Nicotine Page 11

  Cosini, the budding LC fetishist, smokes this first, supposedly singular LC and is a fighter, a champion, a true hero of freedom! He can enjoy his triumph for a while. But a few months, weeks, days later he remorsefully reaches for the fall-back cigarette. He smokes morosely and, due to his dejection, misses one of the most wonderful moments of his life. But not long after he once again has fresh hope. He can, even though he hates himself for his weakness right now, already look forward to the next LC. He knows, as he’s relapsed, that he can have it. Right now. Or tomorrow. Or in a week. Or on December 31. He just has to want it.

  I wonder if people like Cosini can tell the difference when they smoke the final LC, whether they know intuitively that they will not circle back around again as they have before. Since this day at the quarry, I’ve always smoked the last cigarette because I could already sense that a new first one was awaiting me at some point in the future, a relapse cigarette that would surpass all other cigarettes and trigger a giddy clarity within me that had up to that point been waiting in the shadows. As much as I’ve always been ashamed of this last cigarette, it’s also always brought me a private, tranquil joy.

  The last few weeks have been frantic and exhausting. A long journey is now behind us and we’re using the days before the semester starts to regain our strength. Maybe we’ll drive home through Holmes County, I think, nowhere in the world has more Amish and Mennonites than here in the north of Ohio. I read that smoking has caused a dispute between them for many centuries. One side quotes Isaiah 55:2 – Why spend money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy? The other vaguely refers to tradition and explains that God himself created tobacco in order for man to have pleasure. Those who refuse tobacco are against God’s creation. I also hear that many of these farmers, who don’t use tractors or any other kind of technological equipment, cultivate tobacco with great pangs of conscience to feed their numerous children and to have their carriages repaired. Cultivating tobacco is considered highly lucrative, even though the US government removed the subsidies a long time ago. Is it possible for a pious community to produce and sell something when its consumption is a sin?

  We don’t drive through Holmes County. We drive from Cleveland, where we stayed the night at the Case Western Reserve University’s campus and saw some beautiful wall paintings by Sol LeWitt in a museum, and take the direct route to Columbus. On the freeway we resume a discussion that we’ve been having since we first got to know one another: Is it possible to have a work of art that consists solely of thought? I like to quote Musil on these occasions: What matters to me is the passionate energy of thought. Yes, M. says, and then he found a form for these thoughts, a form that’s quite unruly at times, but one that he ultimately had under control. She actually wants to say to me that the essay form is undisciplined, that the book I’m working on is one big lack of discipline. M. solely writes poems, which are published in two-year intervals in exquisite Austrian editions. Over breakfast I made a final attempt to convince her of the detour through Holmes County. But she’s exhausted. She suffers from jetlag worse than I do. Since when do you do research, she asked, are you a journalist now? No, no need to worry. She’s right. I can’t go up to strangers and hassle them with questions, especially not long-established farmers who fundamentally reject modernity and its media because it’s the devil’s work. Why should they answer my questions? What does so-called public interest mean to them? The grace of God is the one thing that counts. It’s best to leave them in peace.

  The flight’s really knocked me for six, M. says, how do you always manage to get over it? We were on the move for eighteen hours, five of which we spent in the Delta Terminal of John F. Kennedy New York airport, always in eye and earshot of the dominating, war-like state of affairs of the infamous Gate 23.

  It’s not been two years since I paid the possibly record-breaking thirteen dollars for a pack of cigarettes. Last week an actor friend of mine who’s a strong smoker told me that he doesn’t mind the long flights he has to make for professional reasons. He flies to South Africa or Los Angeles or wherever and doesn’t think about smoking at all. It’s as if his addiction is suspended, as if he’s fallen out of time for eight or fourteen hours.

  Not even the flight crew’s urgent announcements requesting that people do not smoke in the toilets disturb his peace, even though they constitute a truly insidious meanness, a real insolence from the perspective of the smoker. We board a plane, have found our seat and stowed away our jacket and hand luggage. We attend to our book (one that’s got nothing to do with nicotine) or try and go to sleep before the first feed, we do everything in our power to forget the unattainable cigarettes tucked away in our jacket pocket for a couple of hours. And already we are reminded with subtle mockery, with a slight malice only perceptible to the trained ear of these very cigarettes with the evidently fake, impudent reference to the fire regulations. As if a plane has ever gone down because of a cigarette fire! Why was fire safety not an issue back in 1982 when I smoked a pack and a half of Pall Mall from Frankfurt to JFK? Would we somehow crash, for instance, if a spark happened to fall on an economy seat? And didn’t my father, the fire safety expert, used to smoke on flights? (He was once detained at Tel Aviv airport for five hours. When passport control asked him what his occupation was, he gave the title ‘expert in explosions’.) Why don’t the flight attendants say what they’re really thinking? It’s written all over their faces: Please get a hold of yourself! We think it’s revolting that you smoke. You want to poison us with your cigarettes, you want to kill us! Every cigarette, in fact, every intended drag is an attack on our life, on our health, on our beauty! The next pimple on my delicate flight attendant cheek will be billed to your account. You should be grateful that we’re taking you at all, you haven’t earned it, you have no business being here. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should be considered a murderer, a murderer is what you are! If we were to crash at least I’d be spared the long, painful cancer battle, which you’d be responsible for, and you’ll go straight to hell and get what you deserve. A tirade like this would at least be truthful and would in any case be edifying. You could learn something about the kinds of people who occupy these positions in our society, who with the least amount of effort cause the most amount of inconvenience. Instead of sitting on the toilet, which she absolutely does not plan to do (maybe she finds the idea disgusting and beneath her), the smoker sits in her place and simply listens to false, condescending friendliness, a rebuke under the much too thin guise of the law. Of course the whole thing’s so depressing one would love to do nothing more than light up straight away.

  But, like I said, my friend doesn’t give a damn. During the flight he’s completely relaxed and doesn’t think about having a couple of puffs in the bathroom, he doesn’t even entertain the idea. There’s no point thinking about something that’s strictly prohibited, he says. As soon as he’s off the plane, however, as soon as the flight captain has sent him off with a leathery smile, the addiction, the pent up hunger, overwhelms him. Cold sweat runs down his forehead as he totters down the gangway with weak knees. He waits shaking at the luggage carousel, at passport control. In double time he looks for the exit, any way to get outside. In front of the terminal, even if he’s getting picked up, even if the driver is impatiently seesawing on his heels because he’s double-parked and the anti-terror police could move in at any moment, he lights a cigarette. And then another one. Only then does he take a look around, gets his bearings, finds himself once again in a new place. Only then does he get into the car, without apologising to the driver, and is brought to his hotel.

  For me it’s the exact opposite. I’ve got my addiction well in hand since those days. The craving seldom overpowers me and when it does I know how to bypass it. But as soon as I board a plane, the old hunger ambushes me. I sit there and remember the torment I endured during my smoking days, I hear the announcements, smell the jet fuel and see the dark blue uniforms of the Delta da
mes and I think of nothing but cigarettes, all the cigarettes that I’ve been forbidden, deprived or talked out of. And I wonder whether it is just coincidental that this smoking ban always hurts the most when declared by one of these motherly, perky, friendly women.

  After breakfast in Cleveland we settled our bill and stepped out from the dim hotel lobby into the gleaming sun reflected in Lake Erie. A hotel porter hurried towards us. M. blinked, put her glasses on and handed him a yellow ticket she pulled out from her handbag. He immediately ran off to fetch our car. In America this service is provided by so-called jocks mixing work with pleasure: school pupils and students doing what they like doing best. On top of this they earn their keep and save themselves the monthly subscription to the gym. They get enjoyment from their work and move accordingly, with elegance and vigour. The faster they are, the more tips they can get. I can understand this combination of the pleasurable with the practical well. I look for a physical challenge when doing everyday things and while working too, I’ve always been glad when I’ve had an excuse to exert myself, and not just in the mountains. Since I’ve been able to breathe freely again I take on many daily tasks in a sportsmanlike fashion: lugging things around and helping during house moves, cleaning the house, the long walk into the city, the food shopping. I carry furniture and boxes to the fifth floor, buy long-life milk in twelve packs, ride my bike and walk home from work in the evenings. Sometimes I employ all of my strength and stamina just to buy a single book at the other end of the city.

  This hotel porter is no jock. He runs like a boy. He vanishes behind the hotel with waving arms and an open mouth. He runs like an actor, his movements don’t flow whatsoever. Anyone who’s ever had the chance to compare the usual film-stomp of an American action hero with the light-footed, almost silent float of an Ethiopian long distance runner will know what I’m talking about. The best way of capturing the difference is by imagining an old tractor (Matt Damon) and then imagining a Maglev train next to the tractor (Haile Gebrselassie). Of course it presents an immense challenge for an actor to emulate a natural running style. Luckily these kinds of scenes are mostly cut up in the editing suite in such a way that it can no longer be noticed. Equally great are the difficulties filmmakers seem to have with the way cigarettes are held: you can’t fool me, I think to myself every time I see a smoking actor who doesn’t inhale and clearly has never held a cigarette in real life. Aida Turturro, who plays Tony Soprano’s sister Janice, is one such example. (I admit that murderers and former soldiers must have a similar experience when they go to the cinema: How can they even bear the inaccurate bangs with the gun not kicking back?)

  I smell smoke as I climb into the Jeep. Our jock, who isn’t a jock, stinks of it out of every pore. For the first time I feel something like disgust at the thought that my smell perception has been aroused by the smoke particles that this American student has pumped out of his moist, mucous-filled lungs. Something that was deep within his body is now in mine. He had drawn it in through his yellow teeth, brushed it over his coated tongue before it slipped into my nose and my throat and arrived in my bronchia. I suddenly find it unbelievable that we humans allow this to happen. It’s common knowledge that everything that in some way breaches the confines of the body is branded taboo and triggers fear, anxious agitation and a deep feeling of disgust within us. There is hardly anything that disturbs us in the same way and nothing in society is avenged like the unlawful, violent or fraudulent penetration into another body: rape is the most unspeakable of crimes. And though everyone knows that injections don’t usually hurt, there’s hardly a phobia more widely spread than the fear of needles and injections. We’re incredibly sensitive when it comes to these matters, and justifiably so. We have a right to bodily integrity. We all determine what we absorb, what penetrates us, what we merge with. It’s not for nothing that we grant those who infringe these boundaries in one way or another – mothers, doctors and priests – a special place in our lives. We elevate them because we have no choice. We have to trust them. We kneel, open our mouths and receive with closed eyes.

  When it comes to breathing we don’t insist upon the same integrity. When we breathe and share the same air as strangers in a small room, we barely notice that our physical borders are being breached in the worst possible way – most of the time we don’t think about it at all. As long as we don’t smell it or see it, it doesn’t bother us. Smoke makes it apparent that something permeates us that has just escaped the body, the moist, bacteria-populated bodily orifice of a stranger.

  I tip the hotel porter five dollars through the open window. I feel like I have to buy a partial indulgence for my silent abuse. It’s not you, I think to myself, it’s me. Don’t take it personally. We pull away. Before we turn onto the road I take a look in the rearview mirror. There he stands already back at his post and smoking as if he’d just accomplished some mammoth task and must reward himself for his effort. He obviously sees himself on par with a long distance runner and coughs into the back of his hand. Like I said, I’ve either smoked or I’ve done sport, I exerted myself very rarely in my smoking years, and never of my own accord. There were of course instances when I had to. Often enough I would rush with my heavy bag through the Cologne Central Station to catch the train to the boarding school. I jostled and zigzagged at a running pace through the train station hall and down the level corridors until I reached the tenth or eleventh platform, the train stopped on the side opposite the cathedral: we rural Lower Rhine folk weren’t important enough for the single-figure platforms. I ran past the sausage stand, spurned the clogged up escalator where people lurked like Bismarck in the picture in my history book – eternally disembarking the ship, but never making it all the way down. (It’s still a mystery to me why people stand on escalators, these machines weren’t installed with the intent of slowing your progress.) I took two, three steps at a time, lunged towards the train and tore open the closed carriage doors. When I’d finally made it, when I fell exhausted and breathing labouredly onto the pleather seats and the train had started rolling, I tasted blood. Blood. My bronchia were bleeding, a gazillion microscopic vessel tips deep within my body, just above my heart, had burst and were releasing blood, that I then coughed up out of my body. When I think about it now I can barely grasp it, but at the time I didn’t know any different, I thought it was normal. And this blood of my youth, this taste that I dispelled by lighting up a cigarette as soon as I could breathe again, is linked with the sight of the jock. I inhaled what this young boy had just pumped out of his diseased lungs.

  Of course, these taboos have drawbacks. When eating, kissing or having sex, these border breaches bring us pleasure. And smoking is naturally sometimes a stand-in for these things, at least a distraction from them. Smoking eases the wait for the gratification of actual desires. It works best when you’re hungry. It only works partially for sex. When I smoked my first relapse cigarette looking out at the lake in the quarry when I was eighteen and was then finally able to drive to my first love Eliana’s house, I didn’t get as far as I had hoped I would and had to smoke a lot to compensate. I was disappointed to discover that Eliana hadn’t invited just me, but a load of other friends, among which were many guys older than me who wore torn jeans, opened beer bottles with lighters and drew Iggy Pop cassettes out the pockets of their biker jackets. (I had a soft spot at the time for modernist composers like Scriabin, Berg and Webern.) The party went on until late in the night and as I fell into Eliana’s brother’s bed at the crack of dawn, I knew that I could never compete with those guys. Nothing would happen. No kiss, nothing. Eliana was, and remained, unattainable.

  It must have nearly been midday when she stuck her head around the door to check in on me. Well, kiddo? I had a headache, a tremendous hangover. She came in and sat on the edge of the bed. The arms of her grey dressing gown were much too long, it clearly belonged to her father. I sensed that she was naked underneath it. Her nakedness was actually within reach. Kiss me, her eyes said, push this thick swathe o
f towelling off of my shoulder. I knew then that I wouldn’t get another chance. She had slipped into the room, sat beside me on the bed and looked at me confidentially with a slightly tilted head, stroked my damp hair off of my forehead and laid the flat of her palm on my chest, reinforcing this concerned gesture by leaning slightly towards me, increasing the pressure on my chest, and if I didn’t act now, if I didn’t immediately draw together all of my strength, seize this opportunity and make gravity my ally then it would all be for nothing. Then the chance would vanish, I would have lost. I looked at her, breathed in deeply, as deep as was possible, and my hands twitched under the bedcovers, and I hoped that the Iggy Pop fans had ridden home in the night and no longer stood between me and Eliana’s nakedness. I wanted to touch her and pull her into the bed with me, when I noticed at the last moment the bitter taste on my tongue, the devilish mixture of cigarettes and dark beer and stomach acid that I knew from earlier youthful excesses. I’d never been so disgusted by myself. I froze, I didn’t move. Eliana, who sensed how uncomfortable I felt in my own skin, sat up, smiled almost indiscernibly and took my pack of Prince from the bedside table with a casual, swiping motion that I would recall when I had the opportunity to watch a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas, who took cards from the stack silently with a lithe repeated motion. She lit a cigarette and held it to my lips. How grateful I was for this drag, how good this beautiful woman was to me! I smoked without taking my hands out from under the bedcovers and tried to withstand her gaze. And if, as I think now, I came across like a prisoner before the execution, then I envy anyone that can relive this experience. It was quite possibly the most wonderful drag of my life. And then Eliana lead the cigarette to her own full, slightly parted lips and took a deep, sensual drag. She bent over me and released the smoke, and the shimmering blue veil that caught the first autumnal sunshine sank over my face and caressed me. A kiss, better than a kiss… her lips, where my lips had been. Her breath and the smoke that we shared… I closed my eyes and sucked it in to the tips of my lungs. My first true love’s kiss was smoke, nothing but smoke.