A short story by the late Bill Hicks. Im sure i’ve breached copyright but the nostalgia and passion hit a chord. copied it out over several bored nights, and a few empty lucky strike boxes:)..sure everyone can relate. enjoy…

         BILL HICKS: THOUGHTS ON LOVE AND SMOKING(NOVEMBER 1992)

( My first love was like smoking - Both bad habits and both totally seductive - and as time goes by, my addiction to both lingers until they intertwine, interchange, become inseparable in my mind - forming a nostalgia on the brain, for which there is no cure.)

  Autumn in New York, Spring in the step. Rosy-Cheeked women dressed in black go bouncing down the avenues. Their Coolest coats and jackets hunched against the whipping winds. Their brightly coloured scarves dancing under the slate green sky. They threaten to turn the clock back to 1964, and everywhere you look is like the cover of a Dylan album - pre-jesus, post-folk, ultra cool. This is why i smoke.
  A cafe spills out into the street. Its warm, roasted light and cappuccino steam drawing mods and spectres and vampire queens with the promise of fresh-brewed blood from the bean. On the sidewalks nearby, The multitudes flow by. Red lips giving cigarettes a tug, making embers flare like lightning bugs. Fir and woodsmoke fill the sparkling air, the breath exhaled just hanging there like some frozen joyous scream. And all the girls evoke the dream of Autumn in New York.

  Its nights like these i think of her most….When we first met, I was a roaring drunk. I was twenty-six years old and in a grave deep rut. She was a southern girl, which is the same as saying she was insane. All southern women are insane. Some are cold blooded killers some are harmless eccentrics, but the best of the breed exhibit both of these characteristics and always the one you expect the least at the time you least expect it. She was the best of the breed and the best I’ve ever had. The night of our third date. I grabbed her by the neck and punched holes in the wall around her head, then tried to hurl her off the balcony of my 22nd floor apartment. That was the night she fell in love with me. She like my style. See, she was an addict too, just like me … Later, we smoked and had a good laugh over it all.

  I flipped her every which-a-way, like a cat batting around a half-dead mouse, for its own amusement, staving off the kill. She whimpered and cried and begged for mercy until i found her hot pulse throbbing a bit deep inside. Closest to the bone is the sweetest meat. Her hands grabbed my hair and her feet fluttered against my back as i gulped all the life in her greedily down my throat. Then she lay very still. I rolled away and stood swaying next to the bed, letting the blood rush from my head, trying to remember where the hell my cigarettes were. I crashed about in the dark, knocking over tables and lamps and chairs, finally finding my pack in the shirt i was wearing. I smoked a few while strumming my guitar, then i wrote a song and sang it at the top of my lungs. A baby cried next door, and a fire truck thundered down the street, its sirens wailing. And all the while she never stirred.

  In the morning i awoke, curled up to her like a spoon, feeling her bottom pushing repeatedly against my lap whilst she whispered breathlessly to some dream lover. I got up and put some water on the boil, then sat at the kitchen table, smoking, my back to the bed. Suddenly, her arms were around me and i was smothered in her charm. Her need was ferocious and i lay helplessly on the floor as she exacted her sweet revenge, biting down deep again and again until the shriek of the steam and the sound of my screams was all that filled the room.

  New York is where we moved when Texas got too small, It was summer time. New York in July is hotter than i care to describe, but i will try. Imagine if you will, the hottest part of hell. The place where advertisers and marketing executives go to dwell. And now try to think of even hotter still, where bankers and landlords and like-minded swill, go to spend all the profits that they’ve made, eternally. And now, if you can, go even further into the furnace, back where the coals glow white with rage, where child molesters, bureaucrats, and arms dealers play, and even further still, where the guy who stole my stereo will spend his lonely never-ending night. Picture a heat that hot, only add to it ninety-eight percent humidity. This is New York in July. We had a ball, living in an unairconditioned railroad flat whose kindling walls bulged under the weight of the infernal heat.

  I’d come to in the worst part of the day, gasping, and kicking away non-existent sheets and covers. She’d already be up, pressing a cold water jug to her forehead, leaning naked against the fridge. My dry voice croaked for her to bring me the water. As she walks towards me, i feel her heat cut through the New York summer, and her wetness damper than the July air. She sees the look in my eye but reacts too slowly, stupefied by the temperature in the little wood oven we called home. The water jug falls to the floor, forgotten, as i pull her down on top of me and drink from her, long and slow.

  As the days grew longer, the heat gave birth to some truly inspired inventions. More than once the blistering sun found us lounging in a tub of water, while a fan blew through the cool material of a moistened sheet draped over us from head to toe. Viola! An air conditioner! Rather primitive, to be sure, but that embodied its allure, we were immigrants, setting about exploring our new love, filling the places where others had things, with simple pleasures and ecstasy’s screams, from where in the tub we reflected the glare of the sun. Smoking away the heat of the day. Our lighter flicking repeatedly, fighting fire with fire until the sun would retreat.

  At night we’d crawl through the streets of the city, tracking the shy breeze that had poked its nose through our open window, then withdrawing with an almost imperceptible tug on our threadbare curtains, all the “oomph” of an inaudible sigh. People lolled about in doorways and on stoops, half-dressed and blinking stupidly. The women fanned themselves through damp see-through blouses, their legs apart and skirts hitched high above the knees. Inviting our shy breeze to poke its nose anywhere it likes. The neighborhood crazies were out in force. The Man-with-no-nose oozed by, eyeing me conspiratorially. I wonder if he heard us earlier? Me yelling ‘i love you’ as i drove my point home, again and again? Ah, who cares? We’re all nasty, rutting beasts and those who aren’t are dead. It was too hot to care or think, so we just walked along smoking, absorbing whatever hope the night could bring.

  Once, a careless drunk staggered into the traffic and got sent airborne by a tourist bus late in leaving this freak show of a city. The tourists’ cameras started flashing in hope of catching the drunk as he sailed through the intersection ahead of the bus and finally coming to rest in the gutter he’d just left as the bus trundled on down the street. Everywhere a stillness, a quiet broken only by the sporadic moaning coming from the drunk. ‘Shadduo!’ the man-with-no-nose ordered, and sniffed disgustedly. Then the stillness would return and everyone sat smoking, lazily pondering their existence. She and i would hold onto each other tightly and come to no conclusion than IT’S TOO DAMN HOT. We’d buy ice cream and return to the tinder-box. We’d play chess in our under-wear, smoking, eating ice cream. She moves. I move. She moves. Check. She looks innocently up at me, licking the last of the ice cream from the spoon. The sun starts to rise behind her. I start to raise in front. She chooses me over the sun, and we tumble into bed where i make my final move. MATE.

  It all ended rather quickly. One day i came home and found her gone. She’d cleaned the place and baked a cake which sat next to a note on the kitchen table. I ate the note with a glass of milk, then tore the cake into a thousand little pieces. Her dresser drawers were empty as was the clothes hamper. I was hoping  she’d overlooked a pair of knickers from which i could inhale her scent again before the beginning the arduous task of tracking her down to the ends of the earth and….and…and what? I had no idea. There was nothing i could do, except fall into bed with my guitar, which i banged away on for a month. Playing what was left of my heart out, and crying what was left of my tears, and smoking all the cigarettes North Carolina had exported that year. Classic withdrawal. Finally, i reached the end. I stumbled into the bathroom and a tub of hot , where every ache and pain was left running down the drain. I smiled rudely to myself, feeling like a new man. It would be hard of course, but I’d make it. This was life, my friend, get used to it. Buckle up! You’ll be fine. In the mirror I gave myself a self-mocking scowl, then i reached up on the shelf for a towl, and a pair of her knickers wafted down, landing crotch first on my face. That night, the hunt began…

  Years later we bumbed into each other at the club. She was waiting for me, really, but i didn’t mind. There will always be something about her that just kills me, and she knows it. Is that why she’d come? Why do i care? I’d been lonely for too long. When she saw me, she took a final puff from her cigarette, then stamped it out and looked up at me - hopefully and a little afraid. So i said ‘hey’, as though nothing had gone down. As though we’d parted only moments ago. As though…As though…As though… I said ‘hey’ and she smiled and breathed a slight relief and then she said ‘hey’ back to me. Then arm-in-arm we marched right to my bed. God, how i loved her. I thought there must be some hope, some way, some future we could share. I though of fate and destiny, past lives and tea leaves, of black magic and voodoo and anything else that might explain our recurring rendezvous, as we went about the serious business of washing my sheets in tears and sweat. As usual. God, how i loved her then. I was addicted to her, and she to me. And we always found ourselves rather easily lowering ourselves into each other’s hottest fires. Fearlessly leaping into the abyss, mouths locked together in a kiss that killed us long before we ever hit the ground.

EPILOGUE

  London, England, November. I sit staring at the phone and my pack of smokes which sit side by side on the table before me. The cold grey skies bring the veteran Heathcliff complex which resides in me, near the surface, always ready to rise. She’d never been to England. She would love it here. My hand reaches towards the table, tentatively rests on the phone. She’s a call away, waiting. Pain is one flight away. Ecstasy on dilivery. My hand leaves the phone and swoops up my pack of cigarettes. I light one up and inhale deeply. No, i wont call. I must drop these bad habits one at a time.

  And i must start now, with her. ‘Goodbye Catherine,’ Heathcliff whispers from the thickening cloud of smoke that surrounds him to this day.