Tobacco Roads

I suppose that I haven't used the twist-reality-with-words-and-make-sense-of-it-all approach yet when it comes to what caused my cancer. This approach depends on how much I intend to blame myself for making SuperBall status.

I started smoking at least once a day by the time I was 14. My current bike of the apocalypse was a blue Schwinn, and I'd ride it down Tennessee back roads looking for survivor cigarettes. A cigarette is a survivor when it has not been smoked down to the filter – some have longer remaining life spans than others. Following that logic, you could think of an abandoned but still partially full cigarette pack as a life raft. An empty cigarette pack with the top still closed is a stunt pack – you can only discover stunt packs by opening or rattling their non-contents – if you're feeling generous then rip off their heads so that no other would be rescuer falls for the same trick.

Anyway, I would find survivors scattered along the shoulders of the road, storing them in my cargo short pockets. The only other item in my pockets would be a lighter. After noticing a bright pink lipstick smudge on a mostly alive Virginia Slim, I realized that tearing off the filters of my finds could be a healthier decision. I was also running cross country at the time, and the smoking and just perhaps the riding a bike five or so miles a day seemed to be making me faster. I learned to roll my own lumpy cigarettes when I found out that getting rolling papers was surprisingly easier than obtaining unsmoked cigarettes. I would find survivors and classify them according to size (two inhales being the smallest worthwhile size) before ripping off the series of filters and letting the remains intermingle.

But this was in the afternoon after school. What if I wanted start my day smoking, like a cup of coffee only delivered to my lungs? I started biking the couple of miles to my school and puffing on my finds behind backyard fences. I also started going to bed before 10 so that I could wake up at 4am to go on rescue missions. There was a bowling alley about four miles from my house. The roads were usually abandoned, so I'd ride my bike of the apocalypse along these dark paths, which were sometimes covered in pre-dawn mist. I'd find the survivors with their heads buried in the sand. These ashtray guys were usually better preserved, and I'd take along a sandwich baggie to help keep them that way.

From then on, I would make this trip about twice a week well after I turned fifteen. I would still ride my bike after school to find abandoned farm sheds, untended crops, and shady trees where I could smoke my rollies. I was smoking herb by this time too, just a dime bag or so a week. My rolling skills were even more atrocious when it came to irregular clumps of low-grade weed, so I bought a small glass pipe from a senior. I found out that this glass pipe could also be used to smoke bowls of pure tobacco for the biggest buzz yet.

I was carrying this pipe, a lighter, and no ID, when I was picked up by the then Sheriff of some small, slightly hilly, train-tracked town near Humboldt. It was my sixteenth birthday, and I wasn't wearing shoes and was wearing my ARMY shirt, which was slightly more intact back then. I had decided on my birthday that I would bike until I found some place amazing. Instead, after several hours of riding down roads along which the houses were so far spread out that neighbors would have to use binoculars to spy on one another, I was chased by three or four dogs. Yes, these dogs were laying underneath rusty husks of cars up on blocks, and yes, I had been chased by dogs before. But the dogs of before had been suburbanite hounds that could be chided away while they mostly just barked and ran alongside me. The dogs chasing me on my sixteenth birthday didn't bark – they weren't especially large either – but there were at least three of them, and they moved like a pack. I cranked my pedals as fast as they would go until the dogs were out of sight.

I didn't intend to go back via that route, so when I saw the Sheriff patrol car parked in a field facing a triple intersection, I asked him what road I could take back to Jackson. The Sheriff was a large-boned, old man with big glasses and very white eyebrows, hair, skin – one of those impressive men, who probably stood out even more when only black and white photos existed.

The Sheriff shook his head and pointed at some road and then named some other roads – I nodded my head, although I wasn't following in the daze of the Tennessee summer heat. I rode my bike in that general direction and did what I do best for the next hour; I got lost. I was trying to retrace my route and debating whether I had to the energy to escape the rotten-junk-car-pack dogs again when I saw the Sheriff's cruiser approaching. He stuck his head out the window as he pulled up alongside me.

“Are you running away from home?” He asked. I looked down at my bare feet and back up at him and resisted asking whether or not he was going senile.

“No sir, I probably would've packed a bag if I was going to do that,” I said.

“How about you take a ride with me and we figure out how to get you home?”

“Well, what about my bike? And I know that way back, but there are some dogs guarding it.”

“What? We'll get the bike in the trunk and you can sit in the front. Do you have an ID?”

“No sir, well I do have one, just not with me.” I worried that he would search me and come across the pipe, tarred and grimed up with whatever didn't make it to my throat and lungs.

“It's a good idea to carry some piece of identification with you.” He got out of the cruiser and helped twist the handlebars as I set the bike in the trunk. I nodded, we closed the trunk, and I was relieved when the Sheriff didn't object to me sitting in the front seat. He rolled down the windows a crack and started smoking a Marlboro light; he'd finished two by the time we stopped at a Mom and Pop shop (except here, I suppose that it would just be the shop, since there was no larger store for comparison). The Sheriff bought me a blue Powerade.

I remember the station being a small white brick building, although I was disappointed to see no wrought iron bars or holding cells. We sat on metal folding chairs, and the Sheriff continued his smoking nearer the open doorway as he called my parents. We talked about Afghanistan and W. and some guys he knew from way back when who never wanted to leave Vietnam and kept signing up for more tours. And the Sheriff puffed and his cigarettes kept burning down although he seemed to exhale very little smoke, probably because the smoke felt at home there in his lungs. I didn't even want a cigarette while I watched. He had burned through at least five cigarettes in the hour that I'd been with him, and the unconscious light and relighting and flicking ash fascinated me.

That's all – no life changing moment there. My parents came and got me; we thanked the Sheriff and kept laughing about how long it took us to drive home. The life-changing moment came shortly after my birthday, when I could drive on my own. I never abandoned my bike of the apocalypse completely, but I did find the gas stations that rarely carded. I mostly left the survivors to their fate but never left any of my own, always smoking down to the filter.

I got a bus boy job by junior year, not because I needed the money, but because I wanted to have an alibi for my smoking and drinking. I also began to alternate between smoking and chewing tobacco, since the latter was a convenient way to hide my habit and actually delivered more nicotine. I had begun that shifting process that I'd mentioned earlier from smokeless to shotties to spliffs and this way and that, never quite going a month without nicotine over this last decade.

And so when I ask myself if I caused my cancer, my mind goes through a similar shifting pattern. I tell myself that it would've happened anyway before recalling all the above. I've started growing increasingly annoyed when people ask if the doctors found out what caused it. Yeah, it was the cigarette that I smoked at 4:47 in the morning of March 17th when I was fifteen. But I began to think along those lines – was it all the nicotine gum that I was chomping away on several months before the cancer? I quit chewing the gum at the start of May but smoked my first cigarette in eight months the night before the Rapture – hold that thought.

As I've noticed the lump on top of my SuperBall undoubtedly growing these last few months, I've been looking for signs. If the light turns green riiiiiiiiight now, then I don't have cancer. If I can spin a big unbalanced steak knife two times and catch it, then I don't have cancer. However, if I don't have a new notification of Facebook, then I have cancer. If my left knee doesn't crack when I expect it to, then I have cancer.

And then I remember that I graduated from a tough school and was trained to be a motherfucking scientist, and none of that involved reading omens. As a biologist with a smattering of mathematician, I firmly believe that genotype, environment, and the interaction between the two are what determine our current state. That's a fancy way of saying that there's an OK chance that I'm partially to blame, and I wouldn't be doing myself any favors by smoking cigarettes or consuming any nicotine product that resides along that shifty spectrum.

Fast forward to today; I've been staying near Hollywood and just bought my third pack of Marlboro Reds in less than a week. I know I have a lump that may or may not be the end of my SuperBall. As I've accepted that, I've been smoking intermittently, mostly bumming the occasional drunken cigarette until recently. I smoked about five of the first pack before it fell out of my shirt pocket while I was leaning forward over celebrity hand prints in the sidewalk to see how my gloves matched up. The second pack spent the night, despite my attempts to offer it to a few random homeless people who assured me that they didn't smoke. The third pack beckoned to me as I walked around downtown L.A. trying to find amazing places to work on a story about a pigeon.

It wasn't my sixteenth birthday anymore, and I was wearing shoes and a semi-respectable button-down instead of my ARMY shirt. And I still felt lost.

I was mulling over whether the pigeon in my story could bring together a platinum-haired, suicidal waitress and her hefty, flapjack-eating customer, when I was interrupted by a homeless guy asking for 50 cents.

“Sure, do you smoke?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. I handed him a dollar and dug around in my cargo shorts for my third pack. I considered handing him the whole pack before pulling out only five.

“I'm trying to quit or don't want to get started again,” I said. The bum cradled the cigarettes and looked at me suspiciously. If the Sheriff would've looked more impressive in black and white photos, this man would have looked grey. He was sun-stained and could've have been anywhere from his late 30's to early 50's.

“I see, so you got your fail safe, huh?” he said. He walked away a few steps and then turned back around. “When I had that taken away for a while, I just wouldn't think about it. Not that I would do it or that I wouldn't do it – just that it was taken away.”

“So you wouldn't think about it?”

“I could, but it wasn't there, so not an option. You can think yes, no, maybe all you want. If somebody did half of the stuff I done to myself – well then you know.” He pointed to the side of his head.

“Yeah, I probably shouldn't be doing that -”

“Aha, probably, maybe, yes, no?”

“Yeah, kinda sorta maybe.” I smiled, and he left. I felt that I had sat in one place for long enough and walked to a park with ashtrays lining an asphalt corridor outside of a shop. I smoked my fifth cigarette that hour down to its filter. I worked a little more on my story, where the pigeon poops with intention on the hand of the hefty customer who isn't paying attention to its talkative talon tapping. I had to chuckle, but I also had to stop.

I mulled over the bum's words “it was taken away.” Was he even talking about cigarettes? Did it matter? For the last six months, I think my attitude toward smoking (and all of its alternative forms) has been along the lines of “Behave or you're going to lose your other ball.” I don't think that's the point. I do feel as if something has been taken away, and I'm not talking about my right ball, wherever it may be (side note: I like to think that a guy on the hospital staff put it in a jar of preservatives and kept it as a trophy. This jar and dozens of its counterparts adorn the basement shelves of his abode. They look like pickled eggs, but they make this hoarder feel powerful and not so alone.)

But yeah, something was taken way. I can't say whether or not that's my fault. I don't have that option. I don't have that luxury. There are no more shifts when there's no room left for maneuvering. I walked back to that asphalt corridor ashtray and lit another cigarette. A song played, a soothing woman's voice switching between English and French. I inhaled and blew out my nostrils and put the cigarette out when it was halfway to that filter. I left that halfway survivor floundering in the sand with a half-full life raft perched on the rim above.

So what will be my new addiction? How about unbridled, uncompromising ambition? But more on that one later.