The Smoke Guy

It’s this crazy thing that happens, especially when the room is totally quiet. When I try and go to sleep and I lay on my left side I can feel my heart beat so hard that I start to wonder if the thing is going to explode out of my chest. It really bugs me. It’s jumping around in there like an animal. It makes me nuts laying there listening to it. And then it skips. It’s always skipped. It goes OK, then it stops and double-beats and then it jumps and then it’s normal. And it’s like I can hear the blood going through the vestibule. That sickening, sticky, body sound in there. It’s disgusting. And then any minute it’ll just pop. And there it is, a big blood bubble all over the walls. Like when you’re sitting next to someone just pleasantly chatting about the weather and you suddenly get this thought in your mind that their head is going to burst open in the middle of a sentence and everything will be splattered over you and the floor and the table. Just like that. And there’s this headless body thumping to the floor. For no reason, everything just explodes. I don’t know why I think about things like that when people are pleasantly chatting to me. But anyway I’ve never been able to sleep on my left side. Not for as long as I remember.

And then when I try to sleep on my right side the only ear I can hear with – my right one – gets buried in the pillow and then I can’t hear anything at all. Nothing. Because my left ear is just plugged once and for all. And I’m afraid if I fall asleep like that I’ll never hear the alarm, and then the last job in the city will be taken away from me and I’ll starve and get kicked out of my flat and die somewhere by the railroad tracks like a dog. So I sleep on my face and can’t breath, or on my back and my jaw drops open and I’m just too self-conscious to sleep on my back, even though there’s nobody here but me.

I used to think somebody told me your heart isn’t up in the left part of your chest like when you hold your hand up there and say the pledge allegiance. They said, or I read somewhere, that it’s right in the middle of your chest. Because when you’re thinking about protecting yourself in a street fight the best thing to do is to ram the guy right in the middle of his chest with the heel of your hand as hard as you can so his heart stops beating and he dies and you can get the hell out of there. But my question is; if the heart is in the middle then how come I only hear it beating like that when I’m on my left side and not my right side? I mean if it’s in the middle. Maybe it’s in the wrong spot or it’s enlarged.

Whatever it is, all I know is I don’t seem to get a lot of sleep. Ever. Sometimes I go for days. Nights. Sometimes I’m awake for a week or so. Straight through.

So I don’t worry about left side right side. I can’t sit around or lay around wondering why this is that way or did somebody say something or did I just do something stupid. I have to get out. And I get out. Even if the winter talks like it’s about to kill your ass I get out. I know a few places.

There’s a guy I know and I go that way.

The smoke chomping guy behind Boston Street. I don’t know what his name is. I never asked. He works the graveyard shift in a print shop and he has to go outside to smoke, and he’s out there in every kind of weather and I met him one night as I was walking and we talked and now I come by once in a while. He recognizes me. It’s nice to havesomeone who recognizes you and doesn’t automatically think you’re a shit head.

I shiver and he smokes. Then the words come out of his mouth like a ghost leaking out of his head. He never exhales. He just talks. And he’s no different tonight than any other night. I think it’s because after all the times we’ve stood here by his door while he’s smoking neither one of us could tell what the other would look like in the daylight. We see better in the dark.

“Say you had a garden OK?”

“A garden?”

“Yeah, you have a house and you have a garden.” He takes a deep drag into a third lung he grew sometime in 1997. “Just say you have a house and a garden OK. It’s like a dream of yours to always have a garden and now you finally got a garden. I mean I know, OK, you live in an apartment - but say you got a house. You saved up all your money and you buy a house. And the house has a garden.”

“OK. Yeah. I get it.”

“OK. And you plant all this stuff in the garden you know. I don’t know - tomatoes, you know, carrots, tofu, eggplant, whatever the fuck you plant in a garden, you know, and you got it going good OK. And then one day comes along and you go out there in the morning, you know, with your hat and shit and a fuckin’ spade in your hand you know and, I don’t know, you go out to do the morning shit you do in a garden, OK?”

“OK.”

“OK so you go out there and it’s the morning, you know, and everything smells nice, you know, and you sit down to start, I don’t know, yanking weeds and shit and whatever you do in a fuckin garden in the morning, and you bend over one time and here’s this head looking up at you.”

“A head?”

“Yeah.”

“A head like what, like lettuce?”

“No. I mean a fuckin’ head. You know like with a mouth and eyeballs and it’s looking at you and shit. And it’s buried there and all you see is this face on this head. And only from the neck up you know. It’s a head, you know, it’s a face. It’s a guy.”

“I don’t….”

“I’m saying, you know, like this is a hypochondriac thing OK, this isn’t really… this isn’t really real, I’m just sayin’ OK? You go out to the garden and there’s this head there OK. And the fuckin’ thing looks up at you and it starts talking to you. You know like – hey – like – what the fuck am I doing in your garden, OK? You go out to the garden and there’s this fuckin’ head growing in the garden and it’s talking to you.”

“Yeah.”

“OK – ready? So here’s the thing.” He shrugs his shoulders and puts his hands out, palms up. “There’s all these options.”

“Options.”

“There’s a fuckin’ head in your garden, growing in your garden, and you go out there and it fuckin’ talks to you. There’s like, I don’t know, a million things you could do from that point on.”

“Yeah I don’t… I don’t…”

“Like you could sit there and talk with it right? You could sit, you could talk. Hey how’s your mother? You know. What the fuck? You know. You could talk to the thing, you know. Or? Or you could sell tickets. You could make a fortune, you know? Look at this talking head see… now give me money. You’d be on YouTube, you know, with this talking head.”

“Yeah.”

“Or not. I mean you could talk to it or you could make a million dollars off it or… or… you could find out what the fuck it is and see if it needs shit. You know. Like what the fuck is it doing there and where is it supposed to be. Does it eat burgers? What? You could try to help the thing maybe. Or you could be an asshole and just yank it like a fuckin’ weed and get rid of the fuckin’ thing too. I mean. There are people out there, man, there are kids out there, they’re wicked. They’d pull it out. People would just kill it and not look back, man. They kick cripples down the street and beat up drunks and do all this hokus pokus shit in front of these epileptic kids to try and get them into a seizure and all. So you could just say – what the fuck, get out of my fuckin’ garden – I don’t know, you’re blocking out the carrots. The sun for the carrots and shit. You could do that. I mean that would suck and all but hey I mean it’s an option.”

“Ok.”

“Ok and so the point is, the point is, you know like, the option you pick says a lot about you, you know? I mean this is like life’s big fuckin’ mystery am I right?”

“Yeah that’s…”

“I mean you could go to the police, you know. Hey officer there’s this fuckin’ head in my garden and it’s fuckin’ talking to me, you know. And then… and then they lock you up in the bin and the fuckin’ head has your garden. You… you’re fucked. You’re in jail and this fuckin’ head had your garden and your house and everything. I mean what would you do? What would you do if you walked out and there’s this head in your garden looking at you?”

“I don’t know.”

He tosses the sucked up butt end of his cigarette into the snow and looks at the door to the building. “Hey I got to go. Break’s over, I got to get back in. It’s fuckin’ cold out here man, you need to go home. You’ll freeze your ass off.” He taps my arm. “Get some sleep.”

“Yeah.”

“Seriously,” he opens the door letting the silver dust light from inside pour out into the middle of the night. “Get some sleep. You think too much. You look like shit.”

“Alright.”

“I’ll see you later.”

His big metal door closes with a warped and crooked crank.