The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  Next in priorities is which is packed firmer. Luckies.

  Next is which one holds moisture on the mouth end of the paper better and longer. This is important as a matter of comfort, lip comfort to be exact. Lips count too and you’re not enjoying smoking pleasure if it isn’t comfortable for the lip. Also worth considering in this behalf is where the moisture comes from, it comes from the tongue. It comes from the salivary glands but it’s by way of the tongue. So what happens indirectly is that if a cigarette paper requires a lot of moisture to stay wet then the tongue will be getting dry in the process of keeping the lip satisfied. So while it’s said that a good tobacco blend is one that won’t raw the tongue (this is debatable to say the least and what’s wrong with raw?) the fact of the matter is it’s the paper too that plays a role.

  The winner in the holds water longest and bestest is Camels.

  Next on the agenda is will the smoke be okay if you light the wrong end and which end is wrong? The wrong end is the end with the writing on it. It’s not wrong because it’s not supposed to be lit on that end, it’s wrong on account of the inconvenience caused the smoker. Cause the lettering end is the end nearest the open end of the pack and so you just plant your teeth on it and pull it out. If you had to take the time to take it out with your mitts it would be too long. So it’s the wrong end. It’s also the wrong end because soon after it’s lit the lettering will disappear from oxidation and you won’t be able to tell what brand it is.

  Both brands smoke okay when you light the wrong end.

  Okay next consideration is can you light them from the middle in an emergency? Yes, both will light from the middle in an emergency, in a non-emergency too. But the main emergency may be if it isn’t an emergency to begin with so you get uncautious and burn your nose in so doing. The Lucky lights faster in the middle than the Camel.

  Which burns faster? Well if you light both of them at exactly 4:58:05 and you lay them down unimpeded and come back at 5:07:21 you’ll notice something remarkable as a tender suspender. On the one hand there’s more ash on the Camel and on the other there’s also more unburned portion on the Camel too! In other words they started at the same length but something extraordinary has transpired in the interim. The logical explanation is there however, it’s a very good one. It’s that the Lucky burns faster and it also pulls its ash with it as it burns along! So it’s a most friendly cigarette, it’s one that refuses to reject even its dismembered grotesque burnt end and so it wins that part of the race although that part of the race was unscheduled. Plus it already won the burns fastest part so it has two big points.

  Now which has a better draw? A tie.

  (A subsidiary competition with no bearing in the final decision: which is better for lighting the other without a match? To be entirely within the confines of truth it must be said that Luckies light Camels better than Camels light Luckies but you could easily turn it around cause it’s not always better to give than receive. Hence inconclusive.)

  Easiest on the eyes. Neither.

  Pleasantest for inhaling. If mellowness is the criterion then it’s Camels. If the firewood feeling is the criterion then it’s Luckies. If you take out the tobacco from both and roll your own then it’s as close to mellow firewood as you can get and no fire extinguisher is needed. It’s a tossup here.

  Now it might be stressed that tobacco manufacturers and cigarettes in particular have never (never) done anything for the armless smoker. He or she has to keep it in there tight or it falls out and gets dirty so he or she has to start a new one so as not to infect the mouth with germs. So the cig gets smoked way down to a tiny butt because the person cannot even see how far down the smoke has gone without a mirror. Thus it’s important that the butt be good. Camel butts are better butts, no problem here.

  CONGRATULATIONS LUCKIES FOR WINNING!

  Gulcher: Post-Rock Cultural Pluralism (1649–1993), 1990

  David Rattray

  (1936–1993)

  A sadly under-known poet, elegant essayist, and distinguished translator, David Rattray was an extraordinary scholar, fluent in French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, among other tongues. He interviewed Ezra Pound for The Nation while an undergraduate at Dartmouth, studied at the Sorbonne, and earned a master’s in Comparative Literature at Harvard. While living in France, he became an expert on Antonin Artaud, retracing his footsteps and producing the best Artaud translations in English. Rattray also translated Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, René Crevel, and Friedrich Hölderlin, among others. His poems are collected in Opening the Eyelid (1990). Rattray also spent years as an editor for The Reader’s Digest, a seeming oddity, but he produced numerous scholarly books for The Reader’s Digest Press. This excerpt is from How I Became One of the Invisible, an anthology of his work assembled when Rattray was suffering from terminal brain cancer. He died at the age of fifty-seven.

  How I Became One of the Invisible

  IN ORDER to become one of the invisible, I had to go through an ordeal technically known as throwing oneself in the arms of God. This consisted of going out in the empty desert with nothing but the clothes that one was wearing and a bag containing certain things. Some of us stayed there for months, others years, many forever.

  One night I made up my mind. Pedro, who had already gone, walked out a ways with me in the moonlight.

  “Keep on until dawn,” he advised. “Then dig a hole just big enough to lie down in. Watch out for snakes and bugs. Wrap up. Try to sleep. Whatever you do, stay out of the sun. There is a cloth in your bag. Put it over your nose and mouth. The air out there is very clean but too hot to breathe. Travel at night. Locate plants; stay with them. Never leave one until you have figured out where the next one will be. Make a slit to suck out the moisture. Eat whatever you can chew, and pretty soon the plants will start coming out, just like stars. Follow them. If a plant makes you nervous, eat just a bit. Find out what it does. You will run into some that give strength, more than you ever dreamed of. At first you are going to feel miserable. You will want to die. Sand sticking to your clothes will rub your skin raw, get in your mouth and down your throat. You will be half blind. You’ll think all the time; your mind will race. You will have strange dreams. You will find yourself doing things you would never think of doing anywhere else. You will imagine you are going crazy. All this for a little walk in the sand. There are many animals. Start with the iguana. By the time you learn to get an iguana out of a hole you’ll also know how to keep him fresh. Break his back, tie the legs, block the jaws, drop him in the bag. Two days later, still fresh. You will find the desert as crowded as any habitat on earth. After the reptiles, animals and birds, you will meet a few other things. Devils, actually. When you tame your first devil you can eat scorpions if you choose. At that point you can also start going out in broad daylight. You’ll get tanned black all over, no matter what you wear. Lions and tigers will sit at your knees. Crocodiles, elephants, hippopotami will ferry you across the river that sometimes rushes through the center of this desert for a day and then vanishes as suddenly as it appeared. When it’s time for you to leave, there will be a sign in the sky. All of us witness it. You will feel something like a sudden draft of air. Turn round and face it and you’ll see a cloud of white dust pouring out of the sun. An iridescent arc will appear to the east. Within a few seconds the whole sky will glow with luminous crescent-shaped figures, the biggest of which will form itself into a circle round the sun. This will in turn be intersected by a second ring centered on the zenith, its circumference coinciding also with the sun’s position. The smaller arcs will fall into concentric patterns about these two grand rings, filling the whole sky with lights. Then you will imagine yourself inside a prism that is vibrating like a gong. You will long to vanish in thin air, to disappear in that sound.

  “Then, at the points, three of them, where the two grand circles intersect (east, north, west) you will witness something truly extraordinary: an extra sun at each. Four suns and a whole sky on fire. When you have
seen those four suns, turn around and tell your devils to pull their pants up and point you straight to the nearest town.”

  Four years later, Pedro and I found ourselves together again for the first time, sitting at a table by a mirror in the Café Estrella in Pochutla. The cafe faced out on the marketplace, opposite the jail. Glancing in the mirror, I could see that both of us were skeletally thin, and our eyes bright and bloodshot. In my hair and beard there were traces of gray that I had never seen before. Pedro was beardless still. Both of us wore the crazy-quilt of rags known in that part of the world as la túnica polimita de Joselito (“Little Joseph’s coat of many colors”).

  I found myself staring into a bowl of black coffee, breathless with rapture. Oblivious to me, Pedro worked at carving a pipestem, shaping it from a stick of wood known as jewelwood. Having roughed out a pentagonal star at one end of the pipe, Pedro took up an ice pick and hollowed out the inside a bit farther, then resumed where he had left off on the star.

  Not even the most flagrant of the invisible had ever yet had any serious trouble in Pochutla, so the town was a favorite stopping place. There was what we called a supervisor there, an old man who could if need be go to the authorities on our behalf. But the local Commander’s friendliness to us had always been so genuine, though distant, that none of us had ever needed help from the Pochutla supervisor since the previous Commander’s day. (The present incumbent was his nephew.) Not that the old Commander had been harsh, only his role in those times had been a much more serious one than that of his successor, or at least he had taken it more seriously.

  A generation earlier, the town had been invaded by a group of wandering midgets who were tinkers and bootleggers by trade. They sold and also drank absinthe in enormous quantities. The reason they had come to Pochutla was that the tomb of a long-dead saint named Pepe was there. During his lifetime some two generations before that, the midgets’ forebears had frequented and revered him. Now their tribe was dying out, and they decided to camp next to his tomb, having long claimed him as their patron and protector. Pepe was always said to be the wormwood-eater’s friend. Once settled in, next door to the tomb, they set up shop as repairmen and traffickers as usual.

  Late one night, the old Commander decided to get rid of them. Soldiers roused the midgets at bayonet point; they were given one hour to pack and leave. That same night the old Commander had a dream in which Pepe rebuked him. The saint looked just as he had in life, except in the dream his white beard reached all the way down to the ground. When Pepe finished, the old Commander noticed that a crack had opened at his feet and smoke was rising from it. He leaped out of bed, shouting.

  Soldiers went after the midgets. When they were overtaken and persuaded, with much kindness, to come back, the old Commander entertained them in the street in front of his house and (remembering the dream) said over and over:

  “Pepe is your friend. He loves you . . .”

  We invisibles encountered real trouble only when we allowed ourselves to be seduced by the attractions of the city. There we were viewed as untouchables.

  In the capital, for instance, because a newspaper publisher whose brother was a senator had denounced our order as an anachronistic and malodorous impropriety, policemen kicked and punched those of us they had arrested until they were themselves exhausted. Then in the middle of the night the victims would be pushed, more dead than alive, into the back of a truck and driven out to an empty spot on the highway to be discharged with warnings never to return.

  For his part, Pedro had long since resolved never again to visit the big city. We were now staying at a settlement in the salt swamps south of Pochutla, some ten miles inland from the sea, an area so flat that from the top of a stepladder placed anywhere one saw the ocean glistening in the distance like a curved blade. Between oneself and it, there was an unending expanse of reeds running in all directions, billowy yellow, and bounded on the east by the snaky brown, blue and white outlines of the mountains which defined the approaches to the Wilderness bordering Pochutla to the south.

  The swamp settlement served only as a rest stop for transients, and as in all such places there were only a few permanent visitors, a supervisor, and a handful of old men who had decided to remain until their death.

  Built on an island of dry ground, the red mud huts we were living in formed a circle round an inner square at the center of which there was an immense and ancient olive tree, its trunk and branches forming an umbrella beneath which we spent long days outdoors in dry weather.

  Squatting in two parallel rows facing one another, we played the pebble game. As the game proceeded, both spectators and players kept up a continuous nasal drone the whole time, punctuated only by the click of the pebbles and the beat of a drum played by an aged resident.

  The purpose of this game was twofold: it could be used for gambling or as a method of divination, thus resembling almost any other game. However, we set no store by material possessions and had no interest at all in predicting future events. Nevertheless, we surrendered ourselves body and soul to this game of nonexistent stakes and meaningless prognostications. Quitting for the day, an hour or so before sunset, one of us might tell his brothers how he had been to the bottom of a sea teeming with luminous fishes and plants, while another, who could have told how his soul had been ravished into the center of a rainbow, said nothing. At other times, the lives of various paragons of preceding generations were related. One whose name was Serafin I often heard cited as a prodigy.

  Serafin had worn woolen clothes exclusively. He refused to put on any garment that was not one hundred percent wool. He wore his hair long, never married and renounced worldly things. All that he had was his mother. Her he honored with absolute obedience. Serafin traveled constantly, but never set out without his mother’s permission, and he always returned on the exact date set by her. He smoked tobacco mixed with rifa, was afraid of the dark and could not sleep by himself. Nor could he endure the neighing of horses or the braying of donkeys. He had the gift of second sight. When an inhabitant of any of the villages through which he passed in his wanderings was about to die, Serafin was likely to appear briefly and then, wraithlike, vanish. This always happened at dawn, so that the mere sight of him at that hour came to be taken as a sign that someone must die within the day. Serafin had a prodigious memory. It was said that he had spent some months in a flying saucer where he met with scientists from another planet who taught him their language, their names and the names of their cities.

  The evening meal was the only meal of the day in our settlements. The fare varied according to season and the number of people on hand. Sometimes it consisted of nothing more than a pot of boiled mallow root. We were not prevented by this diet, however, from enjoying happy dreams during the hours of darkness. Each night we gathered round the fire with our pipes, some in small groups round a waterpipe, others sitting alone or in pairs with the smaller pocket pipes. We filled the pipes with the ground-up leaves and flowers of the rifa plant (sometimes mixed with a pinch of Mixtec tobacco) and thus made up for our indifference to the pleasures of eating with an unbounded appetite for the joys of smoking rifa, so much so that the inhabitants of the region had a saying to the effect that if there were no more rifa left on the face of the earth, the invisibles would nonetheless have a little something left over.

  On the question of how this plant first came to be discovered, we used to tell the story of a king of old who was out walking one day with his top adviser and noticed a plant whose distinctive odor aroused his curiosity. Uprooting it, he dried the stems, flowers and leaves, then ground them up. Later, after taking them in a mixture of cloves and honey, he was filled with a mysterious bright, warm feeling. When the adviser asked whether he was satisfied with the experiment, the king replied.

  “ana h’tloc a rifa (I was looking for precisely this!).”

  Thus both the name of rifa (“precisely this!”) and rifa itself were discovered on the same day.

  Mixtec tobacco, which we n
ot only sometimes mixed in pipes with rifa for smoking but often chewed while trekking cross-country, was the only kind we ever used. This tobacco was endowed with the most energetic properties, twenty to thirty times more powerful than the ordinary leaf. Our order had used it for the past thousand years, ever since one of the invisible was initiated by a hermit who made him a gift of some cured leaves, together with the following charm:

  Chew me and be strong,

  Drink my juice, your every member

  Will tingle all day long;

  Smoke me and remember.

  Not that the introduction of tobacco was without serious consequences for us. Because of it, a number of heterodox brethren withdrew to hermitages near or actually within the Wilderness, where—typically—each would build himself a hut, live by fruit-gathering and clear a patch of ground, with his sole object to grow tobacco plants, to live in their midst and to chew and smoke them day and night.

  All of us without exception had two pipes, one pocket and one water. The waterpipe consisted of a long stem inserted in a fat earthenware bowl, which rested on the ground, with a hollowed-out smokehole of conventional type, whereas the pocket pipe was simply a length of hollowed wood with a small metal bowl.

  We thought of these two pipes as a pair of demons, the waterpipe a female and the pocket pipe a male. This demonic couple we imagined to be in league to bewitch their owner and keep him in a state of enslavement, for the pocket pipe was forever glued to its owner’s lips while on the road or otherwise employed, and the waterpipe was the companion of our nights next to the embers of a lone campfire or with our brothers in the darkness of a cave, smokehut or hostelry.