The Fuck Would I Say What For?

Once upon a time, when we all lived in the forest (or when I lived in Philadelphia in 2007 at least), my ex came to visit me. 5’2” of half-Vietnamese sexiness, looking a little the worse for wear after some rough months dating dickwads in the slush-slicked streets of Chicago, careening through her twenties with limited direction but all systems go and boosters at full power (she still looked better than most humans ever will because she was, and remains, one of the single most striking people I have ever seen, and that includes people in movies). She needed a break, and the East Coast was far enough away from the heart of the Midwest to provide a little perspective, some breathing room. Plus what is the point of keeping in contact with people who live 2000 miles away if you don’t occasionally use them for free vacation lodging? It’s the only logical thing to do.

So she shows up on my doorstep with some matching baggage, but thankfully none of the baggage from our years-long and tumultuous relationship that spanned much of 2003-2005. That baggage we long since put in the Goodwill donation bin so other fine couples could lug it around and break under its weight elsewhere in the world. We’re giving, caring people like that. 

After a nap and a trip to the corner pho restaurant, she was energized and ready to tackle Philadelphia, and for the next week and a half that is exactly what we did. We tore that city up. Remarkably, to me at least, we were probably better friends in that small stretch of time, after a couple years of distance and reflection, forgiveness and growth, than we had ever been during span we were dating. Free from the responsibility and the obligations of love, you can just attack margarita pitchers and crack horrible, wildly offensive jokes with aplomb. You can speak frankly and honestly without any sense of tact, and regale each other with tales of hair-curling debauchery or completely mundane office jobs with reckless abandon and no ulterior motives. You can be friends, is what I’m getting at, and it’s great.

People rarely date their actual friends. They date friends of friends, and people they met in bars and slept with six hours later. They date coworkers and people they met on OK Cupid. I’m always amused by the clichéd “let’s just be friends” breakup speech for that exact reason. Chances are you were never friends before you decided to be lovers, so there’s no frame of reference, no way to detach one from the other. It’s why “being friends” so rarely works until you’ve both had time to properly move on (usually best accomplished by minimal to no contact and dating completely new people who smell and taste different and annoy you for totally new reasons, etc). Otherwise it’s like picking stitches out of a particularly nasty cut every day and then getting new stitches before bed, or maybe getting new stitches every day but tearing them out at bedtime each night. It’s like tearing out stitches, though, that’s for sure. Even if you were friends before you started dating, how likely is it that you’ll both just be able to ignore the fact that you just shared a bed and a life and your hearts for months/weeks/years/whatever and just go back to like, watching Mad Men on Thursdays or something? Not very likely, that’s how likely. Don’t be friends. Be strangers again so you can actually be friends sometime in the future, maybe. Or just pick at them stitches. I’m not the boss of you. Do whatever you want (except pedo stuff).

Anyway, there we are, Karen and I, inebriated and dancing and smoking like chimneys, making general asses of ourselves in public, evidenced by piggyback rides to Pat’s (I don’t like Geno’s; too neon) and that time we had sex on the stoop of a coffeeshop at 2:15am before moving to the back of an unloaded flatbed because we’re incredibly classy drunks. A solid week of excess and bun bo hue, midday napping and early evening shopping. July 4th on Colleen’s roof with Steven and Justin #2 (I don’t care if he’s your boyfriend, he gets second billing) and the bassist from Man Man, bike rides to Fishtown and picnics at Ikea. Did I mention we were smoking? Constantly? I lost my zippo in that flatbed. The engraved one I’d had for almost a decade, dented and stained with oil from my fingertips, steel worn thin in spots from overhandling, a constant comforting weight in my pocket. I was furious the next day when I realized what had happened. I smoked several cigarettes to calm my nerves, using matches to light them.

I have no idea when Karen joined me in the two-pack-a-day nicotine warrior club, but she showed up with a couple packs of Parliament Lights in her purse and must have bought half of Philly’s remaining supply in the days that followed. She smoked in bed, on the deck, in front of every café and bar. She smoked before and after every meal, and every time we got off a bus or out of a cab. She smoked while smoking, forgetting one cigarette was still burning and lighting the next, then double-fisting like a champion, which used to be my signature move because I have the short term memory of a chromosomally damaged goldfish. Even for me, a pretty solid and accomplished decade-deep smoker, she was a little too into it, though. I have restrictions, a little self control.

For instance, I’ve never liked smoking before I brush my teeth. My mouth in the morning is … horrible. Covered in what feels like fur and socks and old newspapers, maybe some urine, an animal that’s died, and a bit of lead-based paint, my teeth glued to the inside of my lips, my tongue swollen and blind and lame, weakly moving in all the stale beer and nicotine glaze, searching for escape or an end to its misery. I like to scrub some of that out of there before I add to the atrocity, plus I think the smokes taste better after you’ve found your taste buds (not that it ever tastes good, but just ‘better than bad’). 

I don’t like smoking in bed, as I will invariably ash on my duvet somehow, and I’m kind of narcoleptic so the thought of waking up dead in the charred remains of my apartment never held much appeal for me. I want to die buried under a pile of whiskey bottles and three barely legal art students. Everyone knows this.

I don’t like smoking while I’m eating because what the fuck, man? Chill out on the smoking thing and put some soup in your face. Jesus Christ, it only takes ten minutes to eat, plus you’re eating so your mouth is busy. You freakishly addicted semi-lunatic.

Etc.

After a week with Karen’s maniac chain ripping of P-funks, I was ready to die. It was too much. I wake up in the morning next to a beautiful woman I want to rub some things, put my mouth in questionable places. I do not want to wake up next to a beautiful woman that is already smoking in bed because that’s two things I’m not into combining to ruin something I am. And like I said, I was a two-pack-a-day guy myself, so I get the desire for some cigarettes, but you’ve got to be civilized about it. You’ve got to have some restraint. You must set a good example for the children.

So on her last day in town we go to Morning Glory because it is the best (except for Sabrina’s maybe; it’s a toss-up), then I lug her monstrous suitcases down the cracked and pitted sidewalks of South Philly toward the subway so I can accompany her to the airport and see her safely back to the city of wind. Her suitcases weigh more than I do because she is a clothing freak and must have 243 outfit options at any given second. (As I am a white t-shirt or monochromatic button-down and jeans with some nice boots kind of person, this had always confused the hell out of me, but hey, different strokes for different traditional gender binaries, as the old saying goes).

She also needed to have a cigarette every ten feet, apparently, so every time I got good momentum going in the drag-a-suitcase-that-weighs-as-much-as-a-Volvo game she would invariably make me stop so she could light a god damned Parliament, until I reached my boiling point and just went off in the middle of some terrifying stretch of 15th street.

“Again? Are you serious? No way. No fucking way are you smoking again. Why don’t you just light one of the end of the last one? Why do we have to stop walking? Do you see me stopping every five feet to light a cigarette? Of course not, because I’m lugging this shit and can’t spare an arm! We’re going to miss the train, and then you’re going to miss your plane, because you’re a weird dickhead! STOP SMOKING.”

To which she replied, “Why don’t you stop smoking?”

(Karen V___, ladies and gentlemen, Mistress of Comebacks)

It was at this point I thought of a joke. Not like ‘set-up, ramble, punchline’ but just a kind of long-form, amusing bit of performance art, prompted by my adorable ex’s annoying addiction.

“I’m never smoking again,” I said. “I quit. You’ve driven me to quit.”

I don’t encounter a lot of legitimate scoffing, but she definitely scoffed at me. Hard.

“You love smoking. You actively advocate smoking. To children.”

“That was the old me. Can’t we let the past be the past? I’m different now.”

“Whatever, retard. Come on. We’re going to be late. Do you want to have a cigarette while we’re stopped? I can carry one of those for a while.”

“I just told you I don’t smoke anymore.”

“Okay. We’ll see how long that lasts.”

… two years. That’s apparently how long I can keep a joke going. I threw out my last pack when we got to the airport and I didn’t smoke again for two years, just to be a dick. I would call her up every two or three weeks and shoot the shit, and every time I’d be like, “You still smoking? Why don’t you just quit? That’s what I did,” or variations on that theme. She hated it, which made me happy.

And annoying people makes me very happy. I’m like a particularly antagonistic five year old. If you’re shaking your head and scowling at me, chances are my lips are wrapped around my ears in a huge, shit-eating grin. I can’t help it. Hell, I still do that thing where I’ll say your name fourteen times even though you’ve already acknowledged me and said, “What?”

I’ve done it so often to Dani (my lady BFF) that we’ve developed nicknames for each other based on my dickish ways. “Danitho” is short for “Dani, though” as in “Dani. Dani. Dani. Dani. Dani. Dani. Hey Dani. Dani. Dani, though. Hey. Hey Dani. Dani though. Can I ask you a question? Dani. Dani though, can I ask you a question? Hey.”

“Fucking Justin” comes from 12 years of our friends telling her about something horrible I’ve done and her shaking her head and sadly but with fondness going, “… (sigh) … fucking Justin.”

That’s how her emails start.

“Fucking Justin,

blah blah blah.

-Danitho”

So even after I moved to Chicago and saw Karen every day I still wouldn’t smoke. Just to be annoying. In addition to giggling, I found out that food tastes completely different and that you can put on 20 pounds of muscle if all you do is eat, work out, and run, without all that pesky and time consuming smoking in between. I learned you can bike 30 miles without running out of breath. All sorts of fun facts.

I also learned that quitting smoking is so unbelievably fucking annoying and deathly boring I completely understand why people would rather pay out the ass to kill themselves than do it. 

Sitting on my back deck one unemployed, post-breakup day, reading a book, with a massive cup of coffee resting on the arm of the chair, I realized something was missing from my wallowing. I went down to 7-11 after all that time and ended the longest-running joke I had. Smoked a pack of cigarettes in two or three hours. They were wonderful. Smoked for the next year and a half or so.

And here I am again, in that horrible first-week-of-quitting window, with no joke to keep me going, just a desire to save money for Scotland and make my lady happy since she’s never smoked and finds it “gross”. 

And it’s fucking annoying, folks. It’s a serious pain in the balls.

The mood swings alone are obnoxious, even if you weren’t having them through a haze of fat tears while you shovel anything and everything that resembles food directly into your gaping, moaning mouth. Nothing is satisfying, and you forget how to measure time, or what normal people do at bus stops.

Still, your bank account looks a lot nicer, and you can go up a flight of stairs without experiencing debilitating heart failure.

If I’ve called you a “dumb buthhole with a stupid face I hope you die aaaaaaaugggghhhh, oh god go fuck yourself shitmonkey poop person” in the past week, I probably didn’t mean it.

Three weeks. That’s how long it takes for all that shit to make its way out of your bloodstream and for your hormones to reach some sort of acceptable levels again.

This has been me killing 45 minutes typing so as not to think about smoking.

I will now go eat four meals at once.

I hope you die and have a nice day.

Kill me.