When You Are Engulfed in Flames (20 page)

“Let’s save Africa and the Middle East for when I decide to quit living,” I said.

In the end, we settled on Tokyo, a place we had gone the previous summer. The city has any number of things to recommend it, but what first hooked me was the dentistry. People looked as if they’d been chewing on rusty bolts. If a tooth was whole, it most likely protruded, or was wired to a crazy-looking bridge. In America I smile with my mouth shut. Even in France and England I’m self-conscious, but in Tokyo, for the first time in years, I felt normal. I loved the department stores too and the way the employees would greet their customers.
“Irrasshimase!”
They sounded like cats, and when a group would call out in unison, the din was fantastic. When I looked back on our short, three-day visit, I thought mainly of the curiosities: a young woman dressed for no reason like Bo Peep, a man riding a bike while holding a tray. It had a bowl of noodles on it, and though the broth went right up to the rim, he hadn’t spilled so much as a drop.

I’d thought of Japan as a smoker’s paradise, but, like everywhere else, it had gotten more restrictive. In most areas of Tokyo, it is illegal to walk the streets with a lit cigarette in your hand. This doesn’t mean that you can’t smoke, just that you can’t move and smoke at the same time. Outdoor ashtrays have been set up, and while they’re not as numerous as one might wish, still they exist. Most are marked with metal signs, the Japanese and English messages accompanied by simple illustrations: “Please mind your manners.” “Don’t throw butts into the street.” “Use portable ashtrays in consideration of others around you.”

At a smoking station in the neighborhood of Shibuya, the messages were more thought-provoking, as were the pictures that accompanied them: “I carry a 700-degree fire in my hand with people walking all around me!” “Before I pass gas, I look behind me, but I don’t bother when I’m smoking.” “A lit cigarette is held at the height of a child’s face.”

All of the messages were related to civics. Smoking leads to litter. Smoking can possibly burn or partially blind those around you. There was none of the finger wagging you see in America, none of the “shouldn’t you know better?” and the “how could you?” admonitions that ultimately ignite more cigarettes than they extinguish.

When it came to restrictions, Japan was just the opposite of everywhere else. Instead of sending its smokers outdoors, it herded them inside where there was money to be made. In coffee shops and restaurants, in cabs and offices and hotel rooms, life was like a black-and-white movie. Compared to the United States, it was shocking, but compared to France it seemed fairly normal, the most telling difference being the warning labels on the sides of the packs. In France they read, “SMOKING WILL KILL YOU,” the letters so big they can be read from space. In Japan both the writing and the message were more discreet: “Be careful of how much you smoke so as not to damage your health.”

There was no mention of cancer or emphysema and certainly no pictures of diseased organs. They do that in Canada, and while I don’t know that it encourages people to quit, I do know that it makes for one ugly package.

What with all the indoor smoking, Japan was something of a throwback. It might seem the place to start rather than stop, but when I finally thought of quitting, I thought of Tokyo. Its foreignness would take me out of myself, I hoped, and give me something to concentrate on besides my own suffering.

Nine

We decided on Tokyo in early November, and before I could back out, Hugh found us an apartment in the neighborhood of Minato-ku. The building was a high-rise, and most of the tenants were short term. The real estate agent sent pictures, and I viewed them with mixed feelings. Tokyo I was excited about, but the idea of not smoking — of actually going through with this — made me a little sick. The longest I’d ever gone without a cigarette was twelve hours, but that was on an airplane so it probably didn’t count.

On an average day I’d smoke around a pack and a half, more if I was drunk or on drugs, and more still if I was up all night, working against a deadline. The next morning I’d have what amounted to a nicotine hangover, my head all stuffy, my tongue like some filthy sandal crammed into my mouth — not that it prevented me from starting all over again the moment I got out of bed. I used to wait until I had a cup of coffee in my hand, but by the early 1990s, that had gone by the wayside. The only rule now was that I had to be awake.

In preparing myself to quit, I started looking at this or that individual cigarette, wondering why I’d lit it in the first place. Some you just flat-out need — the ones you reach for after leaving the dentist’s office or the movie theater — but others were smoked as a kind of hedge. “Only if I light this will my bus appear,” I’d tell myself. “Only if I light this will the ATM give me small bills.” There were cigarettes lit because the phone was ringing, because the doorbell was ringing, even a passing ambulance was an excuse. There would certainly be bells and sirens in Tokyo, but I doubted that anyone would come to our door. What with the time difference, I wasn’t expecting many calls either. When not panicking, I could sometimes congratulate myself on what was actually a pretty decent plan.

Ten

In the summer of 2006, shortly before our three-day trip to Tokyo, I bought a Japanese-language CD. It was just the basics: “Good morning,” “May I have a fork?” that type of thing. The person giving the English translation spoke at a normal pace, but the one speaking Japanese, a woman, was remarkably slow and hesitant.
“Koooonniiiichiii waaa,”
she’d say.
“Ooooohaaaayooooo goooooo . . . zaimasssssuuu.”
I memorized everything she said and arrived in Japan feeling pretty good about myself. A bellman escorted Hugh and me to our hotel room and, without too much trouble, I was able to tell him that I liked it.
“Korrree gaaa sukiii dessssu.”
The following morning I offered a few pleasantries to the concierge, who politely told me that I was talking like a lady, an old, rich one, apparently. “You might want to speed it up a little,” he suggested.

A lot of people laughed at my Japanese on that trip, but I never felt that I was being made fun of. Rather, it was like I’d performed a trick, something perverse and unexpected, like pulling a sausage out of my ear. When I first came to France, I was afraid to open my mouth, but in Tokyo, trying was fun. The five dozen phrases I’d memorized before coming served me in good stead, and I left the country wanting to learn more.

This led me to a second, much more serious instructional program — forty-five CDs as opposed to just one. The speakers were young, a guy and a girl, and they didn’t slow down for anybody. The idea here was to listen and repeat — no writing whatsoever — but that, to me, sounded too good to be true. It wasn’t advised, but at the end of each lesson I’d copy all the new words and phrases onto index cards. These allowed me to review, and, even better, to be quizzed. Hugh has no patience for that sort of thing, so I had my sisters Amy and Lisa do it. The two of them came to Paris for Christmas, and at the end of every day I’d hand one or the other of them my stack of cards.

“All right,” Lisa might say. “How do you ask if I’m a second-grade reading teacher?”

“I haven’t learned that yet. If it’s not written down, I don’t know how to say it.”

“Oh, really?” She’d then pull a card from the stack and frown at it. “All right, say this: ‘As for this afternoon, what are you going to do?’”

“Gogo wa, nani o shimasu ka?”

“‘What
did
you do this afternoon?’ Can you say that in Japanese?”

“Well, no —”

“Can you say that you and your older sister saw a bad movie with a dragon in it? Can you at least say ‘dragon’?”

“No.”

“I see,” she said, and as she reached for another card, I felt a mounting hopelessness.

It was even worse when Amy quizzed me. “How do you ask someone for a cigarette?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you say, ‘I tried to quit, but it’s not working’?”

“I have no idea.”

“Say ‘I’ll give you a blow job if you’ll give me a cigarette.’”

“Just stick to the index cards.”

“Say ‘Goodness, how fat I’ve become! Can you believe how much weight I’ve gained since I quit smoking’?”

“Actually,” I said, “I think I’ll just do this on my own.”

Eleven

In the months preceding our trip to Tokyo, I spoke to quite a few people who had either quit smoking or tried to. A number of them had stopped for years. Then their stepgrandmother died or their dog grew a crooked tooth, and they picked up where they’d left off.

“Do you think you were maybe
looking
for a reason to start again?” I asked.

All of them said no.

The message was that you were never really safe. An entire decade without a cigarette, and then . . . wham! My sister Lisa started again after six years, and told me, as had others, that quitting was much more difficult the second time around.

When asked how they made it through the first few weeks, a lot of people mentioned the patch. Others spoke of gum and lozenges, of acupuncture, hypnosis, and some new drug everyone had heard about but no one could remember the name of. Then there were the books. The problem with most so-called quit lit is that there are only so many times you can repeat the words “smoking” and “cigarettes.” The trick is to alternate them, not to reach for your thesaurus. It bothers me to read that so-and-so “inhaled a cancer stick,” that he “sucked up a coffin nail.” I don’t know anyone who refers to tobacco as “the evil weed.” People in the UK genuinely say “fags,” but in America it’s just embarrassing and self-consciously naughty, like calling a cat a pussy.

The book I was given used all of these terms and more. I read the first hundred pages and then offered Hugh the following summary: “The guy says that choking down lung busters is a filthy, disgusting habit.”

“No it’s not,” he said.

After years of throwing open the windows and telling me I smelled like a casino, it seemed that Hugh didn’t want me to quit. “You just need to cut back a little,” he told me.

Not being a smoker himself, he didn’t understand how agonizing that would be. It had been the same with alcohol; easier to stop altogether than to test myself every day. As far as getting wasted was concerned, I was definitely minor league. All I know is that I drank to get drunk, and I succeeded every night for over twenty years. For the most part, I was very predictable and bourgeois about it. I always waited until 8:00 p.m. to start drinking, and I almost always did it at home, most often at the typewriter. What began at age twenty-two as one beer per night eventually became five, followed by two tall Scotches, all on an empty stomach and within a period of ninety minutes. Dinner would sober me up a little and, after eating, I’d start smoking pot.

Worse than anything was the dullness of it, night after night the exact same story. Hugh didn’t smoke pot, and though he might have a cocktail, and maybe some wine with dinner, he’s never seemed dependent on it. At 11:00 you could talk to him on the phone, and he’d sound no different from the way he would at noon. Call me at 11:00, and after a minute or so I’d forget who I was talking to. Then I’d remember, and celebrate by taking another bong hit. Even worse was when
I
placed the call. “Yes,” I’d say. “May I please speak to . . . oh, you know. He has brownish hair? He drives a van with his name written on it?”

“Is this David?”

“Yes.”

“And you want to speak to your brother, Paul?”

“That’s it. Could you put him on, please?”

Most often I’d stay up until 3:00, rocking back and forth in my chair and thinking of the things I could do if I weren’t so fucked up. Hugh would go to bed at around midnight, and after he’d fallen asleep I would have dinner all over again. Physically I couldn’t have been hungry. It was just the pot talking. “Fry me an egg,” it would demand. “Make me a sandwich.” “Cut a piece of cheese and smear it with whatever’s on that shelf there.” We couldn’t keep a condiment for longer than a week, no matter how horrid or ridiculous it was.

“Where’s that Nigerian tica-tica sauce Oomafata brought us from Lagos last Tuesday?” Hugh would ask, and I’d say, “Tica-tica sauce? Never saw it.”

In New York I got my marijuana through a service. You called a number, recited your code name, and twenty minutes later an apple-cheeked NYU student would show up at your door. In his knapsack would be eight varieties of pot, each with its own clever name and distinctive flavor. Getting high on Thompson Street was the easiest thing in the world, but in Paris, I had no idea where to find such a college student. I knew a part of town where people lurked in the shadows. The way they whispered and beckoned was familiar, but as a foreigner I didn’t dare risk getting arrested. Then too, they were most likely selling moss, or the innards of horsehair sofas. The things I’ve bought from strangers in the dark would curl your hair.

You don’t withdraw from marijuana the way you do from speed or cocaine. The body doesn’t miss it, but the rest of you sure does. “I wonder what this would look like stoned.” I said this to myself twenty times a day, referring to everything from Notre Dame to the high-beamed ceiling in our new apartment. Pot made the normal look ten times better, so I could only imagine what it did to the extra-ordinary.

If I survived in Paris without getting high, it was only because I still had drinking to look forward to. The bottles in France are smaller than they are in the States, but the alcohol content is much higher. I’m no good at math but figured that five American beers equaled nine French ones. This meant I had to be vigilant about the recycling. Skip a day, and it would look like I’d had Belgium over.

In time I knew that my quota would increase, and then increase again. I wanted to quit before that happened, but practical concerns kept getting in the way. When drinking and working went hand in hand, it was easy to sit at your desk every night. Without it, though, how could a person write? What would be the incentive? Then there was the mess of quitting: the treatment center with the chatterbox roommate, the AA meetings where you’d have to hold hands.