Venus Drive

Less Tar

Out on the street I’m thinking, “Who needs life, people?” I stop off at Gupta’s to buy cigarettes. I’ve quit quitting them again.

“Two?” says Gupta, goes to the carton on the shelf, my carton, the soft-packs, lays them on the countertop. Forty sticks of friendship there.

“How’s your brother?” I say.

“Doing the same as you,” he says, pinches thumb and finger to his lips. Gupta was a journalist somewhere where it’s okay to torture one for prying. Lucky he had a brother set up in America. Now he sells Salems and bongs and screw-top one-hitters to the kids cutting trig at the prep school down the block.

“Your brother and I,” I say, “we must have a death wish.”

“Don’t be a fool,” says Gupta, “no one really wishes it.”

First smoke in a week. My lungs are good and rested, strong and wet. One drag, another, and the great dense mist of things — the company, Katrine — drifts up, away. When the butt burns down to my fingers I’ll flick it into the street, light another for the short walk home. I’ll put on some records, reread my junk mail, scour the clause minutia in the sweepstakes offers, call Katrine’s machine. I’ll smoke and I’ll smoke and I’ll smoke.

Smoking at work, that’s another story. We are outlaws of the state. We have a hideout, a floor forsaken partway through remodeling. Ghost cubes, glass-walled tombs. We all found our way here somehow. Martha runs the newsstand in the lobby. Mikhail is the Russian super’s lackey, possibly his son. Rich teaches real estate a few floors up. I do ad sales for an on-line magazine. I let them think I’m some kind of player, a silicon prince on the make, but Rich knows enough to see the fear in my eyes. I’ve been tracking numbers of doom these days.

“Don’t worry,” he tells me, “maybe you’ll fail upwards.”

Comments like this are why I’m always encouraging Rich to quit smoking. Who needs a smart-ass during your moments of stress-reduction?

Here’s Mikhail in a busted chair, some ergonomic locus of swivel and command. He flicks ash into a plastic cup. It’s a corner office, nothing here but dead carpet. I think of Gupta, wonder if it was a room like this where they did what they did to him, whip and wire and bamboo shoot, a rubber bucket for the human run-off of him.

Mikhail is runty in the big chair.

“Yo, I’m the CEO,” he says. “Your ass is fired!”

“You’re going to have to buy my shares, Mike.” I tap a cigarette out of the pack and tug it free with my teeth. Mikhail does silver magic with his Zippo, cups me flame. A team. A family.

“How’s the boss treating you?” I say. “Working hard or hardly working?”

Up here, I’m only good for pleasantries, the national patter.

“Work is for bitches,” says Mikhail, puts two fingers out, ash tweezed between them. His thumb is hammer-cocked. “A cap to the motherfucking dome. Know what I mean? Fuck toil, bro.”

“I’m with you,” I say, my words weak, unmeant, me here in French blue, an office-brightener tie. There’s grit in the combs of his thermal shirt, dull smears in his pants. His father, the super, sends him crawling through the ducts and tunnels of this heap. Asbestos hunts. The job, he told me, is to tack up false partitions, fool the Haz-Mat guys.

“I should learn computers,” says Mikhail, “they use them in the big buildings, niggers like me be using them for air-conditioning and shit.”

“Niggers?”

“That’s right.”

Mikhail gets up on the window sill, chops the air, slips a wire back into the smoke alarm.

“What about me?” I say.

“Guess you done slid the python eyes, G.”

We bump fists like ballplayers do.

I’m down.

Every few months I get another newsletter from the National Smokers’ Brigade. How do they know? An eye in the sky? An intercepted e-mail? Each time I have to remember the last time I was drunk, the last time I ever even drank. There was a guy at the bar, goatee and a patriotic T-shirt, “Don’t Tread on Me,” that colonial snake. He had a clipboard with a pen on a string. He rambled on about Jefferson, Rousseau, jabbed that pen around. I guess I must have signed the form. This was years ago. I don’t remember much. The night ended the next morning in the emergency room, a doctor with another clipboard, a metal one, hinged.

“Why do you do it, son?” the doctor asked.

“Go shoot a speedball,” I told him, “and you’d never ask anybody that question again.”

Some people give up the cigarettes with everything else. Me, I was pretty sure that without nicotine I’d be swinging from the shower nozzle in no time. You have to keep something between yourself and the truth of yourself or you’re dead, was how I figured it. Still do.

The upshot is that I get this newsletter from time to time, bumper stickers, membership pins. The Brigade, I gather, is funded by the tobacco lobby, but they play themselves up grassroots, an astroturf campaign. It’s always the same lead story in the newsletter, a trucker bar somewhere that won’t comply with the local smoking laws. The goose-steppers, the anti-smoke Gestapo, they’ve shut the joint down. We threw all of our boys and Patton at them, but the Reich has finally won. Or maybe it’s the Reds. Either way the barmaid can’t make rent and the Constitution is a paper scrap borne off on criminal winds. No veterinary school for the barmaid’s son. He’s headed for the mills.

Those anti-smoking bastards, I’ll think, spark up another square. Then I remember there is no barmaid, no son, and I start to hack up sour chunks of myself, toss my cigarette in the can. Still, it would be nice to stay pissed, to get my hands on a Ruger, or a Desert Eagle, join the brigade. We would puff away in a toolshed and plot the nicotine secession. Let us not forget, one of us would rasp, there are millions like us, ready to die for freedom.

Dying for something, anything, is tricky, though. You’d better be sure you believe. There was a time, I must admit, I might have been willing to die for Katrine. Or at least, as she would say, discuss the possibility. We had a good amount of discussion before we called it quits. Breaking up, she said, should take at least as long as the together part. Otherwise, what was the point? Even when we knew it was over, each of us was waiting for the other to make the move, to assume the mantle of villainy, to blink. She blinked, I told myself when she finally left, like maybe here I was — Jack the Man. I was watching a lot of the History Channel then. I pictured footage of me in deep conference with my close advisors. What if there’s a CIA inside the CIA? What if she screwed that guy at work?

The greeting on Katrine’s answering machine, it’s so honeyed, so wise. Anyone would marry that voice, those cadences, those warm conjunctive halts. Sometimes I call just to hear her sing her poem, the one fashioned of a certain disappearance—“I’m not here right now”—and her deep sweet oath to “get back real soon.” Like the solution to a riddle that will spring the maiden from the dragon’s lair, all you have to do is speak the digits, say your telephone number into the machine, but even that’s too much for me. I let the tape roll out. I am the insufficient son, the older, gruffer one that fails at the cave mouth, back broken on the stones, guts strung up in trees. My type has a seemly sibling who will prevail.

I hang up, draw another smoke from the foil.

All it takes is a morning with the spreadsheets to glimpse the four horsemen of fiscal apocalypse thundering toward our dream of an IPO. There’s Plummeting Ad Sales, in his scorched robes, on his maggot-shot horse, waving a scythe. I bolt from my desk, pass two design guys in the next room arguing about the new homepage art. Don’t bother, I want to tell them, but in this business you can trash a perfectly good career leaking catastrophe an hour before it’s official.

Martha is in the corner office, cooing smoke. It’s hard to tell Martha’s age, but the drop of her face, the veins in her hands, remind me of my mother right before she got sick. When your mother is dead, maybe every woman over a certain age reminds you of her. You’ll find it in an eyebrow, the varicose nova on a stubbly calf, beckoning you to bury your head on her breast and weep.

My advice: Don’t do it.

“How are you, Martha?”

“Fucking pricks don’t pay for their newspapers,” she says. “Grab one, say ‘Get you next time, honey!’ Get fucking this next time! I got rent, you know.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I am, you moron.”

“I know that, Martha,” I say.

“Fuck you, too,” she says, flips her More to the carpet, grinds it out with her espadrille. “You pricks are all the same.”

True, and probably I owe Martha a few bucks myself, but the way things are going I’ll need them. Now Rich walks in, a silver pin stuck in his lapel, his hair slicked back in the style of men who seem to be saying, Hey, go blow, my hair is slicked back, and on weekends I know joy.

“Big doings on your floor, buddy. I’m smelling napalm.”

“What?”

“My only advice for you is to remember to tape the bottom of the box. Got a light?”

It hits me in the stairwell, that pin. The Smoker’s Brigade. Comrade. We could start a cell here in the building, rig Martha with dynamite girdles, send Mikhail on recon jobs through ventilation ducts into the Lysol’d HQ’s of pinklungers. Rich and I would vie for the fealty of our troops until one of us, probably me, came up python eyes in his biopsy. Unwilling to wheeze my way to the Great Smoking Section Beyond, I’d pass my Desert Eagle over to Rich and shut my eyes.

“Savor the fine tobacco flavor for me, Sport,” he’d say, thumb the hammer back.

“Fuck toil, bro!” Mikhail would shout.

“Do the prick,” Martha would hiss.

Downstairs, everyone is weeping and hugging, or readying a lawsuit. There’s a rented cop in my cube.

“Personal files only,” he says.

The boss sticks his head in, his face flushed, teary, trauma-elated.

“You were great,” he says. “You did great work. We all did. They didn’t give me a chance. I could have turned this thing around.”

“I missed your speech,” I say.

“Anything I can do for you, let me know,” he says. I almost ask him to hold down the tape at the bottom of the box.

When my mother was dying I kept going down to the street to smoke. You would think I would be some kind of pariah lighting up outside a cancer ward, but no one paid any mind. Bald men, bald women, bald teens sat out in the summer twilight in their gowns. Cut open, sewn shut, garlanded with IV lines, poisoned with their futile glowing cures, they puffed away like wild heroes.

I would stand nearby and remember a day when I was not much more than six, seven, see myself sitting on a beach with my mother and father, the two of them slung low in canvas chairs beneath a striped umbrella, smoking, drinking sodas, laughing over secret words, sticking their filter-tips into the sand.

That day I stood up before them with all the theater of the firstborn child, my feet clamped to the cement lip of the artificial lake our town had built for us, our neighbors, whomever else was good and kind and willing to pay. It was early summer and my birthday was, as my mother had noted, on the horizon. I pictured it a pack mule in the distance, heaped with trinkets, absolution, cheer.

“What do you want for your big day?” my father asked.

He wore the sideburns of his time, the kind no retro-styling can ever seem to honor. We are Saigon, those sideburns said, Altamont, Nixon under the rotary gust. We are heart-smashed and uncertain and looking to score. My father, with those whiskers, was one of reason’s priests, on the lam from chaos, cabal, a lit stick of disaffection in his lips.

My mother, she was spilling out of her swimming suit cups in all her freckled wonder, moving maybe past voluptuous motherhood into some other great, rippling power. The coils of her hair were lit up with warning flares of white. She visored her eyes with her hand, regarded me as she often did, as though secretly awaiting the moment I would cease to astonish her with my devotion.

“Yes, honey, what do you want? Another Tonka toy?”

That birthday animal lumbered up, buckled under lashed-down treasures — injection-molded soldiers, many-speeded bikes. Beyond the beast stood me, a vision of me, the most perfect boy the world has ever known.

“What I want for my birthday,” I said, “all I want, is for both of you to stop smoking.”

It was my moment of genius, if it is true we are each of us blessed with one. They quit, of course, for a while, at least. Wouldn’t you, if you were as strong and beautiful as my mother and my father were one summer when our town built a beach?

I stop off at Gupta’s. He’s flipping through a skin mag, all those smears of color, angles of receipt.

“That’s what my ex-girlfriend looks like,” I say.

“Is this what you did to her,” says Gupta, “or what you saved her from?”

“I said looked like her. How’s it going?”

“Very well,” he says. “I’ve got an assignment. A magazine overseas. Real money.”

“What about this one here?” I say.

“I’m not talented enough to write for this one. I don’t know all the ways to describe the big tit.”

“You can learn that,” I say. “You just have to care.”

Gupta laughs, reaches back to my carton, the soft-packs.

“No,” I say.

“Box?” There’s a shade of panic in his voice, the order of things thrown.

“No,” I say.

“What do you want?”

“I forgot,” I say.

“No one forgets,” says Gupta. “You didn’t forget. Our brains carry blueprints for a thousand years. There is no such thing as forgetting. You just can’t find it right now.”

“So, in a thousand years someone will remember what I wanted just now?” I picture a man like me, a man of my build, my coloring, my gait, stitched, gathered, helix’d with my codes. He sits in his commuter pod and whistles through space, maybe en route to Jupiter to sell some ads. A vision of Katrine, stepping out of the bath tub, explodes with the terror of endless sameness in his mind.

“Exactly,” says Gupta, pounds his fist on a great glossy ass.

I’m almost out the door when I remember.

“I know what I want,” I say. “I want something new. Something light. Less tar.”

Gupta slides the gleaming thing across the counter. There’s a new world there inside the package, new words ringed around the paper, new speckles on the tip. Life, people, happiness, a jaunty, easeful kind of breathing. I’ve seen print ads for this brand, admired them, or more than admired them. I have communed with them. They have spoken to me from billboards, from the backs of scented magazines — no cowboys, no mountaineers, just a handsome couple poised at the end of a plush settee. Maybe they’re Katrine and me, hosting a party, the heave of voices, the crush and chatter, friends in the living room, on the threshold, in the vestibule, the two of us puffing there so elegant, our free hands laced together on the cushions, our free hands squeezing, pulsing words of oath: I Love You, I Love You, Let’s Make it Work, I Love You So Much, Let’s Not Ever Ever Quit.