Advice for the Smoker

I am currently yearning for a cigarette, and in mourning for my life as a smoker.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message I am no longer smoking,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

Cigarettes were my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

I smoked my first smoke at the age of fifteen with an impossibly glamorous Quebecoise who, aside from smoking had also slept with an older man. We feared her and wanted to be her.

I bought my first pack shortly after. Heart pounding, I went to the RiteAid on Frederick Ave and tried to order camels. The old lady behind the counter smiled and said, “honey, how old are you?”

Undeterred, I went to the 7-11 across the street and the guy there- long, greasy hair, knowing smile- sold me my first pack. I panicked and asked for Camel Wides. Uuuurgh.

In my 20’s, smoking was a strictly evening thing. A beer and a cigarette go SO WELL together, and it was a great way to meet people. See a cute boy? Wait til he lights up, and then, even though you have a lighter secure in your purse, ask for a light. When smoking bans went into effect there was even more material to start a conversation with. You could open with the weather OR the bullshit of the smoking ban.

In Turkey I learned the term “Smoke like a Turk” and I became a serious smoker. It was the only way to make friends. I’d go out with Jim in our ten minute breaks, just to talk to someone, and I cadged at first but then I gave in and started buying my own packs. In my career in Istanbul, every promotion, every advancement can be traced back to a cigarette break with the boss.

But my love affair goes deeper than that. How to explain what cigarettes mean to me? For instance, when writing, when I get stuck, I simply step outside and light up. A cigarette is the perfect length of time to figure out what comes next. A cigarette is the perfect length of time to decide what to say on a difficult phone call. It’s the perfect length of time to absorb what you’ve just read. It’s the perfect length of time to come back to yourself, to recenter, to decide on a plan of action. When you wake up, it’s a lovely way to acclimate to the new day- stand on the balcony, look at the sky, smoke. And then go in for your coffee.

I also love the gestures of smoking, the weight of a cigarette in your hand, the inhale and the exhale. I am one of the few who loves the smell of it.

In short, I love smoking.

However.

We are now in a culture where smokers are not so popular. My mama, I know, went on a crusade to stop my grandparents from smoking and succeeded. Did nana smoke while mom and uncle Walt were in the womb? Absolutely. It was, at that time, medically advised. Smaller babies = less damage. My mother seems fine. It’s hard to tell- we’re naturally phlegmy people with a tendency to sneeze and have alarming coughs whether or not we do smoke.

Lord, I would love a smoke right now.

When confronted with the converted or the never tried, a smoker is presented with a manners dilemma.

“You shouldn’t smoke! It’s bad for you!”

Lord if I had a penny for every time someone said this to me, I’d be in Odessa already. “Really? I thought these were Vitamin C sticks!”

“You really need to quit!” Fuck you, you’re not my dad.

“Have you tried the [patch, gum, vaporizor thingy widget]?”

“Yep.”

“You should try again. It saved my life. It really, really works.”

Gum makes my mouth numb and gives me the shakes. I’ve never tried patches. I’ve huffed off people’s fake cigarettes before but they lack that essential hour glass quality of burning down- the thing that makes cigarettes most valuable in my eyes is that they provide a brief punctuation to your day. You are here, in this spot, for the length of time it takes to inhale the toxic fumes of this little stick of adulterated tobacco. You are here.

You might almost, if you were reading too much Rumi at the moment, consider them a form of prayer.

“You really need to quit.”

Fuck you.

There was an article on Slate recently, that discussed the link between smoking and lung cancer, which is not so strong as people have been lead to believe. It also, to some degree, explored how people are relieved when someone had lung cancer and smoked. “THAT’s why they got sick!” There’s a solution. And people are super judgey of the smokers among us, in America, I find. (Even in Turkey I almost daily found myself saying “No shit! I thought these were healthy!”) Never mind the fact that people who’ve never smoked die of lung cancer routinely now, whereas in 1915 it was a rare disease. Never mind the effluence of factories, the amount of our breathable air that’s occupied by bits of rubber from cars. Smokers are the cause of all lung disease. We should be banished.

It’s 3 in the morning now, and I confess to being somewhat of an insomniac, and I cannot tell you which I’d prefer at the moment: a cigarette or instant sleep.

Oh cigarettes, I shall miss thee.

 

 

 

 

The Health Care Debate

In the fall of 2005 I had no health insurance. I paid for my lady-doctor visits out of pocket once a year, and having had one case of flu in the previous seven years, considered myself fairly healthy and hale. The small business where I worked didn’t offer health insurance, and the out of pocket cost, monthly, was as much as a car payment, so I didn’t bother. 

One day at the end of September, 2005 I went out on my bike and got caught in an awful rainshower. I arrived home drenched through to my underwear, and walking to my room left puddles everywhere. I was unbelievably cranky. I ordered Chinese, and the sweet and sour soup never felt so good going down. The next morning I woke up basically unable to talk, with a fever of 103. 

I would later learn I had tonsillitis. It took me a week to figure out the uninsured thing- that I needed to go to a clinic at the hospital and show documents that showed I had no insurance, which were difficult to get. At the clinic I was seen by trainee doctors. 

A funny thing about illness- you always present better in the morning, and I always had appointments in the morning, and I was by far the healthiest-looking specimen in the waiting room, next to the AIDS patients and the syphilis patients and the patients recovering from gun shot wounds or diabetes amputations. 

I was dismissed. 

I was given antibiotics, and multiple AIDS tests, (there was one morning where I was so beaten down I thought I must HAVE AIDS if they were so insistent, and how was I gonna tell my mom? I started crying.) but never given an x-ray. 

At week two the pain in my side started. The next time I went to the clinic I told them it felt an awful lot like how it felt when I had pneumonia in college. I wasn’t rattling in my chest, so they sent me home with more antibiotics and told me not to worry.

Sometime around here I was laying on the couch, watching the classic movie channel when my roommate left to see his girlfriend. When he left I had a great urge to tell him to stay because something was wrong. But we’d been living together for many years and his girlfriends had a history of being jealous of me so I didn’t. Within an hour or so, something was wrong. Desperately wrong. I was wearing sweatpants over pyjamas and had three blankets over me and yet I couldn’t get warm. I focused on the tv. It was a movie about a horse who had a high fever. 

“Get the blanket off him!” shouted the black and white farm hands. “Move him around! We need to dissipate the heat! Walk him around! There is more surface than mass, we need to release the heat from the skin by allowing it to cool!” 

On screen they walked the horse around. In life, I threw the blankets off and fell to the floor, tried to rise, fell, and began crawling around. Some moments later the “oh shit, you’re fucked, get in a cold tub” occurred to me. It took me a bit to crawl upstairs and then I stuck myself in a cold shower, which might be the most unpleasant sensation when you have a fever. When I felt like I’d snapped out of it I went down and took my temperature, which was at that point 105.7. The movie on the television- it was halfway through Blackboard Jungle. No horses appear in that film.

It was two more weeks of living on the couch before I finally showed up with a chart showing my fever for 48 hours, taken every two hours.

“Why did you take your temperature in the middle of the night?” the trainee doctor laughed.

“I can’t sleep. I have a terrible pain in my right side,” I said, gently, politely.

“Oh god,” she said, apparently having taken in the figures. “Wait a minute.”

She left and came back with her adviser who took one look at my fever chart and sent me down for an x-ray.

“You have pneumonia,”  she said when the results came back. No shit.

I was sent home with new antibiotics.

The problem was that my pneumonia was atypical. Pneumonia is a disease where normally fluid is in the lungs, but the fluid in my lungs was encapsulated by a cyst, thus the lack of rattling when trainee doctors listened to me breathe. The cyst was a hairs’ breadth from my breathing tube. 

I went home that night, and mom delivered egg drop soup, and I ate it. She left and I almost immediately started choking. The cyst had burst and I was drowning. 

My roommate was home and drove me to the hospital after I convinced him there wasn’t time to wait for an ambulance. In between coughing up amazing amounts of green, fetid fluid I had to tell him how to get to the hospital – “Right here, bud cough cough cough..” – because he was so rattled he couldn’t find the hospital nine blocks away. 

When I got there I was swiftly put into the cardiac unit because the infection had taken a toll on my heart. At that point there was still 10 cups of fluid in my lungs- more than enough to drown me. 

I was in the hospital for seven nights. 

At that time there was a convention of the 100 best pulmonary-respiratory specialists in the country descending on Hopkins. My doctor was one of them, and he brought in my x-rays and ct scans. (when I got my ct scan the young girl doing it said, “Whoa. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like a galaxy or something.”) and asked whether he should proceed medically or surgically. The vote was 51-49 that I would die no matter what. 

I found that out later. 

In my time in the hospital I spiked a high fever, got wheeled up to the ICU, and got to hear the nurse screaming on the phone to the on-call doctor to get over there because I wasn’t going to make it through the night. 

When I heard that, my bedside table was no further than my night table from which I’m sipping wine now, but I was too weak to reach it, and all I could think was all the people I wanted to write to, and how there was a pad and paper and pen just over there, but I was too weak to extend my arm a full length. 

I cried over that and readied myself to go. 

Somehow I made it. 

The cyst emptied itself over several painful days where I was hunched over coughing harder than anyone should ever have to cough, my lungs vomiting up the infection violently. Surgery, which might have killed me on the table, was unnecessary. 

I lived. 

My bill at the end of this was $27,000.00. 

When I tried to work out a payment plan, I was told that with my income, (then a modest $30000 a year) I could afford $700 a month, starting now. When I pointed out I’d been out of work for two months, largely due to medical negligence, I was simply told that they had a formula, this is what I could afford, my first payment was due within a month. 

Looking over the bill in detail, I was charged $100 for ever bag of saline. (That was a fight. My first two doctors insisted I had the capability of drinking enough water to keep my hydrated. It wasn’t until they began charting how much I peed that they reluctantly agreed I needed saline because I wasn’t conscious enough hours of the day to drink enough to fight the infection.) 

I defaulted. I am part of the reason American medical insurance is so high. 

Fast forward seven years- I am a teacher in Turkey, a country which doesn’t teach its youth to write an essay, so it falls on me. 

One of my favorite exercises is the devil’s advocate. Make an excellent argument for the position you exactly disagree with. 

“So tell me, you have five minutes, work within your groups, WHY should a government not provide free health care?” 

In this state which has seen oppression, and more jounalists jailed than in any other country; in this state which is slowly eroding the rights of its citizens and delegating its women to the kitchen and the birthing table; no one in my three years of teaching could ever furnish me a reason why a government wouldn’t want to provide free health care. 

“But don’t they care about their people? You can’t have a healthy nation unless you have healthy people.”- Ali. 

I walked away from the debt because no one would work with me. 

My cousin’s wife benefits from military insurance. I’ve had to block her from my facebook feed for a number of reasons; she posts horrible things about towel heads, knowing that I lived in a Muslim country for three years and seeming to conflate Muslim religion with Persian, Turkish and Arabic cultures, all of which are distinct; and because she speaks out vehemently against a  nationalized health care plan, which is an awful convenient take when you’re reaping the benefits of the military’s plan.  

 

 

Advice for the Job Seeker

I am back in Baltimore for the moment, but have a six month plan to get the heck out of dodge and back to Europe, which requires money, which apparently in this day and age requires a job. (No one left me an income of even 200 pounds annually, which I consider a grave oversight.)

I have had a rather erratic career path, which has left me with quite a lot of skills. I can sleep train a baby, sell unnecessary products, file, update computer files, word process, (I’m reluctantly learning Excel) write content, write blogs, manage twitter accounts, proofread, ghost write, correct papers, teach IELTS and SAT and GRE and GMAT (though I’m technically uncertified to do any of that) manage inventory, book appointments, cope when all four lines of a phone are ringing and there are two people waiting impatiently at the desk, convince a client that it was all his idea, soothe apoplectic babies and customers alike, (same skill, really) create curricula, and of course, wax bikinis.

Everyone has an opinion on what I should do (especially babyboomers, who tended to choose their careers early, and maybe they’ve switched companies or specialties or whatever along the way, but who generally last seriously job hunted 30+ years ago) and I find myself sounding incredibly defeatest when I try to explain, for instance, why I can’t just get a job as a publisher or as an editor for the New Yorker or whatever. C, for instance:

“You should just wait tables! I made $5000 one summer doing that!”

“Well, I’ve been playing that card, but I never actually waited tables before. [one of the stupidest oversights of my life] I’ve been working the angle of, you know, ‘I’m older, I actually have a work ethic, I’m not on coke, even if I require more training I’m still probably a better employee than a 22 year old with four years of experience,’ but it’s a hard sell, and if I do land a job, bet your ass it won’t be a good night or a good shift. But thanks for the advice, I’ll keep trying.”

I’m trying to sift through my options, and for my long term goal- Eastern Europe by May!- I need quick cash, lots of it, which puts most wage jobs- cashier, office worker, retail- off the table, or only on the table part time. I tend not to share plans until I am fairly sure of them, because unless you have a rare gem of a friend, (MM, CF, lookin at you) sharing half baked plans tends to lead to unsolicited advice. But even when you’re keeping mum, unsolicited advice will pour in from people who know you’re job hunting.

I have come to tense up as for battle at the sound of two words:

“You should…”

After “you should,” generally comes nonsense or something only an imbecile wouldn’t consider.

Advice I’ve received:

“You should just housesit!” (Great idea! Lemme just go pluck a housesitting job off the housesitting job tree!)

“You should make websites for people. Do the first one free so you have something to put in a portfolio, and then start charging.” (Yes. Because 1. I know how to make a website and 2. There is a complete dearth of unemployed graphic designers and website builders in this economy.)

“You should update your resume to reflect your skills.” (!)

“You should go back to being an esthetician!” (This has come up more than once and my answer, though practical, sounds defeatist even to my ears. 1. I’m no longer certified. 2. I have largely forgotten how to do that job. 3. You have no idea how much I don’t want to. 4. Not a short term solution. I spent five years building a book, and before that I more or less starved. An esthetician without a clientele makes no money.)

“You should write content for people’s websites!” (gritted teeth. That is what I am in the process of breaking into now.)

“You should work at the new Amazon building!” (This is a whole subsection of you shoulds: the jobs that are literally impossible to get to in Baltimore without a car. My job search is fairly limited to a few neighborhoods that are accessible to the Charles St./St. Paul St. North/South corridor, the light rail, and the Circulator Bus System that runs East/West From Federal Hill to Patterson Park. Anything else is more or less impossible, as those with cars fail to understand. Anything in the county is pretty much out. So yes. The new Amazon building. As what, and how the hell would I get to Dundalk?)

“You should work at Aldi’s.” (How do I get to Aldi’s?)

“You should just get a job as …” Oh I could go on and on. There’s always a suggestion that utterly fails to take into account that yes, that’s a fine idea, I’d make a GREAT receptionist cause I give such good phone, but there has to be an actual receptionist position available, and then I have to beat out other applicants who might actually have the word “receptionist” written several times on their resume instead of me who has “fulfilled receptionist duties such as XYZ” as a bullet point under her actual job title, and then, yes, I could be a receptionist.

I know it’s very well intentioned, and don’t think I don’t appreciate how many people want to help, but it makes me feel screamy after a while.

So I have advice for those who seek to give advice for the job seeker:

The only advice we want to hear is, “Hey! So and so’s hiring and I could get you an interview!”

(ps. Don’t worry, I have an action plan which shall be revealed.)

 

 

 

Fells Point II

S. Broadway remains, for the most part, refreshingly unchanged.

The square is the same- when I was very small there was a marble step pyramid in the middle where there is now only a square of asphalt (sticking out in a sea of brick) but it was torn down, if I remember correctly because the skaters were making a nuisance of themselves.

Bertha’s, which has been in business since 1972 and is the famous site where a very young Sarah Liz Perrich, unfond of mussels, could be seen on occasion kicking her feet against her chair legs as the grown-ups talked, is still on the corner. While they claim to have the Best Mussels, and I do not for a moment disagree that they are very, very good, if I were you I’d pop in there for a drink to soak up the nice cozy dark wood feel, and when you become annoyed by the live music, head due East for Ale Mary‘s for either their mussels in cream sauce or their mussels in Natty Boh sauce (do order the extra bread to sop up the rest of the sauce and the mussel juice as it’s unseemly to drink from your plate when you’re done) and get a side of the tots – either the deli tots loaded with swiss cheese and reuben sauce, or the crabby tots loaded with crab dip and cheese. That is fine eating.  Next to Bertha’s, bafflingly, is a fancy new lingerie store- the kind I would feel too hopelessly grubby to ever enter. How did that get there?  Next to that however is the Green Turtle, long-time Saturday night destination of Towson jocks and fratboys, a place I have personally never set foot in, (I think? The end of that one bachelorette party is a little hazy) but the green awning of which makes me feel comfortingly connected to the past. To the right is Maggie Moos for ice cream if you like that sort of thing.

Straight ahead is the Broadway Market, one of seven historical municipal markets in Baltimore, the most famous and widely regarded of which is Lexington Market but I can’t figure that one out cause it’s in an awful neighborhood and full of greasy mall type food and stalls full of plastic, made in China junk. Broadway Market has been operational since 1784, but the current building was erected in 1864.   That’s what the website says, anyway. There are two Broadway Market buildings though, of completely different architectural styles.   I am unclear as to whether they were built at the same time. Any Baltimore history buffs or people willing to do more research than a cursory google search care to shed light?

Anyway, the back one is closed and vacant and locked, but the front one (above)  is still humming an not much has changed. The front-most greasy diner (where sometime in 2003 I sat and told CF the absolute BEST GOSSIP IN THE WORLD and he almost fell off his chair ) sells Korean food now along with the usual assortment of flabby burgers and cheesesteaks to business people who will go jogging after work and wonder why they can’t shift that last five pounds. There’s the eternal Polish deli where you can get pastries, Polish meats and pierogies. Another hamburger joint. On the back, separated, is a fish market that also does sandwiches. Today’s special was an alligator tail sandwich for ten bucks.

As you walk north along Broadway it begins to look more like what all of Fells Point looked like years ago: scruffier and dirtier, although signs of encroaching development are appearing; an entire row of rowhomes has been gutted on the block next to the closed Broadway Market. It looks as though the bottom has been cleared out, with separating walls removed, presumably for retail space. Upstairs then will be apartments or yet more of the upscale luxury condos Baltimore is positively lousy with at the moment.  However, a block up and there’s Killer Trash! One of the best Vintage stores in Baltimore, and looking the same as it did in 1997.

Further up pawn shops and Western Unions start appearing. There are more people in wheelchairs and more men wearing dusty workmen’s clothes. And there’s The Love Zone. I’ve been giggling over their window displays since I was a teenager. THAT’s the kind of lingerie store that belongs in Fells Point. Shelve your Agent Provacateur, fancy store.

I turn when I get to the 7th Day Adventist church and walk back, taking note of how many people are speaking Spanish.

In an episode of Homicide, Life on the Streets, (the less gritty, ’90’s version of The Wire) which I dimly remember, one detective told his partner that he was taking Spanish and his partner scoffed, “What, so you can talk to the other eight people who speak Spanish in Baltimore?”

Fells Point has traditionally been a home for immigrants, and it’s surrounded by Little Italy, Greek Town, the Polish neighborhoods. As the third and fourth generations of these families have moved out to the suburbs, though, new waves of immigrants have moved in to take their places. El Salvadorans, Guatamalans, Mexicans. Tacos and Papusas are abundant, cheap and good on Eastern Ave. and Fleet Street. Every few months there’s an uproar about the new guys- they violate housing codes by cramming multiple families into a single apartment, they’re dirty and loud, they’re responsible for any and all outbreaks of bedbugs, they’re taking jobs, ( and,worst of all in Baltimore:) they’re changing the neighborhood. Just as, one expects, there were periodic uproars about the Italians, Greeks and Poles before them.

I recognize a little of the outraged xenophobe in my tutting at the gentrification of my favorite spots- my faint outrage at the fancy lingerie store echoing outrage at a mexican grocery store, my gladness at seeing Killer Trash because it anchors me to an older, traditional, late ’90’s alternative culture echoing what an Italian must feel driving into the old town and feeling proud that the old deli with the best antipasto is still there.

Times change. Times change.

Fells Point I

I’ve taken refuge in the home of my childhood best friend’s parents’ home in Fells Point, which is a neighborhood of Baltimore I’ve never considered living in, but which has its charms. S & B’s home is a stunning show house that’s been featured in tours- a historically renovated early 18th century brick row home with a deck plonked on top that has a stunning view of the harbor. Inside is all softly gleaming hard wood, exposed brick, muted colors and tasteful decor. My room is on the second floor in the back, with a balcony overlooking their little brick backyard, as well as three or four of the neighbors’. (It’s difficult for me to tell where the back of one neighbor’s house ends and another begins as the houses are all crammed on odd angled streets.) It’s all space here, and quiet, and coddled in the womb of S & B’s infinite tact and unobtrusive courtesies I’ve gotten quite a lot done. Baltimore, for those who aren’t familiar with the greatest city in America, is an old port city, established in 1659, and Fells Point, where sailors and tavern keepers and merchants used to live, is one of the oldest parts of Baltimore, and one of the few waterfront areas to escape the fire of 1904. The streets along the waterfront are still largely cobblestone which is certainly picturesque, but hell on shocks, and painful to bike on. Having started as the sleazy sailor-y part of town, it’s always maintained a certain grit, though with the Harbor East development to the West, and Canton’s explosion as a place for yuppies-who-run-and-do-yoga-and-have-dogs to the East, Fells Point, formerly a rather desolate and dirty part of town filled with skater punks, ancient bars, and mumbling homeless men until Saturday night when it was historically full of drunk frat boys peeing on residents’ steps, has become a desirable residential area, despite the much lamented lack of parking.

Times change

. I walk in the mornings, both to work up an appetite for breakfast and to get my bearings on what has changed, and how much. Today I walked West along the waterfront (past the trash boat that was patiently filtering garbage from a cul-de-sac that accumulates it, past some mallard ducks diving for old food by a foot-bridge) and continued along Thames Street, to see if my buddy MM was working at Soundgarden, which is still thriving despite the fact that nobody I know is buying c.d.’s anymore. Still, MM was too busy to talk. I hooked a sharp left after buying cigarettes and walked along the waterfront.

When I was a wee kiddo of 17, 18, you didn’t want to walk much past Soundgarden. No man’s land lay beyond. Now it’s all converted warehouses with luxury condos and shops full of furniture where a dining room table will run you a price tag of four digits before the decimal point.

Fells Point when I was child

I sat by the waterfront on some old marble steps I clearly remember having long, deep conversations with L on in our early 20’s, and looked out at the harbor. Directly in front were cargo ships, docked. To the left I could make out the Domino Sugar Factory, which moved from New York to Baltimore 91 years ago to be closer to the Hershey’s plant, and which all Baltimoreans claim has the largest neon sign in America. (The largest neon sign may well be in Michigan. Google is unclear.)

It’s also rumored that up to a third of the workforce for this plant is in the machine-works behind the plant making parts for the machinery, which is so old commercially available parts are unavailable. I walked to a park made from an old pier, a grassy rectangle surrounded by neat wood plank walkways, and looked at the remains of the pier to its side, mouldering, no longer even connected to the earth, barely recognizable and completely unusable in any sense, (unless you have a use for rotten wood that I don’t know about)  and thought, “When I was a child, they were identical. When I was a child you’d hold your breath and lock the doors when driving through this area of town.”

A young woman with a wholesome, glossy ponytail and expensively tight running gear jogged past me just then. I turned back.