Essays After Eighty by Hall Donald

Author:Hall, Donald [Hall, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Itzy, Kickass.so
ISBN: 9780544286948
Amazon: B00HK3F0B4
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2014-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

I was forty before I smoked a cigarette, about the time the surgeon general issued his fuddy-duddy warning. I was a college teacher, separated from my wife, and had entered a fringe of the counterculture that took over the sixties. My students’ greatest sport was to turn a professor on. Never did I need to buy a joint, and unlike Bill Clinton I accepted instruction in inhaling, learning to enjoy the pain. Alas, I had another, deeper reason for seeking humiliation and harm. I endured a volcanic love affair with a beautiful young woman who was not psychotic but whose utterance sounded like surrealism. She had other attractions, of which she was aware, but she felt devastated by one unforgivable flaw: she could not stop smoking Kents. In our assignations the foggy air trembled with erotic joy. She adored our sex but abhorred her own fog. Then, viciously, she dumped me. I went crazy, I daydreamed suicide, I took up Kents for revenge. I have not seen her for decades, and at eighty-some I am still proclaiming, “Look what you did!”

If my tender father had not smoked so much, by now he would have turned one hundred and fifteen. From the late sixties into the millennium, American living rooms have become smokeless, as well as bars, restaurants, hardware stores, hotel lobbies, cabins, business offices, factory floors, sedans, hospital rooms, pizzerias, sweatshops, town meetings, laboratories, palaces, department stores, supermarkets, barbershops, McDonald’s, beauty parlors, art galleries, bookstores, pharmacies, men’s rooms, corner groceries, women’s rooms, barns except for mine, movie houses, dairies, airports, offices of thoracic surgeons, depots, tearooms, Automats, cafeterias, town halls, Macy’s, gymnasiums, igloos, waiting rooms, museums, newsrooms, classrooms, steel mills, libraries, lecture halls, emergency rooms, auditoriums, parks, Mongolian yurts, beaches, and definitely funeral parlors.

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