right,” I said to Hugh. “This is it, my final one.” Six minutes later I pulled out my pack and said the same thing. Then I did it one more time. “This is it. I mean it.” All around me, people were enjoying cigarettes: the ruddy Irish couple, the Spaniards with their glasses of beer. There were the Russians, the Italians, even some Chinese. Together we formed a foul little congress: the United Tarnations, the Fellowship of the Smoke Ring. These were my people, and now I would be betraying them, turning my back just when they needed me most. Though I wish it were otherwise, I’m actually a very intolerant person. When I see a drunk or a drug addict begging for money, I don’t think, There but for the grace of God go I, but, I quit, and so can you. Now get that cup of nickels out of my face.
It’s one thing to give up smoking, and another to become a former smoker. That’s what I would be the moment I left the bar, and so I lingered awhile, looking at my garish disposable lighter, and the crudded-up aluminum ashtray. When I eventually got up to leave, Hugh pointed out that I still had five cigarettes left in my pack.
“Are you just going to leave them there on the table?”
I answered with a line I’d gotten years ago from a German woman. Her name was Tini Haffmans, and though she often apologized for the state of her English, I wouldn’t have wanted it to be any better. When it came to verb conjugation she was beyond reproach, but every so often she’d get a word wrong. The effect was not a loss of meaning, but a heightening of it. I once asked if her neighbor smoked, and she thought for a moment before saying, “Karl has . . . finished with his smoking.”
She meant, of course, that he had quit, but I much preferred her mistaken version. “Finished” made it sound as if he’d been allotted a certain number of cigarettes, three hundred thousand, say, delivered at the time of his birth. If he’d started a year later or smoked more slowly, he might still be at it, but as it stood he had worked his way to the last one, and then moved on with his life. This, I thought, was how I would look at it. Yes, there were five more Kool Milds in that particular pack, and twenty-six cartons stashed away at home, but those were extras, an accounting mistake. In terms of my smoking, I had just finished with it.
Part II (Japan)
January 5
The first time we flew to Tokyo, I ran outside immediately after clearing customs. I had just gone half a day without a cigarette, and the one I would light out on the curb would leave me so woozy I’d come close to toppling over. To most people, this sounds unpleasant, but to a smoker it’s about as good as it gets — the first cigarette in the morning times ten. This was always my reward for traveling, and without it I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. After clearing customs on this most recent flight, I set down my suitcase and turned to Hugh. “What happens next?” I asked. And with no fanfare, he led us toward the train.
That was yesterday morning, which seems like months ago. It’s been thirty-eight hours since my last cigarette, and I have to say that while it hasn’t been completely painless, neither is it as ghastly as I thought it would be. I expected a complete meltdown, but strangely it’s Hugh who’s become moody and irritable. If I’m no different than ever, it might have something to do with the patch I applied three hours into our flight. I hadn’t planned on buying any, but a few days ago, while passing a pharmacy, I changed my mind and got eighty of them. If I’d never used one in the past, it’s because I’d thought of smoking as just that — an activity that produces smoke. Patches don’t satisfy the urge to stick something in your mouth and set it on fire, but they are oddly calming. While I was at it, I also bought five boxes of nicotine lozenges. I haven’t opened them yet, but knowing they’re available — perhaps that calms me as well.
More than my products, I think it helps that everything is so new and different: our electric toilet, for instance. There’s a control panel attached to the seat, and on it are a dozen buttons. Each is labeled in Japanese and marked with a simple illustration. What looks like a lowercase w is a bottom. A capital Y is a vagina. If you have both, you can occupy yourself for hours, but even for guys there’s a lot to have done. “May I wash that for you?” the toilet silently asks. “Regarding the water, would you prefer the steady stream or the staccato burst? What temperature? Might I offer my blow-dry service as well?” On and on.
Along with everything else in the apartment, the electric toilet was pointed out by the building manager. Super-san, I call him. The man is a few inches shorter than me and seems to speak no English other than “hello.” Two months of instructional CDs allowed me to confidently introduce both myself and Hugh, and to comment on the pleasant weather as we boarded the elevator to the twenty-sixth floor.
ME: Ii o tenki desu ne?
HIM: So desu ne!
Just inside our door, Super-san pulled off his loafers. Hugh did the same and then he kicked me with his stockinged foot. “No shoes allowed.”
“But it’s our apartment,” I whispered.
“It doesn’t matter.”
At the end of the short entryway, just where the carpet begins, there’s a low metal tree with slippers hanging off it. They’re brand-new, a mix of men’s and women’s, and all of them still have price tags on the soles. Super-san stepped into the smallest pair and then gave us a tour of what will be our home for the next three months.
I knew how to say that the apartment was big, and good, but not that it smelled new and reminded me of one of those midlevel residence hotels. In the living room are two framed pictures. They look like the color samples you get at the paint store, nameless, though, and matted in white. These hang above an empty console that faces an empty bookshelf. There’s an empty, glass-doored cabinet as well, along with two sofas, a table and chairs, and a complicated-looking TV. While the apartment itself is unremarkable, outside it’s a wonderland. Off the living room there’s a shallow balcony, and from it we can see the Tokyo Tower. There’s a balcony in the bedroom as well, and it overlooks a network of canals, some with little boats in them. Then there’s a train yard and, beyond that, a sewage treatment plant. I said to Super-san, “Good. Good. Our place is good.” When he smiled, we smiled. When he bowed, we bowed. When he left, we took his slippers and hung them on the low metal tree.
January 6
Our high-rise is on a busy but not unpleasant street lined with similar tall buildings, some business and others residential. There’s a post office on one side of us, and a chain restaurant on the other. Outside our front door there are trees decorated with festive lights, and across the street there’s a convenience store called Lawson. When writing a foreign word, the Japanese use the katakana alphabet, but this sign, just like the one at the 7-Eleven, is in English. They sell my brand of cigarettes at Lawson, but if I wanted them even quicker I could get them at the Peacock, a good-sized supermarket located in the basement of our building. Their sign is also in English, but I don’t know why. If you’re catering to Westerners, the first thing you need are the Westerners. There are Hugh and me, but other than us, I haven’t seen a single one, not on the streets, and certainly not at the Peacock. We went there twice yesterday and found ourselves completely lost. The milk I recognized by the red carton and by the little silhouette of the cow, but how do you find soy sauce when everything on the shelves looks like soy sauce? How do you differentiate between sugar and salt, between regular coffee and decaf?
In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren’t enough euros to go around. “The entire EU is short on coins.”
And I say, “Really?” because there are plenty of them in Germany. I’m never asked for exact change in Spain or Holland or Italy, so I think the real problem lies with the Parisian cashiers, who are, in a word, lazy. Here in Tokyo they’re not just hardworking but almost violently cheerful. Down at the Peacock, the change flows like tap water. The women behind the registers bow to you, and I don’t mean that they lower their heads a little, the way you might if passing someone on the street. These cashiers press their hands together and bend from the waist. Then they say what sounds to me like “We, the people of this store, worship you as we might a god.”
January 7
A Japanese woman we’d met in Paris came to the apartment yesterday and spent several hours explaining our appliances. The microwave, the water kettle, the electric bathtub: everything blinks and bleeps and calls out in the middle of the night. I’d wondered what the rice maker was carrying on about, and Reiko told us that it was on a timer and simply wanted us to know that it was present and ready for duty. That was the kettle’s story as well, while the tub was just being an asshole and waking us up for no reason.
January 8
I peeled away my patch last night and was disgusted by the cruddy shadow it left. It feels like I’ve been wearing a bumper sticker, so instead of replacing the one I took off, I think I’ll just go without and see what happens. As for my three hundred dollars’ worth of lozenges, I still haven’t opened them, and don’t think I’m going to. What I’ve been doing instead is rolling index cards into little tubes. I put one in my mouth when I sit down to write, and then I slowly chew it to a paste and swallow it. I’m now up to six a day and am wondering if I should switch to a lighter, unlined brand.
January 9
In the grocery section of Seibu department store, I saw a whole chicken priced at the equivalent of forty-four dollars. This seemed excessive until I went to another department store and saw fourteen strawberries for forty-two dollars. They were pretty big, but still. Forty-two dollars — you could almost buy a chicken for that.
January 10
I dropped by a Japanese-language school to ask about classes, and the woman at the front desk suggested that as long as I was there, I might as well take the placement exam. “Why not?” she said. “This a good a time as any!” I hadn’t planned on staying that long, but I liked how fun and easy she made it sound. A test! In Japanese! I was just thinking the exact same thing!
A minute later I was seated behind a closed door in a small white room.
Q: Ueno koen __ ____ desu ka?
A: Asoko desu!
I had been fine all morning — in the apartment, on the subway, standing in line at the post office. It wasn’t as if I had never smoked, but I was able to put not smoking on a back burner. Now, though, under pressure to answer a dozen and a half test questions, I’d have gladly traded one of my eyes for a cigarette, even one that was not my brand. I’ve found that it helps to gently chew on my tongue, but that works only during standard cravings. For this one I needed to chew on someone else’s tongue — until it came off.
Sitting there in that hot little room, I wished I’d taken the advice of my friend Janet, who filled a baby food jar with an inch of water and a half-dozen butts. This she carried around in her purse, and whenever she wanted a cigarette, she’d just unscrew the lid and take a whiff of what even the most enthusiastic smoker has to admit is pretty damn nasty. In times of weakness, it’s easy to forget why you ever wanted to quit. That’s why I should have kept that remote control. Even when the semen dried and flaked off, I think it would have served as a good reminder.
Breathe in. Breathe out. It took a few minutes, but eventually I calmed down and realized that, thanks to my instructional CDs, I knew quite a few of these answers, at least in the fill-in-the-blank section. Then came the multiple-choice part, and I found myself blindly guessing. Capping it all off was an essay question, the subject being, “My Country, an Introduction.”
“I am American, but now I live in other places sometimes,” I wrote. “America is big and not very ex-pensive.”
Then I sat with my hands folded until an instructor came and led me back to the lobby. My test was graded in less than a minute, and when the woman behind the counter assigned me to the beginner’s class, I tried to act flattered, as if there was a sub-beginner’s class, and it had just been decided that I was too good for it.
January 12
In terms of stress and its connection to smoking, language school is probably not the best idea in the world. I thought of this yesterday morning as I headed to my first class. Our session ran from 9:00 to 12:45, and during that time we had two different teachers, both women and both remarkably kind. With Ishikawa-sensei we began at the beginning: Hello. Nice to meet you. I am Lee Chung Ha, Keith, Matthieu, and so on. Out of ten students, four are Korean, three are French, two are American, and one is Indonesian. I was luckily not the oldest person in the room. That’s a distinction that went to Claude, a history professor from Dijon.
It’s sad, really. Put me in a classroom, and within five minutes it all comes back: the brownnosing, the jealousy, the desire to be the best student, and the reality that I’ve never been smart enough. “Stop talking,” I write in my notebook. “It’s only the first day. Don’t exhaust people yet.”
I like Sang Lee, the seventeen-year-old Korean girl who sits in the second row. Actually, “like” is probably not the right word. More than that, I need her, need someone who’s worse than I am, someone I can look down on. Because this class is for beginners, I didn’t think that anyone would know the hiragana alphabet. A character or two, maybe, but certainly not the entire thing. When it turned out that everyone knew it, everyone but me and this little idiot Sang Lee, I was devastated.
“Where did you learn this?” I asked one of the French students.
And he said, very matter-of-factly, “Oh, I just picked it up.”
“A flu is something you ‘just pick up,’” I told him. “The words to a song in Spanish. But a forty-six character alphabet isn’t learned unless you specifically sit down and stuff it inside your head.”
“Picked it up,” indeed. I know two characters. That’s it. Only two. This puts me two ahead of that lovable nitwit, Sang Lee, but still, it’s not much of a lead.
January 13
As school continues, so does the parade of new teachers. We had two different ones yesterday, Ayuba-sensei and Komito-sensei. Both were patient and enthusiastic, but neither could match the exuberance of Thursday’s Miki-sensei. At one point, she asked me how to say the number six. I hesitated a little too long, and out of the corner of her mouth, she whispered, “Roku.”
“Come again?”
She whispered it a second time, and when I successfully repeated after her, she applauded with what looked like genuine sincerity and told me I had done really, really well.
January 16
Just before 3:00 a.m. I awoke to find our bed moving. “Earthquake!” I yelled. Hugh sat up at the sound of my voice, and together we gawked at the gently swaying curtains. There was no time to stand, much less run for cover, but I remember thinking how unfair it would be to die two weeks after I quit smoking.
January 17
I was in the school break room with Christophe-san yesterday, and the two of us got to talking about vending machines, not just the ones before us, but the ones outside as well. “Can you believe it?” he asked. “In the subway station, on the street, they just stand there, completely unmolested.”
“I know it,” I said.
Our Indonesian classmate came up, and after listening to us go on, he asked what the big deal was.
“In New York or Paris, these machines would be trashed,” I told him.
The Indonesian raised his eyebrows.
“He means destroyed,” Christophe said. “Persons would break the glass and cover everything with graffiti.”
The Indonesian student asked why, and we were hard put to explain.
“It’s something to do?” I offered.
“But you can read a newspaper,” the Indonesian said.
“Yes,” I explained, “but that wouldn’t satisfy your basic need to tear something apart.”
Eventually, he said, “Oh, OK,” the way I do when moving on seems more important than understanding. Then we all went back to class.
I reflected on our conversation after school, as I hurried down a skyway connecting two train stations. Windows flanked the moving sidewalks, and on their ledges sat potted flowers. No one had pulled the petals off. No one had thrown trash into the pots or dashed them to the floor. How different life looks when people behave themselves — the windows not barred, the walls not covered with graffiti-repellent paint. And those vending machines, right out in the open, lined up on the sidewalk like people waiting for a bus.
January 18
In my how-to-quit-smoking book, the author writes that eating is not a substitute for cigarettes. He repeats this something like thirty times, over and over, like a hypnotist. “Eating is not a substitute for smoking. Eating is not a substitute for smoking . . .” I repeat it myself while looking through the refrigerator and grimacing at the crazy stuff Hugh brought home yesterday: things like pickled sticks, or at least that’s what they look like. Everything is dark brown and floating in murky syrup. Then there’s this fish wrapped up in paper. It’s supposed to be dead, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s simply been paralyzed. My new thing is the Cozy Corner, a Western-style coffee shop next to the Tamachi train station. I pointed to something in the bakery case last Saturday, and the woman behind the counter identified it as shotokeki. This, I’ve come to realize, is Japanese for shortcake.
January 19
We were given a dictation quiz yesterday, and I found myself wanting to cry. It’s not just that I’m the worst student in the class, it’s that I’m clearly the worst student in the class, miles behind that former dope, Sang Lee. What makes it that much harder to bear is the teacher’s kindness, which has come to feel like pity. “You can keep your book open,” Miki-sensei told me, but even that didn’t help. Instead of kyoshi I wrote quichi. Instead of Tokyo, I wrote doki, as in tokidoki, which means “sometimes.” “It’s all right,” Miki-sensei said. “You’ll get it eventually.”
After dictation we opened our books and read out loud. Mae Li breezed right along, as did Indri and Claude. Then came my turn. “Who . . . whose . . . book . . . is . . .”
“This,” Sang Lee whispered.
“Whose book is this?” I continued.
“Good,” the teacher said. “Try the next line.”
I could hear the rest of the class groan.
“Is . . . it . . . you . . . your book . . .”
Buying a bottle of shampoo and discovering later that it’s actually baby oil is bad, but at least that’s a private humiliation. This is public, and it hurts everyone around me. Don’t call on David-san, don’t call on David-san, I can feel my classmates thinking. When we team up for exercises, I see that look, meaning, “But it’s not fair. I had to be with him last time.”
I went through this with French school but never knew how easy I had it. Certain letters might not be pronounced, but at least it’s the same alphabet. I was younger then, too, and obviously more resilient. I left yesterday’s class with one goal — to find a secluded place, sit down, and treat myself to a nice long cry. Unfortunately, this is Tokyo, and there is no secluded place — no church to duck into, no park bench hidden in the shadows.
It didn’t help any that I got off the subway at Shin-juku. Two million people a day pass through the station. Then they scatter to office towers and department stores, to clogged streets and harshly lit underground malls. I’m always wanting to compare an area to Times Square. Then I walk a mile or so, and come to another, even more crowded area. On and on, and with each new neighborhood I feel ever more insignificant. It’s like looking at a sky full of stars and knowing for a fact that each one is not just inhabited, but overpopulated, the message being: you are less than nothing.
It’s probably for the best that I didn’t cry. A lot of people feel that smoking and drinking go together. “The two are inseparable,” they insist. I guess I feel the same way about tears. Unless you can follow a good weep with a cigarette, there’s really no use doing it.
January 21
Every so often I forget that I’ve quit smoking. I’ll be on the subway or in a store and think, Ah, a cigarette, that should solve everything. Then I’ll put my hand to my pocket and, after the panic that comes with finding nothing, I’ll remember that I’ve given it up, and I’ll feel a crushing little blow. It’s like being told some piece of horrible news, but on a smaller scale, not “the baby is going to die,” but “not all of the baby’s hair is going to make it.” Ten times a day this happens. I forget and then I remember.
January 23
“If you want to quit smoking, you have to return to the person you were before you started.” Someone told me this a few months ago, and I assumed that he was joking. Now I see that, like it or not, I am reverting to my twenty-year-old self, at least scholastically. Yesterday morning we took a hiragana test. Out of a possible 100 points, I received 39. It was the worst grade in the class, but still the teacher decorated my paper with a fanciful sticker and the message, “Cheers up!!!”
“That’s a very bad score,” Claude-san told me. He himself had received a perfect 100, and as he headed off to celebrate with a cigarette, I looked at him and thought, Loser.
January 25
According to the book I read, after three weeks without smoking, I’m supposed to feel elation. Yippee, I should be thinking. I’m free! Yesterday marked my three-week anniversary, but instead of feeling joyful I felt weak and opened my mind to the possibility of having a cigarette. Just one, I thought. Just to prove that they’re not as good as I remember them being.
Then I thought of the supermarket in the basement, and of the convenience store across the street. I could buy a pack of Kool Milds, take just one, and throw the rest away. Imagining how it would taste — the almost medicinal punch at the back of my throat — literally made my mouth water, and for the first time since quitting I saw the hopelessness of it. A person gives up smoking, and then what? Spends the rest of his miserable life wanting a cigarette? It wasn’t like that with drinking, but then again, I have a life to lead, things to do, and being drunk kept getting in the way. Unlike alcohol, a cigarette casts no immediate shadow. Smoke one, smoke five or twenty, and you can not only function, you can function better, unless, I mean, you’re chopping down trees or resuscitating someone, two things I hardly ever do anymore. Just one cigarette, I thought. Just one.
It’s embarrassing, but what got me through my moment of weakness was the thought of the Four Seasons in Santa Barbara. Its regular rooms are pretty swank, but even better are the private cottages. I stayed in one once, back when you could still smoke, and was struck by how comfortable it felt, how much like a real home. Most hotels are fairly spartan. Anything not nailed down is likely to be stolen, so it’s just the bed, the desk, the mindless abstract print bolted to the wall: the basics. These cottages, though, they look like little houses lived in by gentle rich people. Cashmere lap blankets, Arts and Crafts bowls — it’s not exactly my taste, but who cares? My cottage had a fireplace, and, if I remember correctly, there was an iron poker and a pair of tongs hanging from a rack beside the hearth. It’s such a faggy thing to think about — the fireplace tongs at the Four Seasons in Santa Barbara — but there you have it. I thought of them for a minute or two, and then I was fine, the craving had passed, which is another thing they told me in the book I read: just hold on.
January 26
It’s hard to put a finger on our neighborhood. Crammed between the office towers are a good number of apartment buildings. I just can’t figure out who lives in them. Are the people wealthy? Middle class? A woman can wear a tattered dress over two pairs of pants, and it looks to me like Comme des Garçons, last season maybe, but still smart and expensive. Along the canals there are simple two- and three-story houses. Were they in America, you could casually peep through the windows, but here, on the off chance that the curtains are open, you’re likely to see the back side of a dresser or bookshelf. Even in homes facing the park, people have their windows obscured. Either that, or the glass is textured. I noticed the same thing when we went to the country. Here’s a village of twenty houses, and you can’t look into a single one of them.
Likewise, people cover their books with patterned, decorative jackets so you can’t see what they’re reading. In the rest of the world, if you’re curious about someone, all you have to do is follow him for a while. Within a few minutes his cell phone will ring, and you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to know. Here, of course, there’s a considerable language barrier, but even if I were fluent it wouldn’t help me any. After three weeks I have yet to see a single bus or subway passenger talking on a cell phone. People do it on the street sometimes, but even there they whisper and cover their mouths with their free hands. I see this and wonder, What are you hiding?
January 27
It might be different for actual Japanese people, but as a visitor I am regularly overwhelmed by how kind and accommodating everyone is. This woman at our local flower shop, for instance. I asked her for directions to the monorail, and after she patiently gave them to me I decided to buy a Hello Kitty bouquet. What it basically amounts to is a carnation with pointed ears. Add two plastic dots for the eyes and one more for the nose, and you’ve got a twenty-dollar cat. “Cute,” I said, and when the florist agreed, I supersized the compliment to “very cute.”
“You speak with skill,” she told me.
Drunk with praise, I then observed that the weather was nice. She said that it certainly was, and after paying I headed for the door. Anywhere else I’d say good-bye when exiting a shop or restaurant. Here, though, I use a phrase I learned from my instructional CD. “Now I am leaving,” I announce, and the people around me laugh, perhaps because I am stating the obvious.
January 30
Following yesterday’s midmorning break, the teacher approached me in the hallway. “David-san,” she said, “I think you homework chotto . . .”
This means “a little” and is used when you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings.
“You think it’s chotto what?” I asked. “Chotto bad?”
“No.”
“Chotto sloppy? Chotto lazy?”
The teacher pressed her hands together and regarded them for a moment before continuing. “Maybe, ah, maybe you don’t understand it so much,” she said.
I used to laugh at this Japanese indirectness, but now I see that there’s a real skill, not just to using it, but to interpreting it. At 11:00 we changed teachers. Miki-sensei walked in carrying her books and visual aids and went on to explain how to ask for things. If you want, for example, to borrow some money, you ask the other person if he or she has any. If you want to know the time, you ask if the other person has a watch.
I raised my hand. “Why not just ask for the time?”
“Too much directness,” Miki-sensei said.
“But the time is free.”
“Maybe. But in Japan, not a good idea.”
After school I went to the Cozy Corner with Akira, who spent many years in California and now works as a book translator. We both ordered shotokeki, and as we ate he observed that, as opposed to English, Japanese is a listener’s language. “What’s not being mentioned is usually more important than what is.”
I asked him how I’d compliment someone on, say, his shirt. “Do I say, ‘I like the shirt you’re wearing’ or ‘I like your shirt’?”
“Neither,” he told me. “Instead of wasting time with the object, you’d just say ‘I like,’ and let the other person figure out what you’re talking about.”
Our teachers offer much the same advice. Give them a sentence, and they’ll immediately trim off the fat. “No need to begin with I, as it is clear that you are the one talking,” they’ll say.
The next session of Japanese class begins on February 8, and I’ve just decided not to sign up for it. Should I announce this in advance, I wonder, or would that be too wordy and direct? Maybe it’s best just to walk out the door and never return. I’ll feel guilty for a day or two, but in time I’ll get over it. The way I see it, I came here to quit smoking. That’s my first priority, and, as long as I don’t start again, I can consider myself, if not a success, then at least not a complete failure.
January 31
Four weeks without a cigarette.
Given the state of my Japanese it seems unfair to criticize some of the English I’ve been seeing. A sign outside a beauty parlor reads “Eye Rash Tint,” and instead of laughing, I should give them credit for at least coming close. What gets me are the mass-produced mistakes, the ones made at Lawson, for example. A huge, nationwide chain of convenience stores, and this is what’s printed on the wrappers of their ready-made sandwiches: “We have sandwiches which you can enjoy different tastes. So you can find your favorite one from our sandwiches. We hope you can choose the best one for yourself.”
It’s not that horribly off the mark, but still you’d think that someone, maybe someone in management, might say, “I’ve got a cousin who lives in America. What do you say I give him a call and run this by him before we slap it on tens of millions of wrappers?” But no.
Among Hugh’s birthday gifts were two handmade teacups I bought at Mitsukoshi, a department store. Included in the box was a profile of the craftswoman, who has, for many years, been enchanted by “the warmth of Cray.” I thought that this was another craftsperson, the beloved Cray-san, but Hugh figured out that what they meant to say was “clay.” The sentence, in its entirety, reads, “With being enchanted by the warmth of Cray and the traditional of pottery over the period so far she is playing active parts widely as a coordinator who not only produce and design hers own pottery firstly but suggest filling Human’s whole life with fun and joyful mind.”
February 5
Beside the Imperial Palace, there’s a park, with a big koi-filled pond in it. Hugh and I were just nearing the gate yesterday when a pair of young men approached, saying, “Yes. Hello. A minute please?”
Both were students at a local university and were wondering if they might show us the sights, “Not for money,” explained the larger of the two, “but to help improve our Engarish.”
“I don’t think so,” Hugh told him, and the young man who had spoken, and whose name turned out to be Naomichi, turned to his friend. “He is saying to us, ‘No, thank you.’”
Then I piped up. “Oh, what the heck,” I said to Hugh. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”
“Are you saying, ‘Yes, please’?” Naomichi asked. And I told him that I was.
For the first five minutes of our guided tour, we talked about the ruined buildings. “If this is the shell of the guardhouse, where’s the place the guards were guarding?” I asked.
“Burned down,” Student No. 2 told me.
Except for a few walls, it seemed that everything had burned. “Why didn’t you build stuff with stone?” I asked, this as if I were scolding one of the three pigs. “If fires were a problem, and they obviously were, why not move on to fireproof.”
“Not our way,” Naomichi said.
“We did not then have the skills,” his friend added.
It was here that we lost interest in the park and began asking the students about their lives. “What’s your major?” “Do you live with your parents?” “How long have you been studying English?” While Hugh and Naomichi talked about the declining popularity of sumo wrestling, Student No. 2 and I discussed the majesty of nature. “What wild animals do you have in Tokyo?” I asked.
“Wild animal?”
“Do you have squirrels?”
No response.
I pretended to fill my cheeks with nuts, and the young man said, “Ah, sukaworra!”
I then moved on to snakes and asked if he was afraid of them.
“No. I think that they are very cute.”
Surely, I thought, he’s misunderstood me. “Snake,” I repeated, and I turned my arm into a striking cobra. “Horrible. Dangerous. Snake.”
“No,” he said. “The only thing I am afraid of is moutha.”
“The snake’s mouth?”
“No,” he said, “moutha. I maybe saying it wrong, but moutha. Moutha.”
I was on the verge of faking it when he pulled out an electronic dictionary and typed in the word he was looking for, ga, which translates, strangely enough, to “moth.”
“You’re afraid of moths?”
He nodded yes and winced a little.
“But nobody’s afraid of moths.”
“I am,” he whispered, and he looked behind us, as if afraid that one might be listening.
“Are you afraid of butterflies too?” I asked.
The young man cocked his head.
“Butterfly,”I said, “colorful cousin of the moth. Are you afraid that he too will attack?”
Hugh overheard me saying this and turned around. “What the hell are you two talking about?”
And Student No. 2 said, “The wildness.”
February 6
I thought before coming here that every afternoon I would grab my iPod and my index cards and take a long walk. It’s what I did in Paris, and, as a result, whenever I use a particular phrase, I recall where I was when I learned it. Yesterday morning, for instance, I ran into Super-san, and when I asked how many children he had, I thought of the Boulevard Daumesnil, just as it reaches the Viaduct des Arts. It had rained heavily the day I learned Lesson No. 13, and the last leaves of the season, russet-colored and as big as pot holders, stuck to the sidewalk as if they had been glued down and covered with varnish. I walked for two hours that afternoon, and the phrases I learned stayed learned, or at least they have so far. I think it helped that I was smoking. Back in December, I could light a cigarette without thinking. Now I don’t light it and think so hard about what I’m missing that there isn’t room for anything else.
A bigger problem is that it’s difficult to walk here, at least in the way that I can in London or Paris. Take Ginza, a neighborhood of fancy shops and department stores. It’s the sort of place I feel guilty for liking, the sort that offers menus in English. There’s a stand there that sells black ice cream and another that sells pizza in a cone. On Sunday afternoons, the main street is closed to traffic and beautifully dressed people parade about in their finery.
Ginza is a mile from our apartment, and in order to reach it I have to cross umpteen lanes of traffic, often using pedestrian bridges. Then there are the elevated highways and overhead train tracks, the off-ramps and construction sites. It’s not just in this neighborhood, but everywhere I go. The arrangement of buildings is higglety-pigglety as well, the mirrored cube between the high-rise and the one-story house made of cobbled-together planks.
As a child I once found an ant, running a crazy path across my family’s basement. I meant to open the door and herd the thing out, but then I got a better idea and dropped him through the ventilation grate in the back of our TV. What the ant saw then and what I see now are likely very similar: a chaotic vision of the future, heavy on marvels, but curiously devoid of charm. No lake, no parkland, no leafy avenues, and it stretches on forever.
February 7
I tried on a swimsuit at one of the Ginza department stores and made the mistake of walking fully dressed into the carpeted changing room. The saleswoman saw me and called out in the only shrill voice I’ve heard since my arrival. “Stop. Wait! Your shoes!”
It hadn’t occurred to me that I needed to remove them, but after all this time I suppose that it should have. At a small shop I went to last weekend, I had to change into slippers in order to look into the display case. Then I put my shoes back on and had to remove them again to climb the stairs to the second level, which was designated as a sock-only zone.
Then there was our recent visit to the Asakura Choso Museum, the restored home and studio of the late, noted sculptor. Upon entering, you change into slippers, which are then exchanged for other slippers if you want to step onto the patio. Slippers are removed entirely for the second floor, but put back on for the third, and then changed again for the rooftop garden. The artist’s sculptures were displayed throughout the house, and though there were quite a few of them he could have completed twice as many if he hadn’t had to change his goddamn shoes every three minutes.
February 8
Yesterday was my last day of school, and once again I had second thoughts about defecting. Our first teacher was Ayuba-sensei, one of my favorites. With her we spend a lot of time repeating things, which is fine by me. Talking is the only part I’m any good at, and she’ll occasionally reward me with a little “Ii desu,” meaning “Good.”
At the end of the session, she moved her fingers down her cheeks, imitating tears. I started to think that I was making a terrible mistake, but then we had our break, followed by two hours with Miki-sensei. She’s a lovely woman, but I died a little when she handed out lined sheets of paper and asked us to write an essay titled “Watashi No Nihon No Seikatsu” (My Japanese Life).
My final product was fairly simple, but it involved no cheating and it was all written in hiragana. “My Japanese life is entertaining but very busy. My place is tall — 28 stories — and all the time I am riding on the elevator. Sometimes I go to the movies with my friend Hugh-san. Every day I do homework but always I make bad tests. Now I will go to England and talk English. Maybe later I will study Japanese.”
February 9
To celebrate the end of school, Hugh and I went out to dinner. I ordered the tasting menu, which consisted of eight courses, none of them large enough to fill a saucer. The second — a stunted radish carved to resemble a flower, a bit of fish, a potato the size of a marble — was served in a deep wooden box and accompanied by a hand-calligraphed sign. The presentation was beautiful, each plate a different size, a different shape, a different texture. The food was good too. There just wasn’t enough of it.
We ate at the counter, not far from a man who was just finishing a bottle of wine. “Do you mind if I light a cigarette?” he asked, and I told him to go ahead. “Have three, why don’t you, and blow the smoke this way?” I think he read my remark as sarcasm, but I was being completely sincere. Back when I was smoking myself, I was often irritated by the smell of other people’s cigarettes. Now for some reason, I love it. Especially when I’m eating.
February 12
Late yesterday morning, Hugh and I took our new swimsuits and headed to a nearby municipal building. There, on the seventh floor, is an Olympic-sized pool. I liked that I could see our apartment from the floor-to-ceiling windows behind the lifeguard stand. I liked the dressing room and the quiet way people moved about. The only thing I didn’t care for was the actual swimming.
As opposed to Hugh, who’s always had a bathing cap and a pair of goggles drying in the bathroom, I haven’t attempted a lap in over thirty years. Bike riding I can manage, but three strokes in the water and I feel as if my heart might burst. It took awhile, but I eventually got from one end of the pool to the other. Then I did it again and again, each length terminating in an extended howl. While groaning and panting, I gripped the edge of the pool and screwed my eyes shut, looking, I imagine, like a half-dead monkey. Out of everyone in that room, I was the only person with hair on his chest. This was bad enough, but to have it on my back as well — I could actually feel myself disgusting people.
February 14
I quit smoking only six weeks ago, but already my skin looks different. It used to be gray, but now it’s gray with a little pink in it. I also notice how much easier it is to move around, to climb stairs, to run for a bus. I’ve often heard cigarettes compared to friends. They can’t loan you money, but they are, in a sense, there for you, these mute little comfort merchants always ready to lift your spirits. It’s how I now feel about macadamia nuts, and these strange little crackers I’ve been buying lately. I can’t make out the list of ingredients, but they taste vaguely of penis.
February 15
It is now official: there is no place on earth where you will not find a Peruvian band. Leaving Tamachi Station last night, I heard the familiar sounds of Simon and Garfunkel’s “El Condor Pasa.” Up the escalator, and there they were: five men in ponchos, blowing the pipes of Pan into cordless microphones. “Didn’t I just see you in Dublin?” I wanted to ask. “Or, no, wait, maybe it was Hong Kong, Oxford, Milan, Budapest, Toronto, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.”
February 16
On my way home from the park yesterday, I decided to stop and get my hair cut. The barber was just sitting around watching TV when I entered, and he invited me to set my bags on one of his three empty chairs. He then gestured for me to sit. I did, and as he covered me with a cloth I came to realize that the man had shit on his hands, a swipe or whatever, most likely on the palm. The smell was unmistakable, and every time he raised the scissors I recoiled. Spotting it would have set my mind to rest, but because he was busy, and most often gripping something, it was hard to get a good look. Then too I was preoccupied by our conversation, which required a great deal of concentration.
Shit on his hands or no shit on his hands, you couldn’t deny that he was a remarkably friendly barber, and a talented one to boot. Early in his career he’d won some sort of a competition. I know this because he showed me a photo: him, fifty years younger, being presented with a medal. “Number one-o champ,” he said, and as he held up his index finger, I bent forward and squinted at it. “Not number two-o?”
He knew, by my count, eight words of English, and after he had used them, we spoke exclusively in Japanese.
“Last night for dinner I ate pork,” I told him. “What did you have?”
“Yakitori,” he said, and I wondered how I might ask if some of that yakitori, the digested version, might not have come back to haunt him.
“Mimi,” I said, and I pointed to my ear.
“Very good.” And he pointed to his own ear. “Mimi!”
I then touched the tip of my nose “Hana.”
“That’s right, hana,” the barber said, and he touched his own.
Next I raised my hand, fanned out the fingers, and slowly turned it this way and that, as if it were modeling jewelry on the shopping channel. “Te.”
“Excellent,” the barber said, but rather than displaying his own hand, he simply raised it a little.
It went on like this for twenty minutes, and when he had finished cutting my hair, the barber covered my head with a damp towel. He then proceeded to punch me about the ears. I’ve gone back and forth on this, wondering if “punch” is too strong a word, but I really don’t think it is. He didn’t fracture my skull or break any of his knuckles, he never actually drew back his arm, but it really did hurt.
“Hey,” I said, but he just laughed and landed another blow above my right mimi. Luckily the towel was there, or in addition to the pain I’d have obsessed about the shit he was pounding into my new haircut. Of course I washed it anyway, twice as a matter of fact. Hugh had his hair cut a few weeks ago, and so I asked if his barber had punched him in the head as well.
“Sure did,” he said. So at least that part was normal.
February 19
According to Amy’s friend Helen Ann, it takes thirty days to break a habit and forty-five to break an addiction. On my forty-fifth day without a cigarette, I was in Kyoto and didn’t think about smoking until we left a temple and came across a group of men gathered around an outdoor ashtray. This was at about 4:00 in the afternoon, during a brief break in the rain.
Our weekend trip was a package deal — train fare and two nights in a slightly shabby hotel. I don’t know if it’s common or not, but all of the bellhops were women. Not one of them weighed over ninety pounds, so it felt very strange to hand over my suitcase. It also felt weird not to offer a tip, but, according to Reiko, that’s never done.
The hotel wasn’t very busy, and its relative emptiness made it all the more depressing. Our Western-style breakfast was served on the ground floor, in a plain, harshly lit banquet room. It was there that I saw a Japanese woman eat a croissant with chopsticks. The food was self-serve, and I wonder who they consulted before deciding on the menu. Eggs and sausage made sense, as did toast, cereal, and fruit. But who eats a green salad for breakfast? Who eats mushroom soup, corn chowder, or steamed broccoli? On our second morning we went to an equally sad room and had the Japanese breakfast, which was served by women in kimonos. This, too, was something of a nightmare, and while shuddering I imagined a mother scolding her son. “Oh, no you don’t,” she might say. “This is the most important meal of the day, and you’re not going anywhere until you finish your pickles. That’s right, and your seaweed too. Then I want you to eat your cold poached egg submerged in broth and at least half of that cross-eyed fish.”
February 22
Lying in bed this morning, I realized that since leaving Paris I have not seen a single person on Rollerblades. Neither have I seen anyone on one of those push-along scooters that were a five-minute fad for the rest of the world but remain inexplicably popular in France. The problem here is bikes, which people ride on the sidewalks rather than in the streets. Elsewhere this is done with a sense of entitlement — “Get out of my way, you” — but the cyclists of Tokyo seem content to slowly, silently creep along behind you, “Don’t mind me” being the general attitude. I also notice that of the hundreds of bikes parked outside the subway station, hardly any of them are locked. This makes me wonder if people lock their cars or the front doors to their apartments.
February 23
Every time I return from the basement supermarket, Hugh asks me what music was playing. I wondered why he wanted to know, and then I started paying attention and realized that it’s a really good question. A few days ago, I stood in line and listened to an English rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Since then I’ve heard “Rock-a-bye Baby,” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” “The Bear Went Over the Mountain,” and what may well be the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s home from work we go.”
February 27
In the spotless restroom of the Tamachi station, I noticed that beside each urinal there’s a hook for your umbrella. It’s just another of those personal touches that keep you coming back.
March 3
In the lobby of our building, there are four leather sofas and two coffee tables. People occasionally sit down there, but not too often. “Maybe because of this,” Hugh said yesterday, and he pointed to a sheet of rules written in Japanese. “No smoking” was clear enough, just a cigarette with a slash through it. Then there was “no drinking milk from a carton” and what was either “no eating candy hearts” or “no falling in love.”
March 4
I’d always thought of myself as a careful smoker, but last night, while watching a burning building on the evening news, I remembered the afternoon I started a fire in a hotel room. What happened was that I’d emptied my ashtray too soon. One of the butts must have been smoldering, and it ignited the great wads of paper in my trash can. Flames licked the edge of my desk and would have claimed the curtains had I not acted quickly.
Then there was the time I was taking a walk in Normandy, and the tip of my lit cigarette brushed the cuff of my jacket. One moment my wrist felt hot, and the next thing I knew I was like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. Flames leapt from my sleeve and I jumped from foot to foot, batting at them and calling out for help.
In all the excitement, my half-smoked cigarette dropped from my hand and rolled to the edge of the road. Once the fire was out and I’d halfway regained my composure, I picked it up, brushed off the dirt, and stuck it back in my mouth, just happy to be alive.
March 6
I took the train to Yokohama yesterday and was at Shinagawa Station when a couple got on with their young son, who was maybe a year and a half old. For the first few minutes the boy sat on his mother’s lap. Then he started fussing and made it clear that he wanted to look out the window. The father said something that sounded, in tone, like, “You just looked out the window two days ago.” Then he sighed and bent forward to remove his son’s shoes. The mother, meanwhile, went through her bag and pulled out a small towel, which she then spread upon the seat. The boy stood upon it in his stocking feet, and as he considered the passing landscape he smacked his palms against the glass. “Ba,” he said, and I wondered if that was a word or just a sound. “Ba, ba.”
We all rode along for a pleasant ten minutes, and, shortly before the train reached their stop, the father put the boy’s shoes back on. His wife returned the towel to her purse, and then, using a special wipe, she cleaned her son’s fingerprints off the glass. Coming from France where people regularly put their feet on the train seats, and from America where they not only pound the windows, but carve their initials into them, the family’s display of consideration was almost freakish. Ba, I’ve since decided, is Japanese for “Watch carefully, and do what we do.”
March 7
Four hours into Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees, and I wondered how I had survived all these many years without Kabuki. It helped, I think, that we rented those little radio transmitters. Hugh’s and mine were in English, and Akira’s was in Japanese. The play was in Japanese as well, but the stylized manner in which people spoke made them very difficult to understand. The equivalent, in English, might be Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West calling out that she’s melting, only slower, and with frequent pauses.
If I hadn’t had the radio transmitter, I would have been perfectly happy watching the sets and the elaborately costumed actors. I would have noticed that most of the women were on the homely side, some of them strikingly so, but I wouldn’t have known that these roles were played by men, which is one of the rules, apparently: no girls allowed, just like in Shakespeare’s day.
The story of Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees was both simple and complicated. Simple in that things never change: people are consistently jealous or secretive or brave-hearted. As for the rest, it all came down to a series of misunderstandings, the type that could happen to anyone, really. You assume that the sushi bucket is full of gold coins, but instead it’s got Kokingo’s head in it. You think you know everything about your faithful follower, but it turns out that he’s actually an orphaned fox who can change his shape at will. It was he who spoke my favorite line of the evening, five words that perfectly conveyed just how enchanting and full of surprises this Kabuki business really is: “That drum is my parents.”
There was a lot of sobbing in last night’s presentation. Lots of teeth gnashing, lots of dying. Our transmitters explained that the playwrights wanted to end on a dramatic note, so at the close of act six, after Kakuhan reveals himself as Noritsune and vows to one day meet Yoshitsune on the field of battle, he climbs a two-step staircase, turns to the audience, and crosses his eyes. What with his fist clenching and a hairstyle that might be best described as a Beefeater shag, you had to laugh, but at the same time you couldn’t help being moved. And that, I think, is pretty much the essence of a good show.
March 9
Riding the high-speed train — the Shinkansen — to Hiroshima, I supposed that to the untrained eye, all French cities might look alike, as might all German and American ones. To a Japanese person, Kobe and Osaka might be as different as Santa Fe and Chicago, but I sure don’t see it. To me it’s just concrete, some gray and some bleached a headachy white. Occasionally you’ll pass a tree, but rarely a crowd of them. The Shinkansen moves so fast you can’t really concentrate on much. It’s all a whoosh, and before you know it one city is behind you and another is coming up.
If the world outside the train is fast and bleak, the world inside is just the opposite. I like the girl in uniform who pushes the snack cart down the aisle and the two girls in brighter, shorter uniforms who come by every so often and cheerfully collect your trash. Nobody talks on his cell phone, or allows music to bleed from an iPod. You don’t see any slobs either. On the first leg of our trip, we sat across from a man I guessed to be in his midfifties. His lower face was obscured by a mask, the type people wear when they have a cold. But his hair was oiled and carefully combed. The man wore a black suit, matching black shoes, and canary yellow socks that looked to be made of wool rather than cotton. It was such a small thing, these socks, but I couldn’t take my eyes off them. “Hugh,” I said. “Do you think I would look good in yellow socks?”
He thought for a moment before saying, “No,” this without a trace of doubt, as if I asked if I’d look good in a body stocking.
March 10
Having written that so many Japanese cities look alike, I couldn’t help noticing that Hiroshima was clearly different: greener, more open. We caught a cab at the station, and after telling the driver where we were going I explained that my friend and I were Europeans, visiting from our home in Paris.
“Oh,” the driver said. “That’s far.”
“Yes it is,” I agreed.
The trip to the hotel took maybe ten minutes, and Hugh and I spent most of it speaking French. We did this a lot during our time in Hiroshima, especially at the memorial museum, which was torturous. Just when you’d think that it couldn’t get any sadder, you’d come upon another display case, one in particular with a tag reading, “Nails and skin left by a twelve-year-old boy.” This boy, we learned, was burned in the blast, and subsequently grew so thirsty that he tried to drink the pus from his infected fingers. He died, and his mother kept his nails and the surrounding skin to show to her husband, who’d gone off to work the day the bomb was dropped but never came home.
The museum was full of stories like this, narratives that ended with the words “But he died / but she died.” This came to seem like something of a blessing, especially after we passed the diorama. The figures were life-sized and three-dimensional, a ragged group of civilians, children mainly, staggering across a landscape of rubble. The sky behind them was the color of glowing embers, and burnt skin hung in sheets from their arms and faces. You couldn’t fathom how they could still be upright, let alone walking. One hundred forty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima, and more died later of hideous diseases.
There were a dozen or so displays devoted to the aftereffects of radiation, and in one of them a pair of two-inch-long black rods, curled, and the circumference of a pencil, sat on a pedestal. It seemed that a young man had his arm out the window when the bomb went off, and that some time later, after most of his wounds had healed, these rods grew from his fingertips and took the place of his nails. Worse still is that they had blood vessels inside of them, and when they broke off they hurt and bled and were ultimately replaced by new rods. The narrative was fairly short, no more than a paragraph, so a lot of my questions went unanswered.
The museum was crowded during our visit, and nobody spoke above a whisper. I spotted two Westerners standing before a photograph of charred bodies, but because they were speechless, I have no idea where they were from. After leaving the main exhibit, we exited into a sunny hallway filled with drawings and video monitors. The drawings were done by survivors and were ultimately more haunting than any of the melted bottles or burnt clothing displayed in the previous rooms. “Jr. High Students’ Corpses Stacked Like Lumber” was the title of one of them.
March 11
A booklet in our hotel room includes a section on safety awkwardly titled Best Knowledge of Disaster Damage Prevention and Favors to Ask of You. What follows are three paragraphs, each written beneath a separate, boldfaced heading: “When you check in the hotel room,” “When you find a fire,” and, my favorite, “When you are engulfed in flames.”
Further weird English from our trip:
• On an apron picturing a dog asleep in a basket: “I’m glad I caught you today. Enjoy mama.”
• On decorative paper bags a person might put a gift in: “When I think about the life in my own way I need gentle conversations.”
• On another gift bag: “Today is a special day for you. I have considered what article of present is nice to make you happy. Come to open now, OK?”
• On yet another gift bag: “Only imflowing you don’t flowing imflowing.” (This last one actually gave me a headache.)
March 12
Saturday night’s dinner included small pieces of raw horse meat served on chipped ice. It wasn’t the first time I’ve eaten horse, or even raw horse, for that matter, but it was the first time I’ve done it while dressed in a traditional robe, two robes actually, the first one amounting to a kind of slip. The woman who served us was a little on the heavy side, young, with big crooked teeth. After showing us to our table on the floor, she handed us steaming towels and then looked from Hugh to me and back again. “He is you brother?” she asked, and I recalled Lesson 8 of my instructional CD. “He is my friend,” I told her.
This same thing happened last month at a department store. “Brothers traveling together?” the clerk had asked.
Westerners often think all Asians look alike, and you don’t see the ridiculousness of it until it’s turned in reverse. Back home, Hugh and I couldn’t even pass for stepbrothers.
March 19
It was cold yesterday, and after lunch, armed with an out-of-date guidebook, Hugh and I went to Shinjuku Station and then changed trains. The neighborhood we wound up in was supposed to be packed with antique stores, but that, most likely, was back in the eighties. Now there was just a handful of places, most selling stuff from France and Italy: pitchers with “Campari” written on them, that type of thing. Still, it was well worth the trip. Few of the buildings were more than three stories tall. Architecturally, they weren’t that interesting, but their scale gave the area a cozy, almost familiar feeling.
We wandered around until it started getting dark and were heading back toward the subway station when we came upon what looked like a garage. The door was open, and leaning against a counter was a naive painting of a beaver, not the kind you’d see on all fours, building a dam or whatever, but breezy and cartoonish, wearing a shirt and trousers. I had just stepped forward to admire it when a man appeared and held an electronic wand to his throat. The voice it created was completely flat, never varying in tone or volume. Robotic, I guess you’d call it. Otherworldly. It’s how movie aliens used to sound when they asked to be taken to our leader.
The man was so difficult to understand that for the first minute, I couldn’t tell if he was speaking English or Japanese. I sensed that he was asking a question, though, and, not wanting to offend him, I agreed in both languages. “Yes,” I said. “Hai.”
I’d guess the guy was about seventy, but youthful-looking. He wore a baseball cap and a collarless leather coat that left his throat unobstructed and open to the cold. I pointed once more to the painting, and after I said how much I liked it, he brought me a brochure. On its cover was this same cartoon beaver, only smaller and less charming.
This time I said, “Ahhh. OK.”
It was hard to tell what this shop was all about. One entire wall was open to the street, and most of the shelves were lined with what looked like junk: used newspapers, grocery bags, a championship cup made out of plastic. “My daughter,” the man droned in English, and he held the cup aloft and gave it a little shake. “She win.”
I was then shown a photo of a smiling fat guy with his hair in a bun. “Amateur sumo champion,” the shopkeeper told me.
And I said, in Japanese, “He is a big boy.”
The man nodded, and as he returned the photo to its shelf, I asked him what he sold. “Ah,” he said. “Yes. My business.” Then he led me to the street and pointed to the roof, where a handmade sign read, “Cancer Out Tea.”
“I have cancer,” he announced.
“And you cured it with tea?”
He made a face I took to mean “Well . . . kind of.”
I was going to ask what kind of cancer he had, but then I thought better of it. When my mom got sick, people would often push for details. It was their way of setting her at ease, of saying, “Look, I’m acknowledging it. I’m not freaked out.” But when they learned that she had lung cancer, the mood tended to change, the way it wouldn’t have if the tumor was in her breast or brain.
Because of the electronic wand, I assumed the man had cancer of the larynx. I also assumed, perhaps unfairly, that it was prompted by smoking. What shocked me, standing in that ice-cold garage, was my certainty that the same thing will not happen to me. It’s so queer how that works. Two months without a cigarette, and I’m convinced that all the damage has reversed itself. I might get Hodgkin’s disease or renal cell carcinoma, but not anything related to smoking. The way I see it, my lungs are like sweatshirts in a detergent commercial, the before and after so fundamentally different that they constitute a miracle. I never truly thought that I would die the way my mother did, but now I really, really don’t think it. I’m middle-aged, and, for the first time in thirty years, I feel invincible.
Part III (After)
One
On the return flight from Tokyo, I pulled out my notebook and did a little calculating. Between the plane tickets, the three-month apartment rental, the school tuition, and the unused patches and lozenges, it had cost close to twenty thousand dollars to quit smoking. That’s 2 million yen and, if things keep going the way they have been, around 18 euros.
Figuring that I bought most of my cigarettes duty-free, and annually paid about twelve hundred dollars for them, in order to realize any savings I’d have to live for another seventeen years, by which time I’d be sixty-eight and clinging to life by a thread. It’s safe to assume that by 2025, guns will be sold in vending machines, but you won’t be able to smoke anywhere in America. I don’t imagine Europe will allow it either, at least not the western part. During the months I’d been gone, France had outlawed smoking in public buildings. In a year’s time it would be forbidden in all bars and restaurants, just as it was in Ireland. Italy, Spain, Norway; country by country, the continent was falling.
Hugh and I flew British Airways to Tokyo and back. Most of the flight attendants were English, and as one of them roamed the aisle with the duty-free cart, I flagged her down. “Ordinarily I’d be buying cigarettes,” I told her. “This time I’m not, though, because I quit.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s all right then.”
As she turned to leave, I stopped her again. “For three decades I smoked. Now I don’t anymore.”
“Lovely.”
“Cold turkey, that’s how I did it.”
Then she said, “Brilliant,” and hurried off down the aisle.
“Why did you do that?” Hugh asked.
“Do what?” I said, and I turned back to the movie I’d been watching. The truth, of course, is that I’d wanted some praise. I’d denied myself. I’d done something hard, and now I wanted everyone to congratulate me. It was the same in 2000 when I lost twenty pounds. “Notice anything different?” I’d say — this to people who had never seen me before.
Two
It was one thing to be a quitter, but I didn’t have to call myself a nonsmoker — to formally define myself as one — until I returned to the United States. By the time I landed, I hadn’t had a cigarette in exactly three months, almost an entire season. My hotel had been booked in advance and, upon my arrival, the desk clerk confirmed the reservation, saying, “That’s ‘King Nonsmoking,’ right?”
The first word referred to the size of the bed, but I chose to hear it as a title.
Adjusting my imaginary crown, I said, “Yes, that’s me.”
Now when I travel, I like the hotel to have a pool, or, better yet, a deal with the local YMCA. That’s been one thing to come out of this: a new hobby, something to replace my halfhearted study of Japanese. Though I haven’t yet learned to enjoy the actual swimming part, I like all the stuff around it. Finding a lap pool, figuring out the locker system. Then there’s the etiquette of passing someone, of spending time alongside them in the water.
In Tokyo once I complimented a fellow Westerner on the gracefulness of his backstroke. “It’s like you were raised by otters,” I said, and the way he nodded and moved into the next lane suggested that I had overstepped some fundamental boundary. It’s the same in the locker room, apparently. Someone can have a leech stuck to his ass, but unless it’s a talking one, and unless it personally asks you a question, you should say nothing.
I was in El Paso one afternoon, changing out of my swim-suit, and a young man said, “Excuse me, but aren’t you . . .” When I say I was changing out of my swimsuit, I mean that I had nothing on. No socks, no T-shirt. My underpants were in my hand. I guess the guy recognized me from my book jacket photo. The full-length naked one on the back cover of my braille editions.
My other bad experience took place in London, at a community pool I used to go to. It was a Saturday afternoon and very crowded. I’d just reached the end of my lane and was coming up for air when I heard the sound of a whistle and noticed that I was the only one left in the water. “What’s the problem?” I asked, and the lifeguard said something I couldn’t quite understand.
“What?”
“Poo,” he repeated. “Everybody out while we clean the water.”
As I walked toward the changing room, a second lifeguard fished out the turds. There were four of them, each the size and shape of a cat’s hair ball. “Third time today that’s happened,” the person at the desk told me.
At the pool I currently go to, one of the regulars is a woman with Down syndrome. She’s fairly heavy and wears an old-fashioned swimsuit, the sort with a ruffled skirt. Then there’s this bathing cap that straps beneath her chin and is decorated with rubber flowers. Odd is the great satisfaction I take whenever I beat her from one end to the other. “I won three out of four,” I told Hugh the first time she and I swam together. “I mean I really creamed her.”
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “She’s obese. She’s as old as you are. And she has Down syndrome?”
“Yes, and I beat her. Isn’t that great!”
“Did she even know you were having a race?”
I hate it when he gets like this. Anything to burst my bubble.
I no longer tell him about the old people I defeat. Older than I am, I mean — women in their late seventies and eighties. Then there are the children. I was in Washington State, at a small-town YMCA, when a boy wandered into the lap lane and popped his head, seal-like, out of the water. I would later learn that he was nine, but at the time he was just this kid, slightly pudgy, with a stern haircut. It’s like he went to a barbershop with a picture of Hitler, that’s how severe it was. We got to talking, and when I told him I wasn’t a very good swimmer, he challenged me to a race. I think he assumed that, like most adults, I’d slow down and intentionally let him win, but he didn’t know who he was dealing with. I need all the confidence I can get, and one victory is just as good as any other. Thus I swam for my very life and beat the pants off him. I thought this was it — he’d accept his defeat and move on with his life — but five minutes later he stopped me again and asked if I believed in God.
“No,” I told him.
“Why?”
I thought for a second. “Because I have hair on my back, and a lot of other people, people who kill and rob and make life miserable, don’t. A real God wouldn’t let that happen.”
I was happy to leave it at that, but before I could resume he blocked my path. “It was God who let you win that race,” he said. “He touched you on the leg and made you go faster, and that’s how come you beat me.”
He really looked like Hitler then, eyes blazing like two little coals.
“If God knows that I don’t believe in him, why would he go out of his way to help me?” I asked. “Maybe instead of making me win, God reached down and made you lose. Did you ever think of that?”
I continued my swimming but was stopped once again at the end of the next lap. “You’re going to go to hell,” the boy said.
“Is this still about me winning that race?”
“No,” he told me. “It’s about God, and if you don’t believe in Him you’re going to burn for the rest of eternity.”
I thanked him for the tip and then I went back to my laps, grateful that at the church I had attended, the service was entirely in Greek. My sisters and I had no idea what the priest was saying, and when you’re young that’s probably for the best. Lil’ Hitler was only in the third grade, and already he was planning for his afterlife. Even worse, he was planning for mine. While changing out of my suit, it occurred to me that I probably shouldn’t have contradicted him. It’s insane to discuss religion with a child. Especially at the Y. What bugged me was his insistence that I’d had unfair help, that God had stepped in and pushed me over the finish line. I mean, really. Can I not beat a nine-year-old on my own?
Three
When I look back on my many years of smoking, the only real regret I have is all the litter I generated, all those hundreds of thousands of butts crushed underfoot. I was always outraged when a driver would empty his ashtray onto the asphalt. “What a pig!” I’d think. But he only did in bulk what I did piecemeal. In a city you tell yourself that someone will clean it up, someone who wouldn’t have a job unless you dropped that butt onto the sidewalk. In that respect you’re good, you’re helping. Then too, it never felt like real litter, like tossing down, say, a broken lightbulb. No one was going to cut his foot on a cigarette butt, and because of its earthy color it pretty much disappeared into the landscape, the way a peanut shell might. This made it “organic” or “biodegradable” — one of those words that meant “all right.”
I didn’t stop throwing my cigarette butts down until, at the age of forty-eight, I was arrested for it. This was in Thailand, which makes it all the more embarrassing. Tell someone the police picked you up in Bangkok, and they reasonably assume that, after having sex with the eight-year-old, you turned her inside out and roasted her over hot coals, this last part, the cooking without a permit, being illegal under Thai law. “Anything goes,” that’s the impression I had, and so it surprised me when, out of nowhere, two policemen approached. One took my right arm, the other took my left, and they led me toward a brown tent. “Hugh!” I called, but as usual he was twenty paces ahead of me and wouldn’t notice I was gone for another ten minutes. The officers seated me at a long table and made a motion for me to stay put. They then walked away, leaving me to wonder what I had possibly done to offend them.
Before my run-in with the police, Hugh and I had visited the criminology museum, a sad sort of homemade affair, its highlight being a dead man suspended in a glass box and dripping amber-colored fluid into a shallow enameled pan. The sign, which was written in Thai and translated into English, read, simply, “Rapist and Murderer.” It was the way they’d mark a stuffed or pickled cobra at a natural history museum, a way of saying, “This is what this creature looks like. Keep your eyes peeled.”
Except for the amber fluid, the rapist-murderer was actually quite pleasant-looking, a lot like the policemen who’d picked me off the street and the man who’d sold us our lunch. It was only 300 degrees outside, so after leaving the criminology museum Hugh thought we might eat some piping-hot soup cooked in what amounted to a roving cauldron. There were no tables, so we lowered ourselves onto overturned buckets and put the scalding bowls in our laps. “Let’s sit in the blistering sun and burn the skin off our tongues!” That’s a Hamrick’s idea of a good time.
From there we’d gone to a grand palace. It wasn’t my sort of thing, but I hadn’t complained or insulted the royal family. Nothing had been stolen or written on with Magic Marker, so, again, what was the problem?
When the officers returned, they handed me a pen and placed a sheet of paper before me. The document was in Thai, a language that looks like cake decoration to me. “What did I do?” I asked, and the men pointed behind me, where a sign announced a thousand-baht fine for littering.
“Littering?” I said, and one of the officers, the more handsome of the two, took an invisible cigarette from his mouth, and threw it to the ground.
I wanted to ask if, instead of paying the fine, he could maybe cane me, but I think that’s done in Singapore, not Thailand, and I didn’t want to come off as unsophisticated. In the end I signed my name, handed over the equivalent of thirty dollars, and stepped outside to look for my cigarette butt, which I eventually found lying in the gutter between a severed duck head and a fly-covered plastic bag half full of coconut milk.
That’s right, I thought. Fine the Westerner. Really, though, wasn’t I just as guilty as these other litterers? You either trash up the landscape, or you don’t, and I was clearly a member of Group A, a crowd I’d always viewed, perhaps unfairly, as foreign or uneducated. This was a notion I picked up from my Greek grandmother. Yiayia lived with us while I was growing up and was hands down the worst litterbug I had ever seen. Cans, bottles, fat Sunday newspapers, anything that could fit through the car window was thrown through the car window. “What the hell are you doing?” my father would shout. “Throwing crap onto the road, we don’t do that in this country.”
Yiayia would blink at him through her thick-lensed glasses. Then she’d say, “Oh,” and do it again two minutes later, this as if the grocery receipt was litter but the Time magazine wasn’t. I think she actually saved her used tissues and empty medicine bottles, stuck them in her purse until she was back in the moving station wagon.
“That’s a Greek for you,” our mother would say, adding that her mother would never throw anything from a car window. “Not even a peach pit.”
During the period that our grandmother lived with us, litter was very much on our minds, in part the result of TV. The “Keep America Beautiful” commercials featured a crying Indian, his composure shattered by the sight of a trash-strewn creek bed.
“See that?” I’d say to Yiayia. “All that garbage and stuff in the water, that’s wrong.”
“Awwww, you’re wasting your time,” Lisa would say. “She doesn’t even get that the guy is an Indian.”
Our father worried that our grandmother was setting a bad example, but, actually, it worked the other way. None of us would ever think of throwing something out a car window, unless, of course, it was a cigarette butt, which is not just trash, but red-tipped, flaming trash. “Shame about that forest fire,” we’d say. “You really have to wonder about people who do things like that. It’s a sickness of the mind.”
I can’t say that after leaving Bangkok I never again crushed a cigarette underfoot. I can say, though, that I never did it comfortably. If a trash can was around, I’d use it, and if not, I’d either tuck the butt into the cuff of my pants or try to hide it under something, a leaf, maybe, or some bit of paper cast down by somebody else, as if the shade would allow it to disintegrate faster.
Now that I’ve quit, I’ve started collecting trash — not tons, but a little bit every day. If, for example, I see a beer bottle left on a park bench I’ll pick it up and toss it into the nearest garbage can, which is usually no more than a few feet away. Then I say, “Stupid lazy asshole couldn’t be bothered to throw away his own fucking bottle.”
I wish I could do my penitence with grace, but I doubt that will happen any time soon. People see me picking up garbage and figure, with reason, that I’m being paid for it. They wouldn’t want to put me out of a job, so instead of throwing their plastic fork away, they drop it, leaving me with even more to clean up. Empty bags that used to hold French fries, paper cups, used bus tickets . . . it’s funny, but the only thing I won’t pick up are discarded butts. It’s not their germs that put me off. I’m simply afraid that on taking one between my fingers, I’ll somehow snap to and remember, with clarity, just how good a cigarette would taste right now.