Smoking in the Wharf
It’s the first day of the Pride Month, and I think my teeth have turned grey. Not actually grey. More off-white than grey. Like a marine layer—a hint of sand. It’s because I smoke cigarettes, but I’ll tell myself my teeth look regal. Elegant people smoke. That’s what I want to yell when I’m smoking on the sidewalk, and a parent hurries their child past me.
“Hey kid!” I’ll shout, waving my cigarette around. Here I am, the Rumpelstiltskin of Hollywood.
I only smoke at night. My little reward after a long day of doing something. Stuff. Things! I wait till it’s dusk and then I crouch in the corner of my deck, facing the wall, and suck my little cig down like a Shirley Temple. I tell myself smoking is beautiful, because it is. And it’s the only thing I have left. They’ve taken everything else away from me, I think. No more drugs. No more booze. But I still have my smokes.
I didn’t even pick up smoking again when I got sober in New York. I’d stopped months before in the summer, during the swampy death rattle of my addiction. After a bender—not any worse than benders I’d had before—I lit up a cigarette and projectile vomited. And it scared me, not just because in that moment I was certain I could stop smoking cigarettes before I gave up cocaine, or pissing myself in a wine brownout, or maybe even one day picking up crack, but because I knew my body was dying.
I started smoking again after I moved to LA. Everyone here smokes with hunched shoulders, just out of sight. I liked that. It feels right to only smoke when it’s dark. Even now, when it’s dark every day in California, I save it for the night.
We’ve had June Gloom since April. Everyone says it’s like this every year. That it’s permanently August in Cape Cod. And me, a wharf hag, pulling up a crab net with a butt hanging out of my mouth.
But it does feel different this year. Off-white, like smoker’s teeth. The weather—drunk, amnesiac—forgetting what it is, until it won’t remember ever again. The end of the world is a marine layer; a rolling fog muting out the freeway and turning the palm trees into silhouettes. When the world is ending in Los Angeles it’s not ending anywhere else.