Smoke

On my recent visit to Albany Med emergency room, I was asked about my smoking history. Somehow I am still at some risk for, say, bladder cancer because I smoked two packs a day from 1967 to 1973. I had my last cigarette in another emergency room, New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital, in July 1973, some six weeks after my honeymoon, where I smoked in the canoe on Willsboro Bay, smoked at night in the Montreal hotel, smoked in a cab, smoked in the car, smoked in bed, poor Barbara. My gut was killing me, but the cigarette was good and inhaling it consoling, rassuring. It was a tiny waiting room on a side street three blocks from the Park, perhaps on East 77^th Street, and there was cigarette smoke all around. After the doctor, Dr. Barr, took my appendix, showed it to me in a jar, there were no empty beds available in semi-private rooms in which to recover, so I lay for two days in a ward for the poor, the ailing, the old, we all were lying on metal cots, semi-ignored by overworked staffers. I stared at the ceiling, craving a cigarette. From the shaking old man lying in the cot beside me I learned of a solarium some fifty feet away, with ash trays, and planned a trip with my IV. But poor Barbara said, Aren’t you in too much pain to make the trip? Perhaps you should wait one more day. So I just pictured what it would be like to have my next cigarette, holding it between my right index and middle fingers, or tamping the filtered end on the palm of my hand for a tighter draw, or the draw itself filling my upper chest. Lying among the poor groaning mostly black ward patients, I closed my eyes and held my yellowed fingers to my nose. The next day I was moved to a semi-private room with Vincent as my roommate. He had just been operated on as well, for a respiratory problem, he told me. He cleansed his lungs several times a day, sitting up on the edge of his bed, facing me, breathing into a tube connected to a pulsing machine, his eyes calmly watching me watching him. Most days his friends from an East Side Italian deli near where he had worked as a dental assistant for over 40 years snuck in sandwiches on crusty bread that dripped of egg plant and hot peppers and olive oil, and on the side we ate chunks of moist imported provolone which crumbled in our fingers. We watched John Dean testify against Nixon on the TV above his bed, Vincent scowling, disgusted by the dishonor of one betraying his friend. Vincent was a handsome man with an expressive lively face, bushy eyebrows, flowing white hair, and an emaciated body, ribs and elbows and neck that I could see through his hospital gown as he sat and faced me, his eyes smiling, only one of us left three weeks later to never have to think of smoking again.