Listen to this story: If you’re in the car, or cooking, or just lazy… you can listen to me read this story for you, in the audio file below.
Once when I was a boy, in the house we were staying in between more permanent homes, I awoke in the night, for no reason I can recall, and wandered downstairs.
Between the rails of the floating staircase I could see my father in the living room, sitting on the fluffy, teddy bear-brown couch, lit only by the TV. He was smoking a cigarette, something I had never seen him do before.
It was an ordinary smoke, the brand in the gold box (which lay beside him), with the fancy script, advertised at the cricket and anywhere else that was still legal. When my father saw me he put the cigarette out and looked at me in a strange, uncharacteristically vulnerable way. As if to say; You got me… Finally you got me. What now?
My mother was already in bed. My siblings, too. Here we were. I had caught him doing something. A mirror world. A threshold had been crossed, over which we could never return. The house had shifted on its axis.
I said something dumb like What are you doing? He met me there with a Nothing… or Watching telly… or something.
So I went back upstairs. Nothing else was ever said. I never saw him smoke again, or even smelled it on him, either. The talking got no easier, and years later, ceased all together.
It was a strange era for the habit of smoking, the 1980s. We knew it was bad for you by then, but lots of people were still doing it. Addicted, of course. Cool characters in movies smoked. Bad guys, too. The government hadn’t banned all the branding and marketing yet. McDonald’s still had little tin ashtrays in the smoking section, which my brothers and I slid like hockey pucks across the table. At pubs, long troughs ran beneath the foot rail of the bar, so drinkers could simply drop their butts without moving an inch.
We had an uncle who smoked with real gusto, sitting in their front room, French inhaling again and again, the smoke raking through his mustache, his eyes sometimes closing. My mother’s father sold cigarettes, wholesale, as did his father and grandfather before him. She never smoked a single one. To this day. How, I’ll never know.
My dad was a doctor, he knew the score - smoking was out. My parents married young and he’d always followed the rules. He was mindlessly strict on us and himself. He wore sweater vests over short-sleeved shirts with a tie to work. Washed his car by hand on weekends. Drank whiskey only in the way the Scottish intended; water, no ice.
That night I think he was trying something new. Something dangerous. Alone, in the dark. It certainly didn’t seem glamorous.
I tried to exorcise all those demons before fatherhood. Drank bourbon on ice - too much - even though I didn’t really enjoy it yet, just to flip the script on my dad. Smoked in patches on and off, in my late teens and early twenties. Who didn’t? Took some regrettable drugs. But I got out in time. Thank god.
Now at the end of the day I’ll sit on the couch most nights. The TV on. Often with a beer. My son likes to joke about how he can’t wait to drink it one day, too. But I encourage him to slow down, to do his own thing. Find his own way. Not to say that I don’t look forward to sharing a drink with him one day.
Sometimes my son will come downstairs after bedtime, with something or other on his mind (he gets anxious at night, like his mother). I see his pajama legs through the banisters, before he sees me.
He walks over to the couch, his bare feet tilted as he crosses the cold, wooden floor. Sometimes with a weeks-old confession, or a concern I could never have seen coming. I’m not always thrilled; it’s my time. But we’ll talk, hug, say goodnight again. I love you.
Then I go back to being me. A me he knows, and I’ve always tried to show him. Good and bad. And he goes back to being himself, too. I hope. Because he’s a good kid.
This is a great piece Toby, one of the best if not the best.