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Be Happy, Go Lucky

2023; University of Missouri; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mis.2023.0001

1548-9930

Joe Walpole,

Assistive Technology in Communication and Mobility

Be Happy, Go Lucky Joe Walpole (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by chris vaughan [End Page 102] Boyhood, if you'll remember, was performance art. So I traded my youth for a cigarette. At the time, I considered it a good deal. Cigarettes went well with coffee and beer and rock-'n'-roll, and I never wanted to be young. My youth was shot anyway as I blew through my days in diners and donut shops and dances, then, later, discos and bars and romances. Truth to tell, I was a miserable sonofabitch from eighteen to eternity. My family had collapsed, God had died; I put a sign on my door that said, gone drinking. I hated who I was, and I hated who I was not. Soon, I had a face twice my age. The bitter, acrid taste in my mouth from constant smoking was also the bitter, acrid taste of my heart. So I smoked like a chimney; I smoked like a train, one damn coffin nail after another. I once counted them up and came up with something like 292,807 cigarettes, conservatively estimated. All this started back when cars had faces and faces had cigarettes and cigarettes had their place as props in the ritual of teenage truculence. [End Page 103] I smoked around the clock, with my whole being, body and soul. First thing in the morning—I woke up, got up, lit up. In the shower, I would hold the cigarette up and away from the sloshing splish-splash of the spray and take a toke—that jolt, no, that thunderbolt: immediate, the poor man's electroshock therapy. As I dried off with the towel, the cigarette, soggy thing, dangled from my lips, smoke sluicing out both corners of my mouth. For breakfast, I served myself coffee and Lucky Strikes, the real breakfast of champions. Before starting the car, I would make sure the trunk contained at least one carton of cigarettes in case of emergency—emergency defined as the pack of Luckies in my shirt pocket was down to its last ten cancer sticks—and then I would drive off into the day, lighting a butt with the car lighter, tobacco particles sticking like volcanic residue to the broiling coil. Always and everywhere, I kept the cigarette pack within arm's reach. Hungry? Have a smoke. Nicotine: it was in my capillaries. I shit tobacco burley brown. If I cut an arm or a leg, smoke gushed out. Even in my sleep I smoked—a pack of smokes and the Zippo sat in an ashtray directly under my bed on the left side, such that when my left hand reached for the ashtray in the dark, my eyes did not open. I simply placed the ashtray on my chest, and I smoked, and I dreamed my dopamine dreams, the nicotine quick to the brain, serene, just the moon in the window and the dark and the cool throat and the red tip of the fag and me on my back, readying myself, steadying myself, for the next morning's cigarette hangover. _______ As with first sex, everyone remembers their first cigarette. Mine happened when I was in second grade. The damn thing felt like a bullet ripping through my throat. I had been taught well the sinfulness of smoking. The ban on smoking originated, I was led to believe, in the Ten Commandments, Exodus something something, where the Bible says, Thou shalt not smoke—an injunction that came right after Thou shalt not curse. My mother said so. The problem was, I was a born-again commandment breaker. I held on to my bad habits every chance I got, for there was nothing in the world as good as bad. I mean, what was the sense in being a boy if you couldn't be bad? So one morning, as temptation lay before me, a serpentine curl of smoke snaking out of the grass, I took it as a perfect opportunity for this bad boy to do some good honest-to-God sinning. I pinched the thing between my thumb and forefinger and, making sure nobody saw, took a...