Smoking

A week ago they took me out of my cell and into an adobe-walled room with cold soil at my feet and the smell of mud all around, wet and hard to absorb. In this room were several men, men who for me still have no names or faces. Cowards.

Today, I'm limping, walking, bruised as an old boxer, to and fro impatiently, smoking cigarettes, of all things -- those antiquated, nostalgic slips of chemical and ash. And yet, here I am puffing away; the crinkling of the paper Sue has used to wrap them in -- a sonic massage, easing me into calm, aiding messages from one synapse to another with the particular buzz of nicotine. It's quick and rhythmic because it's been so long since I've dragged out an afternoon on one of these. Like when I sit down at a Piano, after months at a time, more time than that sometimes. Funny how something so deeply imbedded in your life can disappear. Like music did for me.

                                  

And because I can't talk about what happened these past few days. Not yet. I will finish the story I started. The story of  my mother and me, in that car with Eli in Lagos.   

We were on our way to meet my father, who we hadn't seen in a long time, who was staying at the Sheraton, after he drilled deep and struck it rich. I wondered whether I'd recognize him. He'd been around for the first three years, and so I had these infantile memories. Except I didn't know how many were actual memories or just old photographs mom had lying around in files. Whatever they were, and are, they're crisp color images of enormous gifts -- a stuffed giraffe and an elephant named Xanadu from FAO Schwartz, an elephant I still had at the time of the trip. It's ears were twice the size of my face when my father gave Xanadu to me.

"You'll never have to worry about Samuel. He will go the best schools; he will always be cared for," he'd said to mom. And then, one day, he disappeared. Seven years later, mom got a letter from dad's mother, my grandmother, who had seen me in the paper. I'd been the youngest kid to have been accepted into the Peabody Conservatory. Papers all had made a fuss and called me Little Mozie.

Anyway, the letter from my grandmother, who I hadn't seen since I was a baby and wouldn't recognize with a DNA test in-hand, said: He hasn't returned for many years. I think we may have lost him. But he still has a responsibility to that boy. She then went on to list the address my father was at -- The Sheraton Hotel in Lagos, Nigeria.

I don't know what made my grandmother do it, or what made my mother, four days later, get on a plane with me. But off we were to ask for a quick dose of cash -- not even for child-support, nothing as consistent as that, my mother didn't care about that. All she wanted was the tuition money so I could go to the Peabody.

...More tomorrow. My left rib aches like it had an ice-pick permanently puncturing it. More tomorrow...