Some prose, for a change.

Flicking It.

My dad tells stories of being thirteen years old, sitting at the family dinner table, after eating, his parents and his sisters and him, all smoking, all flicking the butts into the kitchen sink to burn out. There are pictures of him from the early seventies, outdoors or indoors, outside the middle school he taught at, inside the law school he went to, arm around my then-twenty-something mother or not – but always with a cigarette dangling from his lips, a too-skinny, Jewish, afroed, hippie James Dean wearing too-tight corduroy pants. A decade later, he sometimes appears in home movies, my infant sister in one arm, the other draped over the side of a couch or a chair, index and middle fingers straddling a lit cigarette; more often, though, he’s behind the camera, revealed only by his voice awkwardly commanding the action in front of him (Open the one with the green bow now. Wait. Now give your brother a hug. Ok, now blow them out.) and the wafts of smoke that occasionally drift into the shot.

It wasn’t until my middle school years that his smoking became a problem. He’d fallen ill, had left his office downtown, and was home almost all the time, spending much of the day and night in the home office that for so long had been so under-used. After a few months, the carpet and fabric-covered desk chair and wood desk—none expensive, but previously like-new—all had their own small, sort-of-circular burns. (The strands of earth-toned Berber carpet melted down into rounded pellets the size and shape of the smallest kernels of corn at the narrow end of the cob. Desk burns were the most intriguing: the burn would begin as a circle, but then would follow the grain of the wood, giving it tendrils, like an artist’s rendition of a live flame, inching onward. Burns on the chair just became holes in the fabric, revealing the yellow foam padding beneath. On the weekends, late at night, when I used the computer in his office to chat online with my friends, I’d poke at the holes in the chair, and rub my toes on the now-massaging Berber kernels, and stare at the smoky shapes inscribed on the desk.) But the burns weren’t the problem. It was all the smoking. All the additional smoking in the house. Aside from a few early morning and before-bed smokes, his two-and-a-half-packs-a-day habit had always been satisfied elsewhere. Now yellow tar flavored and colored our lives. Our clothes smelled—his office was next to the laundry room—and wallpaper, heating vents, and electrical outlets were various shades of nicotined ocher, and ashtrays and half-smoked butts floating in glasses of flat, watery Coke became fixtures in the kitchen and family room. My sister, no longer an infant in his arms but a defiant 16-year-old we all somewhat-lovingly called “The Queen,” demanded changes. The door to his office had to remain closed even when he wasn’t smoking, the window had to remain open when he was; when she was home, he had to smoke outside; and even when she wasn’t, he could only smoke in two rooms. So it was that my dad, just when he started spending time at home, was confined to his office and his bathroom.

As middle school turned to high school for me, my dad’s health finally improved – despite his smoking, as his doctors still chronically inform him. With his new lease on life, he embraced the cliché. Freed from home, he was unconfined, and he became a fixture at every somewhat local restaurant with a bar where smoking was allowed. He rarely ate alone (His being a regular, his being friendly with restaurant owners and bartenders and waitresses—though I’m a regular nowhere, my friends tell me now that I am similarly flirtatious with waitresses—is something I associate with other women. I’ve been to suburban bars with him where waiters, who apparently have never seen my dad without a female companion, assume we have a third who is yet to arrive – where my dad can order “the usual,” and actually get his meat cooked extra well done like he likes it. Recently, during one of my breaks from law school, he took me and my mother to one of these mostly-nighttime places for lunch. “Al, how you doin?” the bartender called out, as my dad—who was only ever “Al” with archetypal Chicagoans—directed the hostess to the table he wanted. I winced a bit at his ease, wondering whether anyone could tell that this one was my mother.), he sometimes didn’t come home, and eventually he moved out of the house.

But once, I must have been about thirteen, I remember sitting with him in that old office, as I occasionally did, reading on the couch, fingering the thinning brown fabric with its once-white, yellowed flowers when I wasn’t turning pages. My sister must have been home because he asked me to go out on the porch with him while he smoked. I did, and as we stood there, watching our neighbors play with their kids in the cul-de-sac, he gave me a cigarette and told me to put it in my mouth and let it hang there. “Just for kicks,” he said. I took it between my two first fingers and brought it to my lips, licking them first in hesitation. How the outer paper of the filter stuck to my lower lip surprised me, and I finally understood the magic behind my dad’s ability to talk with a cigarette in his mouth, the lit end flapping up and down with his words. As air came through the filter, I tasted the tobacco – sharp and a bit sweet, it somehow tasted like it needed to be burned. Not liking its rawness, I took it from my mouth, again between two fingers, as he always did. “How do you flick them?” I asked him. He brought his cigarette to his mouth and left it there, and then took the unlit one from my hand. He started to show me how to position it with my forefinger and thumb, but “You really need to do it with a butt,” he said, handing it back to me. I took it, thinking at first that he was actually going to have me smoke it, but he didn’t want me to light it; he wouldn’t have let me had I wanted to. He took a long drag from his, and then stubbed it out on the underside of the porch railing and handed me the butt. He showed me again how to hold it, figuring out how to translate his righty orientation to my left-handedness. With the butt in place, he let go, as though it were a bicycle seat and I was ready to pedal on my own. I flicked it. Down at my shoes. “Pick it up,” he laughed, “You’ll get it. Like this,” he said, flicking the air.

(When he left home, his office was once again unused for a year or so, until the house sold to a divorcee with four kids, who no doubt covered the Berber kernels with furniture when his office became the fourth bedroom we had never needed. His desk chair, with its holes, remained with my mother for years, until I took it from her for a new apartment post-college, and subsequently left it with my roommate, who has since thrown it out – because of the holes. The desk is now in my dad’s new home office—his business was disrupted too badly by his illness to ever allow a move back to the city—and it has fresh burns, from his same old Winston Ultra-Lights, and his girlfriend's Marlboros (the two of them quit together occasionally, and they start up again in equal measure), reaching out through the wood’s grain and cracks in the varnish. Out of habit, I suppose, he still opens the window in the office when he’s smoking, and, out of forgetfulness, I suppose, he leaves it perpetually open – so, like his old office in our old house, though the warm smell of cigarettes is always present, the room is forever either too hot or too cold.)

With something similar in mind, I think, after the last exam of my first semester of law school, standing in the still unfamiliar sun of a California December, I bummed a smoke from a classmate. He was surprised that I asked, and again when I didn’t cough as the smoke flooded my lungs and tickled through my nasal passages. Looking at me, a shot glass of whiskey (provided by the sympathetic second-year students) in my right hand and a lit cigarette dangling between the forefingers of my left, he joked, “Not a very California image.” Still expecting a cough, he paused. And, filling his otherwise unfulfilled pause, as I let the smoke leak back out through my mouth and nose, and rolled the cigarette slowly between my thumb and forefinger, I said, “I have my father to thank.”