Shoulder the Sky (3 page)

I gave smoking a full two weeks of my life. It was a five-days-a-week thing. No weekends. What was the point if I was not with my squint-eyed smoky tribe? So it was ten days, four smokes a day. Mostly I bummed cigarettes, but nobody would have put up with that for much longer.

I tried to tell my father that I started smoking. He was watching golf on TV. During golf my father was visible but pretty much comatose. It wasn't from drinking or anything. It was his own special narcotic state of half sleep/half golf. He didn't even like golf but he liked the hue of the greens, the hushed crowds, and the well-appointed golfers selecting woods or irons. It was another world for him. My father had no bad habits that I knew of, and the Saturday afternoon TV golf/semi-sleep seemed to be enough to transport him from the real world into a dimension akin to a heroin high. I'm just guessing but I think there's truth in it.

“I've started smoking,” I told him. He was lost on the seventh green somewhere outside Atlanta.

“That's not a good idea,” he said, drifting, I think, somewhere above the Georgian treetops.

“No kidding.”

“You really are?”

“Yep.”

“I'll be darned.”

That was it. I don't think he believed me. It just wasn't the sort of thing his son Martin would do.

Opinions

Trees deserve more respect and credit than we give them. Nobody should be allowed to cut down a tree, any tree, without being charged a fee or a tax or something that would then go to health care for poor people. The tree tax would have to be passed on to consumers and that way we'd know a tree had been sacrificed every time we bought something that was part tree.

I was thinking about trees because of the days spent in the woods with the smokers. In the end, I liked the trees better than the puff fiends. Smoking had been part of my quest for healing. I wanted to damage myself somehow, Dave had suggested. But I think that was just the shrink in him talking. I wanted communion with
someone and the smokers took me in — or out to the woods, at least.

But I had to give up on being part of that squint-eyed but oh-so-cool squad. My breath smelled bad — my teachers said so — but that's not why I gave up on smoking. I could have taken that flack. It was the smokers' conversation that did me in. The complaints about teachers and homework. How creepy the principal was. Older siblings who were getting in trouble with the law over petty crimes and automobile offences.

I'd try to initiate new subjects. I started pointing out different trees one day. “This old oak here must be over a hundred years old.”

The girls looked at me like I'd arrived from Jupiter. Finster and Hubbards, both older and more threatening than the other guys, looked somehow offended. “How do you know?” Finster asked in an intimidating manner.

“Yeah,” Hubbards asked, “what are you, like some bloody tree expert?”

I could tell they weren't interested in my thoughts on the maples, oaks, gums, birches, poplars, or any of the shrubby undergrowth. Instead, the conversation turned, as it always did, back to cigarettes. Which was the subject that drove me from the fold.

“I really could have used a cigarette during that test in math,” Cindy said.

“I nearly died for a smoke towards the end of history. It was like so boring.”

“I don't think it's fair we can't smoke in class,” Scott Rutledge added, fine-tuning his agenda for the race for class president.

“God this tastes good,” Finster said, dragging smoke into his lungs.

“Do you believe they're raising the price of a pack of smokes again?” Hubbards asked the elms.

“I smoked two whole packs on Sunday,” somebody else confessed with pride. “My folks were gone.”

Etcetera.

And so my smoking career ended of its own accord. Whatever it was supposed to do for me, it wasn't working. It didn't make me angry or release my emotions. I wasn't edgy and nervous with chips on my shoulder like the rest of the gang, and I think eventually they would have simply told me to stop hanging out with them. The simple comment about the age of the tree had set off a lot of mistrust. Finster and Hubbards were beginning to think I was some kind of mole or snitch. So I faded from their lives as quickly as I had entered.

And then I woke up one night soon after, remembering something.

I was twelve and my mother and I were sitting in the kitchen. She was peeling potatoes, and I liked
watching her do this — graceful, artistic, long spirals of potato skin being released from the spud, revealing a cold white flesh beneath. Out of the blue, she said, “You know, I smoked one cigarette in my entire life.”

“You did?”

“I was about your age. An older boy gave it to me. I didn't smoke it then but took it home and lit it up behind the house. I was all alone. I sipped at the smoke. I didn't haul it in like most amateurs do. I never coughed. I liked it. It made me feel important. There was no filter. I smoked it down until it burned my fingers. And then it was over. I loved every minute of it. I especially liked the way that the world looked through the smoke that was right in front of my face.”

She saw the stunned look on
my
face. She was scaring me because she was revealing something of herself that seemed very private.

“That's why I never touched another one. Don't you ever start, okay?”

The final parental caution seemed like it was tagged on as an afterthought. Obligatory. She wasn't really trying to give me a lecture. Remembering that one-sided conversation brought her back to me for a brief moment.

“Claude Monet,” she had said, “was a French painter who said that he did not paint the object but the space between the viewer and the object. That was where the smoke took me.”

And that was part of what was happening in her paintings, I soon realized. Whether it was Asia or other worlds, the air was thick with diffused colours. It was a beautiful distant place my mother went to when she painted. But I don't think any of us in the family ever went there with her. The paintings themselves had created barriers, or maybe we had created them ourselves.

I was beginning to wish I had asked my mother more questions when she was alive.

Advice

My advice to you today is to shut off your computer. Maybe there are two kinds of people: those who live life and those who are just an audience. We're all becoming lazy and stupid because of our machines. Get out of the house and do anything that does not involve electricity. You don't want to hear this, but it needs to be said.

Dave said that Lilly was right on track with her anger. “She is working it out,” he told me. But Lilly was rebellious and angry before my mother got sick, while
she was sick, and now Lilly was still angry. She had pierced her nose recently, which would make anyone cranky, I would think. But she was proud of it. And she shaved off all the hair in her eyebrows. I don't know why a person would do that, but she must have felt it was important. “It's a statement,” she told me. Whatever that means.

Lilly had given up smoking herself, but she still stayed out late with people who seemed odious to me. Her “friend” Jake had bleached blond hair and wore a black leather jacket with little metal things stamped into it. Apparently, people, including Lilly, thought Jake was really something. But I wasn't impressed. He always had a look on his face like he had just done something really nasty and felt good about it. I'm sure he had been working on that look for many years. Lilly thought he was “deep.”

If you asked him what he'd been up to he always answered, “Not much.” In that regard, I think he had some sincerity.

Jake, along with the others, encouraged Lilly to stay out too late doing “not much,” but so far it hadn't seemed to do her much harm. I think hers was a crowd that tried to be nasty, cruel, and even hurtful — but they couldn't quite pull it off. So they wandered around in some cynical limbo world of what someone once called “quiet desperation.”

I explained this all to Dave and he said that this was a “common malady” of many young people today. (Not like when he was growing up and young people knew exactly why they were angry and who they were angry at.) Anger, even frustrated anger, Dave would explain, is better than apathy. Dave was a real stickler when it came to apathy. He ranted about apathy. Just to get his goat, I told him I was apathetic about apathy. He almost lost his cookies until he realized I was messing with his head.

“Good one, dude,” he said, finally taking a breath. “Physician heal thyself. Right on.” Then he tightened the rubber band on his little ponytail and we continued talking about me and my problem of acting so normal.

Disappointment with my short-lived smoking career sent me back to a traditional cafeteria lunch with Darrell. Darrell was a loner like me, and when two loners go separate paths, well, you just have two individual loners instead of two loners who hang out together.

“I felt forsaken,” Darrell said. I know that doesn't sound like anything a kid would say, but neither Darrell nor I have ever spoken in the same manner as our contemporaries. This is why sometimes we were referred to as “intellectual snot” — or “snots” if we were being referred to in the plural.

“It was just an experiment,” I said.

Darrell understood all about experiments. “How'd it turn out?”

“I had high expectations, but it didn't make orbit.”

“Been there, done that. Got the T-shirt for it.”

We liked to mix idioms. In fact, we liked the word “idiom” a lot and fantasized starting a band called the Idiom Idiots, just Darrell and me and about a hundred thousand dollars worth of computerized music and sound gear.

While I'd been trying to learn how to smoke, Darrell had been up to his own experiments. I noticed he was wolfing down a tuna sandwich: whole wheat, heavy mayonnaise, sliced pickles protruding from the edges. “Martino, I thought long and hard about your alliance with coffin nails and came to the conclusion that I too need some way to break out of this shell I've created for myself.”