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Walking Cross-Town. With Cigarette.

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Dawn. Manhattan. 6:10 a.m.

I exit an early morning train.

The Up escalator from the tunnel in Grand Central Station to Madison Ave., is down, again.

Commuters, a wolf pack building at the bottom of stairs, jostle for position before funneling into a single line formation up 70+ stairs.

My Apple Watch silently counts steps, counts heart beats.

I’m looking down, stepping deliberately, not wanting to take a header on the concrete steps. The alternatives (to a header) were awful: clipping the heal of the man in front, or flopping backward into the Pack, both scenarios setting off Dominos. Rubberneckers would pull out iPhones to catch the scene, photos later sold to the NY Post and run in the afternoon edition. “Dummy Triggers Dominos, Sends 20 to hospital. Grand Central exit to Madison closed for the morning as Paramedics clean up the carnage.”

A soft morning light beams ahead, a few more steps. I exit without incident, not without anxiety. What’s the bloody rush?

Winded.

I flick my watch to check heart beat. 114. No chance. No way. No how.

The “Walk” sign has turned, but I need a moment to clear vertigo, the head is spinning, the lungs gulp oxygen.

He was two ahead. Middle-Aged. 6′ 2″. Suit. Balding. He lights his cigarette, closes his eyes, pulls in deeply, pauses, and exhales. He sets off briskly down 47th. In his wake, he deposits a stain of nicotine, his secondhand smoke fills my lungs. My eyes water.

I’m in pursuit. How can this guy, a Middle-Aged smoker, blow right by me? And he’s not slowing down.

His left hand is tucked in his pant pocket. His right hand swings, the cigarette is caressed between his index and middle finger. He periodically flicks the ash, the ember glows red.  Is that flick, a smoker’s tick, a natural reflex, or just an instinctual sixth sense when a smoker just knows, it’s time.

It’s quite impressive, awesome really, how this Mind can retrieve a moment, and connect that moment to this moment, in vivid technicolor, a humiliating moment from a time gone by. This one, from College.

“Have you ever smoked a Cuban?” “Oh, of course.” “Here, go ahead.”  I light the cigar and try to inhale – the movement akin to blowing a trumpet with all mouth, no lips – I’m red faced. They snicker. “You need to clip the end, stupid.” Not knowing what a cigar cutter was, I gnawed off of the end of the fine cuban with my two front teeth, and lit it up again. I wrap my lips around the jagged edges of the cigar, and inhale a mouth full of tobacco leaf, all in a cloud of smoke. The Leaf slides down my throat, tripping the gag reflex. I bend over, spitting it all out in the smoke storm.

30 years later, they are still laughing. And the short, undistinguished smoking career is over.

But I digress.

I trail him, and can’t quite understand why I don’t pass this guy, and his secondhand smoke.

I hover five steps behind, admiring the elegance of a Smoker, the tilt of his head skyward, his exhale followed by the stream of smoke evaporating into the skyline. Smoker just then finding his moment of peace, the joy of being swept away in his nicotine high.

Meditation, of some sort, I’m sure. Peace that you’ve never found.

And then, there’s me.

Parsing Murakami…

“I never had the urge…” but “I could hear the scratch of the match”

…and recall the bitter taste of the leaf.

 


Notes:

  • Post inspiration: “I never had the urge. But at that instant, for the first time in forever, I thought about how great it would be to have a cigarette between my lips and light it. I could hear the scratch of the match.” ~ Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore: A Novel. (Knopf, October 9, 2018)
  • Photo: Cigarette by Maritè Toledo
  • Related Posts: Commuting Series

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