Cardboard Ocean

by Mike McCardell

  “Are you kids nuts?” he said. “You don’t buy straw. You pick it.”

  We had no idea where we would pick straw.

  We had already been practising smoking with dry ice. In the summer when we could find a few finger-sized slivers steaming on the ground by the ice cream trucks we would pop them into our mouths and blow out the steam, which looked like smoke.

  If you kept your tongue wet the ice would usually not burn a hole through it. But if the piece was too large or you left it too long it would suddenly start burning through the soft flesh and leave you yelling, trying to spit it out and then getting it stuck on your lip which started burning like a hot iron and then it would swell up and you’d have a scar.

  So straw would be better. But nowhere we went did they have straw for sale.

  We were sitting on the bench at the bus stop on Jamaica Avenue looking at the steel pillars of the El. “Those are kind of like trees,” said Jimmy Lee. “If we had straw, we could pretend we were in the woods and we would look like we were country kids.”

  “Wait,” said Johnny. “Don’t go away. I’ll be right back.” He jumped up from the bench and ran home.

  We returned to thinking about the picture of Dick with his straw. I put my fingers up in front of my lips and pretended what it would be like to twirl the straw between them.

  “What are you doing?” asked Joey.

  “Pretending I have straw.”

  “How can you pretend when you’ve never had it?”

  “I’m pretending I had it, and now I don’t have it.”

  “Hey, don’t pretend you’re smoking,” said Joey. “Tiny’s coming.”

  We all looked down the street and saw Tiny, the huge cop who walked the beat on Jamaica Avenue. He was a giant and he walked from the station house on 117th Street to Van Wyck Expressway. That was about a mile, then he walked back. He was always whistling and swinging his night stick.

  “You kids being good?” he said to us.

  “Yes, sir,” we said.

  “No smoking, no drinking, no fighting, no cursing,” he said. “You know the rules.”

  With each rule he pointed his night stick at one of us.

  He had once let us feel the night stick – it was as hard as iron, and that was because it had lead in the middle. He gently hit each of us on the rear that night and told us if we ever did anything wrong he would not be so gentle.

  “I’m proud of you kids.”

  Then he went on with his beat.

  Johnny was back half a minute later.

  “I have straw,” he said.

  He held out his hand as he got closer and there, for sure, was a bunch of straw. He handed us each one.

  “Be careful. One end is dirty,” he said.

  We looked, and sure enough, one end was dirty, so we put the other end in our mouths. It was wonderful. We already figured out that just by moving our teeth we could make the straw flip up and down. This was just like being in the country.

  “Where’d you get the straw?” asked Tommy.

  “From my mother’s broom,” said Johnny. “I heard her say it’s a straw broom so I got some scissors and cut off a hunk. I hope she doesn’t notice.”

  We hoped so too because all of a sudden the concrete wall we were leaning against was a tree and the street was a stream and Jane was going to come and sit alongside us and admire our straws.

  We all went home that afternoon carefully carrying our straw, and I put mine on the windowsill. The next morning when I got up after my mother had gone to work it was gone. It either fell off and went behind the radiator, or she threw it out.

  A week later Tommy opened a pack of Camels.

  “How’d you get that?” I asked.

  “I told Matty they were for my father. That’s why I had to get Camels, cause that’s what my father gets. I really wanted Luckies because lsmft.”

  “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco,” we both said because the commercials on the radio said that.

  We knew our butts. We knew women smoked Chesterfields, like my mother. And we knew the men in the bar usually smoked Pell Mells because they were longer. I remember standing at the door once and seeing a guy while he was still sitting on a stool fall asleep with a Pell Mell between his fingers. I knew it was a Pell Mell because it was long and I watched while it burned closer and closer to his fingers.

  I wondered what it would be like when I got into the bar and could only have beer. I felt sorry for those guys because it was more fun to choose among Coke and Pepsi and orange soda and cream soda and Yoo-hoo. Sometimes we would get a Cherry Coke, but you couldn’t do that with beer.

  And the cigarette burned closer to the guy’s hand.

  If we were really broke, we could get just a seltzer water for two cents. It was still good. We could sit on the stool and pretend we were in the bar next door and watch Matty stack the packs of cigarettes against the wall in slots. He sold a lot of cigarettes. He would pile them up with his left hand and then poke them into the slots in the wall with the stretched-out fingers of his stiff right hand. He didn’t smoke. That was odd. But we could buy a pretend cigarette which was made of white, hard candy with a red tip at one end and then sit with our Coke and make believe we were smoking.

  Now I was watching the burning end of the cigarette reach the guy’s fingers but he just sat there, slumped over, sound asleep on the stool leaning against the bar with his cigarette hand hanging down. That’s impossible, I thought. It must hurt.

  Suddenly it was impossible. He jerked awake with a loud, hard-to-imitate sound followed by yelling profanity. Then he swung his hand in the air and grabbed it with his teeth and bit his hand. The other guys just laughed.

  “Wow, did you see that?” I asked Tommy. We were standing by the open door of the bar. “That was fun.”

  Then Tommy opened the Camels and I smelled the sweet smell of tobacco, the same odor that would come from thousands of other packs when they were first opened.

  We each took a cigarette and put them between our lips and Tommy lit a match. He cupped it in his hand for me. I felt special because he gave it to me first. I sucked in as the match touched the end and oh my God: the burning, the poisoned gas that came across the ground and fell into the trenches, the ripping of my throat and lungs.

  “Cough, cough.”

  Gag. Yell. “Oww. My chest.”

  The pain.

  “How’s that?” asked Tommy.

  “Good,” I choked. Then I coughed and tried to suck in air. “Good,” I repeated.

  He lit his own just before the flame on the match reached his fingers. He drew in the smoke and blew it out.

  “That was your first, wasn’t it?” he said to me.

  I nodded. My chest and throat hurt too badly to talk.

  “Do it again, and it won’t be so bad,” he said.

  I took another drag and sucked it in and blew it out. He was right. It didn’t hurt as bad. It only hurt like a hundred knives instead of a thousand.

  Another drag and I was feeling dizzy.

  “Keep doing it,” said Tommy. “You’ll get used to it. Remember, doctors recommend Camels.”

  He was right. Nine out of ten doctors said Camels were less irritating. In the magazines there was always a picture of a doctor in a white coat smoking Camels.

  I took another drag and did not feel as bad. At least I could stand. We finished and flipped the burning butt ends out into the street. I felt like a man.

  When I got home, the light in my mother’s bedroom was out and I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth. My mouth was stinking. We had tooth powder which I didn’t like using because I thought it was sissy. So I always just brushed my teeth with water, but not tonight. Tonight, powder piled thick on my brush.

  Then I went to bed and felt sick.

  Forty years later, I took my mother to the hospital to have one of her lungs cut out. After we signed her in, she said she had to go outside to have a cigarette. A few years later I was back at a
different hospital, but the same patient.

  She was on life-support: a breathing machine, wires, tubes, inserted into her limp body, and each time the machine forced air into what remained of her one remaining lung, her body jerked on the bed.

  She was unconscious. They told me she was brain dead. I whispered into her ear and a tear came out of her eye. One of the machines said that her heart rate went up, if only for a moment.

  She had left instructions for me and everyone that she was not to be kept alive by machines. I signed the papers and they unplugged her. But she did not die right away. It is something in nature, I suppose, that makes a living creature try to hold on, no matter what. The doctor said it was her brain stem automatically keeping her diaphragm going, but every breath was a gargantuan struggle to pull air into a lung that was useless. She was breathing like a person with acute asthma climbing a mountain. We wished she would die.

  She had started smoking when she was a teenager. No one told her it was bad for her health, and even if they had, she would not have listened. Smoking was glamorous. It was beautiful. Exciting men and women did it.

  We sat by her bed for four days, four eternally long days after the life-support machine was turned off. Four days of watching every breath sweated and strained over before it was let go, and then the struggle began again.

  After that we went though boxes of her old photographs. She was young and happy. She was a person I didn’t know because you don’t know your mother when she is young. She was smiling and laughing and she had a cigarette in her hand in almost every photo. At the beach she was smoking. At family gatherings she was smoking. Everyone was smoking. She had a cigarette while she was holding her baby.

  Everyone was smoking. The few who didn’t were oddities. “He probably doesn’t drink either.” The implication was that he was a wimp.

  My mother’s burial was beautiful. She wasn’t religious and she wanted no service or memorial, but she loved shopping. She did not own much, but she loved going through high-end department stores, looking, touching, comparing. When she found something she deeply wanted, a blouse usually, she would wait and wait until it went on sale. If she missed the sale or if the remaining blouse was the wrong size, she would shrug and let it go. It was a small gamble, and it put some excitement in her life. Before long she would set her eyes on some other potential Kentucky Derby winner on a wire hanger.

  After we picked up her ashes my daughter came up with a list of the best department stores in New York. Then her brother and she and I took Grandma to Bonwit Teller and Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord and Taylor. We spread Grandma where she most loved to be. She was secretly put to rest in front of the counters where the blouses were sold. She was spread in the shoe department. Then her grandson went into Tiffany’s and while the security guards were looking at him because he is not the type to shop there, his hands were by his sides spreading his grandmother in front of the diamonds.

  We took a subway downtown to get something to eat, and when we came up the stairs to the sidewalk we saw a bus passing by. On the side was a big ad with a picture of a glamorous young woman with a cigarette in her hand. The woman looked a lot like my mother when she was younger: same smile, same joy of living, same cigarette, and possibly, same future.

  I didn’t know any of that when I was buying a pack of Luckies a week after the Camels.

  “Who are these for?” Matty asked.

  “My mother,” I said.

  “She smokes Chesterfields.”

  I held out my quarter. “She wants to switch because lsmft,” I said.

  He gave me the cigarettes, took my quarter and gave me my two cents change.

  “Make sure you don’t smoke them,” he said. “They’ll kill you.”

  I left the store, went around the corner and lit a Lucky. Now I was grown up. I no longer needed straw or dry ice, or even someone else to smoke with. I was eleven.

  Milk is Good for You,

  If You Don’t Get Caught

  “Wanna get some milk?” Buster asked.

  Good idea. We had nothing else to do for a half an hour. To get milk we went to the end of our street where the dead end was and the factory that made instruments.

  “What kind of instruments do you think they make?” we would ask when we passed by. We always asked that.

  “Secret war stuff,” someone would say. Someone would always say that. It was a good answer.

  Then we climbed the chain-link fence at the end of the dead end. Someone long ago had taken off the barbed wire from one section that was at the top. We jumped down from the top of the fence and climbed up the steep bank that was covered with asphalt, and had some weeds growing out of cracks. I wished that I could show my mother and the doctor that there were weeds here, but I could never let them know what we were doing.

  At the top of the hill was a wide flat surface that went on forever. On it were four train tracks, two going to the city and two away. In the middle, between the tracks was a path wide enough to stand or walk on even if two trains were passing each other at the same time.

  Everything was covered with railroad rocks, so thick on the ground and under the wooden ties that you could not get your fingers through them, or even poke a stick very deeply. And every one of the rocks was shaped sort of like a pyramid but with only three sides and about the size of a golf ball which I had never seen back then, and every one of them was dirty and brown, which is the colour they were, dirt brown.

  It was just yesterday that a little kid named Lester had one of the railroad rocks. Lester was only about eight so he didn’t hang around with us much. We almost never saw him. We knew there was a lot of yelling from his apartment and we felt sorry for the people next door, who happened to be Dorothy and her mother and father and grandfather, because you can’t listen to the radio if the people on the other side of the wall are making too much noise.

  Sometimes Dorothy’s grandfather would pound on the wall, but then there would be louder pounding back from Lester’s side. Still, it always quieted down shortly after that, Dorothy said, because she figured the people next door were afraid of her grandfather. He was very tall, with white hair and an accent that made him impossible to understand. But he always got his way, and the wall went quiet after he pounded.

  That was when we saw Lester sitting on his front stoop looking at a railroad rock that he was holding.

  “What are you looking at?” Tommy asked.

  “Nothing,” said Lester as he kept on looking.

  “Must be something.”

  “Nope, nothing.”

  But he kept his eyes on the rock, hardly blinking and then Vinnie came over. Vinnie always seemed friendlier than everyone else. We thought it was because he was Italian and his mother hugged him all the time. His mother hugged everyone. It was nice to ring Vinnie’s doorbell to ask if he could come out because if his mother opened the door she would hug you.

  “What are you doing with the rock?” asked Vinnie.

  “Just pretending,” Lester said.

  And maybe because we didn’t laugh, he quietly told Vinnie and Tommy and me that there were some people, some farmers, living on the side of the mountain.

  “You see where those little holes are in the rock?” He was barely whispering. “They live in there.”

  Then he put the rock in the palm of his hand and said, “The evil king lives at the top and he’s taking away all their food.”

  Vinnie tried hard to see the people. “You’re making that up,” he said.

  “No,” Lester looked up in defiance, but he didn’t want to sound stupid. “They’re really small. And the good guys are down at the bottom of the mountain.”

  He started talking faster because we guessed he didn’t want to sound like he was making it up.

  “And they can’t climb up the hill fast enough because they haven’t eaten for a long time and they’re weak.”

  All three of us were listening and staring at the rock.

  “And the bad
king’s army is just about to take over the farmers’ land and throw the good guys out when one of the good guys says he’ll save them because he’s in love with a girl who lives on the farm,” said Lester.

  “Then what happened?” asked Tommy.

  “The good guy sneaked up the back side of the mountain.”

  Lester turned the rock around and we all watched as he moved his fingernail slowly up a crevice. “And then he fought off the king’s guards and captured the king.”

  This was like the movies. We just kept looking at the rock.

  “Then the king’s army had to go back and try to free the king,” said Lester. He was talking even faster now. “And that gave the good guys at the bottom time to get to the farms and get some food, and then they attacked the bad guys and threw them off the mountain.”

  Vinnie’s mouth was open. Lester had a big smile.

  “And the good guy and the girl got married.”

  “Did all that really happen?” asked Vinnie.

  “Yeah,” said Lester, “and then they all went back down to right here.” He pointed at the middle of the rock where the holes were, “and had a feast.”

  A few days later some kids from Rocky’s gang came by and saw Lester playing with his rock. We don’t know why they walked down our street. Lester couldn’t tell us much, but he said they were from Rocky’s gang. They surrounded Lester and took his rock away from him and threw it back on the tracks with a million other rocks. Then they went away laughing.

  When we heard about it we went to Lester’s apartment to make him feel better, but he was outside, sitting on the front stoop. We knew he had been crying, because we could see the stains down through the dirt on his cheeks. We didn’t know if that was from losing the rock or from something that just happened inside his apartment.

  But he wasn’t crying now, and there was a smile on his face when he saw us.

  “Those big boys are rotten,” we said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Lester. “The farmers and the good guys escaped just in time.”