The Smoke Hunt

It was a regular part of the errands I run early most Saturday mornings. Change the cat box, water the evil tree, walk down to the bank, swing by the grocery store, then hit the bodega to pick up a carton of smokes. A carton is usually enough to get me through the rest of the week. Being as I've been stopping by this particular bodega nearly every Saturday for the past 15 years now, the guys who run the place have come to recognize me, and sell me my smokes on the cheap.

This past Saturday when I stepped through the door into the too-dim interior and stood at the counter, however, something was amiss. Usually the Middle Eastern fellow behind the register, knowing full well what I'm there for, simply bends down, grabs a carton of Kools, throws it in a bag and takes my money. But this time he just stood there. We stared at each other in silence for a moment, and then he mumbled something.

"Excuse me?" I asked, leaning in a bit closer to hear as people came and left, dropping coins on the counter for their newspapers.

He mumbled again, and I noticed the nervous smile on his face. This time I caught the words "no cigarettes" and "sorry."

It had happened before-I've shown up before they got that week's shipment, so they didn't have anything at the time. It wasn't that big a deal-it just meant coming back the next day. I usually had at least a pack or two left over from the previous week's carton to carry me through.

But this time things were different. I was, quite literally, down to my last one. A sole, lonely, slightly bent cigarette rested in the pack in my breast pocket. I'd planned on smoking that one on the trip home, but after that, I was lost.

Still, if I needed to come back the next day, I could just stop someplace else along the way, pay full price for a single pack, and make do. Everything would be fine.

Then my attention was drawn to the hand-lettered sign behind the counter, the one hanging in front of the empty racks that used to be filled with every imaginable brand of cigarette you could ever want.

The sign, in essence, said (with deep apologies) that they'd lost their license to sell tobacco products. They did hope, however, to regain that license in a few weeks. Until then, we were all shit out of luck.

It took a moment for this to sink in. My immediate (and lasting) assumption was that they'd finally been busted. Morgan's been suspicious of the smokes I'd been buying from those guys for some time now, after first noticing that the tax stamps had been scraped off all the packs. And what, apart from bootleg smokes, could explain the fact that they sold them to me with such a mighty discount?

Well, I thought, I guess that takes care of that.

I left the bodega a little numb, with the black hounds of despair gaining on me fast. What the hell was I going to do? I lit my last cigarette and began plotting. Buying one pack, or even two or three elsewhere was not a big deal. But I'd run into similar circumstances over the years, only to learn much to my horror and dismay that very few, if any other bodegas, greengrocers, drug or convenience stores in the neighborhood would sell me a whole carton-let alone a carton at a big discount. Even asking for a carton of cigarettes elsewhere inevitably gets me the hairy eyeball. It wasn't as if I was asking for imported hand-rolled Turkish jobs-they were Kools for godsakes. Still, from behind a dozen counters they've all looked at me as if I were some kind of fiend or crazy person.

Well, fuck 'em, I thought. But as I walked down the street working that last cigarette down to the filter, a much more disturbing thought began worming its way into my head:

My God, had they finally done it? Had it finally, really happened?

What if that bodega wasn't the only one? What if the city had quietly hit every store in the neighborhood? What if there had been some kind of sweep the night before, and every cigarette within a 10-block area had been confiscated, every license revoked? What if it was all of Brooklyn? Or all of New York? What the hell would I do then? I had no emergency stash around the apartment. I'd have to make some phone calls, then maybe make a trip.

The fear began to grow in me. It was stupid, I know, but who knew? Stranger, more surprising things had happened in recent years.

I dropped the groceries off at my apartment, and immediately headed back out on my new quest.

I stopped at one of the nearby Korean places and asked them if they'd sell me a carton of cigarettes. The young man behind the counter looked at me blankly for a moment as if trying to register this, then took a perfunctory look under the counter before shaking his head at me.

"Not now," he said, enigmatically.

If not now, I thought, when? When?!

I left the store and crossed the street. I knew the drug store wouldn't help me, so it was two blocks further to the next bodega. They didn't carry Kools, so it was back out on the street.

This was ridiculous.

Finally I found a place that wouldn't sell me a carton, but would sell me 10 individual packs. He rang it up, handed me the bag, and I was on my way home, calm once more.

That stupid morning got me thinking about this "smoking" business. Not that I was considering stopping, not for a second. But I was thinking about those early days, lighting up my first cigarette in Minneapolis while standing in front of the local headquarters of the American Heart Association. That was a Lucky, and no cigarette has ever tasted better.

Things had grown so complicated in the 20 years since. Maybe it was time to try and simplify again. Morgan hated the fact that I'd settled on Kools, even all these years after they removed the asbestos from the filters. But I'd originally settled on the deadliest brand around because, after all the brands I'd tried, they were the last one that didn't make my head scream. But maybe that was all part of their nefarious scheme.

On Monday I stopped in a deli in Manhattan.

"Do you carry Luckies?" I asked.

The kid behind the counter fumbled around the cigarette rack a bit, and pulled a pack out.

"I got these," he said, holding up a pack of filtered Lucky Strikes. "Or do you want the little ones?"

"Whatever you have is fine."

"I got Camel straights, if you'd like those little ones instead."

"No, really. What you've got there is fine."

"Because if you like the little ones, I'd be happy to order them for you."

"That's really not necessary," I told him. "I just hadn't had Luckies in a while, and wanted to try them again."

"Just smoking for the day, huh?"

Not wanting to get into the whole, long, pathetic story with some guy behind a deli counter, I just shrugged.

"Well," he said, as he rang them up and pushed the pack toward me, "have fun smoking."