Music played by gentlemen who try to make their living as cigarette salesmen, and post boys, and delivery boys and messenger boys
Ben smells like cigarettes when I lean into him. “Wow, you smell so good.” This is the first date. We’re basking in the glow of some pasta we whipped up and watching something on TV.
“Thank you!” I’m leaning against him fully at this point and he’s been lightly teasing me every time I go for body contact. “Hello,” when I pop up around him to “check on the pasta.” It makes me feel a little silly and wobbly.
“Hi,” he says now, this sweet, sweet smile on his face when I look up at him from my slight lean against him. He tastes like cigarettes, too, when I kiss him. His kisses are like pressing your face against a soft comforter. “You’re so attractive.” His voice breathes out those words. I’m rippling. It's been a single date and he’s looking at me with that soft shiny eyed smile and I’m thinking about buying tickets for the play so we can go see that a month from now so I can secure a ticket to hear his voice again.
Here’s a trick: you can open your eyes when you’re kissing to peek at the other person’s face and feel a little more special when you get to witness the moment they’re completely into you, or at least into kissing you. His eyes are closed and I feel warm all over.
He shows me how to smoke and I try my first cigarette with him, and he’s marveling at how it’s a first I’m sharing with him, and even though I’m not sentimental about firsts or lasts I can’t help but make it a little special too.
My brother and I are in Korea, it’s the summer after my freshman year, and we’re Americans in Seoul, soaking in the local culture, soft invisible particulates of tobacco smoke snowing lightly on us, carried by the wind. We watch a cloud of gray smoke rise into the air above the stone-paved corner of the park, both of us in awe of the casual consumption of dark tar cancerous growths sticky coughs by such a large group of random individuals.
To say something, I offer a conclusion: “I guess that makes sense, a post-lunch time smoke break.” Total culture shock for the both of us, American-made puritans. Is it because of our health values? Or maybe it’s because we’re more scared of the idea of the taboo? Would it have been the same if it were just people drinking? I don’t know how to feel about the fact that it smells sweet and good, but the brain automatically links the dark tar cancer smoke gray air and I watch the smoke in the air replenish itself, getting thicker and thinner and flowing in between.
“That’s so crazy. Isn’t that crazy?” My brother shook his head.
Korea smells like cigarettes and carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and exhaust and wet concrete. It smells like breathing in car smoke and ventilation air. When I’m little and my brother and I imagine that our home is really in Korea, even though we’ve lived in America almost our entire lives, we go and catch the smell in America behind certain apartment buildings where it’s dim and the outgasses cling to the brick walls and asphalt ground, sticking to the pores in the cool darkness.
My dad is busy at work until 6pm, at which point he’ll probably go shut himself outside to smoke and then shut himself inside to work more. But my brother and I both count the time down anyway, silently counting the number of smoke clouds we see outside as we wander around on the large sidewalk blocks and metro stations, as lunch passes into late lunch into supper into early dinner.
He lights his cigarette by hunching over it, flicking his lighter on with one hand and cupping around the cigarette end with the other. Do you mind if I smoke in here? It’s your car, Ben. I don’t mind. I think of the way Al Pacino would say that as Michael Corleone in The Godfather, diplomacy, quiet politeness, words coming out like he’s sighing in monotone. I don’t mind. Does he want me to say that I do mind? I’m never sure what I should say. That question only comes up because I am in love with the way he holds the cigarette in his mouth and the cigarette end bobs up and down. What does he think he looks like when he’s smoking?
I’m clinging to his arm while he’s driving us to a bar. “You smell so good.” It’s automatic. I can’t stop myself from saying it. I watch the smoke whip itself into a cloud around his open mouth.
“I do need my arm to drive.” I let go of his arm. “And I think,” he says, “that what you said is probably Freudian.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? I look at his face to try to figure out the undercurrent of emotion in that statement, but I can’t see anything in his half smile overexposed by the sun glaring through the car window.
I’ve never actually seen him do it, but I’ve always known that my dad smokes. His apologetic explanation always follows the smell itself, but it was always a sweet smell when he picked me up.
My mom explained to me after he had gone and left that he would smoke near the dimly lit “basketball court” (asphalt with a single crooked basketball hoop) attached to the cul-de-sac we lived on by a set of large stairs made with mulch and square wooden frames, where I once felt my six-year-old feet unstoppably smush the unending flood of wooly bear caterpillars.
I will never see him as he walks up the stairs covered in black goop. I can only imagine the image through my mom’s voice, that he would go all the way over there to smoke because he didn’t want to do it near us. Also, she said as if it was an aside, also, our next door neighbor wouldn’t let him smoke near her house.
Why smoking? Smoking is opulent. It’s bad for you in every way with very little reward. There is some utility to smoking. Smoking calms you down, according to Ben. That would be in line with his depression. It wakes you up too. It’s an upper (also according to Ben). Also in line with his depression if we consider the idea of self medication. It seems a little nonsensical to smoke weed and then a cigarette, the way Ben does it, since it seems to negate the intentional slowness of the former. Or, another nonsensical combo, alcohol and cigarettes. But he says that antidepressants don’t work for him so he just makes do with what he can (which is a surprising statement from a psychology major, but hey, what do I know about cigarettes and drinking five beers a day and medication resistant depression, when my depression played nice to the first medication I was put on).
Also, it looks cool. I think most people smoke cigarettes because they think it looks cool. I think that at least Ben smokes partially because he thinks it looks cool. Men smoke. In Casino, after Robert De Niro explodes (really, before he explodes, if we want to get into storyline chronology), he lights his cigarette by taking out his lighter and flicking it open, holding the flame right up to the cigarette. We’re watching Casino together after Ben showed me his newly acquired VCR copy. I curl up on the corner of his sofa and listen to the VCR squeak. The beer is making me feel warm so I watch the silhouette of Robert De Niro’s cute pink suit (did they really wear those back in the day?) get into his car and explode. He flies through the air.
“No no no, for your first time watching it you have to be able to see all the details.” Ben grabs the remote and flips through his TV and breathlessly we’re on HDMI 2 we’re on the new TV interface that’s somehow connected to wifi we’re on youtube and he’s rented a copy of Casino, without asking me to pay and it’s playing and I try to say something about how I can pay him back but he’s watching the movie so I turn to watch it too.
I can now see the buttons on Robert De Niro’s pastel pink suit, the embossed details of his nice car that he climbs into. He explodes again. He flies through the air. He turns around before all of that happens in his reality within the screen and takes out his Zippo lighter and flicks it open and puts the flame to the end of his cigarette. He takes his cigarette out of his mouth and smoke pours out like fog flowing over a creek.
Ben thinks that’s hard as fuck. I can’t say that I don’t think so too.
The staircase was glowing faintly. I tiptoed down and saw my dad dimly lit by the tv through the grates of the staircase railing. I can’t smell him from over here.
“What are you doing up?” He was eating the snacks we had bought at Hmart. I didn’t know that he actually was the one eating all of those. My mom had said it and I thought of it as a mythology. I didn’t know that my dad ate snacks in general.
“I can’t sleep.” I looked at my dad through the grates of the staircase and imagined myself on the sofa.
“You should go back upstairs and try again.”
I went back up the stairs. The room next to mine, my brother’s, is silent.
In the opening of The Sopranos, Tony Soprano smokes a fat cigar on his way down the familiar looking highways of New Jersey. The highways look exactly as they do in Virginia on a rainy day when you’re somewhere that looks like the kind of miserable Annandale, which has successfully dodged development since the 80s after the first wave of post-Korean War immigrants, maybe trying to keep that feel of an older Korea that still smells like exhaust and concrete rather than the something shinier now.
Ben’s making me watch The Sopranos because he wants to watch it. When the opening plays, Ben bops his head back and forth and bounces with the beat. I imagine that he learned this in his local Pittsburgh band days in high school, where he was introduced to cocaine. His smile is this soft thing.
Bwa oo wa oo wa, I mimic the saxophone interjecting in. His smile is this soft thing, self-satisfied, sweetly happy. I can smell the sweet smell of cigarettes lingering on him from across the room.
“In high school I used to dig through ashtrays to find enough cigarettes to smoke.” The orange tip of Ben’s cigarette flickered with his oxygen intake. I wanted to kiss him. Maybe rather that I wanted him to want to kiss me so I just stood there, watching his cigarette flicker in the dark. He looked into the street. I imagined the high school Ben digging through the ashtray across the street in front of a fluorescent laundromat. I’m in high school and I’m seventeen years old, snapping rubber bands against my wrist because of fucking AP tests, of all things, what have I lived through that’s “real.” I think about how if Ben and I had met in high school we would be unrecognizable to each other. I feel stupid and small for thinking he would want to kiss me.
When he finished his cigarette he threw the butt into the road. Fluorescent orange circle hitting the ground and popping soundlessly. The dash of bright orange against the darkness made me smile so hard that he looked at me and asked me if I was against his littering. I shook my head no in what I hoped was a cute manner. We walk back into the bar I’m pretending to enjoy being at so I can stay next to him.
Later, two weeks after Ben stopped responding to my texts, I wrote:
I'm not talking about the good or bad of the action,
I'm just talking about the arc a lit cigarette makes in the dark
an orange arc that dashes itself against the dark asphalt smashing into a million little stars.
My brother and I, most of our conversations happen passively, as if we breathed in and what came out happened to be words, since we were next to each other anyway. Never much further than that. The real version of my brother is hidden behind the perfect invisible barrier, an uncrossable ocean of privacy. Maybe he’s more comfortable this way?
We’re in the car in the two front seats. In the car, he’ll pull something up on the aux and ask me if I’d ever heard of it before. It’s MF DOOM. “I like his production,” I’ll say, knowing that I won’t be able to pull the criticism even though it’s what I’ve hated the most about my mom, her constant criticism about the music I’d show her, “but his lyrics aren’t great.” I wonder if that hurts him. I don’t know why I can’t just not say it. But the criticism comes out like carbon dioxide, the unstoppable consequence of pulling in breath.
“I like Kendrick Lamar’s lyrics,” I say. I imagine everyone else who has listened to Kendrick Lamar before my ripe age of 21 and I feel stupid, again. I wonder how many of his friends at Brown know so much more about music than I know or ever will know.
“I just can’t get used to his voice,” he says.
“No, I get that, but you know the one that goes I got I got I got royalty got loyalty inside my DNA.”
“DNA,” he responds.
“That makes sense,” I say, feeling stupid again. “I like that one. You know the one that’s about being alright in the end? I like how his voice sounds in that one. You get used to it. He talks poetry, you know?”
I wonder what my brother’s inherited inner critic is saying about me and what I’ve said. Poetry. Who do I think I am?
Brisk cold. Bracing cold. I think about the feel of each cold temperature as I go out to meet the morning on my way into school and the night on my way out. The morning colds are often brisk in Pittsburgh compared to how they feel in Maryland. But sometimes the yellow sun is cold in the face of a bracing cold.
The night colds are usually bracing. Had I always felt this cold in the winter? Ben said that, that stupid fucking mimetic phrase that comes out of my mouth habitually, Ben said that his favorite days are cold winter days, smoking in snow fields.
I walk into the dark today and feel the bracing cold. Bitter cold. I take out my third cigarette out of the yellow pack and fail to light it three times in a row, the wind is blowing so hard. The cigarette lights and then goes out again. Another click click click now facing away from the wind and the cherry stays in this time. Ben said it was called a cherry. Cherry sounds bad and a little slimy. It’s orange, anyway. The cigarette does nothing to warm me up and it instead makes my hands start hurting with cold in the bracing and bitter cold of the nighttime. The dark makes my hands feel more miserable. What a fucking liar Ben is. Nothing good about cigarettes in the cold and I smoke only half of it before it pisses me off and I put it out on the ground, crouching, smushing the butt into the asphalt and then getting up and stepping on it for good measure. I pick it back up and put the half cigarette in my pocket.
The image of Ben cupping his hand around the end of his cigarette suddenly released itself and floated away like a balloon going to touch the sky. I still watch movies and think about what he might have said about the camera angle and split diopter shots because everything he said in those moments were true and pure and from somewhere deep inside of him. But the Ben who threw me onto the bed and called me gorgeous and kissed the back of my neck, the Ben who couldn’t stop repeating how attractive I was to him, the Ben who texted me if he could give me a ride to my friend’s place just because he wanted to see me, that Ben flattened.
Most of the men I hook up with put on some sort of pleasant character that they think I or a general someone will like. Just projections of what they think is a character that’s realer or truer than they can be. It’s polite of them, I guess. Is it like if I have something to offer them, they feel obligated to be nice to me? It’s almost like sales, to lie and swim slow circles around the eventual wake of the waves.Maybe that’s what being a boy is, constant image projection. Those boys and their images blot out of my mind, but I say blot out like it’s something I do consciously, when it’s more like they leave my house and a wet fog has dampened the lines that they left in my house and their marks will fade away with the water evaporating in the morning sunlight. I wonder what my brother would think if he knew I did these things he would disapprove of, like hooking up with guys with this kind of fake exterior and smoking cigarettes, what a shitty third parent I turned out to be.
Why would you lie about being into someone? Because you weren’t lying but the attraction was just brutally short, because for him it’s not about meeting someone you actually like, it’s about having power over someone else in a small window of time, because he wanted to believe it.
More and more my dad fades from my field of view too, fading from the day that I smelled the stale cigarette smoke from his polo shirt in Korea, meeting my brother and I during my 4th grade, his 3rd grade summer visit, a surprise arrival, both my brother and I knowing that the consequences of his appearance would be a disappearance from the rest of our lives. Now all I see of him is images on Youtube and TV, images that are just surface projections of him, the banking institute professor, the PhD in economics he earned in the US that ruined him so much that he had to run from the US as a whole (according to my mom, he’s never said that to me). Does he ever think of my brother when he makes these videos? Imagine the boy who asked my dad all of these questions about his job in economics and going to graduate school and what kind of jobs there are, my dad seeing this boy for the first time in four years because he refuses to visit us in the US, so this boy traveled miles and miles and spent thousands of dollars for his tickets and mine. Does he actually think about the boy who I watched over and who watched over me when we flew internationally for the first time, a 3rd and 4th grader trying to handle passports and tickets and baggage all by themselves, dealing with a stranger grandma trying to convert us to Christianity, both of us maybe more scared for each other’s lives than for our own…
“Your dad smells bad, right?” My dad picks me up, all of me in a single armful. I shook my head no and felt his stubble on my cheeks. He had gotten me chocolate covered strawberries, my favorite. The blunt hairs felt like a million pencil leads. It was itchy. The smell was sweet. I wished I could handle the itchiness for a little longer but I wiggled and he pulled away.
One of my favorite things to do is to just sit behind my brother while he’s doing whatever on his computer, watching Youtube videos on the hottest restaurants in New York City (where he goes whenever he can), reading about expensive watches he’ll never ever let me buy for him regardless of my earning power, playing video games. I sit behind him, a couple feet of empty space separating us. He doesn’t turn around.
“What are you playing?”
“Just ARAM. Just something casual.”
“With who?”
“Brian and Jason.”
“How are they doing?”
“Good.”
That’s all I know to ask. I wish I knew what to ask more, but maybe this is what I do best for him. Sitting behind him and watching silently, like how dads do on the images I see on the internet. Giving their silent audience and hoping that their son can feel the warm sweet smell of someone watching over him for the brief moment they can.