When You Are Engulfed in Flames

by David Sedaris

  I don’t know what got her started again: stress, force of habit, or perhaps she decided that she was too old to quit. I’d probably have agreed with her, though now, of course, sixty-one, that’s nothing.

  There would be other attempts to stop smoking, but none of them lasted more than a few days. Lisa would tell me that Mom hadn’t had a cigarette in eighteen hours. Then, when my mother called, I’d hear the click of her lighter, followed by a ragged intake of breath. “What’s new, pussycat?”

  Seven

  Somewhere between my first cigarette and my last one, I became a business traveler. The business I conduct is reading out loud, but still I cover a lot of territory. At first I was happy to stay in any old place, be it a Holiday Inn or a Ramada near the airport. Bedspreads were usually slick to the touch, and patterned in dark, stain-concealing colors. Parked here and there on the hallway carpets were any number of cockeyed trays, each with a hamburger bun or a crust of French toast on it. Room service, I’d think. How fancy can you get?

  It didn’t take long to become more discriminating. It seems that when you’re paying for yourself, any third-rate chain will do. But if someone else is footing the bill, you sort of need the best. The places that made me the insufferable snob I am today ranged from the fine to the ridiculously fine. Sheets had the snap of freshly minted money, and there was always some little gift waiting on the coffee table: fruit, maybe, or a bottle of wine. Beside the gift was a handwritten note from the manager, who wanted to say how pleased he was to have me as a guest. “Should you need anything, anything at all, please phone me at the following number,” he would write.

  The temptation was to call and demand a pony — “and be quick about it, man, this mood of mine won’t last forever” — but of course I never did. Too shy, I guess. Too certain that I would be bothering someone.

  More than a decade into my snobitude, I’m still reluctant to put anyone out. Once someone sent a cake to my room, and rather than call downstairs and ask for silverware I cut it with my credit card and ate the pieces with my fingers.

  When I first started traveling for business, it was still possible to smoke. Not as possible as it had been in the eighties, but most places allowed it. I remember complaining when, in order to have a cigarette, I had to walk to the other end of the terminal, but in retrospect that was nothing. As the nineties progressed, my life grew increasingly difficult. Airport bars and restaurants became “clean-air zones,” and those few cities that continued to allow smoking constructed hideous tanks.

  The ones in Salt Lake City were kept in good condition, but those in St. Louis and Atlanta were miniature, glass-walled slums: ashtrays never emptied, trash on the ground, air ducts exposed and sagging from the caramel-colored ceiling. Then there were the people. My old friend with the hole in his throat was always there, as was his wife, who had a suitcase in one hand and an oxygen tank in the other. Alongside her were the servicemen from Abu Ghraib, two prisoners handcuffed to federal agents, and the Joad family. It was a live antismoking commercial, and those passing by would often stop and point, especially if they were with children. “See that lady with the tube taped to her nose? Is that what you want to happen to you?”

  In one of these tanks, I sat beside a woman whose two-year-old son was confined to a wheelchair. This drew the sort of crowd that normally waves torches, and I admired the way the mother ignored it. After hot-boxing three quarters of her Salem, she tossed the butt in the direction of the ashtray, saying, “Damn, that was good.”

  As nasty as the tanks could be, I never turned my back on one. The only other choice was to go outside, which became increasingly complicated and time-consuming after September 11. In a big-city airport, it would likely take half an hour just to reach the main entrance, after which you’d have to walk ten, then twenty, then fifty yards from the door. Cars the size of school buses would pass, and the driver, who was most often the only person on board, would give you that particular look, meaning, “Hey, Mr. Puffing on Your Cigarette, thanks a lot for ruining our air.”

  As the new century advanced, more and more places went completely smoke-free. This included all the Marriott hotels. That in itself didn’t bother me so much — Screw them, I thought — but Marriott owns the Ritz-Carltons, and when they followed suit I sat on my suitcase and cried.

  Not just businesses, but entire towns have since banned smoking. They’re generally not the most vital places on the map, but still they wanted to send a message. If you thought you could enjoy a cigarette in one of their bars or restaurants, then think again, and the same goes for their hotel rooms. Knowing that a traveler would not be smoking while sitting at his desk at the Palookaville Hyatt: I guess this allowed the townspeople to sleep a little easier at night. For me it marked the beginning of the end.

  I don’t know why bad ideas spread faster than good ones, but they do. Across the board, smoking bans came into effect, and I began to find myself outside the city limits, on that ubiquitous commercial strip between the waffle restaurant and the muffler shop. You may not have noticed, but there’s a hotel there. It doesn’t have a pool, yet still the lobby smells like chlorine, with just a slight trace of French fries. Should you order the latter off the room service menu, and find yourself in need of more ketchup, just wipe some off your telephone, or off the knob to the wall-mounted heating and air-conditioning unit. There’s mustard there too. I’ve seen it.

  The only thing worse than a room in this hotel is a smoking room in this hotel. With a little fresh air, it wouldn’t be quite so awful, but, nine times out of ten, the windows have been soldered shut. Either that, or they open only a quarter of an inch, this in case you need to toss out a slice of toast. The trapped and stagnant smoke is treated with an aerosol spray, the effectiveness of which tends to vary. At best it recalls a loaded ashtray, the butts soaking in a shallow pool of lemonade. At worst it smells like a burning mummy.

  The hotels I found myself reduced to had posters hanging in the elevators. “Our Deep Dish Pizza Is Pantastic!!!” one of them read. Others mentioned steak fingers or “appeteazers,” available until 10:00 at Perspectives or Horizons, always billed as “The place to see and be seen!” Go to your room, and there are more pictures of food, most in the form of three-dimensional flyers propped beside the telephone and clock radio. If it’s rare to find a really good photograph of bacon, it’s rarer still to find one on your bedside table. The same is true of nachos. They’re just not photogenic.

  When my room is on the ground floor, the view out my window is of a parked eighteen-wheel truck, but if I’m higher up I can sometimes see the waffle restaurant parking lot, and beyond that the interstate. The landscape is best described as “pedestrian hostile.” It’s pointless to try to take a walk, so I generally just stay in the room and think about shooting myself in the head. In a decent hotel there’s always a bath to look forward to, but here the tub is shallow and made of fiberglass. When the stopper is gone — and it usually is — I plug the drain with a balled-up plastic bag. The hot water runs out after three minutes or so, and then I just lie there, me and a bar of biscuit-sized soap that smells just like the carpet.

  I told myself that if this was where I needed to stay in order to smoke, then so be it. To hell with the Ritz-Carltons and the puritanical town councils. I’d gone without decent sheets for close to forty years, and now I would do so again. My resolve lasted through the autumn of 2006 but was never terribly strong. By the time I found a wad of semen on the buttons of my remote control, I had already begun to consider the unthinkable.

  Eight

  If the first step in quitting was to make up my mind, the second was to fill my eventual void. I hated leaving a hole in the smoking world, and so I recruited someone to take my place. People have given me a lot of grief, but I’m pretty sure that after high school, this girl would have started anyway, especially if she chose the army over community college.

  After crossing “replacement” off my list, I moved on to step three. Accord
ing to the experts, the best way to quit smoking is to change your environment, shake up your routine a little. For people with serious jobs and responsibilities, this might amount to moving your sofa, or driving to work in a rental car. For those with less serious jobs and responsibilities, the solution was to run away for a few months: new view, new schedule, new lease on life.

  As I searched the atlas for somewhere to run to, Hugh made a case for his old stomping grounds. His first suggestion was Beirut, where he went to nursery school. His family left there in the midsixties and moved to the Congo. After that, it was Ethiopia, and then Somalia, all fine places in his opinion.

  “Let’s save Africa and the Middle East for when I decide to quit living,” I said.

  In the end, we settled on Tokyo, a place we had gone the previous summer. The city has any number of things to recommend it, but what first hooked me was the dentistry. People looked as if they’d been chewing on rusty bolts. If a tooth was whole, it most likely protruded, or was wired to a crazy-looking bridge. In America I smile with my mouth shut. Even in France and England I’m self-conscious, but in Tokyo, for the first time in years, I felt normal. I loved the department stores too and the way the employees would greet their customers. “Irrasshimase!” They sounded like cats, and when a group would call out in unison, the din was fantastic. When I looked back on our short, three-day visit, I thought mainly of the curiosities: a young woman dressed for no reason like Bo Peep, a man riding a bike while holding a tray. It had a bowl of noodles on it, and though the broth went right up to the rim, he hadn’t spilled so much as a drop.

  I’d thought of Japan as a smoker’s paradise, but, like everywhere else, it had gotten more restrictive. In most areas of Tokyo, it is illegal to walk the streets with a lit cigarette in your hand. This doesn’t mean that you can’t smoke, just that you can’t move and smoke at the same time. Outdoor ashtrays have been set up, and while they’re not as numerous as one might wish, still they exist. Most are marked with metal signs, the Japanese and English messages accompanied by simple illustrations: “Please mind your manners.” “Don’t throw butts into the street.” “Use portable ashtrays in consideration of others around you.”

  At a smoking station in the neighborhood of Shibuya, the messages were more thought-provoking, as were the pictures that accompanied them: “I carry a 700-degree fire in my hand with people walking all around me!” “Before I pass gas, I look behind me, but I don’t bother when I’m smoking.” “A lit cigarette is held at the height of a child’s face.”

  All of the messages were related to civics. Smoking leads to litter. Smoking can possibly burn or partially blind those around you. There was none of the finger wagging you see in America, none of the “shouldn’t you know better?” and the “how could you?” admonitions that ultimately ignite more cigarettes than they extinguish.

  When it came to restrictions, Japan was just the opposite of everywhere else. Instead of sending its smokers outdoors, it herded them inside where there was money to be made. In coffee shops and restaurants, in cabs and offices and hotel rooms, life was like a black-and-white movie. Compared to the United States, it was shocking, but compared to France it seemed fairly normal, the most telling difference being the warning labels on the sides of the packs. In France they read, “SMOKING WILL KILL YOU,” the letters so big they can be read from space. In Japan both the writing and the message were more discreet: “Be careful of how much you smoke so as not to damage your health.”

  There was no mention of cancer or emphysema and certainly no pictures of diseased organs. They do that in Canada, and while I don’t know that it encourages people to quit, I do know that it makes for one ugly package.

  What with all the indoor smoking, Japan was something of a throwback. It might seem the place to start rather than stop, but when I finally thought of quitting, I thought of Tokyo. Its foreignness would take me out of myself, I hoped, and give me something to concentrate on besides my own suffering.

  Nine

  We decided on Tokyo in early November, and before I could back out, Hugh found us an apartment in the neighborhood of Minato-ku. The building was a high-rise, and most of the tenants were short term. The real estate agent sent pictures, and I viewed them with mixed feelings. Tokyo I was excited about, but the idea of not smoking — of actually going through with this — made me a little sick. The longest I’d ever gone without a cigarette was twelve hours, but that was on an airplane so it probably didn’t count.

  On an average day I’d smoke around a pack and a half, more if I was drunk or on drugs, and more still if I was up all night, working against a deadline. The next morning I’d have what amounted to a nicotine hangover, my head all stuffy, my tongue like some filthy sandal crammed into my mouth — not that it prevented me from starting all over again the moment I got out of bed. I used to wait until I had a cup of coffee in my hand, but by the early 1990s, that had gone by the wayside. The only rule now was that I had to be awake.

  In preparing myself to quit, I started looking at this or that individual cigarette, wondering why I’d lit it in the first place. Some you just flat-out need — the ones you reach for after leaving the dentist’s office or the movie theater — but others were smoked as a kind of hedge. “Only if I light this will my bus appear,” I’d tell myself. “Only if I light this will the ATM give me small bills.” There were cigarettes lit because the phone was ringing, because the doorbell was ringing, even a passing ambulance was an excuse. There would certainly be bells and sirens in Tokyo, but I doubted that anyone would come to our door. What with the time difference, I wasn’t expecting many calls either. When not panicking, I could sometimes congratulate myself on what was actually a pretty decent plan.

  Ten

  In the summer of 2006, shortly before our three-day trip to Tokyo, I bought a Japanese-language CD. It was just the basics: “Good morning,” “May I have a fork?” that type of thing. The person giving the English translation spoke at a normal pace, but the one speaking Japanese, a woman, was remarkably slow and hesitant. “Koooonniiiichiii waaa,” she’d say. “Ooooohaaaayooooo goooooo . . . zaimasssssuuu.” I memorized everything she said and arrived in Japan feeling pretty good about myself. A bellman escorted Hugh and me to our hotel room and, without too much trouble, I was able to tell him that I liked it. “Korrree gaaa sukiii dessssu.” The following morning I offered a few pleasantries to the concierge, who politely told me that I was talking like a lady, an old, rich one, apparently. “You might want to speed it up a little,” he suggested.

  A lot of people laughed at my Japanese on that trip, but I never felt that I was being made fun of. Rather, it was like I’d performed a trick, something perverse and unexpected, like pulling a sausage out of my ear. When I first came to France, I was afraid to open my mouth, but in Tokyo, trying was fun. The five dozen phrases I’d memorized before coming served me in good stead, and I left the country wanting to learn more.

  This led me to a second, much more serious instructional program — forty-five CDs as opposed to just one. The speakers were young, a guy and a girl, and they didn’t slow down for anybody. The idea here was to listen and repeat — no writing whatsoever — but that, to me, sounded too good to be true. It wasn’t advised, but at the end of each lesson I’d copy all the new words and phrases onto index cards. These allowed me to review, and, even better, to be quizzed. Hugh has no patience for that sort of thing, so I had my sisters Amy and Lisa do it. The two of them came to Paris for Christmas, and at the end of every day I’d hand one or the other of them my stack of cards.

  “All right,” Lisa might say. “How do you ask if I’m a second-grade reading teacher?”

  “I haven’t learned that yet. If it’s not written down, I don’t know how to say it.”

  “Oh, really?” She’d then pull a card from the stack and frown at it. “All right, say this: ‘As for this afternoon, what are you going to do?’”

  “Gogo wa, nani o shimasu ka?”

  �
�‘What did you do this afternoon?’ Can you say that in Japanese?”

  “Well, no —”

  “Can you say that you and your older sister saw a bad movie with a dragon in it? Can you at least say ‘dragon’?”

  “No.”

  “I see,” she said, and as she reached for another card, I felt a mounting hopelessness.

  It was even worse when Amy quizzed me. “How do you ask someone for a cigarette?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How do you say, ‘I tried to quit, but it’s not working’?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Say ‘I’ll give you a blow job if you’ll give me a cigarette.’”

  “Just stick to the index cards.”

  “Say ‘Goodness, how fat I’ve become! Can you believe how much weight I’ve gained since I quit smoking’?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I think I’ll just do this on my own.”

  Eleven

  In the months preceding our trip to Tokyo, I spoke to quite a few people who had either quit smoking or tried to. A number of them had stopped for years. Then their stepgrandmother died or their dog grew a crooked tooth, and they picked up where they’d left off.

  “Do you think you were maybe looking for a reason to start again?” I asked.

  All of them said no.

  The message was that you were never really safe. An entire decade without a cigarette, and then . . . wham! My sister Lisa started again after six years, and told me, as had others, that quitting was much more difficult the second time around.

  When asked how they made it through the first few weeks, a lot of people mentioned the patch. Others spoke of gum and lozenges, of acupuncture, hypnosis, and some new drug everyone had heard about but no one could remember the name of. Then there were the books. The problem with most so-called quit lit is that there are only so many times you can repeat the words “smoking” and “cigarettes.” The trick is to alternate them, not to reach for your thesaurus. It bothers me to read that so-and-so “inhaled a cancer stick,” that he “sucked up a coffin nail.” I don’t know anyone who refers to tobacco as “the evil weed.” People in the UK genuinely say “fags,” but in America it’s just embarrassing and self-consciously naughty, like calling a cat a pussy.