ADVENT 1.5: Le Smoking

My mother started smoking cigarettes when her father’d died at the age of fifty-five, and in her later life I watched her collapse in tandem with her own mother,    though only one of them did die all the way.

Quentin — my namesake unmet, the fulcrum of my nomenclature, in death preceded my arrival by excess of a decade — to me, he is a vaguely ageless black-and-white-or-was-it-sepia?-PHANTOM, in a military uniform¹ that I imagine in quickening color to have been drabgreen, though in truth I’ve not seen the reference photo in yet another decade-plus’s excess — Quentin had gone quickly.

Thereafter they’d both smoked copiusly, mother and daughter, widow and orphan; and I the alleged son was the recipient of windows-UP lungfull after lungfull, second-hand sinister — even in the limousine of the womb! — my mother’d said her doctor’d told her that smoking and mild drinking were fine during pregnancy, and doctors can be VERY 𝚜𝚂STUPID PEOPLE, and memories do  ROT, and people  CAN  𝐞x post 𝑭acto fabricate for absolution as well, but why ask questions; even in the sanctity of the cradle! — in my “nursery,” doubled-duty nursery for the brief ghost of the alleged father, who in childhood I was made to understand to have been NEFARIOUSLY growing marijuana in the very room in which the Devine child fretfully slept; and whose motivations in stoned adult stature I’ve come to consider as having potentially been VISIONARY, as tides do change and as I have now-and-again set foot in multi-milli manses²³ purchased — legally! — with the proceeds of commercial cannabis.

It’s at this point that I retreat briefly into the scant remains of my own visual archives, digital not material, having recalled a black wool-silk tailored blazer I’d once owned, Alexander McQueen — real deal, no diffusion — just about the time McQueen’d CALLED IT, as I recall, so he’d⁴ still have had a hand in it — that featured a vespertine smoke plume, a frozen moment in time, hanging in suspension, icicles.

I’d abhorred smoke in all its forms for most of my life, and my initial response to the item was a feeling of revulsion, a feeling which never altogether subsided.

Ultimately I sold the jacket for a penny to-me far prettier and shinier  than the gimmick-sheen of iridescent designer cloth.

  I don’t believe I have any photos of it anymore, having destroyed nearly all my archives, so you’ll have to make do with a photo of McQueen’s nephew in it:

(get all of that shit out of your pockets, trouser texture doesn’t work here, lose the buttondown collar & tie — barechested or a scarf, here — a rare ascot moment)

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I’d never once smoked a cigarette at the time I possessed the piss-take smoking jacket,

though I’ve since taken down the equivalent of about six packs’ worth,

       in the aggregate.

You see stress does induce desires, for release or for harm or

for some tongue-tip          now in evasion.

AUTHOR FILE PHOTO

It began with spliffs, as it always does.

A svelte art pimp’d lent me a drag on the terraced overhang of ‘eir low-slung hillside plum — floating and cosmopolitan — above the city lights of Los Ａngele𝑆.

We’d not known each other long, but it was clear that fast-and-perhaps-fleeting friendship was de rigeuer. ‘e’d emerged from the stilt-hangers’ deathdefying bedroom all hipbones in Euro-briefs, an alien sauntering with a torch into night air, duelist’s strut.

This was⁵ a manse of a singular MILLI, though it’s since been advanced with the fattening of the city.

  ⅋ it hosted well the afters and disasters of parties and bullshit.

I don’t know that words were involved in the offer — pre-COVIDIAN smoke-swap as spit-swap among the near-strange and well-sotted was a rather differing affair.

And it is here, DEAR_READER, that you stumble  into an Erowid Trip Report for TOBACCO.

(erewhon trip report?)                                (i’m left with no resort)

                             (put out the blowtorch)

So you see, so you see, so you see — Tobacco, I feel, is woefully underdiscussed as a psychedelic drug! I must say, the first hit of that spliff, as a person or something like it who’s been PROFESSIONALLY HIGH before⁶, mother fuck, Mother of Fuck — I’m gonna fall over, I’m gonna keel over the railing of this mother-fucking place in front of a few dozen people too chemically compromised to do much of anything about it other than to experience an awe at my splattering — or would it be a crunch, from here? — hard to tell!

You know you’re rich when a fall from your balcony splatters rather than crunches.

Anyhow it’s likely a crunch sitch, this ain’t the Palisades, and thank the god of this particular instance for that fact, because I’d be cliff-diving beach-meat.

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Subsquent more potent applications of the demon-drug tobacco have wrought more refined experiences, of which I will describe to you two:

❶

This shit gives you the tunnel-vision of a sniper.

This drug is an invaluable part of the toolkit of any killer or gambler.

❷

SO YOU SEE really what I think I’d been angling for was an attempt to embody my mother, to become her in an eyes-on POV sense, experientially, to understand. We are very alike but not at all alike. I gather that this may be standard.

The bulk of my disgusting intake was stress-spurred in dæmonic irony thru the close diagnosis of oral cancer — not I, not I, not I — but in the home.

I’d always blamed my mother for her weakness in taking up the habit in the loss of her father and I think I wanted to find a way to forgive her by exceeding her idiocy.

The art girls who’d bum me periodic loosies after I’d been turnt-on by the spliff’s mix had always had those yellow American Spirits when they didn’t have the blue ones, so well on a whim and bent-beyond I wandered into the liquor store most familiar, and made an unusual addition to my more typical order of Brut or cider or imported lager:

       “uhhhhhhHHHHHHHPack-americanspirits-Yellow?”

The question-command.

A hideous place to find oneself.

I’ve frequently been taken for a smoker in life, having circulated in various music and art scenes full of them, and looking to some people “like a drug addict,” and walking the streets in the night-time for hours as I’ve done, forever and ever.

And I must say that in the moonlit hills a Homeric lung full of tabac feels quite human.

I am, however, deeply vain, and quite invested in that vanity, in addition to overlapping sensorial investments in the olfactory and gustatory elements of the life-world — drawing what pleasure I can, while I can, to the full exten𝘁 I can — and those pleasures are best drawn without all of that shit under your fingernails, though it’d be Neat if somehow smoking were good for you and also cleaned your upholstery.

Perhaps in the future there will be cigarettes the smoke of which will impart upon the user an array of nanomachinery or similar which will undertake the process of painless deep-teeth cleaning or interior repair of the ventricles or perhaps — perhaps! — ease in the facilitation of language-learning.

     Perhaps perhaps perhaps.

1. I am the only AMAB person in my family who is not active-duty or retired military personnel.

2. A former client had pot leaves embroidered in the linings of his $5-10k full-bespoke suits and sportcoats.

3. Another former client, now Washed in the Blood of legal income, confessed to having learnt his canna-biz fundamentals — quality control, marketing, logistics! — through the peripatetic laboratory of innovation and experimentation of the adjacent desert crystal meth scene.

4. It is a result of our very contemporary condition that I wonder at whether an Alexander McQueen + 10 yrs would be a “he,” a “they,” or something else — and it’s occurred to me that ‘e could function as a pronoun that obviates the problem of he/she while retaining the chaotic poesy of English language’s explicable wreckage, a bar (to me, to-whom it must surely apply should it be at all applicable) they-them sadly fails to clear.

I should note that the elegance of this innovation is proof-positive that I am smarter than Richard Stallman and have made considerably fewer apologies for Jeffrey Epstein than ‘e has, which I believe means that I now hold dozens of honorary degrees and titles.

5. Goodnight moon.

6. I had a business, you see. I still technically do. There are reasons for Me, Now to have wondered at the balance of my father’s foresight and criminality, and I can tell you that I believe in intuition a great deal more than I do the fake low-minded child’s’ idea of “crime” — I got to do it for Legal Money! I was washed, too! Who will wash my dead father? Hell, I didn’t even show up to do it. Still wonder if he killed himself.