The Nicotine Chronicles Read online

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Introduction

  PART I: THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING

  Park & Play

  Hannah Tinti

  My Simple Plan

  Ariel Gore

  The Renovation of the Just

  Christopher Sorrentino

  Deathbed Vigil

  Jonathan Ames

  PART II: HUNGRY FOR FLAVOR?

  Dying for a Cigarette

  Lee Child

  The Smoke-Free Room

  Achy Obejas

  Spécial Treatment

  Cara Black

  Yasiri

  Michael Imperioli

  PART III: ARRIVALS DEPARTURES

  Smoking Jesus

  Eric Bogosian

  The Summer You Lit Up

  Lauren Sanders

  Climax, Oregon

  Robert Arellano

  Freshly Cut

  Peter Kimani

  PART IV: INHALE TO YOUR HEART’S CONTENT

  Smoke Break

  David L. Ulin

  God’s Work

  Bernice L. McFadden

  Menthol

  Jerry Stahl

  Vaping: A User’s Manual

  Joyce Carol Oates

  About the Contributors

  Also in the Akashic Drug Chronicles Series

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  Introduction

  A Faulty Delivery System

  Food scientists have discovered a complex compound naturally present in, among other things, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. The compound offers us a number of benefits: it improves our fine motor skills; it increases our attention spans; it improves our cognitive abilities; it improves our long- and short-term memories; it lessens depression; it delays and possibly even prevents Alzheimer’s; and it decreases the risk of Parkinson’s. In and of itself, it has no real downside. It’s called nicotine. We should all get some.

  The problem is the delivery system. To get a detectable benefit, you would have to eat enormous quantities of vegetables—and who wants to do that? The most efficient way is to burn dried tobacco leaves and inhale the smoke. Ten seconds later, the compound is in your brain, doing good in all its various ways. Unfortunately, the rest of the smoke doesn’t do good. And therein lies a great mystery of human behavior. To get the good, we risk the bad. Or we prohibit ourselves the good, for fear of the bad. Which approach makes more sense?

  The stories in this book explore the issues around that dilemma. They come at it from every angle, and illuminate it in every way. I’m deeply grateful to all of the contributors, and I’ll be deeply grateful to every reader. And to Akashic Books, our publisher. I have contributed to several of Akashic’s anthologies (although never before as editor), including The Cocaine Chronicles and The Marijuana Chronicles. For those, I expected and received no negative reaction at all. I suspect The Nicotine Chronicles might be different. Another mystery of human behavior.

  Lee Child

  New York City

  Part I

  Thank You For Not Smoking

  Park & Play

  by Hannah Tinti

  The rooms at the Park & Play Motel are labeled nonsmoking but the guests smoke in them anyway. My boss Shirley fought this for a while but eventually gave up and put an old cigarette machine outside the office. The customer puts in the money, yanks a glass knob below the brand they want, and a cellophane-wrapped box drops down into the collection tray, along with a tiny book of matches. I bought a pack once but it wasn’t for me. There’s enough smoke in my life already. Sometimes people use the ashtrays we put in the rooms and sometimes they use the plastic cups from the bathroom or crush the ends of their filters into the side tables or flick their embers onto the carpet. It’s my job to patch the holes.

  Knock, knock, open the door, wipe the sink, scrub the tub, replace the linens, spray some air freshener, run the vacuum, lock the door, move on to the next. When I find burns in the sheets or towels I cut them into rags; burns in the wall-to-wall carpet I fix with glue and some fibers snipped from the corners; furniture burns I paint over with a nail polish color called Espresso that I keep in the pocket of my apron.

  The woman in room 207 has a black eye and bruises on her neck and checks out of the motel early. She says she is an airline stewardess and that she’s driving to Phoenix to see her sister, but she doesn’t have any luggage in her trunk. Later, when I clean her room, I find where she’s pressed her menthol cigarette into the wood over and over, until the burns become an etching of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a series of connected circles angling up the side of the window frame. There are eight floors, including the bell chamber. I recognize the image from my father’s postcard collection. I wonder if she’s seen the building in person or just in pictures like me. Most people don’t tip at the Park & Play but the woman in 207 leaves five dollars on the windowsill beneath the drawing, as if she is apologizing for the mess.

  After the nail polish dries I can still feel the bumps of the Tower of Pisa with my fingers. It makes me think of something my father said once, about how we leave a bit of ourselves every place we go. Skin cells. Traces. Human dust. That’s why famous buildings are famous, he said. So many people pass through over the years, shedding parts of themselves, that the buildings start to breathe on their own. It makes the memories there more powerful. Because the buildings are remembering too.

  The Park & Play Motel is two miles from the Chickasaw Indian reservation and three miles from their casino. There are twenty-eight rooms. Shirley is half-Chickasaw and has owned the Park & Play for ten years, supporting her husband, who lost both of his legs in Iraq. I started cleaning on the weekends during high school and then went full-time after my father got sick. The motel is nearly always full of gamblers looking for a cheaper place to stay than the casino, which is a high-end establishment with a theater and a hotel. My high school had their senior prom in the hotel ballroom. I didn’t go because my father was in the hospital by then and we couldn’t afford the tickets. Pastor Billy offered to pay but my father wouldn’t let him. Pastor Billy brought me a corsage anyway, white roses in a clear plastic box, and I wore it on my wrist as I held my father’s hand and all of the machines stopped blinking.

  * * *

  In the mornings I make coffee and put out the Park & Play continental breakfast, which is a bowl of apples and a box of blueberry muffins. Then I get my rolling cart and start pushing. I fill up on sheets and towels and follow the concrete path from room to room. I knock on doors. Housekeeping. I knock again. Housekeeping. Always twice before I put the key in the lock. You never know what you might walk in on.

  I see sleepers sleeping in all kinds of ways. I see families sharing fast-food dinners. I see sex workers entertaining customers. I see kids left alone all night. I see mattresses overturned. I see old men weeping. I see bathtubs full of clothes. I see strangers hiding things under covers. I see tinfoil and pipes and spoons and bags of powder. I see people lying in pools of their own making. I see folks so sick they should go to the hospital. I see carpets turned into dark, fetid, squishy lakes. I see every kind of naked person doing every kind of naked thing. I see truckers burned red down one whole side of their arms and face from driving with the window open across the country and I want to ask them, Where are you going? And sometimes I do. Sometimes, when I’m tired, I lean back on the pillows of someone else’s bed and close my eyes and think of Pastor Billy’s hand on my forehead, the sweat of his palm making its way into my hair. His skin smells like Marlboro Lights, the same brand my father smoked. Pastor Billy is busy trying to expand his church but he stays after service on Sundays to talk. I tell him I feel empty i
nside and he tells me, The Lord will send you comfort.

  I am still waiting for it to come.

  When I talk about Pastor Billy my boss Shirley rolls her eyes. She doesn’t go to church anymore. She says she doesn’t trust white men. I tell her that I pray for her and she tells me that’s my choice and like her I’ll regret many of them in this life. After my father died she let me move into one of the rooms at the motel. She says it’s temporary and she’ll take the rent out of my salary but I’ve been here for a year and my paycheck hasn’t changed.

  * * *

  Before he got cancer my father was a janitor at a strip mall. I’d go with him after hours and sit at one of the tables by the Chinese food place and eat scallion pancakes and do my homework while he worked. The owners of the Golden Dragon had a little shrine just inside the entryway, where they’d burn incense and put out oranges. It was the closest thing our town had to something foreign. But next door was a travel agency and when my father took out their trash he’d comb through for maps and pictures of faraway places. Then he’d bring the outdated brochures and travel guides home and cut them out and paste them into a scrapbook and together we’d make up stories of our vacations there. Remember when we went to Rome? he’d say. All that pasta we ate? And how hot it was at the Colosseum? He tracked down menus of restaurants by the Spanish Steps. He chose hotels. He even went down to the bank one day and got some Italian currency. Five dollars was the same as fifteen thousand lire. It made us feel rich, the colorful paper like magic in our hands. When he was in the hospital my father gave me the lire folded up in a handkerchief. He said, See if you can exchange that for some ghost money.

  * * *

  So far I haven’t made it out of Oklahoma. The closest is my birthday when Shirley takes me to the casino to see a Russian circus act. There are trapeze artists and dancing bears and jugglers that stand on each other’s shoulders, performing in front of a giant image of Red Square, the brightly painted domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral rising to points like soft-serve ice cream. As I watch the silver rings being tossed in the air, I remember my father saying that Ivan the Terrible blinded St. Basil’s architects when the cathedral was completed, so they wouldn’t be able to make anything more beautiful. And it is beautiful. My eyes keep drifting from the performers to the backdrop, imagining that cluster of domes burned into the walls of the Park & Play. Shirley laughs at the Russian clowns and hugs me when the show is over. Then we have a steak dinner and drink virgin margaritas.

  I needed that, she says as we drive off the reservation. You did too, Rita. She pinches my cheek. Happy birthday.

  I tell her it was a real treat and try to keep my voice bright so she won’t know that I’m lying. I watch the lights of the Park & Play in the distance getting closer and think about the human dust inside of St. Basil’s. Over 450 years’ worth of people on their knees praying. Good people and bad people and everyone in between. I bet some bits of Ivan the Terrible too.

  * * *

  The people in room 103 are having an affair. I know this because the woman is a blackjack dealer at the casino, and the man is Shirley’s husband. The blackjack dealer rents the room on Saturday mornings, when Shirley has her AA meeting. She pulls her yellow Camaro into the parking lot after her all-night shift. She’s one of the only folks left on the rez who speaks Chickasaw and she’s always trying to get Shirley to speak it too. She says Chokma? and Shirley says Chin-Chokma? and then they both say Sho-taha and laugh. Shirley hands her a key and the dealer goes to her room and Shirley gets in her car and drives to the community center. Then Shirley’s husband rolls out of the manager’s office in his wheelchair and slips me fifty dollars to turn a blind eye. It’s nearly as much as I make in a day, so I keep my mouth shut. I take the money. And afterward, I clean the room.

  Shirley’s husband smokes Camel Wides. He always carries a pack folded in the sleeve of his T-shirt, as if he’s still in the army. Wides are nearly twice as thick as a normal cigarette. They are supposed to deliver more flavor and they are supposed to burn more efficiently too, especially when they are crushed into the wood of a headboard, leaving a deep white curve in the varnish. I try to fix the first mark with my Espresso nail polish, but the following week it’s burned through again, along with two more arches, and when the third appears I recognize the outline of the Sydney Opera House. My father kept a promotional brochure of those white arches taped to the wall above our kitchen table. He said it took thirteen years for the opera house to be built and that it cost $102 million. He said the first person to perform there was Paul Robeson, who climbed the scaffolding when it was under construction and sang to the workers. My father got a record of Robeson from the library and we played it on the stereo. The deep, vibrating tones of his voice rolled over us like thunder. There are five different performance spaces at the Sydney Opera House. I count the cigarette burns on the headboard to make sure they got it right, the arches lifting like sails in different directions. I strip the soiled sheets and make the bed and imagine my father inside one of those white shells, surrounded by water.

  I leave the nail polish in my apron.

  The bills from Shirley’s husband go into my travel fund, which I keep in an old peanut butter jar. When new bills go in I spread the money across the mattress and kneel down next to the bed for a fresh count. When I was a little girl my father and I would kneel like this and make a list of things to be thankful for—ice cream and waterslides and coloring books. Bedtime prayers that filled my mind with sparks before I fell asleep. After he was diagnosed I tried praying in a new way—asking for things and making promises. Then he died and the prayers stopped working. So now I look for the buildings. I check each room as I clean, touching the wood for cigarette burns, thinking, This is a sign, and this and this, and slip another dollar into the travel fund. The more I put inside the jar the closer I feel to my father. But when I start to imagine getting on a bus or a train without him my mind freezes and I screw the lid shut tight.

  An hour after the dealer leaves, I hear the tires of Shirley’s car pulling into her parking spot. I watch her step into the sun, flushed and tender from AA. She puts her keys into her purse and walks over to her husband, who is outside the office in his wheelchair, reading the paper. As I lock the door to room 103 Shirley waves. The sheets from the bed are in my cleaning cart as I roll over and ask how her meeting went. She tells me it’s the closest thing she’s found to being all right. And then she bends down and kisses her husband on the cheek.

  * * *

  Pastor Billy has a wife. Her name is Constance. Before she was married she worked as a call girl and smoked Virginia Slims. She’s one of the first naked people I walked in on when I started working at the motel and she’s the only one who didn’t cover up. Her breasts are smaller than mine and the back of her spine is twisted. She saw me staring and took a drag from her cigarette and said, Scoliosis. She said her customers didn’t mind. She pressed ten dollars into my hand and told me to come back in an hour. When I checked the room later she was gone and an outline of the Eiffel Tower was burned into the lampshade. Turns out Virginia Slims are perfect for latticework, from the wide parabola at the tower base to the observation deck on top. I switched the burned lampshade with the one from my own room and before I went to sleep I would look at the Eiffel Tower and think about Constance’s naked back, and the way her shoulder blade presses sideways beneath the skin, like half an angel’s wing folded over. She wears a body brace now and long-sleeved dresses that button up past her neck. She still smokes, though. I’ve seen her in the parking lot at church, lighting up. She stands between the cars and stares at her reflection in the windows. She’s not going anywhere now.

  * * *

  It was cheaper to burn the body. That’s what Pastor Billy said and so I agreed. My father got delivered in a cardboard box. The cremains weren’t like the stale ashes left behind at the Park & Play; they were gritty like sand, with small pieces of bone mixed in. The smell was different too. It reminded me
of the incense from the Golden Dragon, the sticks burning ribbons of smoke in front of the shrine, the heavy scent like eucalyptus on a campfire. I can smell it even when the box of my father’s ashes is closed. It sits on a shelf in my closet, waiting. Just like the jarful of money.

  * * *

  The blackjack dealer is sitting up in bed with a sheet wrapped around her, leaning against the headboard and smoking. She says, Chokkowa, so I come in. She is smoking a pink cigarette. I’ve never seen one before so I ask the brand and she holds out a box of Nat Sherman Fantasias, multicolored like a box of crayons. They aren’t sold in our vending machine. She offers me one and I choose blue but I don’t light it. Instead I point to the Sydney Opera House burned into the wood beside her. I say, Did you draw that building? She turns and stares at the mark like she’s noticing it for the first time and shakes her head, and when I ask her if it was Shirley’s husband she shakes her head again. Then she leans forward, takes a closer look, and says, It looks more like a flower than a building.

  Right away I can see the petals, and the opera house transforms like a cloud changing shape. The floor starts sliding away beneath my feet. I crush the blue cigarette in my hand and lean against my rolling cart as I head toward the door. She says I’m a good girl, Chipotatiik chokma chiya. And I tell her I don’t think either one of us is good.

  Back in my room I turn on the lamp and the Eiffel Tower isn’t the Eiffel Tower anymore either. The letter A flickers at me through the lampshade, a monogram made of Virginia Slim–sized holes. I saw what I wanted to see and now I can’t see what I want. My father isn’t sending me messages or telling me to travel the world. He’s dead. And I’m at the Park & Play.

  I open the peanut butter jar and pour the money I’ve collected onto the blanket. I do the math and realize that over the past six months I’ve lied to Shirley nineteen times. In my pocket is payment for the twentieth. I jam the new bills into the jar with all the others. I hear the office door slam. From the window I watch her husband roll down the cement walkway toward the blackjack dealer’s room. Then I pick up the phone and call Shirley. I tell her the toilet in 103 just exploded, and she needs to get back to the motel as fast as she can.