SOMETHING FOR OVER THE COUCH CHAPTER 6

Something For Over The Couch

PART 6

“I Start To Smoke”

Sitting at the kitchen table that Saturday afternoon I began telling my substitute art teacher about the first time I smoked a cigarette. I had already told my brother about it and it made him laugh. He was drinking a glass of milk when I told him, and he laughed so hard milk ran down his face from his nose. The milk on his face was funnier than my story, but we could always make each other laugh till we cried. So now I began to tell this “funny story” to my art teacher.

I tapped my cigarette into the Cinzano ashtray on the table and began. “About three years ago, just about the time I began doing the watercolor abstraction paintings in a sketchbook, I woke up about one in the morning and went downstairs to the kitchen. Everyone was asleep. I stood on a chair and from the top shelf of a cupboard took a pack of cigarettes from my father’s carton. He was dead, but his carton was still in the same place as always. I went out for a walk in the dark. I had decided to start smoking.”

Hanna interrupted me at that point asking, “How long was it after your father died that this happened?” but I continued without answering her question.

“That night it was violently windy. The wind came in gusts that made me walk like I was drunk. It would blow so hard, and so suddenly that you would be pushed right off the sidewalk into the street, and you could stretch out your arms and just lay on the wind, as if it was a mattress, and it kept you from falling onto your face.

At the corner of Sunset and Mildred I turned left, and went over to Rose Place. I walked to the corner to the Shell Station, and went to the men’s room at the back of the building. The door was unlocked, it was unlocked because I had jammed a piece of bubble gum cigar into the latch the week before, and it had not been fixed yet."

Suddenly I stopped speaking as I became aware that I had told an adult, and a teacher about my act of vandalism, but she seemed unconcerned so I continued. “That Shell station is new,” I continued. “It was built about two years ago, but the bathroom is a ruin, and looks like a bathroom in an abandoned building. You would have thought a bomb had gone off in the stall. I’m the only person in the world who knows how that bathroom got into such a sorry state because I did it myself, a little bit at a time.”

Then again I looked up at my listener, but seeing only a sympathetic expression on her face, I continued.

"I was hiding in that bathroom, because I didn't want anyone to see me and tell my Mother what I was doing. I don't think my Dad would have minded so much, even if he had been alive, but my Mother would have given me the silent wounded treatment.

I took the pack out of my coat pocket and banged it on my fist, like everyone does, and then I banged the pack again on my hand so that three cigarettes peaked out, like you see in advertisements. I lit a cigarette and blew out some smoke, but I didn't inhale.

I kept puffing and blowing out the smoke without breathing it in and I only felt a little light headed at first. The taste and smell were very strange, I can’t describe it. Later, when I had really started to smoke it never again tasted or smelled like the first time. Suddenly, without intending to, I inhaled a mouthful of smoke down into my lungs, and then all hell broke loose in my body. I felt like I had breathed in a mouthful of molasses, and thought I would die before I could breathe again. Then I threw up all over the door of the stall, and broke out in a cold sweat all over my whole body, even my feet.

I put out the cigarette without taking any more drags from it. I tried to stand up but I couldn’t because the stall was spinning around too much. My heart was pounding bam, bam bam, and then it would suddenly stop like it was going to take a rest, and then it would start up even faster like it was late for work.

All that was nothing compared to how frightened I suddenly became. My mind was racing and I wanted to do a lot of things all at once. Right then and there, I wanted to get some things, some very important things, settled once and for all.

The first thing I wanted to do was to tell the gas station attendant that it was me that had vandalized the bathroom. I was going to go straight to the office and tell them but if I let go of the walls of the stall the walls would speed up, and I would need to sit down again. I soon realized how to get the walls to slow down. I threw the pack of cigarettes into the toilet, and flushed them down. That did the trick, and I started to calm down.

I decided to go home, wake up my Mother and tell her about the gas station, and about smoking cigarettes. I was sure this was the best thing to do. I ran almost all the way home, but I stopped at that mailbox at the corner. I was going to make a vow to never smoke any more cigarettes again when my mind started to play a funny trick on me, and I thought I was seeing things. In the light of the street lamp I noticed the letters U.S. Mail on the side of the mailbox. These letters were raised up and the edges of them were lit up by a street light. It was as if the letters had never been there before, and had now appeared out of nowhere, just because I was looking at them. I ran my fingers over the letters, and I can’t find the words to describe how interesting their shapes were. Across the street was an apartment complex where I had the job of taking out the trash cans on Monday and Wednesday nights, and I realized, as if for the first time, that there were people I would never know living there. It sounds stupid, but I never realized it before, in that way. It was two in the morning. On the second floor a light was on, someone was watching television. It was so clear to me, as if it was stretching itself out to me, and pressing itself onto my eyeballs.

At the same time I began to feel wonderful. I felt strong and good. I felt like I understood everything, I felt like I even understood the sidewalk, in a way I had never realized before.

But, most of all, I decided to smoke another cigarette. So I went into the house and stole another pack. I went up to the corner and stood by the mailbox and lit up. I was careful not to inhale too much at one time, and, sure enough, I felt dizzy and sick again, but it didn’t bother me so much, since I was expecting it.

I looked at the sidewalk, and thought about how, like a continuous ribbon, it wandered about and connected all the different sections of the city, and I set out in the night to follow it. I would walk to a corner, and not decide which direction to go until the very last instant, either to go straight, to the left or to the right. I walked for two hours, with my collar up and my head down while the wind blew first into my face, then against my back, and then again into my face again, for, as I said before, it was the edge of a hurricane that night.

After that, somehow, I became a different person. I have been smoking for two years already, and nobody knows about it. I am not a heavy smoker however, half a pack a week is my limit.”

My substitute art teacher found nothing to laugh about that afternoon as we sat talking in her kitchen. I could see myself that it was not exactly a funny story, and fell more into the category of the confession of a crime. Like a confession to a person who might only not find fault, but even absolve you of guilt, and even go further and cheer you on in your aberrant behavior.

But Hanna was after something darker, and once I had finished my funny story, she again asked me about the death of my Dad. Again I refused, and to change the subject said I wanted to tell her about the art collection in my house, but it would have to wait for the following Saturday, after the lawn was done.

—RICHARD BRITELL

PARTS 1 THROUGH 5, AT SPAZIFINEART.COM (SHORT STORIES)