Misguidance Counselors: I reach for a cigarette
by Sam Beasley
Happy Valentine’s Day, Campers!
Remembering your first heartbreak feels good on a day like today. Light up a Parliament for warmth and gather ‘round for a little love letter to New York, cigarettes, and our lovesick teenage selves.
Smash that heart above and share with someone you love (like your IG story)!
xoxo,
Marilyn and Sam, Ur Misguidance Counselors
I love cold Brooklyn air flash-chilling me as I step out of a muggy bar. It reminds me of coming out of dance class in tundra-frozen winters. My muscles shocked after hours of efforting “art” from a chubby teen body.
Never wanting to be an athlete, I assume that’s the closest I’ll get to submerging in an ice bath after the “big game.” I prefer to imagine Ina Garten blanching me in a bowl of ice water like steamy haricot vert on Barefoot Contessa. She warns of the embarrassment of serving something anemically gray due to not taking enough care to ensure my vibrant, Frenchy green. My idea of heaven is Ina Garten waterboarding me.
In the summer, the warmth of the suspiciously saccharine-smelling air embosoms me. It’s unknown origin of bready sweetness specific to New York.
I listen for clucking bargoers invoking the carefree hatchlings they were during bygone summer breaks. Or, preened and plumed, living out big city dreams based on the last 20 minutes of a movie repeatedly seen on TBS then scrupulously incubated in the midwestern bedrooms they were appetent to escape. They strut around finally gratified by dilettante conversation, over-budget summer uniforms, and requisite cigarettes held between their fingers like credentials.
On a dance floor thick with humidity – another rank origin better not thought about – my drunkenness will slosh enough to reveal I am, like Kirk Cameron, “left behind” and dancing alone.
I send my friends a futile text: “where’d you go?”
I’m miffed, getting bumped and shoved by cooped dancers while trudging out to a patio or the few feet of stanchioned-off sidewalk where I know they’ll be. But all is forgotten after stepping into fresh night air.
I’ll enter mid-conversation and right on cue with a one-liner setting up the C-plot of this episode of our hangout sitcom. After our found audience of smoking strangers provides the laugh track, I make a downplayed show of acquiescence.
“I guess it’s one of those nights.” and reach for a friend’s cigarette.
Just touching the butt of a cigarette transforms this milieu into some gratifyingly fustian and never-written Ginsburg. Perhaps, wishing it weren’t regretfully apt, into the existential anxiety of quirky Woody Allen films. More likely, and homosexual, into the brilliant orbit of the fifth Sex and the City character: television’s New York City. Any of the versions of the city really, famous or private, ever propagated by the huddled masses.
Or I’ll suddenly hear not a sound on those commodified streets of New York. Just the beating of my own heart, as I return to a singular memory: alone in the woods. The summer before my senior year of high school. Not a boy, not yet a woman.
We told our lies to our parents and asked a townie to buy us flavored liquor and Natty Light. With my GrandPrix’s sunroof open and iPod full blast, we Ya Ya Sisterhooded through roads lined with tall, foreboding pines, shouting along to “Get Low” and “Seasons of Love.”
Forty-five minutes north of town, we pulled into a gravel driveway. The unlit lake house became shadow-drawn by my headlights. We entered giggling - so spooky.
The interior was decorated in only black and white; stark except for a few set dressings found exclusively in mansions from ‘90s kids’ movies. Like the self-playing baby grand. The finishes were several years past being fancy.
“Did he just move in?” I asked during the welcome tour. “Cause it looks like a sociopath lives here.”
Like a dagger to my heart, my friend, who was housesitting the place, didn’t laugh at my joke.
“Oh really? I feel like it’s very bachelor,” he sincerely responded. He was unable to notice the house’s potential for homicide and I was in love with him.
He was a pretty, straight boy, who tossed his head to the side to get his bangs out of his eyes when he played guitar and called himself libertarian to be edgy in a red state.
We stood in the jacuzzi tub built in the middle of the bedroom, shotgunning beers and feeling grown. Not because we were drinking but drinking responsibly. We were incontestably good kids. Permitted to throw this party by the homeowner and, safely, stay the night. We were babes in the woods, overachieving at underage drinking. Soon to be a night I’d never forget, but not wonderful yet.
Some of us piled about a worn couch stashed in a corner, and as plotted days in advance, I brought up a Cosmo-like article from the AOL homepage teaching how to read your crush’s body language.
“For example, sitting with your knees in the direction of someone indicates that you want their attention,” I explained from where I had positioned myself on the floor, at the feet of my housesitting friend.
“But my knees are facing you,” he said, laughing as if this proved the body language I’d conferred onto him was ridiculous. As if my crush on him made ridiculous a distant memory.
Covert with counterfeit apathy, I asked if he wanted to kiss someone.
“Why?”
“Cause when you dart your tongue in and out of your mouth, it means you want to make out.” Come on, baby. Come to papa.
“I don’t do that.” All I had to do was tap it in. Just tap it.
“You’re doing it now.”
“Well, I guess, cause I was just doing that... activity.”
My breath caught on my devastation. I jumped up to switch the music from probably Something Corporate to Nelly Furtado - he remained perfectly slouched behind me. Like an 18-year-old rockstar of northeast Kansas.
I surveyed my friends littered around. Which one of them did it? One of them did it.
They all knew. I spent 80% of my time talking about him. How dare they make out with a straight boy who would never make out with me.
I poured another Parrot Bay and Coke. When I turned back... he was gone.
I can imagine my Jack Nicholson eyes while descending the stairs to the walkout basement: a short labyrinth, due to my inebriation, of unfurnished bedrooms. I flung open doors one by one until two sets of eyes caught mine.
With the recognition of my presence, my best friend, her body pressed against his, silently warned me to leave.
Et tu, bestie? Then fall-
“Sam.” He said my name.
I strained to hear worry in his voice. A promise that he was here against his will. But my name sounded like nothing more than a flaccid “wazzup?” in his mouth.
The door slammed behind me as I ran. Flames heaved on the side of my face. I flew up the stairs with measured petulance. Who needs affection when I have blind hatred?
I tore unsparingly and determined through the boho sequined purse I’d picked out for her. Taking what I wanted, then stalking back down the steps. Past their room. Into the one at the end of the hall.
I stalled feeling the cool air of the night.
I’d opened the back door to the room’s private porch which we were shown on the welcome tour and, lit by the country moon, I could see almost everything. The serene water of Lake Perry came up to the small porch in what I’d called a cove. My crush, whose family owned a boat - “lake people” - had corrected me.
“It’s not a cove,” he said.
Across the cove was a wall of those tall pines, once daunting in their communal presence, now comforting. Beethoven the St. Bernhard came to mind.
Inhaling the fresh air, I stepped from the black-and-white house out into the cinematic wide shot. Not the saturated land of Oz, it was moody and manicured. It glittered through my tears (I was crying) like a certain future summer blockbuster. Thankfully, I didn’t yet have the reference of huffing and furrowed Kristen Stewart.
I fancied myself the narrowly escaped, fresh-faced Jennifer Love Hewitt, but I was Sally on the truck bed in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Drained, hysterical, splattered in carnage.
I staggered forward. God, did this seem like a glorious place to be devastated. To be seen looking beautiful and crying - a desirable predicament to my people regardless of how early the age. I was transmuted, sauntering toward the railing like Stockard Channing in First Wives Club. A leading lady stepping into frame for a career-defining breakdown. I sniffed up cry snot, readying for my close-up. And so, the moment had come, the reason we’re here...
I reached for a cigarette.
My heart pounded in my ears as I held the Parliament between my index and middle finger, exactly like the women who ran the community theater held their Parliaments. I had memorized this grip while piously judging their habit and desperate for them to wheeze a laugh at the clunky, puerile jokes I interjected during the heavy drags they took between their own brassy quips.
The paper was unexpectedly stiff around the cylinder of condensed fluff, and I was surprised by the filter’s clean white. I thought, do you suck in when you light the cigarette? while tearing up
the edge of my baby-skinned thumb attempting to make fire with a 99-cent lighter. Ignoring my certainty of impending addiction, I sucked the end of my first cigarette and considered whether I knew the difference between inhaling and not.
The stink I knew from being around certain relatives, at birthday parties thrown in bowling alleys, and walking past entrances of Applebee’s, became a welcome, cloying pungence in my mouth. It left a rancid film of sophistication on the inside of my cheeks and a dignifying buzz that justified my ire.
Watch out! I was bad news and high allure. The diva scorned.
Now inherently chic, I leaned against the dry, crumbling wood railing. The streams of tears tightened the skin of my cheeks, and I wondered, in my general disdain, what would happen if an ember fell on this dilapidated porch. Could it burst into flames?
My new and genteel familiar, the cigarette buzz, advised me to ash into my almost empty drink. Like a lady, Sam. Don’t want to burn down the house with those monsters in it!
Nostalgic for the moment I was having, I took another drag. I suppressed a cough to maintain the vibe, if only for myself. Memory is what I’d have instead of the view, and I knew I’d visit tonight again and again. The textbook betrayal. My unrequited love. There was no more glorious of a benediction for a hatchling homosexual than this slapstick tragedy.
My exhaled smoke caught the moonlight, floating away across the water before drifting into evaporation. With a single cigarette, I had so totally changed the trajectory of my entire life irrevocably. An insignificant feat in the wake of a dumb boy.
My best friend slipped outside, not apologetically sheepish enough for my liking, and pushed herself up to sit on the railing. I didn’t warn of its deterioration. She, an insouciant teenager, said something shitty like, “He’s not gay, y’know. He wouldn’t hook up with you anyway.”
Like I didn’t know that. But what of “bros before hoes,” Judas? She took him anyway. I knew how to be a very good loser by this age… with this body, in this state, with these attractions… But I took care not to concede one more thing to her, least of all my star turn.
“So, how was he?” I asked cooly, lifting the cigarette to my lips. My mom watched a lot of TCM, and I was unexpectedly confident in attempting what I’d seen of Bette Davis’s sardonicism. I felt as striking as she, forgetting the track jacket and shin-length gym shorts I wore.
She said they started to kiss, but he abruptly stopped it. His earlier make-out had been with yet another of our friends. And he “felt bad.” Straight boys in theater have disproportionately high body counts. My best friend was merely the latest girl kissing him, dating him, texting- whatever straight kids got to do in high school.
Pleased by her mischance, I softened. “Sorry I stole your cigarettes.”
“It’s ok. Do you like it?”
“Smoking? Unfortunately...” I gladly blamed her for that, too. A shitty teenager myself, I said, “Not to be a bitch, but I don’t really want to talk to you right now. Can we just enjoy the porch in silence?”
Not for nothing, but she’s a lesbian now, and he came to my birthday party this year.
Last summer, over a decade later, I spilled outside onto a lot next to a concert venue with the other smokers. My friends and I plopped cross-legged on the asphalt, like we still had carefree teen bodies, and passed around cigarettes.
A stranger asked for a light. He had a pack of Parliaments, so I told him about the community theater ladies. He chuckled politely - paying the lighter tax of congeniality.
I reached to share the cigarette in my friend’s hand and felt the sense memory of my first cigarette. The veil of manicured cinematography draped over us making everything gilded. I saw the starlet smiles of my friends against the Brooklyn night sky. The impressive, now familiar, Manhattan skyline watched over us as I listened to their friendly jeers and sentimental affections. I took a inhale of the night air before bringing the cigarette to my mouth. It was the closest thing to heaven in this city, it was one of those nights.
“I reach for a cigarette” by Sam Beasley (@sbeas)
I can’t quite picture Jo but I can hear her