It’s always nice to open the New Yorker and find that it contains a piece by David Sedaris. These days, he is one of the few writers anywhere who can cause me to laugh out loud in public places. Every so often, however, he comes up with a piece that, while funny, is also in some ways a horror story, so that the urge to laugh is suppressed, or laced with discomfort.
His recent piece about smoking was in the latter category. It also, to add to the horror aspect, reminded me of my own days as a cigarette smoker, short-lived and pathetic as they were. I would have been no more than 13 or 14 years old. How I was able to obtain cigarettes I have no idea. Most likely, it was through somebody’s older brother. I don’t remember ever smoking at home, or even having cigarettes anywhere near any place my parents might appear. The instigator of my smoking career was my friend Weary. We were at the age where we needed something to make us, at least in our own eyes, "cool". Because neither of us was particularly cool by nature. Sure, I hung around at the back of the portable classrooms with Kim Richter and Peter Condotta, talking about Bob Dylan and Monty Python, but they were the ones smoking, not me. (That is, if they were even smoking at all. I may have simply associated smoking so strongly with coolness that the two merged into one.)
Weary and I had conspired to ride our bikes to the football at Fish Creek, after which we would ride back to Weary’s parents’ house, on the Waratah road, and I would stay over for a night or two. We thus had bikes, and an adequate supply of fags. And mints. You had to have mints, because mints possessed the magical ability to mask any and all evidence of recent smoking. (Even then I had my doubts about whether this could possibly be true; but you had to believe.)
The football ground at Fish Creek must be one of the most picturesque venues in the country for watching a football game. It is nestled in a little valley at the back end of the town. Cars park around the ground and honk their horns when somebody kicks a goal. If someone kicked a goal with too much vigour at the northern end the ball would end up in the creek, thus delaying the re-start by a few minutes. You could do laps of the road around the ground with your mates, stopping off occasionally to buy a pie or a bag of mixed lollies from the kiosk.
But you couldn't, if you were Weary and me, smoke there, on account of you didn't know who was watching. Fish Creek is a small town. There might be spies about. We thus spent most of the match suppressing the idea that we would soon be puffing away in freedom. The bike ride was a slow affair, mainly because we spent most of it walking our bikes along the edge of the road, cigarette in one hand, bike in the other. (We soon discovered that it is impossible for a novice smoker to ride a bike and smoke at the same time.) We also had to stop every time we heard a car approaching, blow out any inhaled smoke, hide the cigarette, and wait for the car to pass. You never knew who might be driving past.
Weary had an older brother, Tony. (Tony shares the name of one of Miles Davis’s greatest drummers, but I suspect, even though he was, like all of the best older brothers,"into music", he may never have been aware of that fact.) Sleepovers at Weary’s house involved time in front of their colour television, time spent helping their dad working their sheep farm, time spent obsessing over Tony’s record collection and endeavouring to talk to Tony about same (difficult to do, because Tony for the most part saw us as annoying little kids), time spent playing world cup soccer in the back yard, and time spent at the disused dairy that sat over the hill from their house, out of view, and which had as its main attraction a kind of sleepout that came with its own supply of dirty magazines. These I assumed belonged to Tony, but, on reflection, they might just as well have belonged to their father.
And so we spent an afternoon smoking, learning the remarkable things that sheltered teenage boys could learn from dirty magazines, smoking, listening to the radio ("Sultans of Swing" I heard there and then for the first time, convinced both that it was the greatest song I had ever heard and that it was by Bob Dylan), and smoking.
That is, until we had built up, as teenage boys do, a superabundance of energy, which needed to be expended. So we started chasing each other around the milking shed, up and down the ramps and along the platforms where the cows, in days gone by, would have stood to be milked. It was all fun and games, as they say, until somebody lost an eye. Well, I didn’t exactly lose an eye, but I did hit the very top of my head against a steel beam, thanks to a very slight error of judgment, thus knocking me horizontal in the manner of Charlie Brown after Lucy pulls the football away from him just as he goes through the act of kicking. My head landed on the concrete with what might have been described as a sickening thud. I saw stars. (Did Charlie Brown see stars?) I may or may not have briefly passed out. When I looked up Weary and Tony were looking down at me with horrified expressions on their faces. We all learnt that head injuries tend to bleed heavily, making me look like a victim in a horror movie.
Two thoughts were foremost:
1. Get help.
2. Hide the cigarettes.
I wasn’t nearly as worried about almost killing myself as I was worried that Weary’s mum was about to learn that I had a secret life as a cigarette smoker. The mints were back at the house. There was no way of getting them to me before she arrived. I don’t have a great memory of what happened. I was probably suffering from concussion. At some point I was taken to Foster Hospital, where stitches were administered to the very top of my head (there may well be a scar there; we won’t know until my hair falls out, which it hasn’t yet). The sleepover was cut short. What I do remember is the sense of panic when Weary’s mum leaned over me and said, "You haven’t been smoking, have you?", looking at me in a way that suggested that she knew very well that I had been (well, you know, she really must have known) and that, perhaps, this might be a lesson for me on its own, without any need to tell my parents. "No", I ventured, unconvincingly. I vowed, in those moments, lying in a pool of my own blood, that I would never smoke again. And I haven’t.
