GUTTER CIGARETTES

And Other Things I Am Now Too Good For

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When I was working at the wine bar in Brooklyn, I would have to go outside to take the occasional cigarette break. This invariably found me sitting on the curb about 30 feet away, or “in the gutter,” as I preferred to say.

On some levels, I am a fancy lady of a certain age who shouldn’t sit in gutters. I guess it was an old punk rock habit that hasn’t died in me yet. But it gets worse.

Since I only smoke about 4 drags, I would invariably stub out a good four inches of my cigarette, then leave it in the gutter. After a while that started to look wasteful to me, and as long as my cigarette was still unmolested when I returned for another smoke break — as long as it hadn’t been obviously walked on or pissed on — I’d sit on the curb, pick it back up off the street, put it in my actual mouth and smoke it again.

I confessed this casually to my comely co-worker - a tall, beautiful young girl from Vermont whom I adored. She looked at me with fresh blue eyes full of pity, and I realized: I have to be better than this. The feng-shui of gutter cigarettes was all fucked up, and probably suggested that I had all kinds of other disgusting habits I was barely aware of that were aligning me with the gutter. I decided I was worth more, dammit. My hideous treatment of me would not go unchallenged.

I didn’t mean the smoking, of course, I just meant storing my future cigarettes in the literal gutter. After that I started to hide them places, like in the yard of the church in the next storefront that fancy black women in hats occasionally emerged from.

For the first few weeks of living in my new Oakland apartment, I thought the landlord (who occasionally lives in back) forbade any smoking on the patios, so I was back to smoking in the gutter.

I had already decided I was too good for that, and there I was doing it again (without the leaving butts on the street part). So, I bought some black aluminum patio chairs that I could take outside the gate and smoke on the street with. It was important: I was elevating myself from the gutter. Rising. Semiotics are real. Then the landlord caught me doing it and told me it was fine to smoke on the porch. I returned the deck chairs, but I think they were temporarily invaluable to my self-esteem.

There’s all kinds of things I swore I’d never do again, which now I am doing. I just accepted a journalism assignment from a magazine I like for under 30 cents a word, which is a threshold I told myself I’d never cross — the lamentation song of every prostitute who ever lived. They pay absolute dogshit for articles these days. The magazine wants me to try to get a grant for the article, so that I might be paid like an actual writing professional. Better I should set up a hand-job stand behind the Chevron station.

When I worked for the New York Times, I had to subsidize them. It’s how I went broke and lost my condo. They capped my income at $1800 a month by forbidding freelancers to write for anyone else while freelancing for for them. My agent assured me the exposure was important enough to keep doing it. Well, as my jazz musician mother always pointed out, “You can die of exposure.” I worked for them on and off for 5 years, living out of my HELOC (Home Equity Line of Credit). I had paid cash for my condo and ended up eating nearly the whole thing, until I had to sell it.

I’ll never do that again (she said, preparing to do a feature article for less money than I’ve ever received in my entire 38-year writing career.)

There’s a certain amount of exploitation I said I’d never stand for again, but I like writing enough to keep spreading my literary ass out on the hood of the Toyota. It’s no way to live.

I dispensed with the Beauty and Cinderella myths around the time I turned 50, and stopped caring if men thought I looked like a black haystack. It was a decision I made never to care what men thought about me, ever again. It was great. I highly recommend it. Unconditional self-acceptance is a terrific project, especially for women, who have been starved and corseted and needled in the face since the dawn of time. Just say “fuck it” and be your own human.

I didn’t realize how much casual sexism I have succeeded in utterly rejecting until I recently saw the terrible Elke Sommer movie “Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number!” (I’m in a marvelous movie club on Zoom with some other literary luminaries prone to great fits of camp.) It was something of a grisly revelation to see just how utterly infantilized women still were in the mid-sixties. Elke is always pouting and stomping blondly and falling asleep in bubble baths, and men are always dragging her limp body around like she is a piece of luggage. It’s supposed to be a funny movie: It has Bob Hope and Phyllis Diller in it, but for me, Elke, who plays a spoiled starlet, was being treated like an oversexed 5-year-old and it gave me waves of nausea. It was like the social psychology version of watching a Civil War amputation, watching Elke blonde around helplessly.

We must never forget the Bimbo, ladies and gentlemen. She walked among us for decades like Aunt Jemima, being a harmful stereotype.

I feel a chill on the air that warns me of her imminent return. Suzanne Somers Uber Alles!

Killer Joe is going to the anti-Tesla rally in San Francisco tomorrow. “This is the time to stand up and say No,” he told me quite seriously.

I told him I didn’t have any riot gear. I gave away all my motorcycle body armor. I felt terrible about being physically wimpy, especially after Anonymous made that wonderful, hope-filled broadcast.

“The time calls for bravery,” said Joe.

“I think I’d end up doing more harm than good,” I said. “I’d fall down and twist my ankle and people would need to rescue me. Bring diluted Maalox in case you’re tear gassed.”

I’m not averse to getting beat up, but I do have an absolute horror of jail. It’s another place I swore I’d never go (again), like Vegas or Costa Rica. I like to think I am some kind of a living protest, but it’s probably time to start building my riot wardrobe again. Usually this involves buying more motorcycles, which is yet another habit I swore I had broken, but as this society breaks down into Mad Maxism, it is one I may be forced to re-embrace. I decided to go to the protest tomorrow, regardless of Kevlar.

But we will return to bad behaviors as a dog returneth to its own vomit. It’s the state of the world. You just have to keep it stylish, and get the deck chairs.

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ARTWORK: “Loni Anderson,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson, 2022