Nicotine Fingers

By Christian Knobloch

Girls, his failed band, and baseball on the North Side, these are some reasons why Edwin smokes, but has the time come for him to quit?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781619274044

Book preview

9781619274044

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.

- Mark Twain

* 1 *

Everything seems to have its expiration date. No matter what's done to preserve it, any person, place, or thing will change—be manipulated—by time. Children grow up. Grandparents pass away. Banks go bankrupt. Cathedrals gather dust. Possessions start to show scuffs or cracks. Meanwhile, we start to notice the lines on our faces, and suddenly we are no better than the people, places, and things that we've spent so long desperately trying to maintain their perfection. In the end, we are no better than a piece of fruit. We start to notice the bumps and the spots, and sooner or later we lose our appeal. Lately, I've been feeling my own expiration date.

I heard that each cigarette smoked takes eleven minutes off of life. This fact concerns me very little, considering that the main portion of this time will be removed from the ass-end of my life. Therefore, why should I be concerned? Eleven less minutes of delusion or time spent in a hospital bed doesn't seem like such a bad thing. Consider my smoking a courtesy to the future loved ones that will spend less time watching me suffer. Eleven less minutes of grief. Seems like a fair trade.

My love affair with smoking started eighteen years, three months, and seven days ago today, by far my longest lasting relationship. If you'd like me to count down the minutes, I could probably muster up some sort of rough estimate. Nonetheless, this habit has consumed half of my life. I suppose working in a bar for so long hasn't helped my cause for quitting. Not that I've ever truly wanted to quit. It has never been huge on my list of priorities. I often wonder how I could even function in this shithole club without nicotine. At the same time, it's hard not to question what would life be like without smoking. How would I ever cope without the ashes in the back seat of my car? How could I ever live without the way it lingers on my hands and lips?

It all started my senior year of high school. I wasn't one of those kids smoking under the school bleaches after moments of heavy petting, looking for a place to hide when partaking in both activities. I didn't have to. When I started, I was of age. I had missed out on the ability to be rebellious in my smoking. No one stopped me on the parking lot or between classes because they knew I was doing it legally. On top of that, our campus was open. We could do pretty much whatever we wanted. Where was the fun and excitement in that? Even at thirty-six, part of me still feels gypped on the whole experience. Anyone who starts smoking as a teenager unconsciously—if not consciously—craves the disapproval of authority. I was deprived and refused my chance at the fuck yous that I so deeply desired to berate upon my parents and teachers.

I bought my first pack without even being carded. There was no search for someone to buy for me or bum me one. It was the easiest and worst thing I did all for myself. Even then, I'm not so sure that I regret it. Why should I regret it? Only now as I'm stumbling through my mid-thirties has smoking seemed to have caught up with me.

Not so much the act of smoking but how the world portrays the avid smoker. In January of 2007, Illinois passed a law that prohibits smoking in restaurants and bars, taking effect at the beginning of 2008. You might call this move a progressive one, if you consider taking away the rights of business owners advancement. When did fresh air at bar become a right and not a privilege? If you're willing to spend your weekends in crowded, smoky bars, then why should you complain about the lack of comfort?

Why does anyone subject themselves to a bar in the first place? Most would argue that it's about getting laid, but that's never been my goal. I've spent most of my adult life working in a bar and drinking in bars on my spare time. Not once have I ever taken a girl home from one. It's not that I couldn't. Sure, if my self- esteem was so damn low that I needed to fuck a complete stranger on occasion, I'm sure that I could swing it, especially being a bartender. Sleeping with barflies never appealed to me. Several of my relationships stemmed from a bar, this bar, but I had the common courtesy to at least find out if a girl could count to ten before I made any drastic moves. Called it self-defense, whatever. There's never been a stranger in my bed after bar hours.

* 2 *

My father always told me to show some initiative, but I doubt that taking up smoking was what he meant. Frankly, it's the one thing I've stuck with. I dropped out of college for my band and then stopped playing music to sling drinks all night. And now as the lines on my face have started to take over, there has been an undeniable force in my brain telling me to stop bartending, too. However, the money is so goddamn easy. Why would I want to struggle in a nine to five, living paycheck to paycheck, when it's so convenient to have cash in hand? If I told you how much I made saucing people up, you'd probably close this book and find another novel with a more rewarding protagonist, far more charismatic to root for. Honestly, I'm not writing this for your support. It's more like some twisted therapy I've concocted to help me cope with this meaningless yet consuming habit, among other things that I will get into later on.

You might wonder why I would start smoking. Every smoker has a reason: stress, trying to be cool, working against the system, Black Flag, all that bullshit. None of it applies here. For me, it was a girl.

Her name was Natasha. She was a Russian exchange student. It played out like a bad 1950s movie. I was just in awe of this woman. And she was a woman, compared to the girls that I had always gone for prior to her. A real dark lady, like the subject of so many of those Shakespearean sonnets. I was in love. A teenage love, but still pretty genuine.

We took Honors English together my senior year. There was little room for her to adapt, having learned more in one year abroad than most of us do in the states an entire four years of high school. Other students looked down at her because she looked down at them. However, I thought she was rare and offsetting. Why would I waste my time with these American girls when this apparition had already read Tolstoy and Nabokov? We were still being subjected to Chopin and Steinbeck, as though either of them had the weight and depth of these Eastern authors. The first time I spoke to her I tried to wax philosophical over Lolita, and she just replied, Nabokov is shit. Maybe she was right. Did I know any better at eighteen? Later on I realized that she knew as much about Tolstoy and Nabokov as I did about astrophysics. Sadly, it didn't mean much to my libido at the time.

I had only two things on my mind: Natasha and cigarettes. We spent nights sitting under the stars on the football field and smoking cigarettes until our lungs felt like caving in. She would proclaim the Beatles fakes and praise bands like KMFDM and Lords of Acid, of which I knew nothing about. Upon further investigation, I discovered the Beatles were the clear winner in this discussion, and my interest in techno and industrial music died the day Natasha started to make a Lolita story of her own.

My love affair with smoking was the only one of these two evils to last. Natasha ended up cheating on me that summer with my eleventh grade science teacher, Mr. Shaleski. He was only in his mid-twenties, just fresh out of graduate school and working on his second year of teaching. I found them groping each other outside her host parents' house, her panties thrown from the car like some cheesy eighties flick that I would embrace later in my college years.

Even before my shocking discovery that evening, I knew that Natasha and I were not meant to be. She listened to crappy music and knew little about her own culture. And despite how she led on, Natasha had a sickening fascination with America. I caught her watching Beverly Hills 90210 one day after school, and she promptly turned off the television and acted like she was trying to mock it. The last time I saw her before they shipped her back to Mother Russia she was wearing a flannel and baggy jeans and appeared to have not washed her hair for weeks. We used to make fun of all those grunge kids together, and then she became one of them. These were the same kids who were killing the ozone layer with hair spray and listening to Warrant freshmen year, and suddenly they had issues that only Kurt Cobain could sort out for them.

Not that Nirvana wasn't great. They made some ferocious music for the time and certainly pushed pop culture in the right direction. However, the quick change in trend didn't inspire me to wear boots and baggy short pants. I struggled with separating Nirvana from Snow or Technotronic. It was all pop music. Seeing that the star quarterback had stopped cruising the parking lot to Talk Dirty to Me in exchange for Come as You Are had little effect on what I listened to. I was still jonesing on U2's Achtung Baby, Concrete Blonde's Bloodletting, The Cure's Disintegration, and Morrissey's Viva Hate. How I ever made it through high school as a Smiths fan without a stern ass kicking is something that I will never understand.

I loved Natasha because she was different like me, not in the same sense of what we liked, but the idea that neither of us belonged where we were. She was a Russian know-it-all. I was an emotional little boy who listened to sad bastard music. After I found her making dreamy eyes at Luke Perry, it became obvious that I had been left alone in my peculiarity. There would be no me and her against the world. Just me and the smoking she had helped me pick up.

* 3 *

When did I become so goddamn cynical about my patrons? I remember when I was one of them: drinking, laughing, and itching to get laid, however in the respectful manner that I stated earlier on. Now I have nothing but spite for these people, and they are the very same people who help me pay my rent. What kind of horrific hypocrisy is that?

I didn't even know the guy standing by the bar and hitting on a young, somewhat suspecting piece of tail this particular evening, but a great portion of me wanted to jam my church key right into his eye, pull out his retina, and feed it to that woman just to stop the false sense of laughter.

But, alas, I am their whore.

If he wasn't trying to get laid in my bar right at that moment, he'd be pissing his money away somewhere else, and I'd be out of a job. People in the service industry are saints. They put up with so much bullshit in order to make a living. Grant it bartenders tend to be at the top of that wretched totem pole, especially the great ones, but it doesn't make it any easier watching some sleazy bastard try to get his rocks off in my fucking bar.

And it is my fucking bar, despite what you might think. I don't own the place, but I've devoted almost a third of my life to it. Who was the one flyering around town when it first opened? Who helped build a reputation around Chi-Town when the management would sit on their asses and reap all the benefits? Ownership has changed since I walked into the place so many years ago, but the one thing that has stayed the same is the status I helped build and, unfortunately, my own presence. I could have put money down on my own place, still could. That is one of the few