When You Are Engulfed in Flames (19 page)

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
Pan
tastic!!!” 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.