DESTRUCTION BUDDIES by Aurora Gordon
My dad was a smoker for twenty five years and had emphysema while I was growing up, in addition to a nasty set of “hands-off parenting.” I was an angry yet passive kid, and so one morning I took life by the balls and sheepishly crawled into a drugstore to buy a defiant pack of cigarettes. I shrunk back home and waited for the weekend to come, when I planned to out my “habit”.
Saturday came and the morning slept in later than I did. The rain seemed to have had an invisible stand in: all the gloom and doom without the hydration. The clouds were still though and so I felt obliged to go do something, so at least one of us expended energy. At least I brought a good book to read, and a little over two dollars in change. Perfect. I stepped through the door, immediately forgot about the wind, and it slammed behind me, in a “how did you like that, ol’ so-and-so?” sort of way. I struck gold today. Blueberry cream cheese muffins and my favorite french roast. The short squatty college student behind the counter looked like a nut cracker, and when he asked for two o’seven I got so distracted I handed him two pennies and keep looking. Oh right, haha. We laughed and I paid, chanting together like the members of an irregular church, “Too early.”
I dragged my dishes over unbalanced arms and poured myself out the door onto the patio, where a gaggle of persistent smokers sat in the drizzle. Though there’s only one table open the chairs around it were left unoccupied, so space was certainly not lacking (a relief for claustrophobics. Explaining a ridiculous fear to addict strangers doesn’t come first nature to me). And so I sat, burned my tongue, opened my book, dropped it on the ground and lost my place...the usual. But fortunately the folks cleared out, drifting away with the smoke until just a few people remained. A few thirty somethings to my left discussed the nuances of Becky and Alejandra and George and the sex lives thereof, straight out of a bad sitcom with a laugh track. The whole time I had my usual schtick: irritatingly observant and awkward, trying so, so hard to be aloof and stuck in my book but secretly craving stares from curious strangers, wanting to get through to me, “oblivious idiot savant.” I always say I am, but I’ve begun to just think it may be my ego.
But the chap to my right had the act down. His table was littered with bottles and sheets of rolling paper. Honey, vitamins, loose tobacco. Something that looks like a citrusy fruit. A barista came barreling through, looking far more high strung than his long, knotted hair would seem appropriate for. But he saw the mystery shaman and suddenly calms down.
“Hey man, you come prepared.”
A nod.
”You got a set up goin’ on here.”
Another almost dismissive nod, followed by a foreign trickle of speech.
“Well, I got that heart condition. Gonna get it under control.”
And the barista wound back into the shop. Something seemed oddly comical in the whole affair. I wonder if this man just decided to cure his illness in this one afternoon. The tens of bottles seem to indicate it. My hand stayed as stagnant as my cognitive gray matter, hovering over my journal, absent of anything but a desire to suck something creative out of the moment.
But the man caught me staring at him and stared me down with a look that seems to say, “Hey little punkass, live it first. Then write about it.”
And I tried to serepticiously shift my gaze away, but the gold ring in the top of my left ear gets caught on his eyes, like a purse on a door handle trumping a quick getaway. His eyes drifted to my earlobes, dotted with four more empty piercings.
He paused before getting over disgust.
“So you really need five holes? You’ve only got one filled.”
I looked back.
“Isn’t it a bad idea to smoke with a heart condition?”
Now we shared mutual discomfort. He continued to smoke.
“Gonna get that under control.”
He indicated the bottles. Honey, mint leaves. Ginger, maybe. And tobacco.
He lit another curative cigarette. Sitting with this burning stick in the rain. Replacing one illness with a contained one, just for control’s sake.
On the way home I took the pack of cigarettes hidden in my car, and held it open out the window, watching them fly out like the tail of a long, morbid kite.
