think I should look normal?”
“No. Maybe not.”
“Meanwhile, back at the ranch...” he said, which was Dave’s way of trying to get back on subject — this issue of me and the fact I’d been acting so seemingly normal, which seemed to upset everyone so much. “How do you feel about this smoking thing?”
So we did that one long and hard. Maybe I was acting out my anger and my hurt. That was the theory. Dave didn’t have to give me a lecture about the fact that my smoking career should be short. From the start, I knew I couldn’t commit myself to the smoking lifestyle. I was pretty sure it wasn’t worth lung cancer and sexual dysfunction.
My only true commitment to the smoking world was love of the foray into the woods at noon hour and then right after school, a quick couple of puffs with the gang at the designated spot near the bus garage followed by running for the bus with nicotine breath. Sometimes it was me keeping pace with Scott Rutledge, which must have raised a few eyebrows at the mingling of such strange companions.
I gave smoking a full two weeks of my life. It was a five-days-a-week thing. No weekends. What was the point if I was not with my squint-eyed smoky tribe? So it was ten days, four smokes a day. Mostly I bummed cigarettes, but nobody would have put up with that for much longer.
I tried to tell my father that I started smoking. He was watching golf on TV. During golf my father was visible but pretty much comatose. It wasn’t from drinking or anything. It was his own special narcotic state of half sleep/half golf. He didn’t even like golf but he liked the hue of the greens, the hushed crowds, and the well-appointed golfers selecting woods or irons. It was another world for him. My father had no bad habits that I knew of, and the Saturday afternoon TV golf/semi-sleep seemed to be enough to transport him from the real world into a dimension akin to a heroin high. I’m just guessing but I think there’s truth in it.
“I’ve started smoking,” I told him. He was lost on the seventh green somewhere outside Atlanta.
“That’s not a good idea,” he said, drifting, I think, somewhere above the Georgian treetops.
“No kidding.”
“You really are?”
“Yep.”
“I’ll be darned.”
That was it. I don’t think he believed me. It just wasn’t the sort of thing his son Martin would do.
Opinions
Trees deserve more respect and credit than we give them. Nobody should be allowed to cut down a tree, any tree, without being charged a fee or a tax or something that would then go to health care for poor people. The tree tax would have to be passed on to consumers and that way we’d know a tree had been sacrificed every time we bought something that was part tree.
I was thinking about trees because of the days spent in the woods with the smokers. In the end, I liked the trees better than the puff fiends. Smoking had been part of my quest for healing. I wanted to damage myself somehow, Dave had suggested. But I think that was just the shrink in him talking. I wanted communion with someone and the smokers took me in — or out to the woods, at least.
But I had to give up on being part of that squint-eyed but oh-so-cool squad. My breath smelled bad — my teachers said so — but that’s not why I gave up on smoking. I could have taken that flack. It was the smokers’ conversation that did me in. The complaints about teachers and homework. How creepy the principal was. Older siblings who were getting in trouble with the law over petty crimes and automobile offences.
I’d try to initiate new subjects. I started pointing out different trees one day. “This old oak here must be over a hundred years old.”
The girls looked at me like I’d arrived from Jupiter. Finster and Hubbards, both older and more threatening than the other guys, looked somehow offended. “How do you know?” Finster asked in an intimidating manner.
“Yeah,” Hubbards asked, “what are you, like some bloody tree expert?”
I could tell they weren’t interested in my thoughts on the maples, oaks, gums, birches, poplars, or any of the shrubby undergrowth. Instead, the conversation turned, as it always did, back to cigarettes. Which was the subject that drove me from the fold.
“I really could have used a cigarette during that test in math,” Cindy said.
“I nearly died for a smoke towards the end of history. It was like so boring.”
“I don’t think it’s fair we can’t smoke in class,” Scott Rutledge added, fine-tuning his agenda for the race for class president.
“God this tastes good,” Finster said, dragging smoke into his lungs.
“Do you believe they’re raising the price of a pack of smokes again?” Hubbards asked the elms.
“I smoked two whole packs on Sunday,” somebody else confessed with pride. “My folks were gone.”
Etcetera.
And so my smoking career ended of its own accord. Whatever it was supposed to do for me, it wasn’t working. It didn’t make me angry or release my emotions. I wasn’t edgy and nervous with chips on my shoulder like the rest of the gang, and I think eventually they would have simply told me to stop hanging out with them. The simple comment about the age of the tree had set off a lot of mistrust. Finster and Hubbards were beginning to think I was some kind of mole or snitch. So I faded from their lives as quickly as I had entered.
And then I woke up one night soon after, remembering something.
I was twelve and my mother and I were sitting in the kitchen. She was peeling potatoes, and I liked watching her do this — graceful, artistic, long spirals of potato skin being released from the spud, revealing a cold white flesh beneath. Out of the blue, she said, “You know, I smoked one cigarette in my entire life.”
“You did?”
“I was about your age. An older boy gave it to me. I didn’t smoke it then but took it home and lit it up behind the house. I was all alone. I sipped at the smoke. I didn’t haul it in like most amateurs do. I never coughed. I liked it. It made me feel important. There was no filter. I smoked it down until it burned my fingers. And then it was over. I loved every minute of it. I especially liked the way that the world looked through the smoke that was right in front of my face.”
She saw the stunned look on my face. She was scaring me because she was revealing something of herself that seemed very private.
“That’s why I never touched another one. Don’t you ever start, okay?”
The final parental caution seemed like it was tagged on as an afterthought. Obligatory. She wasn’t really trying to give me a lecture. Remembering that one-sided conversation brought her back to me for a brief moment.
“Claude Monet,” she had said, “was a French painter who said that he did not paint the object but the space between
