Untitled #8
He had been a smoker since as far back as I had first known him, and that was ten-plus years ago, and when we were relaxing and talking in that small, brightly lit room that day, he had on him a half-empty cigarette box and a big, shiny metallic lighter that he tucked down inside his breast pocket. When he noticed that I was secretly looking at his pocket, he quickly pulled out one and offered me a whiff.
“You sure you don’t want some fag?”
“No, no thanks. I don’t smoke, remember?”
“I know, I know. I was just checking.”
“You know it’s bad for you, right? Smoking?”
In reply, he puffed out a big, white cloud of smoke in the form of an onion ring and it floated up and away towards the fast-moving ventilation fan. And then he proceeded to blow another one just like that, another exact copy, and another, and at the end of his breath, he blew off whatever cigarette smoke he had left in his lungs in a quick, loud puff – whoosh – and he drew his head back and up and he looked at the ceiling and at the ventilation fan and at whatever was left trailing off by the onion ring smokes that he had conjured. The smoke rings rose up and dissipated fast and were disintegrating badly even before they reached the fan, where they would eventually meet their doom at the swift choppings of the fan’s wide, plastic blades.
“Yeah, I know…”
I sensed small traces of euphoria and arrogance on the well-defined lines that aged the surface of his face when he said that, as if he was also dismissing my claim that smoking is such a bad thing. But he hid them well, these lines. He hid them well under his dark, heavy eyelids and in his thick, black hair and on the stale smell of his sports jacket. He did not want to hurt the feelings of an old and dear friend, I guess, but he could not help but show me, the familiar, old square that I am, that what is so bad and so poisonous to a person is not entirely that bad or poisonous to another.
Before he continued, he straightened up his seating and brushed off fallen ash of his right lap, a quick wipe once, twice and a gentle third, and then he looked at me directly in the eyes, and softly, but clearly, he asked me a long question in return:
“But did you know that: the part of the brain that gets stimulated by the fun-loving chemicals in a cigarette smoke is the same fucking part of the brain that gets stimulated by the rush and the crush and the puff and the huff of orgasm? Of sex? Of your Saturday-morning masturbating on the bathroom floor onto MAXIM centerfolds? Of your big, fat, shoot-the-ceiling ejacu-fucking-lation? Did you know that?”
“No”, I answered, simple, direct and honest.
He smiled an evil smile and he took a light whiff of the smoke and he blew it all onto my face and said, with the Devil still on his lips: “Well, that’s just too bad.”
“What? You think I’m a pussy or something because I don’t fucking smoke?”
“No”, he replied, quick, “…but you don’t know what you’re missing, pal.”