Smoking Gums

You can tell a lot about a man by the way he smokes. Which is perhaps the only reason it’s such a shame most men don’t anymore. Not true smoking at least, not according to my mother. I think it makes the Europeans so attractive— them and the Californians and the Texans. Something something about wearing hearts on their lighters caught between two fingers in an alleyway. So when you see one, one of the rare true-smoking breeds, you know: heartbreaker, heartbroken, dangerous.

Stay away. 

I started smoking with a boy who’s now a man who’s now a rapper. It didn’t work for me the first time the same way sex didn’t work the first time, but practice is easy in good company. In high school, all he could think about was having fun so it was fun to be around him. Now, he wants to keep having fun even though the rest of the world is passing him. He belongs to that other sect of people in the arts— the ones that didn’t start to be important, but rather because they couldn’t find anything better to do. Not out of a lack of creativity, but an abundance of it. Simply because after college, very few things are actually fun, and if the idea of working in the traditional sense makes you want to find a short dock and shoot yourself on it, then you go into the arts. I think some of the best work is made this way, by the people who aren’t trying to be important. 

Bit of a lost art, smoking. 

You don’t see it in New York unless you’re at an art gallery or in the east village, and the way those people smoke won’t tell you anything about them that you don’t already know. That’s a practiced smoke, handed down from the ex of an ex, more for the bit than the feeling. It’s not real smoking. Not like the cowboys do it.

Closest you can get now is weed, at least without a plane ticket. Most people smoke weed, despite what my mother will tell you. Weed or vapes, or vapes with weed. I tell myself most of them must’ve started to impress a girl. “Oh, you’ve never done it before? It’s easy, you just put your lips together and blow.” I bet most of them actually started because of anxiety, or maybe something they call anxiety but feels more like that aching pit in your chest that flares up like a cold fire every time you think about the future or the last night you spent in you childhood bed.

Anyway, I was on the almost-rapper’s porch and he held the joint between two fingers and I smoked until I could lie about feeling it. And I let him kiss me me and kiss me again because it seemed like he wanted to. Our friend was filming us through the haze, sixteen-year-olds through the smoke, through the blinds. The video is still out there, and I was topless for a bit of it. Maybe it’ll make its way onto the internet someday. Maybe it already has. If I were Kim Kardashian it might’ve been important. If he were anybody, it might’ve made me important. But he was just someone in high school with a joint and lighter and the idea that “If not now, when?” would be a perfect tattoo. But there’s still time right? For one of us to be important. Maybe I can make a scandal out of myself after all.

I’d bought packs of cigs before, but only out of altruism. I had a habit of dating older men without jobs who liked to smoke on my dime and I was always too quick to feed our addictions. I figured I’d leave the smoking to them since I was content to smell it off their cuffs, but I get tired of letting my vices sneak in through the windows, so I unlocked the doors and I bought my own first pack two weeks ago. The second and third followed too fast for my body to digest. I loved the head rush but couldn’t handle the shaking hands. By the end of pack three, I got so sick I spent a whole day shivering. I guess I wasn’t cut out for the cowboy life.