Beginning with the End

Of course I spend my last night in San Francisco procrastinating. It’s 3:30 am and I surreptitiously take a couple of things to set out by the trash can on the corner. I walk around and smoke a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke. I used to hate smoke. In fact, I still do. But on Saturday I was somehow inspired at the post-closing boozeryfest to pretend smoke a whole cigarette, (pretend smoking’s the only kind I do!) pulling the smoke into my mouth and exhaling but not taking it into my lungs. The way I used to smoke with Samin, only now with actual cigarettes instead of Pocky. It’s still gross. I hate it. But what the hey, peer pressure’s a wonderful thing?

Tonight, though, it's a special cigarette. I lead up to it, having myself a whirlwind day of running around in Berkeley and SF, trying to squeeze in just a few last last last minute goodbyes. Avoid any tearfulness for the most part, right up until my friend Addie and I part ways at the BaRT station. It’s hard, though, I have a feeling I’ll remain mostly impassive all the way through the rest of my all-nighter packing, all during the drive down to LA, and then I predict on the first night when I’ve got nothing to do, no play and no packing and no thing to do, that I’ll probably spread out on the floor and cry till my skin hurts.

Anyway, the last stop before finally making my way home tonight: my friend Lucille’s apartment in Russian Hill. I’ve never made it out there for any parties or anything of that nature, never seen her humble abode, so I have to make that happen before leaving. Despite my insistence that I have too much freakin’ stuff and that I’ve got to throw most of it away before I can go, she keeps putting things in my hands on my way out. A miniature plastic starfruit. An oversized pink resin ring. Two fancy looking cigarettes, one pink and one green, with gold tips. “These are all Christine and I smoked in college,” she tells me, referring to another friend of ours who recently migrated down to San Diego for grad school. Not wanting to crush them in my pocket and wind up with loose tobacco lining my clothes, I hold them gingerly in my left hand the entire cab ride home.

Do some packing, and eventually I need to get some of this stuff out of my face. The giveaway pile is mounting, and I’m wary of putting everything on the curb because if no one takes it all, I don’t know if there’s a fine involved or what happens. So some of it gets put out on the corner, not directly in front of my house, at 3:30 in the morning. It’s also a good time to smoke one of the treasured stoges, I figure, and I walk around and pretend to be cool for three minutes.

As I’m stubbing out the end of the green one on a stop sign and thinking about how I hate smoke and smoking, a street soldier engages me at a distance and asks for some change. I haven’t brought anything out with me but the cigarettes, and I tell him so. I offer him what I've got, and he says he could use a fresh one; I hand him my last smoke, and apologize for it being pink.