Menthol

by Jerry Stahl

I started smoking at six and a half months. Negative six and a half.

More or less.

My mother, Floss, used to call herself a “working girl.” And she liked to smoke when she worked. At the time of my conception, Mom was, as she liked to say, “a three-pack-a-day gal.” Strictly menthol.

So Kool.

So Salems.

So Marlboro Green.

What she breathed, we breathed. Me. And by me, I mean me the fetus, cured for months in her menthol cloud. I like to think, when they yanked me out of the womb and spanked me, I didn’t cry, I coughed, a puff of minty-fresh smoke wafting from between my baby-blue lips. Blue because I arrived so ahead of schedule. Three and three-quarters pounds. Sweet as a sick Chihuahua in a cup.

Not that I’m mad about it. Cough, cough. It’s not like I was born with a harelip. I mean I was, but still . . . Nicotine does that sometimes. One of the side effects, along with that teensy birth-weight, and tendency to be born premature. (Did I mention the six and a half months?) Since the beginning, I’ve been early for everything. But things work out. One of Mom’s regulars was a cosmetic surgeon. Dr. Ono. So he fixed me up when I was five. Not that he wanted to. He had to. He knew we had pictures. And I knew. Because I took them. That was my job. Mom called it insurance. But I just liked holding the Polaroid.

Peek through the viewfinder. Press the magic button. Pull out and hold under armpit—it’s always warm—for a few fun seconds while Mom beams at me over the client’s pillowed behind, bound hands, whatever’s going on, between us. Without saying a word, my mother taught me my first lesson: Never get done, always do.

I watched, and learned, from my perch at the foot of the Murphy bed.

The Spank and Burn, the Filter Tip, the Brown on Top, and my personal favorite, the move that Mom invented, the one Dr. Ono loved: the Bottle Rocket.

Floss talked as she worked.

“You see the pee-hole, doctor?”

“Mmmf . . . Yes, mistress.”

“I’m going to take this match . . .”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh . . .”

Floss produces the wooden match, clutches the doctor’s thing like a roll of Play-Doh, squeezes—just at the tip, where it’s got the army helmet—and his purple snake mouth just kind of gawps, like it’s hungry. Like it’s eager. Like—

“Now!” Mom’s voice goes low. “Are you ready?”

She tells the doctor what she’s going to do. But she’s also, this comes to me later, also telling me how to do it. “We put the stick in the wee-wee. We twist. No squirming!”

And all the while, Dr. Ono, Dr. Ono, lashed to the iron bars at the head and foot of the bed with bright-red rope so that he reminds me of Gulliver, in the story, if Gulliver were gift wrapped, Dr. Ono on whose hairless chest Mom has written words in lipstick I can’t read, Dr. Ono’s mouth twists in an expression I only recall—nothing fancy here—as happy. He even purrs. He mewls. Wet-lipped, eyes crinkled to slits. The weird thing, through it all, the doctor wears a hat, a goofy sailor’s cap, like Gilligan, which somehow stays on his head while my mother, this tiny lady, holds his rancid dumbness (that’s what she calls it) now stiff and at, as they say, attention, in her two doll-hands.

“Oh, my haha, my haha!” Dr. Ono’s eyes roll back, shoulders hunching.

Floss barks, “Shush!” Looks my way. Whispers: “Japanese for mommy.” Continues, very calmly, “Okay, like we practiced, count to ten, and shoot.” And I do! I do! Aiming straight at eight, finger on the button at nine. At ten, pressing down, then—whoosh—like a magic trick, the matchstick’s lit, Dr. Ono’s rancid dumbness spitting flame.

Even now, I can’t figure how she did it. The mechanics.

I just watch. Keep snapping. Pull Polaroids.

Shoot Dr. Ono, blubbering. Shoot happy Dr. Ono, who swings his fiery unit side to side. Who singes his silky seagrass pubes. Shrieks, “Haroo! Haroo! Sooo happyyyy!” Then stares straight at me, so white-eyed I forget the camera.

I think, He can see me! though I know he can’t. Because I’m inside the cabinet, with the built-in hiding space, and the missing panel. Just big enough for little girl me.

“Please, lady, now!” The doctor’s voice all squealy, “Now, now, now!”

And Mom, I don’t know how she does it, goes from tiny to tall, like that, in front of my five-year-old eyes.

A woman engorged, like Dr. Ono himself. Because she is not having it.

“What’s this?” Mom asks, icy soft. “Did someone forget who gives the orders?”

The doctor only quivers. “Please! Please! Please, pleasey, please!”

“Begging? That’s what we’re doing?”

“No, no, no! No begging. I want—”

“You what? You want?”

Doctor Ono burbles. Mommy Floss says nothing. Silent now. She snaps her wrist. Another trick! Cigarettes materialize. Newport shorts. In a box. Mom snaps again, the top pops open, and out—just an inch, no more than a filter tip—slides one cigarette. Like that, it’s in her mouth.

“Watch and learn,” my mother says, “watch and learn!”

And Dr. Ono, who by now beams, whose eyeballs would probably glow in the dark, stares at her with something like love, something like happy terror, as she reaches for that red rope, and pulls. It was never a real knot; just there for show, and the doctor wriggles out.

Another life lesson: If you really want control, you don’t need ropes. Don’t need cuffs and chains. All you need is obedience.

O-be-di-ence.

It’s obedience that has Dr. Ono still flaming as he begins to move. (Mom gets her matches from magic shops, so even if you blow them they won’t go out. Fun at birthdays!) Dr. Ono gets up and kind of waddle-walks. He’s not fat. Not fat-fat. But he’s fleshy, and soft. And he shivers. Staring down at the fire between his thighs. Because he believes, from prior waddles, in prior sessions, that his waddle will keep the flame from going out. Even if we know—Mommy and me—that he could kneel down in front of an electric fan and the flame would only flutter.

“Get over here and light me!”

“Yes, yes, yes! I will light you, mistress.”

The doc waddle-walks straight to Mom.

Ever breathed burning pubic hairs? They don’t smell like roses.

The menthol helps. When Dr. Ono shimmy-shammied his way to Mom’s throne, I thought he might combust. But wait—have I mentioned her throne? It’s a love seat really, beside the bed. Paisley quilt, on which Mom sits, in the lotus position, lipping her Newport so the doctor has to bend forward to get the flame just right, tip of her cigarette touching tip of him.

Mom lights up, inhales, blows out a billowing cloud. “Get that thing out of here.” Now she licks her fingers, wets them good, and tamps out the penile match.

When Dr. Ono, deflamed—but still at eye level—tries to move closer, Floss swats at his member as if it were an errant bat, or a fly, trying to land on her face.

Ah, memories!

There were many versions of Dr. Ono. I can reach in the photo box right now. Pull out—oh my God!—another Polaroid. Reich Marshal Malcolm. Who came to the door dressed in uniform, complete with epaulettes and Iron Cross on his chest, and worked at City National Bank. He helped Mom with the mortgage, though I’m not sure how. Reich Marshal (he insisted Mom call him that, and paid extra) liked the Roman Candle. So Mom kept a box of fat wax candles in the kitchen drawer. Reich Marshal, in my mind, seemed like a giant. He always brought Salems, by the carton. Mom would tell him to assume the position the second he entered.

“Excuse me?” he’d say.

“You heard me.”

I remember how Mom took her time opening the long box, removing that first pack, slowly pulling off the cellophane, folding back a corner, doing her wrist snap and flipping the cigarette directly into her mouth without touching it.

The whole time, of course, the enormous Reich Marshal Malcolm knelt at her feet, crisp green uniform yanked down to blue-veined, shiny ankles, face pressed to the carpet

“El gape-o,” Mom snaps, talking around that Salem angled out of her mouth.

Reich Marshal salutes. Obliges. Proceeds to clamp his hands on his nether-cheeks, with great theater, as if gathering the strength to pry himself open. While he works, Mom positions the dinner candle, I go back to my coloring book. Use the green for Jiminy Cricket’s face. Orange for his eyes. But how to color the little cigarette I put in his mouth? You can’t color white, so I go with yellow, with red for the tip. Same with Tinker Bell. Peter Pan, Captain Hook, I give them all cigarettes, all twirling plumes of smoke. Tinker Bell’s Kool almost looks like another wand.

“Ready?” Mom calls, after she works in the long fat candle, giving me a wink over the prone wannabe-Nazi.

Reich Marshal thinks she’s talking to him. He replies, all aquiver, in a strange fake accent. British but not, like he’d watched an old Sherlock Holmes movie and wanted to sound like Watson. “No ma’am. I am most certainly not ready. I will never be ready. This Reich Marshal has been to the veld, let me remind you. Captured by natives. Who had their savage way with him. Unspeakable duress! Unspeakable . . .”

He was the only person I’ve ever seen who actually harrumphed. It went with his mustache, what Mom called his pregnant caterpillar, the same ginger as the brush cut under his military hat, but faded under his nose, which he was always wiping with a folded handkerchief the same martial green as his outfit. For a man buns up, hosting a candle in his sphincter—the Reich Marshal had enormous dignity.

“Why, if I told you I was put in a pot and boiled with rodents, I’d be painting too pretty a picture. You can’t do anything these primitives have not done already. Done worse. Done repeatedly. The nightmares!”

His speech was part of the event.

“You know Hitler hated tobacco,” he might rail another day. “The Führer was the first man in the world to ban smoking. For Jews! You see the irony. He would kill them by the millions but he wanted them healthy! No tobacco before the gas. Eventually he banned smoking for the whole nation. Such a visionary!”

Floss might indulge him for a moment, before lashing out. “Stop talking, scum bucket!” He was a regular. Sometimes Mom would switch out the Polaroid and give me the little Super 8. The Kodak Instamatic M2 movie camera. If he heard the whirring, Reich Marshal did not let on. Of course—do I have to say it?—the sight of a man on the floor, doing the kinds of things Mom did to men, the kinds of things men did in font of her, was hardly shocking. It was normal. It was my normal.

The movies were strictly for Mom. Her idea of fun. But not great for blackmail. Not that she ever used the word. She sometimes called these transactions “arrangements.” Plus, she explained, it was harder to get money from people for Super 8s. They’d need to have a projector, a screen, enough know-how to wind the film in the sprockets to actually see the thing. But a Polaroid is a Polaroid. Portable, effective, and so easy that a child—me!—could shoot them.

Sometimes I heard her on the phone to one client or another. “If your wife doesn’t believe me, darling, we’ll take the polygraph.” While she talks, I get the wink, and some Johnny Facecream, whichever human ashtray she’s plopped her feet on, squirms and eeks under a bun-stubbed Newport.

“Mama likes her pollies, right, Johnny?” All the mouches—half men, half couches—were “Johnny Facecream” to my mother. Beefy furniture who paid.

Dr. Ono, Reich Marshal Malcolm, Johnny, Johnny, and Johnny—to me they were zoo animals. The cabinet gave me distance. “Pretend you’re at the movies, honey.”

And I did. I did. I became a voyeur, and a professional, almost before I could read.

Mom had a credo: “I believe children should have jobs.”

* * *

But listen, I hear you wondering—if you’ve read this far—what is the story here?

What is any story? One Smoking Bottom, then another Smoking Bottom? There was this, there was this, and then there was that. Do you read to find out what happens next? Or do you read to flee what’s happening now, while you are reading?

Mom was once premed. She knew things. Like how, drug-wise, nicotine is peculiar; how it changes from stimulant to sedative, the more you do. The phenomenon—how up turns to down—is called “Nesbitt’s Paradox,” after the doctor who discovered it in 1969. Mom claimed to have dated the actual Nesbitt, as a very, very young woman. He got her into tobacco action. Her eventual specialty. Mom owed some of her style, her technique that is, to Dr. Nesbitt. Beyond his paradox, Nesbitt also had a theory about sex and cigarettes: that, counterintuitive as it sounds, cigarettes were not, inherently, oral items. In fact, as he laid out in a keynote paper delivered at the Airport Hilton in Queens in 1971, to the National Society of Nicotine Studies, suppressed ethnographic research suggests that early tobacco users did not restrict themselves to breathing in the burning leaves. Rather, there is significant evidence that the first tobacco aficionados—in still not wholly understood rituals—would carve elaborate pipes, some long as flutes, and decorated with intricate filigree—then fill their bowls with cured leaf, set them aflame, and, after a few puffs, insert the pipes in the shaman’s anus, what Nesbitt’s treatise labeled “the Shamanus.” The upshot: rather than the lungs, that nicotine’s chemicals were delivered into the bloodstream via the porous, nerve-dense rectal portal. Special tabs were cut to slide over the burning leaf, forcing the smoke through the pipe and out of the opening.

I’ve seen the Polaroids the doctor himself took of the pipe extended between his own ample nether-globes. In a sense, these were early selfies. But this is not the point. Leave that aspect to panicked doctoral candidates looking for an angle. The point is that for half a minute, a minute tops, what smoke was trapped in the pipe’s interior escaped and entered the client’s alimentary canal, an even more effective nicotine-to-bloodstream delivery system.

Dr. Nesbitt himself—at least in my mother’s telling—liked to “wear” his native pipe extended from his rear and do a kind of Pan-inspired goat-dance around his living room. (Back then, my mother did outcalls. This was before the big bed and secret cabinet setup, before Mom had her headquarters. Before me.)

But still . . . just marching out a sample butt-sub does not a story make. Did I mention—my memory again!—that it wasn’t till two years ago that I came upon the book of Polaroids, the ones I took, and under that, an older box, taken by who knows? Rifling through them, I made two (to me) shocking discoveries.

One: that what Floss had written on the chests of her most flamboyant customers, like Dr. Ono—what I’d seen her write before I could read—were two words, CIG PIG, vividly rendered in Mom’s trademark shade: Scarlet Desire.

Two: that one of the gentlemen she’d scrawled on was a man of note. In this case a jowly, big-haired, orange-tinted real estate heir and lout-about-town. His special fancy involved two women and one lit cigarette; specifically, lit and inserted in the vagina of Woman One, who stood astride the head of Mr. Orange Tint, eye-to-eye and belly-to-belly with Woman Two, who also straddled him, perfectly positioned to pull herself open, tilt her pelvis toward the ceiling, and urinate, so that a small fountain arched onto that smoldering cigarette clamped in the labia of the woman before her, ashy pee-drops falling directly onto the face, and lips, of the big soft orange man below.

And yes, the man liked to talk the whole time, mostly about how “filthy” the two women were. Mister Orange, possessed of some weird, or weirdly predictable, shame, would not even remove his own tighty-whities. Would not expose himself. But he was always eager for the ladies to expose themselves, to put on their brazen display, poised (as mentioned) nipple-to-nipple over his own prone loaf of a body. He liked to get wet, then explode in shock that “these whores” would spray him.

“Men,” one of Mom’s favorite quotes, “are not mysterious.”

All they want is to be listened to, Mom explained one morning. They don’t even want what they say they want. Not really. What they want, what they really want, more than anything else, is to be listened to. Especially powerful men. All power is cosplay, really. They all want to tell their secrets.

“Because they’re lonely, Mommy?”

“Not exactly.”

“They’re not lonely?”

“Not just, honey. They have people around them. And everybody sort of listens to them. They want to be important men. Some of them, they are important men. But deep down, deep deep deep deepity down, they want Mommy to tell them they’re not really powerful. Deep deepity down, they’re worms. And they want Mommy to know. They want Mommy to see, and to hear what they can’t tell anybody else.”

“And that’s what you do?”

“That’s what Mommy pretends to do.”

“You pretend to listen?”

“Yes.”

We had our talks, in the morning, while she drove me to school, her eyes meeting mine in the rearview. At red lights, we would both stare out the window, at the faces of the men walking by with briefcases on their way to work. I knew, even then, that the way Mommy saw people was different from how other people saw them. What she did in our apartment—the men, the menthols, the smoke and flames—what she did was our secret. Not a bad secret. Just something we didn’t talk about. Except to each other. I was Mommy’s special helper. If I talked about it, then other kids would want to know why they couldn’t help their mommies. They’d want to be special too.

“I understand,” I said. “It’s just, I don’t know why . . .”

“Why what, honey?”

When I couldn’t figure something out, I’d chew the inside of my cheeks, and if Mom noticed she’d ask me, gently, to stop. Nobody else but her could even tell I was doing it. But if she didn’t stop me I’d keep at it until I spat blood.

“Why what, honey?”

“Why it’s important? To the men, I mean.”

“Why is what important?”

“Why the men, you know, want you to listen. I mean, why you?”

Here she stopped, and thought. Which is one of the things (one of many) that I loved about my mother, the way she never patronized, the way she always took great pains to let me know she was thinking about my questions. (Later, people would say Mom was a monster—especially therapists, early on, when I’d make the mistake of telling them what my mother did, and how she’d let me help her do it.)

“Because,” she finally told me, smiling that funny smile she had when she was happy/sad, sad and happy at the same time, “because they know I don’t matter, honey. Because Mommy does . . . what Mommy does. And they like it. And they hate what they like.”

She never said, Someday you’ll understand. Never said, Wait till you’re older . . .

Instead, she told me everything. The way it was. So later on, nothing ever surprised me.

Outside of our house, out in “the world,” my mother’s tininess always came as a shock. In our apartment, doing what it is she did, my mother towered. Even large guys, in her presence, seemed less large. Seemed small. Seemed cowed. Like the puffy orange man. A man with strange, specific needs.

Like most men. From what I’ve seen.

It’s all so obvious now. But then, what did I know? What does anybody?

But forget all that. Those Polaroids are still in a box. In a safe. (Inside another safe.) Sometimes it’s nice (if nice is the word) to just have a look, to remember. When I do, I get excited. And then I get very, very tired. That’s the paradox.

We are none of us young more than once.

And never again.

Just thinking about it, I need a cigarette.