How to Be a Smoker

    I fucking hate the rain. Some people like how it sounds and that’s nice, and some people say it cleans up the streets. All I know is that my shoes are dirty enough without having mud on the inside, too.

    Students are already filing out the door when I figure that it’s been another hour of class wasted wondering how nasty my socks are now. The rain is pounding against the thin roof of the lecture hall and as I head toward the doors, sidewalk outside soaked already with footprints and puddles, I realize that I don’t own a fucking umbrella. It’s the beginning of the fucking rain season and all we’ve got to show for it are two hoodies and the jacket Pierre eats in, sleeps in, and probably shits in. And before I know it, I’m bumping into the girl to the right of me with the bright yellow umbrella still tucked into her backpack. Her books spill out of her hands and I motion towards them, picking up a couple and dropping them into her outstretched arms. I keep my head down as she mutters a flustered thanks, and I rush out the hall. I’m around a corner and down two streets by the time she notices anything’s missing, bright yellow umbrella bouncing on my shoulder as I jog through the rain.

    I can tell what you’re thinking already, this kid’s some punk who jacks shit for kicks, but that’s not the way it is. I can’t help it. It’s just something I do. It started with little things, when I needed them. You walk into the Vons fingering change in your pocket trying for something to keep the hunger away and when you’re not even looking you’re walking out with two sandwiches under your jacket. It’s not something I’m proud of, no. Pierre says it’s a real fucking talent, and I guess it kept me alive when I first got outta the house. I was living off of wallets I picked on the streets then and sleeping in the park, which is how I found Pierre last January shivering in his rattyass brown canvas jacket and dying of a heroin OD on a park bench where his buddies dumped him. I carried him five miles in the snow to the hospital and after that he takes me out for a smoke and says to me that I’m a better friend than any of his and tells me he’s got a place to crash if I want to. I tell him he looks like more of a bum than I do but I’m not gonna turn down a roof over my head.

    Anyway, Pierre’s arguing with some guy, Freddie, in the apartment when I shuffle in. He’s some buyer I’ve seen a couple times around, getting hyped up on lines off the coffee table, and he says to Pierre, “Man, turn that Mozart shit down and put on some real music.”

    I should explain. The only music Pierre listens to are the classicals, real old stuff he burns onto CDs and blasts over the stereo. He’s batshit crazy about the stuff, it’s the only thing he can’t stand being talked about. He turns to the guy and gives him the eye. “It’s Chopin. It’s fucking Chopin. It’s what we’re listening to. We ain’t gonna put on that shit you call music cuz I do enough drugs to not have to listen to music about it.”

    He looks at me expectantly, eyes dulled, without saying a word, and I toss my backpack in the corner with the umbrella, and sit next to him and start cutting my own line. Pierre watches me card the powder with mock-interest. The strains of the keys tumbling over each other fills the room but that kid Freddie though, isn’t done talking. He stares at me and says “Hey, Harry, right?”

    I keep cutting my line. He doesn’t shut up. “Hey, it’s Harry? Hey you owe me twenty from the pills I spotted you. Hey Harry boy, wheresit? Wheresit?”

    I keep cutting my line and Freddie stands up. Pierre turns his gaze on him. “Freddie. I can’t hear the piano. Harry don’t owe you any money. You hear me? Kid don’t owe you nothin’. You see that crack you been huffing off my table? There’s your money, right? Kid don’t owe you any money.”

    The guy sits back down. He wants his stuff now and so Pierre gives him it and kicks him out. I rail my line hard and lean back into the couch. Pierre hobbles over to the corner and picks up the yellow umbrella. “You bought yourself a fruity umbrella? Where’d you get the cash for that?”

    “I didn’t. I stole it.”

    Pierre raises a bushy eyebrow at me. The guy’s only a couple years older than me but he looks a deal more. He’s dressed up in a big brown jacket that makes him look bigger than he is, and he’s got a thin little face with curly brown hair he keeps short with a pair of scissors and a hard bony jaw and stubble he likes to scratch when he’s looking at you and thinking. He says he showers but I’ve been living with him a year now and I’ve never seen him outta that jacket, let alone wet. He breaks open in a grin at me now. “I thought you quit pickin’.”

    I cast a glance over the table to avoid looking at him but know that I shouldn’t take another line. “It’s raining, man. My backpack’s got holes all over it. My books are gonna get wet. I can’t let my books get wet.”

    He’s jumping around now and waving the yellow umbrella around like a conductor’s baton to the music, Vivaldi, I think. He looks like a little kid prancing around in his poofy brown jacket and he looks at me, eyebrows wriggling like caterpillars. “Hey, hey. If you’re jackin’ again, Mike tells me he cased a place and he could use another pair of hands. You in?”

    I shake my head and stand up to go out onto the fire escape for a cigarette. This is the guy who splits freebase cocaine on his living room table, and he has this thing about smoking inside. I don’t get it but he makes the money and I’m not paying rent. “Picking pockets ain’t the same thing as robbing some shop.” I tell him, and I wrench the umbrella from him as he’s poking it under my nose and step out. He stands there grinning at me like an idiot.

    It’s raining the next day but I don’t bring the umbrella back to school. It was a dumb deal to jack it in the first place, you could see the thing a mile away and I didn’t want any trouble for it. I’m walking out of class and trying to cover my notebook with my hoodie when someone bumps my arm and the book falls splat-on into a puddle. GodfuckingDAMN I hate the rain. I fish it out of the water and try to see if there’s anything worth salvaging when I turn and freeze.

    It’s Umbrella Girl. She’s in this little leather jacket with a hood up and looking at my sopping mess of a notebook with this mortified look on her face. I stiffen when she starts talking. “Ohmygod I am so sorry, ohmygod I didn’t even—I swear I’ll buy you a new one right now.”

    She doesn’t recognize me. She’s still spouting apologies and I wave her off in relief. “It’s no biggie. It’s not like I paid attention in that class anyway.” She gives a half-hearted giggle and I turn away and inspect the damage.

    The torrent still running off it makes it clear nothing’s left of my writing; there’s probably more water than ink in it at this point. That notebook had everything in it, all the notes I take from my classes when I can stay awake. Three-subject notebooks are cheaper than buying three single ones and I barely had enough buck for another, but I knew I had to spare it for a new one. I curse under my breath but start heading to the bookstore to drop by before heading home.

    Umbrella Girl hurries up besides me. “At least let me buy you a coffee, alright? I feel horrible, and you’re getting soaked. Shoulda brought an umbrella, huh?”

    I grimace out of instinct, but nod. Coffee always made me shit funny but the Starbucks was on the way, and the girl didn’t look like she was going to leave me alone anytime soon. We hurry across the flooded street towards the shop and she shouts to me over the sound of cars rushing down the swamped road, “What’s your name?”

    “It’s Harry,” I tell her as we sweep into the Starbucks. It’s cozy warm inside, and she takes off her hood and pulls me into line. Her cheeks are flushed with the brief dash across the street.

    “Not Harold, huh?” she says, and I shake my head with another wince. She tilts her head and smirks, a little teasing tongue showing between her teeth as she smiles. “Alright, Harry-not-Harold, I’m Julia-not-Julie.” She nudges against me in lieu of a handshake in the crowded line. With her hood off, and close together in line, I get a good look at her. Julia has the kind of light brunette hair you just wanna brush down and eyes that always look up at you. She’s got this quirk where she pouts her lips to the side when she’s telling you about how horrible the rain is and how her roommate has a cold and she’s afraid she might catch it any day now, and she glances at you every other sentence to make sure you’re listening and you can’t help but crack a smile.

    We get our coffee and hustle our way out of the busy café, and I tell her I’ve gotta get to the bookstore now. She bites her lip, and says she’ll walk me there, and I let her. Along the way I tell her about Pierre and his classical music but leave the bit about the drugs and dealing out, and she’s laughing by the time we get there. It’s then when I decide to grab a smoke before heading into the bookshop, and the cig is halfway to my mouth when I see that she’s frowning. She notices my look and puts her hands up in mock-surrender. “Oh no no no, don’t worry. I’m not gonna give you the smoking-is-bad-and-you’ll-get-lung-cancer lecture, I’m sure you’ve heard the whole spiel a million times by now.” She sticks out her tongue and flashes a grin.

    I give her one back and solemnly light the grit. “Don’t worry. You know, I’m actually thinking of quitting.” Where in the fuck did those words come from. No Harry, there is no way in fuck you have ever thought of quitting. Ever. Why of all the idiotic little lies you could tell did you say that? But she puts a little sincere smile on her face and her eyes look up at me.

    “That’s great. My granddaddy was a smoker, and he never could quit the stuff.”

    Fuck. There goes that. I tell myself you’re a fucking idiot, but those eyes. Those eyes.

    There’s a moment, when you buy your first pack and just stare at it, and think what the hell did I do? You’ve bought this pack and now you’ve got to finish it, the whole damn thing. Well, you say to yourself, I guess I’m a smoker. That’s partly true, but that’s as far as most people get. No, the real moment, when you know you’re a smoker, is the first time you buy two packs at the same time. You bring up the two boxes to the checkout and you think you’re saving yourself a trip to the drug store but you don’t know it yet, this is when you know you’re a smoker. This is when you start getting the looks.

    The cashier will give you the first one. He glances at you and then at the packs and back. Oh, you’re one of those smokers. Those smokers who can’t go two days without another pack. From here on out you notice the looks, you collect them, attract them, the looks of pity, the looks of contempt, the condescending looks that say “I’m better than you” so well.

    Julia didn’t have the look in her eyes, any of the looks, and so as you’re finishing the last of the cold coffee in the rain you decide to tell Pierre you’re quitting when you walk in the apartment.

    Pierre’s in a good mood today, sitting forward in the couch and wagging his fingers in the air to one of Bach’s Brandenburgs. He turns giddily to me and announces, “I made Crack Daniels!”

    I toss the ruined notebook and my nearly full pack onto the counter and peer over at the coffee table. He’s got shots and lines split down it, the white cut so cleanly it looks like tiger stripes. “The fuck are crack daniels?”

    He motions me over excitedly. “You know how you drink tequila by taking a shot and then you bite a lime? Well Crack Daniels is when you take a shot of Jack and then rail a line!”

    He’s giddy with his own wittiness, so I decide now’s a good a time as ever to break it to him. “I don’t want any crack daniels, man. I’m quitting smoking.”

    He looks up at me. “No you’re not.” He says, grin still plastered over his face. “You’re gonna take a smoke with me, but first you’re gonna try a Crack Daniels.” He pronounces the capitals. Don’t ask me how he does it, but when he says it you know it’s capital Crack Daniels.

    “The fuck I am,” I say, but I crouch across the table from him anyways. He slides over a glass and hands me a rolled up dollar bill, watching earnestly, and I take the Crack Daniels. It’s harsh stuff and I’m sniffing my nose and coughing a little from the whiskey still when he clambers over the sofa and grabs my pack off the counter, and pats my back on the way to the fire escape.

    Pierre’s leaning on the railing when I get out there, grit lit in his mouth. He likes to call the fire escape “the balcony.” I tell him it’s a fucking fire escape but he says nah man, it’s a balcony like penthouses got. Lookit the view from here. The view is good though, cars flashing down the road beneath you and the city lights shining under the orange city twilight.

    He hands me a cigarette as I shut the escape door behind me and I cock it between my lips. “I wasn’t joking about quitting,” I mumble around the grit while he clicks the lighter to get it going.

    He finally gets a flame going, and I inhale deeply as he holds it up to the tip. “Whatchu gotta quit for?” he says. “It’s no fun smoking alone, man.”

    I let the smoke waft out slowly and watch it drift out until I can’t see the difference in the musky city haze anymore. I can’t think of anything to say, so I just straight out and tell him. “I met a girl.” I shift my weight against the metal bar and try not to glance around at him too quickly.

    He taps his cigarette against the railing, the ash trailing downward amongst the raindrops still dripping steadily down. “Whatchu doing with a girl, Harry?” I take a look at him. He’s got a grimace on his face, and I can’t tell if he’s holding back a laugh or scowling. “If you wanna get laid I can get us some whores. Pay them off with blow and they won’t be too much cash.”

    “I don’t want any goddamn hookers, Pierre. I want this girl.” I look back down over the noisy streets bustling with cars and stragglers, and fiddle with my stick before taking another drag.

    “Man, what’s a girl want with a cracked-out junkie like you anyhow? All you gonna be is a bad influence on her,” he says, and I can hear the twinkle in his eyes without looking at him.

    “Look who’s talking,” I shoot back, and he gives a hearty guffaw. I want to chuckle along with him, but something about what he said pulls me back.

    “Yeah. We’ll get us some girls after the bust. I know where to go.” I shake my head and brush my grit on the railing, and drop it down onto the wet streets. Pierre keeps talking, “Mike says we’re hitting the place soon. I’m driving the getaway, and him and you and two other guys are gonna sack the place. They’re good guys.”

    “I’m not doing the bust, Pierre.” I keep my head down and my eyes on the speeding lights below. “I’m quitting smoking.”

    He looks sideways at me, and I can feel his eyes on me. I squint as if I’m trying to make something out on the sidewalk. “Really?” I sneak a glance over. He’s nibbling on the butt of the cigarette, hand rubbing his hairy cheek as he scrutinizes me. “Really really?” he says.

    “Really.” I tell him, and I head back in and leave him on the fire escape.

    Julia comes bumping into me walking outta lecture after a couple days of talking after class and asks me if I wanna go grab a coffee again. It’s a long walk home and I know I really don’t have the money for it but I take one look at her glowing face and I’m smiling like an idiot already. So I decide that Pierre can hang it solo for one night. She slips her arm through mine and as we’re hiking up the sidewalk and hopping over puddles I listen to her chatter and wonder how anyone could be just so goddamn full of life. The wind picks up all of a sudden and whips her hair around her in a dirty golden halo in the light and she gives a squeal and bolts the rest of the way through the rain to the shop, pulling me along. She’s loving every moment of it.

    The Starbucks is crowded, filled with people looking for a haven from the downpour, and we grab a table by the window to wait for the line to die down. It’s warm as always, and filled with soft yellow light that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. I think back to the dark little apartment where the heater’s been broken as far back as I can remember and the coffee table’s always covered in a thin layer of white. Right now, that’s the farthest place I can imagine from this, gentle jazz playing instead of dramatic violins and the scent of cocoa instead of stale liquor. Julia’s in her element, head resting on her hand and the glow reflecting onto her face as she watches raindrops race down the window. The clouds are that shade of too-bright white that only happens when it’s raining and the sun is setting behind them, and her eyes follow the people outside as they bustle past us, heads tilted down against the wind.

    “Isn’t it crazy?” she asks me, and snaps me out of my little reverie. She glances at me and trails a finger down the window, leaving a little foggy trail. “All these people out there.”

    “What d’you mean?” I squint out the window and try to see what she does.

    “All these people. There’s so many, and they’re all trying to get somewhere. Isn’t it crazy?” She purses her lips. “You’re trying to go somewhere, and I’m trying to go somewhere, but we have no idea at all where we’re going to end up. Isn’t it crazy that out of so many people in the world trying to go somewhere, we bump into each other and sit down in a coffee shop and watch all these people just try to get to where they’re going? Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it nuts?”

    Something about that hits me, hard. She notices my stunned look and takes my hands on the table in hers jokily. “Oh man, that must’ve sounded like I’m coming on to you pretty hard, huh?” She giggles but she doesn’t get it.

    I’m thinking about all these people trying to get somewhere.

    It’s dark out when I leave Julia at the coffee shop and start heading back to the apartment, as dark as it gets in this city anyways. At night, there’s more smoke that comes out when you smoke a cigarette. Pierre would probably say it’s heat transfer or some other scientific bullshit he pulls outta his ass. I don’t know what it is, if it’s the cold or just the dark, but there’s more smoke that comes out when you smoke a cigarette at night. You just take a drag like usual and watch the tip flare up ruby red, and when you exhale there’s a big ol’ plume of smoke drifting, and you wonder what your lungs look like with something like that coming out of them. But walking home right now with all these late stragglers, you probably wouldn’t take out a grit right now even if you had your cigarettes with you.

    Pierre says smoking’s a social thing, smokers can always find a friend to smoke with, he says. But it’s not like that at all. You know when that girl coughs pointedly at you, when the guy ahead of you flips up his collar and cuts across the street instead of passing you. When the mother covers her kid’s face as you walk past and keep your head down. Pierre doesn’t mind it. He calls it “parting the Red Sea.” And sometimes it’s useful like that, when you’re trying to cut through a crowd to get to class, they just move outta your way but you know they’re not doing it for you. You know smoking’s not a social thing. It’s what makes you a smoker.

    So you wonder as you’re walking home in the dark drizzle, even without a cigarette in your mouth, why you feel so alone.

    Pierre’s lying back on the couch with his eyes glazed over when I come in. He’s rocking gently to Chopin’s Nocturne in some minor, I don’t remember. He doesn’t stop his swaying when I shut the door and barely turns his head to greet me. “Would you. Like a pill.” he asks me between the notes and I nod.

    He somberly retrieves a plastic baggie from one of his pockets and fishes a tablet out. “How do you want it?”

    “Crush it.” I needed something to take the edge off.

    “You really did quit.” He peers at my fidgeting curiously. “You get more out of it if you just eat it.”

    “Crush it, Pierre.” I fumble a spoon from a drawer and hand it to him, and he grinds the pill dutifully. He watches me roll up a dollar bill and take the molly deliberately, contemplating.

    I look up at him and he shrugs. “I wanna smoke. Come out with me. I wanna smoke.” He’s setting me up for one but I can feel the E kick in and so I follow him out for some fresh air.

    He holds the door open for me and leaves it open, and lights up. I almost expect him to blow a puff in my face but he doesn’t, just leans back against the wall and looks out over the city, raindrops dripping past us from the floor above. “Whatchu thinkin’ about?” he asks. Pierre’s serious when he’s on E.

    I look straight at him and I can tell he’s not joking around. “Where you going, Pierre?” I ask. “Where you going in the world? Where you trying to go?”

    He glances at me, knows what I mean. He takes another drag, closes his eyes, and lets it out slowly. “I ain’t going nowhere. Nobody is.”

    This just pisses me off for some reason. “I’m going somewhere,” I say to him, and watch his eyelids flutter. “I’m gonna go somewhere, Pierre.”

    He sucks in the smoke, and lets it float out of his mouth before grinding the grit on the railing slowly. “You’re not, Harry. You don’t have nowhere to go.” He just stands there, looking at the smoldering ashes on the railing. Behind us I hear the last scene of Mozart’s Don Giovanni start to play on the stereo. I don’t feel the molly anymore and I am fucking pissed.

    “You think you’re all I got?”  The fucking bastard just won’t look at me. I rear in front of him, but he keeps his eyes down. “You think I got nowhere else to go?” I say.

    He turns an eye on me. “Where you got to go?” he says, getting riled up now. “You gonna go to that new girl of yours, huh? Or maybe you gonna go back to the dad who drinks all the money away and beats you, or the mom who cares about getting her meds more than you?”

    I hit him, hard, square on the jaw and he reels back. He turns back to stare at me and I can see his eyes are clear now, not ecstasy-clear but crystal, piercing clear. He stands up to face me now and I can see that he doesn’t give two fucks about his swelling lip.

    “You go to a shit school,” he says. “You live in a shit city and you go to a shit school and you spend your money on shitty books for shit classes to get a shit degree that you think will land you a shit job somewhere but it won’t. And all this fucking shit in your life, you think you have it worse off than the rest of them but you don’t get it.” He casts an arm around him, at the rest of the city sitting brightly against the night sky but removed from the tiny fire escape on the side of the building.

    “You think these people, these people have it better, but they don’t. They’re running around scared shitless like the rest of us, running in circles tryin’a find somewhere to go but in the end, Harry? There ain’t no difference between them and you and me.”

    I don’t know what to say.

    “Beethoven spent his entire life on his music and in the end he couldn’t even hear the greatest music he ever wrote. Amadeus Mozart died halfway through writing his own requiem, without a penny to his name.” Pierre watches me, shoulders slumped forward as he leans onto the wet railing. “What makes you think we can do any better?”

    The first cigarette isn’t the worst. You wish to God you could go back and punch yourself in the face when you took that first drag, but it’s not the worst. The worst is the first cigarette you smoke after you try to quit. There’s a word you once heard a meth-head use. He was watching the pure white smoke fume out of a pizzo and he turns to you with this melancholy, painful look in his eyes and says, “It’s that fucking white. We just fiend for it.” Fiend. That word.

    You feel the smoke on your tongue now and you realize you never really liked the taste of it, but right now it tastes so fucking good and you hate it. You breathe it out and watch it float out under the streetlight through the tiny raindrops pit-pattering down. You know it tastes the same as it always did but why the fuck, why the fuck did it taste so good right now?

    My phone shudders in the middle of lecture and I throw my backpack on. As I trudge up the stairs Julia perks her head up and catches my eye from above, and passes me a little quizzical smile. I avert my eyes as I hike past her and feel her turn and look around at me, confused. I want to turn back and give her an excuse, something at all, but there’s nothing really to say and I don’t know if I can stand to see the look in her eyes.

    Pierre’s waiting outside in the beat up getaway van, and I get in the front seat and slam the door. He’s drumming his fingers on the wheel to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, and I tell him to stop by the apartment so I can drop off my stuff before the bust. He shrugs and careens into the traffic, wheels barely finding traction on the wet road.

    He skids to a spraying halt outside the place. My sneakers are probably too fucked up for the puddles to make a difference anyway at this point, so I hold my backpack over my head and slosh my way to the stairwell. I hoist myself up the apartment stairs and unlock the door, toss my backpack in the corner, and cast a glance around the room when I notice the yellow umbrella. Pierre’ll give me shit for bringing it along but it’s raining and I really don’t want to get wet.