The Nicotine Chronicles Read online

  * * *

  After church on Sunday, I tell Pastor Billy about the money. How I earned it and how I was supposed to use it and how it doesn’t feel right anymore. He listens and then he suggests that we pray. I close my eyes. I lean toward him and smell tobacco. I imagine tiny bits of leaf under his nails, grains of scent embedded in the whorls of his fingerprints. His own human dust. My throat goes so tight I can barely swallow.

  He calls on the spirit of my father to listen. He asks him to guide me toward the right path. He squeezes my fingers and I feel the spirit lift me up and carry me out of Oklahoma, past the border of America, and across the sea. And all the buildings I’ve conjured from cigarette burns aren’t made of smoke and ash anymore but iron and steel and stone. They are as real as the Park & Play Motel. As real as Pastor Billy’s hands as he touches my head for a blessing.

  And then his fingertips slide onto my back, to the place where his wife’s twisted wing folds into her spine. And he says that I should give the money to the church. He says this act will wash it clean. It will wash you clean too, he says, and something shifts inside of me, and I begin to feel dirty, even though I spent the whole morning scrubbing bathroom tiles with bleach.

  * * *

  I find Shirley outside the office, refilling the cigarette machine. The front door of the case swings open like a refrigerator, and she is stacking different-colored brands on top of each other. There are Lucky Strikes and Virginia Slims. Marlboros mixed with Camels. She doesn’t say anything as I roll up with my cart, but there is a cloud of smoke around her head. I watch her lips suck and pull. The tip of the paper glows.

  I’ve never seen you smoke before, I say.

  It only happens when I’ve been drinking, she says.

  I can smell it now. The air is stale and sweet and sticky around her, like she’s been rolling through old cotton candy.

  I have something for you, I say.

  I don’t want anything from you, she says.

  And there it is again, the dirty feeling.

  I stayed in my room after calling Shirley about room 103. Watched her turn into the driveway, then cross the parking lot with a plunger in her hand. A few minutes later Shirley came out of 103 pushing her husband’s wheelchair, but her husband wasn’t in it. She rolled the empty chair all the way to the street and then sent it barreling down the hill.

  Now she jams all the wrong cigarette boxes into the wrong slots. She won’t look at me. The cellophane is crinkling in her palms.

  I reach inside my cleaning cart and take out the travel jar. I hand it over to her. She has to put down a carton of Merits so she can unscrew the top.

  How much is in here?

  Enough for a vacation, I say. A long one.

  Shirley puts the lid back on. He told me that he paid you off. She sets the jar on the ground. She says, How many times?

  The truth is too high so I say, Nine.

  She bends in half like the number has kicked her in the stomach. She breathes out hard. She says she’ll never forgive him and I’m not sure if she’ll forgive me either.

  The Italian lire are in my pocket, still folded in my father’s handkerchief. I slide the cloth out and open the corners and the colors are bright. The bills so small they feel like play money in my hands. Monopoly or Life. I try to hand them to Shirley but she won’t touch them.

  I say, These came from my father.

  She looks closer. Italians haven’t used lire for over a decade, she says. I don’t think you can even exchange them anymore.

  There are faces on each of the notes. I read the names underneath: Guglielmo Marconi, Vincenzo Bellini, and Maria Montessori. I need this money to matter, so I tell Shirley the different ways my father and I used the lire on our make-believe trip. How we threw coins into the Trevi Fountain, how we bought blue gelato outside the Vatican that melted down our fingers, and how we tipped a gondolier in Venice so he’d stop singing because he had a voice that cracked so badly it hurt our ears.

  Shirley takes a drag from her cigarette and leans against the machine. I’m still not taking it, she says.

  The neon sign for the Park & Play flickers over our heads. We stand there until the tip of her cigarette turns gray and white and dangles loose, the shape just holding. With a flick of her wrist, the ash will fall. But she lets it grow and grow until it’s nearly at the filter.

  Pretend money isn’t always worthless, Shirley says. In China they burn it after someone dies. So their spirit can travel to wherever it is they’re going, and buy anything they might need.

  I think about the shrine at the Golden Dragon. I rub the bills between my fingers.

  Ghost money, I say.

  That’s right, says Shirley.

  I reach for her cigarette and take it into my fingers. The shape of the ash breaks and it drops to the concrete between us. I put the filter in my own mouth. It tastes like Shirley’s lipstick. I inhale and cough and inhale again until the tip is a burning red ember. Then I press it into the face of Maria Montessori. The paper catches quickly. I suck on the cigarette again and then press the tip into the next lira and the next, until they are all in flames. Then I drop the money to the ground and watch the colored paper bend and curl.

  Shirley picks up the travel jar and opens it. She takes out one of the fifties that her husband gave me and adds it to the pile of burning money. It takes longer to catch, but when it does it glows around the edges. She sighs. She says, That feels all right.

  I pull a twenty from the jar. I light it from the rest of the bills and it ignites with a burst, as if it has been soaked in lighter fluid. It doesn’t feel all right but it feels like something. Something I can’t name yet. So I keep burning, we both do, until the travel fund is nothing but layers upon layers of white dust, like flower petals that have been peeled apart and cast into the wind. And when it’s done the jar is empty but I’m not anymore. I’m filled up inside with sparks.

  Your dad can go anywhere he wants to now, Shirley says.

  And I say, So can we.

  Our faces shine in the glass of the cigarette machine. Shirley closes the door and latches it shut. I put out the last ember of our bonfire with my sneaker, smearing the ashes into the hard concrete. And that’s when the ashes blow back at me, as if the Park & Play has taken its first breath. Gray specks spatter my ankles. I can smell eucalyptus in the air. I think of where else I might want to leave traces. And behind me Shirley strikes a match.

  My Simple Plan

  by Ariel Gore

  This was during the strike of ’92.

  The tobacconist had run out of the real thing on day one.

  The pharmacy sold out of patches and gum on day two.

  The town filled Marco’s café, trying to mask their true desires with caffeine and Campari. They ran their fingers through their hair. Their hands trembled like hummingbirds. They were quick to anger.

  It’s incredible, when you think about it, how fast an entire people can be brought to their knees. I mean, I got nothing against Italians, but these particular Italians had gotten on my last gay nerve since I’d washed up in their very picturesque hill town a few months earlier. So, yeah, maybe I liked imagining their torment now.

  None of them knew about my stockpile.

  Non ancora.

  * * *

  I intended to make my capitalist debut on the fourth day of the strike. I figured they’d be desperate by then, but still trying to wait it out without making drastic trips to Switzerland or Greece. My plan: I’d offer single cigarettes for two thousand Italian lire apiece. I’d sell them all fast—make enough to get out of this godforsaken town, catch a bus and then the train all the way up to Berlin, find the squat I’d heard about with central heating. I’d hunker down for the winter.

  I wouldn’t even have to sell to everyone who asked. I could make those provincial gossips beg me for their relief.

  But my capitalist revenge dreams turned to shit on the cold morning of that fourth day.

  The shot
rang out before dawn.

  The sound jolted me out of bed. I sat straight up, and for a split second I thought I was back home in America. It was a gunshot, not a Fiat backfiring.

  From my mattress on the stone floor, I couldn’t make sense of it. I took in the dirty white walls of the wine cellar I’d half disguised as an apartment. In my precoffee haze, I tried to reconcile the impossible: A gunshot. In Middle-of-Nowhere, Tuscany.

  What in the actual fuck?

  I stood up to look out the basement window, but darkness still pressed down on the stone street. I could hear faraway shouting, then the sirens.

  I craved a cigarette right then like I was missing not some foreign chemical but a part of my own soul, and from each cell of my throat and my lungs, I thanked the universe that I had one. Yes, I had a cigarette. Who’s the homosexual slut now? I snapped at no one.

  The buy had seemed extravagant but oddly rational at the tail end of summer—spent my last two hundred US on two backpacks crammed full of stolen cartons of Nazionales and MS cigarettes from a desperate punk in Rome. I already had a ride to this town I’d seen in watercolors, and I had no reason to foresee that I wouldn’t find work here or that I’d get caught up right away with the winemaker’s daughter. I figured I’d just be traveling broke to a pretty town—no big deal, right? You can always make a few bucks doing this or that wherever you end up, right? Well, not so in the watercolor town.

  You ever live in a world of crumbling castles where no more than three people will even say hello to you? And I spoke decent Italian then. Not even hello. They called me l’Americano when they talked about me; they rarely addressed me directly. And you can forget about hitchhiking out of here if you don’t expect to get raped.

  It puts you in a spot.

  The only reason I survived at all was that Antonia, that shrill gossip with bright-yellow hair, let me stay in her wine cellar—I later realized it’s so she can talk shit about me with more authority, but what was I gonna do? A wine cellar is practically an apartment. That and Marco, the old man who owned the café and let me clean it after hours in exchange for coffee and caprese sandwiches.

  Well, survive I did.

  No thanks to most of the locals.

  So when news of the strike trickled in, I couldn’t help the smile that crept across my face. I couldn’t wait to start hissing, Where were you in my hour of need?

  I stripped off the sweats and T-shirt I’d slept in and pushed open the arched wooden door that led deeper into the wine cellar. I grabbed one of my designated smoking blankets from the top of a small barrel and wrapped it around my body. The cold flagstones felt like ice on the soles of my bare feet.

  I’d rigged a fan in the depths of that place, and the fan blew the smoke out a small window that opened only onto a deep ravine at the edge of town. I’d set up a bucket of water next to that window too, and after every smoke I brushed my teeth hard enough to make my gums bleed.

  In the first days I hadn’t wanted anyone to know I had the cigarettes for strategic business reasons, and even now, as I sucked hard on an MS filter, the hot smoke radiating like relief across my chest, I had only begun to understand all the ways the stakes had just changed.

  I crushed the cigarette into the stone wall, flicked the butt out into the ravine below, and lit a stick of Nag Champa incense.

  As the church bells clanged, I crept back into my living space, pulled on my army-surplus pants and black sweatshirt, and laced up my Dr. Martens.

  The café would just be opening. Someone would know what had happened.

  I took a deep breath, and didn’t smell smoke. I climbed the steps from my place to the street level, sidled into the already-full café to listen.

  Marco’s café was that watercolor town’s local news channel: street journalism with espresso. The sense they would try to make of it.

  It seemed the victim had been old man Martelli, gunned down in the dark of dawn just a few steps from his car at the edge of the piazza. It was the first murder anyone could remember in that town since 1974. The first gun murder maybe ever.

  “I heard he’d just come back from Napoli!” Antonia called out, hands on her hips and eyebrows raised.

  Even I knew what that meant.

  In those days, in that place, Napoli meant one thing: the black market. And since the state workers from the Italian tobacco monopoly had decided to strike, black market meant cigarettes.

  Obviously Martelli had gone down to Napoli to buy a few cartons—at the very least.

  Antonia raised both hands dramatically. “I looked in his car,” she said. “No cigarettes.”

  Everybody nodded, like it made perfect sense.

  Martelli had brought cigarettes to town, and somebody had killed him for them. Who would kill a man over cigs? Everyone moaned, because right then, on day four of the strike, probably most of them would have done it in a heartbeat.

  I slunk back into my wine cellar, bolted the door shut behind me, and took off my clothes to go smoke.

  * * *

  I watched from my basement window as the woman known as Giovanna paced up and down the cobblestone street in her black stilettos, a familiar sight for my sore eyes. I marveled at the way the tips of the heels never got stuck in the cracks between the stones. I’d been holed up all morning and into the afternoon.

  Lying on my bed, looking up, all I could see were those shoes, her thin ankles draped in sheer nylons, the hem of a black skirt. I always knew who that was. She kept pacing, like she needed a smoke badly. The rhythm of her tapping steps lulled me into a relaxed state. If anyone in this fucking town could help me, maybe it was Giovanna.

  Now, Giovanna—like all the rest of the locals—had never given me the time of day, but I knew they hardly talked to her either. Town slut, she was the subject of at least half the gossip that poured through the café in any given week. I figured there was at least half a chance that her arrogance toward me was just the old pariah-saved-by-a-bigger-pariah kind of a thing.

  Either way, click click.

  I stood up fast and rushed to the widow. “Giovanna!”

  She looked down at me. “Pervertita,” she spat toward the cobblestones. “Pervert” tumbled and landed on my windowsill.

  Like, did she think I was trying to look up her skirt from here? How embarrassing. “No,” I hissed. “I—” I hesitated. “I have something.”

  Giovanna shook her head and clucked her tongue, but she click-clicked around the edge of the building anyway and next thing I knew I was scrambling up the steps and next thing I knew I was opening the door and next thing I knew Giovanna stood in front of me and next thing I knew I swallowed awkwardly.

  She was beautiful.

  “Come inside.” I gestured fast and Giovanna walked into my actual apartment and I shut the door behind her.

  “What do you want?” Her English was just fine.

  I felt like such a tongue-tied loser. I touched my fingers to my forehead. “Giovanna, I have cigarettes.”

  Her eyes sparkled wild and I saw rainbow crystals. She took my arm like we were friends. The streaming energy of her sudden love for me burst into butterflies. “You have cigarettes?” She winked at me. Did Giovanna wink at me? “You bad girl,” she growled, but then she froze suddenly, and she leaned away from me. “Did you kill Martelli?”

  I stared at her. She had faint acne scars on her face, like a lacy white tattoo.

  She lowered her voice. “A couple people have already mentioned you, actually. You know, Italians don’t do guns.”

  “I’m from the West Coast. We don’t do guns either.” And I met her gaze and I wanted very badly for her to believe me as I pulled her deeper into the wine cellar.

  When we rounded the corner to my stash, illuminated like a golden pyramid in the thin stream of afternoon light, Giovanna grabbed my shoulders and kissed me hard. I felt surprised and electric with painted heart confetti bursting from the stone walls and I said, “Wait! We have to take off our clothes.”
/>   Giovanna shook her head.

  “Oh, no. I meant, you know. To smoke. We can’t. We don’t want our clothes smelling of smoke.” I thought I might die of embarrassment. Like my beating heart might stop.

  “Aha,” she said. I could tell she still thought I was trying to get in her nylons.

  “I mean, you don’t have to,” I said. “It’s just what I’ve been doing. So people won’t be able to smell it on my clothes.”

  Giovanna smiled, and took off her sweater slowly, like a stripper, and then pulled her dress over her head and grinned at me. Her breasts swelled, and I imagined Botticelli himself had never beheld skin so delicate.

  “Holy shit.” I stared down.

  Her belly arched toward me.

  I whispered-stuttered, “I had not heard that you were expecting,” and I held a blanket out to her.

  Giovanna winked at me as she took my blanket, letting the edge of her hand touch mine. “No one knows,” she said. “Or even you would know. Now, can I have a cigarette?”

  What did she mean, even I would know?

  I handed her a pink lighter. “Help yourself.” And I carried her clothes farther away from the smoking spot under the window and I took off my own clothes too. My skin was pale and red where my army pants rubbed my waist the wrong way. By the time I sat down next to Giovanna, and lit my own cigarette, the revelation had started taking over my brain: I mean, maybe this was the reason I’d ended up in this backward watercolor washout town to begin with. To meet Giovanna. To help her get out. I said, “It doesn’t seem like single motherhood is really a thing here. I mean, what are you gonna do?” They already called her a whore, and worse.

  Giovanna just smiled wide. Her teeth were stunningly crooked. She rested her head on my shoulder. “I know,” she whispered. “The only kind of single motherhood allowed here is widowhood.” She took my hand in hers, and brought it to her tight belly.

  I felt turned on with a savior fantasy like in a fairy tale; my whole chest went warm even though I wondered if it wasn’t kind of creepy on my part.