Playing With Fire
The fastest punch in the face I ever received was from a dense fist of tobacco smoke.
I'm in a cafe when a stranger sitting next to me lit a cigarette and exhaled. It was like a physical assault as the smoke hit me in the head. I recoiled. I almost slapped him in the face in retaliation. But he was unconscious of what he did, and threw another upper cut and then a jab as he puffed away, making me duck. He was young, in his early twenties, at an age when health consequences of smoking are a distant problem in the future, they can be ignored.
When I arrived in Indonesia in-a-day smoker thirty and seen how cheap cigarettes were, I knew I had found paradise. When I seen how almost everyone smoked wherever they pleased, I wondered if my plane had indeed crashed into the Indian Ocean and I had gone to heaven. In no time, I had graduated from being a smoker sixty-one-day. It was said that most Indonesian men needed just one portion every day, to light their first cigarette, the rest being informed of "dog-end." This was one aspect of Indonesian culture in which I was very happy to assimilate with the natives.
The choice of the so-called coffin nails was extensive, although I did take for kretek cigarettes clove infused ubiquitous, hating the fragrant fumes. Instead, I stayed firmly in the saddle Marlboro cowboy. But boy did I smoke. When I got a job teaching English, I built my lesson plans around cigarette breaks. When ill and admitted to one of the few hospitals in Jakarta, which imposed a no smoking rule, I hung in the window fifty times a day. I wound down the windows in air-conditioned taxi for me to smoke. I was smoking in bed, during meals, in elevators. I had a homosexual in my mouth before, during and after sex.
food or smoke? The latter, hands down. Ashtrays were my waypoints. Bins around me were quick to overflowing with empty packets of Marlboro wrinkled. In English we have the saying "to smoke like a train. In Indonesia, it is "smoking like a truck. I thought I was smoking more as Krakatau in training for 1883.
And then I tried to quit. I took this decision because now I am forty years old, smoking was to make me feel decrepit. I was tired of my lungs being the first thing I noticed each morning. I'm sick with coughing, rasping, nausea, as were the closest to me. I was sick of worrying about the insidious damage I was doing to myself, shorten the odds against longevity. Most of all, I'm tired of being dominated by cigarettes, whipping my ass "tobacco companies such as Marlboro, one might say. Also, I had a fit of coughing at exactly the same time an earthquake hit Jakarta. For a moment I thought he was the convulsive power of my lungs affected rocking the huge building that I put my forearm against the wall to steady myself as I coughed. I recovered from the shock of this illusion
Believing that it is important to avoid stress when to quit, I took to relax in a restaurant on Jalan Jaksa, the first street of Jakarta -. Keeping things simple - backpackers, prostitutes, alcoholics, drug addicts, free riders and scammers. I was none of these. I just loved mischievous and colorful atmosphere of the street, and I enjoyed drinking cheap beer. Yet there was often a threat to threat. There were two burly Irish brothers who embodied the stereotype of Irishmen short tempered drunks. We will call the moodier of them Aidan. One night, Aidan brooding at the bar with a group of friends, one of whom had started questioning me in a tone not unpleasant.
He asked me if I came from Ireland. I said I was not. So maybe I had just New Zealand? No, I replied. Australia then? Not there either. Wales? Uh-uh. Aidan, who had grown increasingly irritated throughout this exchange, turned to me and scolded me so hard to stifle the room, "Are you f-ing English or what?"
"Er, yes, I am," I croaked.
I wondered how fast I could drive a 650ml bottle of beer and go. Before I could empty my glass, Aidan got off his stool like a cowboy dismount a horse, and headed directly toward me. So this was it. Prophecy fulfilled.
there, my mother would try to dissuade me from drinking by saying that I would eventually die in a bar. It lists all my parents had indeed perished in pubs, failing to mention that most of these deaths were caused by German bombs dropped on London during the Blitz. So, was about to be Aidan equivalent to a German, or perhaps an Irish bomb?
There was a hope left. Many times in my life, entering a boor had inexplicably taken a liking to me at the last moment retracted his fists and engaged in banter instead of the battery. I can not say why. Sympathy? Empathy? Or some kind of superpower I own: "... he disarms his enemies with his near fatal powers cower" Not that it always worked, as my dental crowns and broken nose testified
. but he worked with. Aidan. he paused, reached out his paw and has apologized. he even refers to himself as the equivalent of a despicable person, using a word that can not be printed here. and then he invited me to join his band at the bar for a drink. I would rather have accepted his apology and been done with it. But he insisted, so I asked for another large Bintang.
This was not the beginning of a beautiful friendship. We never sat together again. the next time I saw Aidan in the same bar, I was recklessly drunk. a friend had been annoying me, so in the wrong I flicked a match on him. Unfortunately, he looked at his ear before continuing toward the back of the head of the girlfriend of Aidan, landing in her long black hair, smoldering and then turned on my friend was able to turn around and quietly retire the match and extinguish the flame before his head could surprise everyone in the eruption bar. Aidan and his crowd wondered aloud where the smell of burning hair came, then they checked each other locks.
The memory of this disaster narrowly averted makes me shudder even now. This was the last game I ever hit. Not a lighter I buy. That night, I went down the horse of the Marlboro for good. Impressions of my earthquakes causing coughing have been behind me with buying fags instead of the food and the setting almost innocent on fire. I kicked the smoking habit and became a part of the minority Indonesian easy breathing.
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