Cigarettes Killed Me, but Not the Way You Think

They didn’t kill me by choking me with great brown globs or by slowly drowning me in my own liquids. I wasn’t a curled up dry thing with claw hands dipped in poison yellow. But they did kill me.

Cigarettes killed me on a bright blue day when I was feeling hot as hell in my own skin for once. Barely halfway through my twenties and strolling down the street like a bright balloon, although my hangover may have made me droop and bob in the air a little bit. I didn’t mind. When you’re young, aren’t hangovers just proof that you had a really good time? Anyway,,, there I was, just a bright flash of a girl with my red hair streaming out from under my headphones, Nirvana loud in my ears. Kurt growling about Polly and her cracker.

I had woken up in the bright warmth of the afternoon and reached past the cup of coffee Sam had made and left for me and found my pack, empty. At the time I didn’t see the point of coffee if I couldn’t also have a cig with it so I stuffed my feet back into my steel toes, shrugged on my hoodie even though it was a hot summer day so I could avoid both wearing a bra and the bodega dude staring at my nipples poking under my shirt, grabbed my walkman and slammed out the door.

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I was distracted, I’ll admit. Full of last nights fumes and adventures. Kicking at the hard fruits that the Olive trees rained down, staining the sidewalk with oil. I was thinking about Sam. Was she really pissed or had she just been hammered and maudlin? Was the coffee an apology or a guilt trip?

I was a block away from the bodega. Carlos was on his lowrider bike in the lot doing lazy circles. I wonder if he had any new poems for me. I had found one for him and had it folded up in my pocket. T.S. Eliot. My favorite. It was a long one but I didn’t think he’d mind. Sunlight glinted off the chrome on his bike, the shiny dome of his shaved head. His scalp tattoos looked like a magic thing; runes or a spell, sigils. My bodega-lot-shaman-holy-man, I thought. I’ll have to tell him. I stepped down off the sidewalk to go around a big van parked in a driveway. It’s back doors were hanging open and I saw the shape of something just inside. Rude as fuck to block the sidewalk but whatever. I didn’t really care.

Just then, a flash of color. Was it blue? Was it? The shape shifted and sprung toward me like the shadow of an airplane or some awful giant bird and, with a crack that sounded like searing, lightening fast pain, confidently and completely turned out all the lights.

It’s a strange dream I’m having. Car exhaust and oil and cold metal and somewhere a giant is munching rocks. Grinding them between his teeth like jawbreakers. Like that huge creature with the sad eyes in that movie about the horse who gives up and the crying boy and the wolf who is really nothing at all. I loved that movie the most even though it made me cry. Wait, what? My head hurts and my face is cold cold cold. This dream sucks. Wait… not a dream. My eyes are sort of gummy and crusty feeling and don’t want to open. My cheek is stuck to something cold and metal .I realize the crunching rock sound is not a sad-eyed giant snacking but gravel. Gravel under tires.

My eyes snap open. I’m suddenly horribly awake.

The back of the van is open, no seats back here. Just a gas can and some piles of clothes and other shapes that I can’t quite figure out in the half-light. I squint my eyes toward the driver of the van. The back of a man’s head. Tan baseball cap, thick neck. There’s a mark like a big mole just beneath the neat, buzzed hairline. I glance up at the rearview mirror and see his eyes looking right into mine. There’s something wrong with them.

“Good morning, sunshine,” he says.

I try to sit up but I can’t move. Panic floods my body. I try to scream and that’s when I feel the tape over my mouth for the first time. Bile rises in my throat but I swallow it back and thrash around on the hard metal floor of the van. I kick as hard as I can against the doors in the back, expecting him to stop the van and come back here and grab me, try to stop me. He does stop the van but when he does he simply turns in his seat and regards me as you would something very small and very stupid. His voice is very soft and very calm.

“Now now, “ he says. “You better stop all that knockin’ about. You’re gonna hurt yourself.”

I scream against the tape, pulling and twisting my arms so hard I feel the bindings cut into my wrists and a warm wetness trickles over my fingers.

He swings himself out of the front seat and comes toward me, hunched over. He’s very big and l squirm as far away from him as I can.

“Aw, come on baby. You gotta be a good girl, ok?”

I close my eyes tight and curl into myself, throat raw as if I’d been eating glass. And so I do not see his foot rear back and forward again, slamming into my temple and sending me back down into that dark hole. Back into the dream of oil and exhaust and a big rock monster with sad eyes who chews boulders in his slow moving jaws until they are reduced to nothing but a handful of grit.

When I wake up for the third time that day it’s into darkness. I’m in a perfectly ordinary room, in a perfectly ordinary bed. The only thing is that it’s not mine. Suddenly I remember and leap out of the bed and run toward the door. I’m almost there, my fingertips nearly brushing the brass handle when I am snapped back, gagging and stumbling. I’m so shocked it takes me a second and then I feel it around my neck. The motherfucker has collared me. A length of heavy chain leads from the collar to a hook in the sealing. It looks strong. Industrial. Like something for hanging livestock in a slaughterhouse.

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