Spirits.

Yellow., was all that I had to say. The man reached down and dropped the pack on the counter and I watched as $6.29 became $6.90 beneath the weight of the California state sales tax on tobacco. I quickly pocketed my dime and began to tap the top of the pack against my palm, packing the weed away from the ends to encourage a quicker light and a more even burn, and also satisfying yet another link in the chain of ritual as I looked at, without reading, the headlines of the day on the newspapers in the rack of the liquor store. Its no mystery that I consider this a new beginning, just as it seems logical that, as I stub out the last smoke of a last pack, I consider it the ending of a long affair. The desire to have it behind me, part of the past, is clear and strong and seems more probable with demonstrative action and thought. This is it! Thanks for the memories. But there is no end. The desire to smoke begins again even before the final exhale is fully blown. Each cigarette seems so discrete and separate, with its obviously naked beginning, unconsciously repetitive middle, and regretful and optimistic ending. Yet cigarette smoking, for me, an active smoker, is not a frame, but rather a flow, an entire series, of frames, a movie of fire and inhale/exhale, and packs and smoke and ash and butts, a massive stadium full of the smoking life. It will never end. Even if I never light another and suck the smoke down into my body, cigarettes are here to stay. Theyre all around me. I must disclaim that I find writers who cover their own addictions as facile as those who essay their families of origin, or their own bleeding writers block. But Im not writing this for the reader this is my therapy, my hypnosis, my self-help. Weve come a long way baby. I dont recall who the kid was, with whom I smoked my first cigarette. We moved around a lot when I was younger. About every 2 years Dad would get transferred to yet another town, and into yet another territory. But I remember that we had ridden our bikes to some patch of weeds, some suburban semblance of nature which usually meant a vacant lot, or the no-mans land of a drainage ditch or power line right-of-way. I recall a chain link fence, our backs against it as he produced the pack hed stolen from his mother. But its just a story. Probably not even true. I certainly dont recall loving it, or feeling some palpable effect. Most likely it tasted horrible and gave me a coughing, fuzzy, ten-year old buzz. Christ, I might not have even been ten. Its all the same age to me now. Yeah, Dad had smoked when we were young but he quit when I was probably ten. I remember him cautioning us not to smoke, at some point in my youth, my brother and I being aspiring athletes. Itll cut your wind. Such a classic expression, "wind", straight out of the depression or earlier, this crude, American middle phrase to describe the lung capacity for running down a flyball, or stealing second base. Today they probably call it lung capacity.

Non Smoker

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 But eventually I didnt care about wind, or that both of my grandfathers had been cut down young as a result of yes, depression era, filterless, smoking habits. My mothers dad was known as Camel; He was barely 60 when he died of leukemia. And my namesake, Bill Brown, was gone early to heart disease, just after I was born. No, eventually, all that mattered was rebellion and cool. How many times have you heard that? Its unfortunate that billions of dollars worth of advertising cleverness coalesce with a basic human, adolescent need for self-definition: individuation, they call it these days. Corporations and their shareholders earn handsomely from the economy of teenage rebellion. But I didnt think I was a rebel, I just wanted to belong. To the blue jean, t-shirt, Marlboro Red generation. But again, my memory is suspect. I dont remember being on a continuous, always with a pack, chain of smoking life. I most likely didnt smoke during the week for most of my high school years grabbing a pack on Friday night as we headed out to the powerlines to get drunk. And, in my early years of college, I didnt smoke at all for a few years. But then, I picked it up from time to time. Perhaps for a year, or just six months. Over the years, it seemed that my smoking habit depended upon context, almost (but not quite) a purely social habit. There was definitely some self-medication going on, with nicotine and many other things, but smoking seemed to come and go, as if I really could take it or leave it. But never, forever and finally. There was always another continuation disguised in my psyche as another beginning. I wont go deeply into the years of my heaviest drinking and drug use, not here, and hopefully, not anywhere. Suffice it to say that, things go better with smoke. Near the end, what should have been the end, but definitely at the nadir, my primary basis for living was booze and drugs and cigarettes. Christ, I even penned a prescient song once entitled, Booze and Drugs and Cigarettes (Are All Thats Left To Me). But I eventually sobered up, or marriage sobered me up, and our clean, healthy living didnt include smoking. She might have known that I had once smoked, but I cant recall us ever discussing the subject. Until it got rough. So, although Ive been smoking for my entire life, sometimes not-smoking for considerable periods (months, even years), this chapter does indeed have a beginning, though in the big picture it was just a continuation, just another form of self-medication, the smoking chapter of which this particular typing session is part and parcel began when my second marriage became, shall we say, difficult. I knew I was fucked when a spiritual teacher described it as untenable. I was back in Venice Beach, staying on Ds couch, in early 2006. C. and I had moved to Borneo and I was back in California to take care of some business and refresh my visa. Borneo is a long story, best told elsewhere, and does not include headhunters,
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unless you count her. We lived in a city of 300, 000 people there. Near the end of my time there, a Starbucks opened in this city. Anyway, I was in Venice on Ds couch, as I had been a few times before, and he was a smoker American Spirits, yellow box. I dont recall my first one, really, perhaps it was so completely primal, the need to breath fire and fog my mind (and cut my wind). I do recall that he gave me, or made available to me some Galouises rolling tobacco. I was familiar with the little blue packs of French fags, but had never seen the schwag and it appealed to my sense of myself as a rugged world traveler, just back from the wilds of Borneo and marriage to an Alpha, Asian female, recovering on the couch in Venice and about to head up to a Zen monastery for a week and then down to Joshua Tree to camp in the desert. But that moment now is many years ago. And it has been over an hour since I began this story. And this is, I believe, a perfect point at which to pause. A point designed by the cosmos and the muse to require the turning of key and the lighting of another cigarette.

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