This Is About Smoking

I’m coming apart like the first cigarette I ever rolled. Loose, slobbering, and burning too fast.

II

It started in December when I walked into Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge in Madison, Tennessee with a slim collection of essays, and told Sara the bartender that I need a few and some alone time before a party at one of my boss’s homes. I’m not the first. Another regular rolled through and returned within an hour of showing his face at his company Christmas party before retreating to Dee’s where we choose the music and there’s usually something good and bad on the TV. Tonight it’s the feature-length car chase starring Burt Reynolds in White Lightning. Sara drops a PBR in front of me and I open to “No Smoking” from Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall and take a sip and watch Burt get sideways in a ’70s-brown Ford Custom 500 before I proceed to read about the poet-laureate-turned-essayist and his near forty-year relationship with Chesterfields, Kents, and Pall Malls.

III

If I hadn’t stopped for American Spirits I wouldn’t have hit a deer on Highway One. I wouldn’t even remember that night now—a decade back, midnight, winding toward Pigeon Point after a Giants game with my father after, or maybe during, his divorce, and after his broken neck and bone cancer diagnosis. Today, it’s vignetted in all that California gray. I’m fuming to the post-game wrap on KNBR Sports Radio and racing thoughts about family crashing to pieces as I speed along One, ignoring the ocean and any real feeling from the cigarettes or the lighthouse signaling I’m halfway back to Santa Cruz. The deer is dead center. She’s fifty yards down road in my lane. I kick the brake and clutch to the floor and sincerely believe there isn’t a chance.

IV

A journalist-editor friend emailed me a few weeks back to tell me, among other things, that my writing is emotionally evasive. They weren’t sure what was happening—or if anything was—in a stretch of interiority in an unpublished essay I sent them around Christmas. I could treat that deficiency by planting some of the themes from the end of the piece into the beginning so it wouldn’t confuse a reader when I swerved into a section about my father’s health and my enduring problems with God and time. But I was wrecked by the end myself. Not because it’s devastating prose or anything. I just hadn’t seen it coming, I wanted to reply. To reverse-engineer it feels like choreographing a fall. Can’t people tell when you eat shit on purpose?

V

If I didn’t smoke when I drank in my twenties I wouldn’t have talked to Jared Fickle about God that night during the start of what’s turned into a decade of deconstructing my Christian faith. I’d never connected with Jared before. Not at Craig’s Brother shows in the Vets Hall basement, the bachelor party poker game inside the Ocean Beach apartment that night. Nothing. Not until swaying in the quiet foggy night while we smoked his girlfriend’s Parliaments and he had to ask how was it that I, Luke Wiget, a pastor’s kid and youth pastor, was smoking and drinking so hard nowadays?

VI

Before it was called Dee’s, the beat square building off Gallatin was Janine’s Country and Western Bar, and Janine, unlike Dee, allowed smoking inside the low-ceilinged spot behind a sex shop called Jenna’s Toy Box. After I finish the Donald Hall essay on smoking, Sara tells me how when Amy Dee bought the place, they transformed it in a matter of days and a large part of that was airing it out as they dragged in a different jukebox and a new used pool table and hung their neon signs against the wall across from a solid L-shaped bar. One night, Sara brought her terrier in with her to visit her boyfriend who was installing the bar I’m now leaning into and it couldn’t have been a half hour, Sara says, but she and the little dog reeked of smoke so bad they had to bathe together when they got home, she says and smiles, and I can see it. I tell her, I just read an essay about smoking cigarettes and I haven’t really in years—essentially since before my daughter was born.

VII

The journalist friend told me to tell readers who I am and what the piece is about in the first hundred-some-odd words. I think now, in the context of whatever this is becoming, how that approach is a lot like pretending to or expecting to love your first cigarette. There’s a difference between getting hooked and the hook.

VIII

Donald Hall started late—after his first divorce around age forty and during a three-way with a writing student from one of his classes and a daily bottle of bourbon—and he smoked until the end, until the next collection called A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, where he admits to switching to an electric cigarette though he still kept a carton of the real stuff in his freezer just in case.

IX

The deer was dead center, like I said, fifty yards off when I hit the brakes rather than veering around the stunned animal. As I skid in the dark I hear that scene from the Robert Rodriguez movie Planet Terror, with Wray’s lines about roadkill rattling around my head.

Wray: If you’re driving out here at 70 miles an hour and a deer darts out in front of you. If you blink or brake or swerve. You should just kill yourself.

Cherry: So what do you do?

Wray: Pick them off. Just like this. [Punches one fist with the other]

Send them flying away from you.

Cherry: Unacceptable.

Wray: Not really. It’s just a clear case of you or him.

Cherry: Or her.

Then a corkscrew crash and they’re upside down and Rose McGowan slays us, saying, “I thought you said if you saw a deer you shouldn’t fucking swerve.”

X

I don’t know for sure, but I worry my first was a Djarum black clove in Travis’ garage with AFI on the tape deck of the 1970 Chevelle he never finished restoring, a muscle car we all loved and I worry Travis might still dream about two decades later. I talk to Travis every other year and you can hear something throttling his voice and even read it between the lines of his texts, but he never really says anything real about when we were young.

XI

In personal nonfiction, which is the type of thing I sent the journalist, I’m stuck on Who in the Who-What-Where-When-How-and-Why continuum. If I ever land Who, I’ll hunt down Why next. The rest can wait because it’s all pretty interchangeable and stabilizes the thing in a way that feels untrue. I think you and I can trade our What-Where-Whens, and even our Hows, and our stories will still shake out differently depending on who we are and why we believe we are.

XII

Joan Didion cut back to a quarter pack after learning that Aldo Moro, the Italian Prime Minister who was kidnapped and shot to death by terrorists, only smoked five a day. “I thought well, five cigarettes aren’t what killed Aldo Moro,” Didion said sometime after Moro’s bloody death.

XIII

My good friend, this roving Iranian-American writer from Los Angeles called Sam Farahmand, sent me this devastating number a few days shy of March, with this high and tight pitch running in around the head that reads: “I wonder if some of the nonfiction I have been writing has become too true to be good.” If I were hitting Sam with notes, I’d say, strike “has become” and “have been” and write: “I wonder if my nonfiction is too true to be good.” In his voice, I’d add, we can’t “have been” if we’ve never been. I’d add, too: At the moment, shaky on my own writing and the lit scene in general, and having loved so many of the wrong writers, I feel like a has-been who never was. But we only talked this way over cigarettes in New York during grad school and over craft beers here in Nashville now, not email, so this is as good as it never gets—or maybe in rewrites, this is better than ever. There’s so much about death that’s about choice, right, Sam? And, do I think about it so much—God and death—because I’m at odds with life or God or are they one in the same?

XIV

The other night at this expensive bar below my downtown office a talented and pretty artist-designer tells a group of us cigarettes are still her muse even though she quit. Even as a runner, Lauren was a committed smoker. Her body could handle it, she indicates, like some of us are made for more poison than the rest. She kicked a pack-plus a day habit at the same time her mother started after her sixtieth birthday after she tried to quit drinking. We pass it back and forth—ad approvals, work tiffs, brands we liked. One of the guys shows us the cool guy (read: masculine) way to hold a cigarette and then, because of this thing I’m trying to write, I tell a few stories I bummed from a friend who was in the military and bragged about running the Hawaiian hills with a pack of Camel Lights stuffed in his tube sock and sometimes taking things so seriously he smoked in the shower. In a way I praise that kind of commitment, I think but don’t say because I’m teetering and tired, slouching away from Bethlehem before a birthday party for a one-year-old I don’t want to go to but trust I’ll enjoy enough. When the checks come, the artist’s boyfriend, the bartender at the bright downtown bar, has discounted my tab into a miracle—like if the son of God had turned beer into water.

XV

Unprompted on our walk back from the public library, my two-and-half-year-old daughter tells me that when she’s an adult she can smoke in the smoking section. It might have been that I mentioned something the other night at the brewery, that we were close to the smoking section, but it was only in passing as we watched the sun set and she crunched on a gigantic apple and I sipped a beer. The journalist might not like it, but this is looking to be an essay about trying to write an essay about smoking.

There’s so much about death that’s about choice, right, Sam?

XVI

This week, as I tinker on this, Lauren, the artist and runner, showed me and a few others a picture of her car, which a large bird had crashed into on the highway and made a kaleidoscope of the windshield of her gold Mercedes. I wanted to tell her about the deer I hit in California in my gold truck but I didn’t. Maybe this is an essay about coincidence, which is cool, faint magic.

XVII

Another night at Dee’s, an older regular asks Sara to dial the lights down as I pull up to the bar. I was telling myself I’m here to read but end up working on this because you can still type in the dark, which is to say watch the sound guy tune the drum kit and drink diet Red Bull in all the humming electric sadness of another Tuesday happy hour when I should be at home with my family or at least here trying to write something meaningful about a full pack of American Spirits yellows I found walking our empty stroller to pick up my daughter from school and then hid in the shed under a collection of Flannery O’Connor letters about writing and God. I’ve got this long list of notes in my phone about smoking Lucky cigarettes in Europe with my wife—the ten packs—flipping that one lucky one to save for last—studying the drop off the bridge over the Cumberland river with a bummed Winston last winter—the ceremony of needing something to happen—that flick of the wrist, that nod at life to say, I see you, do you see me? I want this to be about living in the moment and magic or the magic of living in the moment when one thing leads to another even if just another smoke or knowing I’m lucky enough to hear the voice of God when my daughter calls me dude instead of dad or the jukebox plays my song. This is about disbelief in God and life—how it’s all a lot like holding smoke down while you run. How exhausting and exhaling are kissing cousins. This is about my wife’s uncle sneaking Camels as he recovers from a heart attack. That’s not simple fatalism, is it? It’s the opposite. And there’s more to unpack, but some things have to come to an end, and I only have three more of these things.

XVIII

The house band at Dee’s heats up during what’s turned into another wet spring in Tennessee and the pedal steel slides in, and I find the email from the journalist and re-read it again. It’s been quiet between us since a birthday text from them in January. I write: My emotions are evasive and when they’re not I avoid them for a number of reasons. I’d like to think I know better than to launch into my own version of Tropic of Cancer even if there’s poetry in some of those long rant lists about the carnal parts of being. I know it’s played. But maybe I’m making up for lost time, having lost my body years to Christianity’s Purity Movement. I still don’t know any of the answers to your questions about my work and hope it’s okay because I don’t know another way of writing or any other reasons for trying. I come to one of my favorite lines of feedback. “I found myself wanting establishing elements.” To that end, all I can say about my life is, I feel that. I’m coming apart like the first cigarette I ever rolled. Loose, slobbering, and burning too fast.

XIX

My father’s cancer has nothing to do with smoking. In fact, it has nothing to do with anything at all.

XX

Sam has a pack that December night after Dee’s and the Donald Hall essay about smoking and the Christmas party that went better than I thought it might. He and I, we just missed the band we Lyfted down to see at the Basement so we loiter and smoke on the porch just out of the windy rain and it’s just like it’s always been and it’s what started all of this. It’s why I’m here in the guesthouse of another boss’s place, considering how far my truck flung that deer that night on Highway One. It’s a part of why I’m stunned on nicotine gum—post-work, shaky on black tea and stress—watching cherry blossoms wave in this off-kilter yard in South Nashville. Nothing is not for nothing. Finally alone, the loss of friendships and time have me citing something weathered but sturdy like that about Nothing, and here in the moment, at least, I mean it. And this scene seems to agree. The neon leaves of a Maidenhair tree and the quiet it takes to replay my daughter calling me daddy—calling, Daddy, I need you, after thinking I was going to die on my way over here after my daughter and wife kissed me and I kissed them and the dog and steered onto the highway in an elated panic to be alone in the quiet. All of it had scared the death out of me for a moment—enough to wonder if I need another God and question the difference between craving something and loving it. I know I’m not the first to tease death with safe danger and dumb hope and shaky faith, and I won’t be the last.