When You Are Engulfed in Flames

by David Sedaris

  I was in El Paso one afternoon, changing out of my swim-suit, and a young man said, “Excuse me, but aren’t you . . .” When I say I was changing out of my swimsuit, I mean that I had nothing on. No socks, no T-shirt. My underpants were in my hand. I guess the guy recognized me from my book jacket photo. The full-length naked one on the back cover of my braille editions.

  My other bad experience took place in London, at a community pool I used to go to. It was a Saturday afternoon and very crowded. I’d just reached the end of my lane and was coming up for air when I heard the sound of a whistle and noticed that I was the only one left in the water. “What’s the problem?” I asked, and the lifeguard said something I couldn’t quite understand.

  “What?”

  “Poo,” he repeated. “Everybody out while we clean the water.”

  As I walked toward the changing room, a second lifeguard fished out the turds. There were four of them, each the size and shape of a cat’s hair ball. “Third time today that’s happened,” the person at the desk told me.

  At the pool I currently go to, one of the regulars is a woman with Down syndrome. She’s fairly heavy and wears an old-fashioned swimsuit, the sort with a ruffled skirt. Then there’s this bathing cap that straps beneath her chin and is decorated with rubber flowers. Odd is the great satisfaction I take whenever I beat her from one end to the other. “I won three out of four,” I told Hugh the first time she and I swam together. “I mean I really creamed her.”

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “She’s obese. She’s as old as you are. And she has Down syndrome?”

  “Yes, and I beat her. Isn’t that great!”

  “Did she even know you were having a race?”

  I hate it when he gets like this. Anything to burst my bubble.

  I no longer tell him about the old people I defeat. Older than I am, I mean — women in their late seventies and eighties. Then there are the children. I was in Washington State, at a small-town YMCA, when a boy wandered into the lap lane and popped his head, seal-like, out of the water. I would later learn that he was nine, but at the time he was just this kid, slightly pudgy, with a stern haircut. It’s like he went to a barbershop with a picture of Hitler, that’s how severe it was. We got to talking, and when I told him I wasn’t a very good swimmer, he challenged me to a race. I think he assumed that, like most adults, I’d slow down and intentionally let him win, but he didn’t know who he was dealing with. I need all the confidence I can get, and one victory is just as good as any other. Thus I swam for my very life and beat the pants off him. I thought this was it — he’d accept his defeat and move on with his life — but five minutes later he stopped me again and asked if I believed in God.

  “No,” I told him.

  “Why?”

  I thought for a second. “Because I have hair on my back, and a lot of other people, people who kill and rob and make life miserable, don’t. A real God wouldn’t let that happen.”

  I was happy to leave it at that, but before I could resume he blocked my path. “It was God who let you win that race,” he said. “He touched you on the leg and made you go faster, and that’s how come you beat me.”

  He really looked like Hitler then, eyes blazing like two little coals.

  “If God knows that I don’t believe in him, why would he go out of his way to help me?” I asked. “Maybe instead of making me win, God reached down and made you lose. Did you ever think of that?”

  I continued my swimming but was stopped once again at the end of the next lap. “You’re going to go to hell,” the boy said.

  “Is this still about me winning that race?”

  “No,” he told me. “It’s about God, and if you don’t believe in Him you’re going to burn for the rest of eternity.”

  I thanked him for the tip and then I went back to my laps, grateful that at the church I had attended, the service was entirely in Greek. My sisters and I had no idea what the priest was saying, and when you’re young that’s probably for the best. Lil’ Hitler was only in the third grade, and already he was planning for his afterlife. Even worse, he was planning for mine. While changing out of my suit, it occurred to me that I probably shouldn’t have contradicted him. It’s insane to discuss religion with a child. Especially at the Y. What bugged me was his insistence that I’d had unfair help, that God had stepped in and pushed me over the finish line. I mean, really. Can I not beat a nine-year-old on my own?

  Three

  When I look back on my many years of smoking, the only real regret I have is all the litter I generated, all those hundreds of thousands of butts crushed underfoot. I was always outraged when a driver would empty his ashtray onto the asphalt. “What a pig!” I’d think. But he only did in bulk what I did piecemeal. In a city you tell yourself that someone will clean it up, someone who wouldn’t have a job unless you dropped that butt onto the sidewalk. In that respect you’re good, you’re helping. Then too, it never felt like real litter, like tossing down, say, a broken lightbulb. No one was going to cut his foot on a cigarette butt, and because of its earthy color it pretty much disappeared into the landscape, the way a peanut shell might. This made it “organic” or “biodegradable” — one of those words that meant “all right.”

  I didn’t stop throwing my cigarette butts down until, at the age of forty-eight, I was arrested for it. This was in Thailand, which makes it all the more embarrassing. Tell someone the police picked you up in Bangkok, and they reasonably assume that, after having sex with the eight-year-old, you turned her inside out and roasted her over hot coals, this last part, the cooking without a permit, being illegal under Thai law. “Anything goes,” that’s the impression I had, and so it surprised me when, out of nowhere, two policemen approached. One took my right arm, the other took my left, and they led me toward a brown tent. “Hugh!” I called, but as usual he was twenty paces ahead of me and wouldn’t notice I was gone for another ten minutes. The officers seated me at a long table and made a motion for me to stay put. They then walked away, leaving me to wonder what I had possibly done to offend them.

  Before my run-in with the police, Hugh and I had visited the criminology museum, a sad sort of homemade affair, its highlight being a dead man suspended in a glass box and dripping amber-colored fluid into a shallow enameled pan. The sign, which was written in Thai and translated into English, read, simply, “Rapist and Murderer.” It was the way they’d mark a stuffed or pickled cobra at a natural history museum, a way of saying, “This is what this creature looks like. Keep your eyes peeled.”

  Except for the amber fluid, the rapist-murderer was actually quite pleasant-looking, a lot like the policemen who’d picked me off the street and the man who’d sold us our lunch. It was only 300 degrees outside, so after leaving the criminology museum Hugh thought we might eat some piping-hot soup cooked in what amounted to a roving cauldron. There were no tables, so we lowered ourselves onto overturned buckets and put the scalding bowls in our laps. “Let’s sit in the blistering sun and burn the skin off our tongues!” That’s a Hamrick’s idea of a good time.

  From there we’d gone to a grand palace. It wasn’t my sort of thing, but I hadn’t complained or insulted the royal family. Nothing had been stolen or written on with Magic Marker, so, again, what was the problem?

  When the officers returned, they handed me a pen and placed a sheet of paper before me. The document was in Thai, a language that looks like cake decoration to me. “What did I do?” I asked, and the men pointed behind me, where a sign announced a thousand-baht fine for littering.

  “Littering?” I said, and one of the officers, the more handsome of the two, took an invisible cigarette from his mouth, and threw it to the ground.

  I wanted to ask if, instead of paying the fine, he could maybe cane me, but I think that’s done in Singapore, not Thailand, and I didn’t want to come off as unsophisticated. In the end I signed my name, handed over the equivalent of thirty dollars, and stepped outside to look for my cigarette butt, which
I eventually found lying in the gutter between a severed duck head and a fly-covered plastic bag half full of coconut milk.

  That’s right, I thought. Fine the Westerner. Really, though, wasn’t I just as guilty as these other litterers? You either trash up the landscape, or you don’t, and I was clearly a member of Group A, a crowd I’d always viewed, perhaps unfairly, as foreign or uneducated. This was a notion I picked up from my Greek grandmother. Yiayia lived with us while I was growing up and was hands down the worst litterbug I had ever seen. Cans, bottles, fat Sunday newspapers, anything that could fit through the car window was thrown through the car window. “What the hell are you doing?” my father would shout. “Throwing crap onto the road, we don’t do that in this country.”

  Yiayia would blink at him through her thick-lensed glasses. Then she’d say, “Oh,” and do it again two minutes later, this as if the grocery receipt was litter but the Time magazine wasn’t. I think she actually saved her used tissues and empty medicine bottles, stuck them in her purse until she was back in the moving station wagon.

  “That’s a Greek for you,” our mother would say, adding that her mother would never throw anything from a car window. “Not even a peach pit.”

  During the period that our grandmother lived with us, litter was very much on our minds, in part the result of TV. The “Keep America Beautiful” commercials featured a crying Indian, his composure shattered by the sight of a trash-strewn creek bed.

  “See that?” I’d say to Yiayia. “All that garbage and stuff in the water, that’s wrong.”

  “Awwww, you’re wasting your time,” Lisa would say. “She doesn’t even get that the guy is an Indian.”

  Our father worried that our grandmother was setting a bad example, but, actually, it worked the other way. None of us would ever think of throwing something out a car window, unless, of course, it was a cigarette butt, which is not just trash, but red-tipped, flaming trash. “Shame about that forest fire,” we’d say. “You really have to wonder about people who do things like that. It’s a sickness of the mind.”

  I can’t say that after leaving Bangkok I never again crushed a cigarette underfoot. I can say, though, that I never did it comfortably. If a trash can was around, I’d use it, and if not, I’d either tuck the butt into the cuff of my pants or try to hide it under something, a leaf, maybe, or some bit of paper cast down by somebody else, as if the shade would allow it to disintegrate faster.

  Now that I’ve quit, I’ve started collecting trash — not tons, but a little bit every day. If, for example, I see a beer bottle left on a park bench I’ll pick it up and toss it into the nearest garbage can, which is usually no more than a few feet away. Then I say, “Stupid lazy asshole couldn’t be bothered to throw away his own fucking bottle.”

  I wish I could do my penitence with grace, but I doubt that will happen any time soon. People see me picking up garbage and figure, with reason, that I’m being paid for it. They wouldn’t want to put me out of a job, so instead of throwing their plastic fork away, they drop it, leaving me with even more to clean up. Empty bags that used to hold French fries, paper cups, used bus tickets . . . it’s funny, but the only thing I won’t pick up are discarded butts. It’s not their germs that put me off. I’m simply afraid that on taking one between my fingers, I’ll somehow snap to and remember, with clarity, just how good a cigarette would taste right now.

  About the Author

  David Sedaris’s half-dozen books have been translated into twenty-five languages, including Estonian, Greek, and Bahasa. His essays appear frequently in The New Yorker and are heard on Public Radio International’s This American Life.