Dirty Smoker

Hi, let me introduce myself.  I’m David Blaine, the writer, not the magician, and I’m a dirty smoker. 

I’ve never smoked cigarettes.  When I was a kid I smoked a pipe, because my grandfather smoked pipes.  When I married and had children my wife asked me to quit smoking and I did.  But I kept the pipes.  When I turned fifty, about five years ago, the kids had all grown and moved out.  So I lit up again, but cigars this time.

You might wonder how someone would decide to start smoking again after thirty years off.  Well, it goes back to that grandfather.  Grandpa Nunzio smoked cigars on occasion, and cherry blend in his pipe.  I remember sitting on his lap watching the game at his house, baseball, always baseball.  I’m told I was two at the time.  I think the aromatics somehow imprinted in my mind because even now I enjoy sitting near total strangers if they’re smoking a cigar or a pipe.

I enjoy short fat cigars like a classic Robusto,  5 x 50 or so, with a dark oscuro wrapper.  I don’t spend a lot on these smokes, a box that average a couple of bucks a stick does it for me.  But I probably smoke differently than many of you, as I said, I’m a dirty smoker.

I like to smoke in small spaces, like my truck.  I’m sensitive to other people’s feelings so I don’t want to light up in a room full of non-smokers.  Outdoors I’ll face into the breeze to get the smoke back in my face.  And that short five inches gets the fire under my nose sooner.  I enjoy the volume of smoke I get from a fifty gauge or larger.  I want it in my hair, in my clothes and on my skin.  I want to live in a cloud of tobacco for forty-five minutes or so, and then I want to keep smelling it and tasting it for the rest of the day or night.

When I get home, sensitive to the noses of others, I’ll wash my clothes, shower, and brush my teeth.  But toothpaste really doesn’t fix my breath.  Blue cheese and red wine though, that helps.  May not smell better, but different?  Yeah.

A cigar, a drink, some hot jazz and a good book.  Heaven on earth for pocket change. 

Glad to meet you.

David

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The Smugglers

 

by Andrew Haley

 

Mohamed came by and asked if I wanted to go with him to Andorra. I was wearing a sheepskin coat I'd picked up at the flea market and my window was open. It was November and the coat was too big.

 

“Why don't you close your window?” he asked.

 

“Andorra?” I replied.

 

He explained that there was a bus early Saturday morning and that we'd be gone for the day. He was going to buy cigarettes for his grandmother.

We walked together to the train station and climbed up to the second floor. There on the roof, grim with the residue of diesel fumes, the buses were idling. It was still dark and the morning was cold. I bought a watery coffee from a machine and stood beside our idling bus while the passengers smoked outside. The driver came up, closed the baggage compartment doors and climbed aboard.

We sat near the back. There was not an empty seat on the bus. We were the youngest passengers and I was the only American. The bus backed out of its stall and turned down the ramp into the street. I grew disoriented as it wound through a part of the city I'd never ventured to on foot. The buildings seemed to grow shorter and soon we were passing through vineyards on a two-lane road with whitewashed plane trees* running along the grassy slopes of the roadside ditches.

We stopped for lunch at a small town in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The streets there were wider than in the cities and had brick gutters between the sidewalks and the cobbled road. The bare limbs of the plane trees loomed yellow-white against the winter sky.
 

As we wound into the mountains I thought of my home. Snow flurries whirled against the glass and the ugly buildings at the ski resorts towered over great black berms of snow at the edges of the parking lots. There were fewer trees now.
    

We wandered the ugly streets, the cold air carrying minute flakes that blew against our faces. Mohamed led me to a shop he favored. It was crowded inside. In a back room I found the liquor. They had casks of muscat and casks of wine. I bought a liter of muscat siphoned into a plastic bottle. I bought a liter bottle of Paddy's and a liter bottle of Pernod.
    

Mohamed was at the cash register in the next room with four cartons of Marlboros.

 

“Aren't you going to get cigarettes?”  he asked.

 

“No,” I said.

 

“What about cigars?”

 

There in a glass case by the register were beautiful boxes of cigars. I couldn't believe the prices. I smoked cheap Partagas from time to time, 10 Franc panatellas good for a quick smoke watching the barges from the bridge. But here were boxes of the cigars I smoked maybe once a year, real full-bodied Cubans, and at exquisite prices. I bought a box of Montecristo No 4s and counted out six blue fifty-franc notes and got my change in coins.
    

At the French border our driver spoke expertly. A customs officer came aboard and stood at the front of the bus looking over us warily. Mohamed and I had a carton of Marlboros up each leg of our trousers. I had the two bottles in my sleeves. Mohamed had the muscat wrapped in his coat. The box of Montecristos was tucked in the small of my back.
    

The customs officer walked up and down the aisle and stopped at the seats in front of us. He demanded the woman in front of us open her bag. She protested and he opened it for her. Inside were cassettes and pots and pans and brand new clothes. These are mine she shouted but he pulled her up and dragged her off the bus. Her husband, with a neutered look, got up and followed her off. As we drove away they were standing beside their bag of contraband, the woman shouting in the faces of three customs officers.
    

Once we were safely back in France, all the passengers erupted in good cheer. A strange fraternal feeling came over us. We pulled goods from sleeves and coat pockets and from beneath our seats. There was a frantic thirty minutes of show and tell.
    

Out in the dark the whitewashed trunks of the trees glowed in the bus's lights. Over the fields you could see the lights of the villages. It began to rain softly. From time to time the headlights of a car coming in the opposite direction would illuminate the seats and the sleeping passengers.
    

Back at the station Mohamed bid me farewell. He was taking the cigarettes to his family's home directly. We shook hands and kissed each other on the cheek. I walked down the escalator into the hall of the empty station and went out under the black electric timetable and past the taxi stand to wait for the bus back to the university.
    

Once home, I arranged my goods on my vinyl table top and washed my face. Then I filled my little water glass with whiskey. I opened that beautiful yellow box, lifted the elegant paper wrapper and admired them together, packed neatly side by side. I tore a strip from the sheet of cedar, warmed the tip of the cigar above the flame, and, turning it neatly, lit it and pulled the chair up to the open window.

 

 

 

 

*Sycamore trees

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Andrew Haley is the author of four novels: Octopus, Liar, Transference and Beggars Opera. His poems have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Quarterly West, Zone and GoodFoot. Along with Ivana Gamarnik, he co-translated Lola Arias' play, Mi Vida Despues, into English. A bilingual edition of the play was published in Buenos Aires. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories, titled Signals.

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