Here go the next five shards of memory, expunged from me like so much hot air:
6) O’Neill Plaza, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA
Concurrent with my fool’s errand/follow-your-heart switch to a Film Studies major was a brief foray into the world of THAY-ah-ta. I showed a surprising relentlessness in procuring the requisite departmental permission to eventually take a Playwriting course in the fall of my sophomore year. It was after three or four or more increasingly polite, additionally irritating emails for the professor to respond that he was then on sabbatical and not on campus much. But I got the damn signature and got the chair in that class. One of the first assignments given right after the end of the add/drop period was a “Write-a-Site” project. We’d select a place on campus, anyplace, really, and write and give a monologue that incorporated the backdrop. I chose the steps in front of O’Neill Library, my school’s main library. There was always a smoker or two out there and, after my summer of maturation, I was among brethren. Smoking a clove because the metaphor fit better, I sat there on a gorgeous fall afternoon, t-shirt and cargo pants, and rather quietly, nervously but earnestly gave my performance in which I compared the clove I enjoyed then with the girl I was newly dating. Everything about those three minutes, the clove, the smoke, the girl, the material, is all gone with the wind now, except for my memorable delineation of the new girlfriend, just like the Djarums, as “Export Quality – good enough to send to another country.”
7) Big City, Allston, MA
The name of the place suits it – it’s the entire second story of a huge building, one half full of twenty or so pool tables, the other half full of couches and a few more pool tables. There’s also a wraparound bar in the middle with dozens of taps. I only went there a few times senior year but it was at an intersection near three or four other places we frequented. But I especially enjoyed Big City, because I especially enjoyed pool back then. I hadn’t yet fallen in love with darts to pool was the drunken athletic pastime of choice. Add to the pool the opportunity to smoke, and you’ve got something fun and familiar. Add to those a green-tinted Carlsberg for St. Patrick’s Day, and you’re three-for-three. Add to all that a new girl under your arm, and you’re cooking with gas. I asked the girl to recognize the entirety of that moment, with me, but she was rightly caught up in the detail that I called her “a girl” instead of using her first name. Telling? Maybe. But it wasn’t her fault. Incidentally, this is also the bar at which I watched the Marlins defeat the Yankees in the fall of that same year. I’d wager that cigarettes were involved then, too, but that bit fell through the sieve.
8) Half Hollow Hills High School East, Dix Hills, NY
I realize this particular memory deserves more than a couple of hundred words, so I’ll forgo for the time almost the whole deal, except to say that it was from the night of the blackout in August of 2003 and that I wouldn’t really have needed cigarettes to remind me of it in the future, but also that they helped.
9) Meadow Lane, New Rochelle, NY
For a single year right after college, 2003-04, I lived on the second floor of a house in New Rochelle, about halfway between Rye, where my roommate worked, and the Bronx, where I was going to Fordham for grad school. I was studying for my Masters degree in English, hell bent on riding the vector of artsiness straight through to guaranteed employment. Precocious, poorly wrought sentences like that one are right out of the time period, 21 years old, naive as hell. Hanging around the rest of the English grad students – mostly 26 and older, cast out in one way or another – was an easy excuse to smoke as much as I wanted, or could. But more on that in #10. In New Rochelle, my roommate always told me, “Don’t get addicted” to smoking, but it was too late: I’d found my ultimate brand (Camel Lights), good smoking company at school, and the albums of Bill Hicks (whose attitude and persona did nothing to dissuade me from smoking, obliterating my mind along the way). I’d smoke out the bedroom window some, already yearning for a New York City that still doesn’t exist, if it ever did. One cigarette, one pack, was especially memorable, from a beautiful, horrible last week of the semester. I had three papers to write, about 60 pages in all. I’d knock out a few pages, then play Pinball on my laptop, then have a cigarette, in some order. Curiosity got me and I then but only once indulged myself and got “Kent” brand cigarettes, Kent being my middle name. I’d never had them and they were of a different quality. The smoke was very thick, it was like smoking out of a bong. Vivid stuff. (Honorable mentions go to the cigarettes I smoked outside the library at the College of New Rochelle, a block away, especially the one right before I moved out of the house entirely.)
10) Fordham University, Bronx, NY
Again, nothing quite goes with half-assed intellectualism like cigarettes, so my first year at Fordham was full of them. And there were opportunities everywhere, which facilitated the addiction: I drove to school and could smoke there, as I oscillated between The Bends and OK Computer. I lit a cigarette from the pack in that green jacket and smoked that as I walked across campus and might have had another if I ran into a classmate outside Dealy or the library. And there were those afternoons and nights at the Jolly Tinker bar, a short walk away, and Howl at the Moon, in the other direction, and outside Pugsley’s. And on the walk from White Castle back to campus. The habit of smoking was as pervasive as the smoke itself, attaching itself to my body and clothes like a filthy barnacle. The habit, though, went with the academia and as one neared its end, so did the other. My last semester of coursework was the fall of 2004. I stopped smoking two days before my sister’s wedding that November, the idea being that I would not want to step out during the reception, have one and then reek, marring the occasion I wanted to help be as good as it could be (not to mention killing my already middling chances of finding a single girl to hang out with, unless she also smoked, which all in all was yet another in a series of poor choices on my part.) My last cigarette, ironically enough, is one I can’t exactly remember, undermining the entire point of this list. I can say it was either on the way to the apartment of that girl studying history after a particularly awesome drink-up at the Tinker, or the morning after, leaving the apartment. I can’t say which is more likely, that’s sadly lost to history. I can admit that the only beings I slept with were her cats, who had run of the apartment including the spare room with the blanket on the floor where I curled up for the night. I can also admit that I did not have sex with her cats.
Well begun is half-done. Ten down, the ten most memorable smokes/situations from the Very Beginning until the First Quitting, starting November 18, 2004.
But wait: There’s more.