Folded Up in Smoke

essay

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

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During my senior year of high school, while getting fitted for a tuxedo, the tailor asked me if I smoked.

"No," I said. "I'm a basketball player. It's pretty impossible to find a serious basketball player who smokes."

"Ah," he said.

I assumed the tailor was asking a routine question. A tuxedo rental business would naturally have to consider the collision between cigarette smoke and rental clothes. But I was uncomfortable—a stranger was measuring my body—so I kept the conversation going.

"Why do you want to know if I smoke?" I asked.

"Well, you stink of smoke pretty bad," he said.

I was mortified. Shit. It was my father's cigars. He smoked them in the house, in the car, everywhere. But, until that moment, I'd never pondered all the ways in which my father's smoke would affect how I smelled. I didn't know there was such a thing as being nose blind—being so inured to an odor that my sense of smell no longer registered it.

That tailor was certainly an asshole for speaking to a kid that way but he also gave me a valuable lesson.

We humans are consistently unaware of how much we affect the people around us. We love to think of ourselves as conscientious. We carefully separate our compost and recyclables but we thoughtlessly harm our friends, family, and lovers with our behaviors, words, and silences.

A few weeks after that tailor shamed me, I wore that rented tuxedo to the prom. My date loved me, I think, but I didn't love her with the same intensity. I liked her. That was all. And I broke her heart a few weeks later when I reunited with an ex-girlfriend. Two years after that, I left that girlfriend for another woman. Through action and inaction, that woman and I broke each other's hearts. We took turns leaving until I was the final one who left.

All three of those women were better people than I was then. They're probably better people than I am now. I don't know what they think of me. Hell, I don't want to know what they think of me. Or maybe I just want them to be nose blind when I enter their thoughts.

My father died of alcoholism in 2003. I inherited four chests of the sports memorabilia that he'd collected during his life. There was nothing valuable. He kept things based on their emotional content rather than on their potential financial value.

I opened those chests only one at a time and only every five years or so. And, every time, I was shocked by the cigar stench that rose from the t-shirts, magazines, books, trading cards, and figurines that were stacked inside.

That was my father's scent. I think of him puffing on his cigar. He was a quiet man. A silent man. It's funny to say this but, sometimes, he was an Indian man whose smoke was the only language that he spoke.