NEEDLING

We sell cigars and cigarettes at the liquor store. My knowledge on smokes and tobacco in general is not much better than my knowledge of survival techniques inside the artic circle. A self-respecting smoke shop would probably not hire me ever, not even to mop the floors. At the liquor store, I’m in charge of ordering all cigars and cigarettes, foreign and domestic. I make sure the humidor is full with a varied array of smokes. I do my best. I’ve learnt quite a lot by default on the mater since I started working at my job eight months ago.

To add insult to injury, I’m the worse kind of smoker. I don’t really smoke, I bum. I’m the kind who never buys for himself, though I live in denial by purchasing packs of cigarettes every once in while for the people from whom I bum. The denial part has nothing to do with my smoking habits, in the sense that I do not crave cigarettes – or at least rarely do I – outside the socializing element, I am not in denial about being a semi-smoker, I’m totally at ease with the fact that I’m a social smoker, and I feel no need to move up or down from this station, what I’m in denial about is about being a bum.

It’s funny really, whenever I purchase a pack of cigs for myself, I don’t smoke them, I let them go stale don’t find the urge nor the envy to smoke. To be perfectly honest, I don’t like smoking, and I don’t enjoy smelling like smoke the next day, but if it’s somebody else’s cigarette and we’re out drinking some place, then it’s a whole different story. At this point I start needing a smoke.

Cigars? When I was a kid, not long after we immigrated to America, my dad quit smoking and threw away a whole box of cigars, his last. I fished them out of the trash can and hid them. I did not have a humidor. Most ten year olds hiding cigars from their parents don’t. We lived in San Francisco then, but shortly after, we moved to West Texas for reasons too long to talk about at this point. My two older sisters stayed behind with an Italian-American family so they could finish their year at the French Lyce, while me and my little sister hopped into the Pontiac station wagon with my parents to cross half of America in the hopes of ending up somewhere close to its asshole. Or armpit. Still not sure. I remember driving into Mansfeld. It was nighttime. It smelt like something I’d never smelt before: Raw Petroleum. Mansfeld was right outside the county seat of one of the highest oil-producing county in Texas during the late seventies. The smell was horrible. Somewhere between free-flowing burning melted rubber and gasoline. Big ugly in-humane machines all over the place going up and down sucking petroleum out of the ground. Later, after having lived there a while, and having discovered the mosquito, that’s what I compared these great big pumps to. Great big metal mosquitoes sucking the blood right out of the earth.

I kept those cigars hidden from my folks. I was very proud that they never found them, but I was afraid to smoke them, afraid of being caught, of taking my father’s wrath, of loosing my cigars, those crusty dried out tobacco rolls which broke away like dust if you weren’t real careful whenever I braved taking them out of their hiding place to look at them, to hold them, to smell them. My treasure. My secret possession. The box which held the forbidden fruit. The apple of knowledge to my preteen eyes.

My parents bought a motel in West Texas and I shared a room with my little sister. Then my two other sisters joined us and I changed roommates. My parents wanted to keep only two rooms occupied. But after a year or so of this arrangement which was definitely not working, I got my own room. Three joining motel rooms. My eldest sister in the first, my second oldest sister and my little sister in the second, and myself alone in the third room. I kept the joining door to our rooms closed at all time. They kept theirs between the first and second room open.

This was my first taste of freedom. All these months, over a year, since we’d been in America, and I finally had my own room. Never had I slept in my own room ever. In Paris we all four slept in the same room. The same thing in St. Briac, and I can’t remember Chateaugiron, how the rooms were laid out. All this waiting, this hiding, this clandestine adventure, could I finally open my treasure openly – though the shades of my room were closed and it was more often than not late at night – could I open the box of cigars and light one up.

I would place a wet towel underneath the door which joined my room to my sisters’ rooms, and I would light up these old dried out disgusting cigars with so much pleasure that nothing could match it today I don’t think. Not even a great bottle of wine. Those stale sticks were for me the total representation of freedom. I smoked them while hanging out on my bed and I felt like I was man for the first time, whatever that means.

A few months ago, one of our cigars was too messed up to sell to a customer. The ex-manager told me I could take it home. I smoked it. I was sick for the three following days. My house smelt like an ashtray for at least a week. I had to wash my clothes several times.