Black Lamb

Twenty-one!

November 1st, 2006

BY ANDREW DARREL

People talk a lot of nonsense, if you ask me, about the supposed differences between men and women, and one of the principal sources of muddle, as far as I can judge from what I see on morning television, is that too few people understand what a generalization is. “The people in group A are on average taller than the people in group B” is regularly interpreted as meaning that every member of group A is taller than any member of B. Until recently the Italian government was capable of concluding that since men, on the whole, in psychological tests, demonstrate themselves to be more strongly predisposed to use violence than women are, then all Italian men should do military service — unless they know someone who could pull strings to get them out of it — and no women may. I wonder if they need to spend more time teaching statistics in high school.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Darrel, All Smoking & Drinking Issue | Link to this Entry

As far away as today

November 1st, 2006

BY ROD FERRANDINO

To the junkies and lushheads in two-bit scratchpads,
And the flophouse grads in morgue iceboxes,
R.I.P.
—Mezz Mezzrow, Really The Blues

You know when I drink alone,
I prefer to be by myself.
—George Thorogood

I was no pinky-lifting drinking dilettante, no sloe gin, no umbrella drinks, and nothing in a coconut, thank you very much. I was the real deal. Bombay, yes, Frangelica, no. Oh, I had smokes, and I had other smokes, and more than enough in the way of powders and pills to fuel a run at the Presidency, and I inhaled everything, but it was Drink that ran the show, and Drink that pimped me for a big chunk of the twentieth century.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Ferrandino, All Smoking & Drinking Issue | Link to this Entry

Pruno

November 1st, 2006

BY DEAN SUESS

“Stuff these down your pants.” “Say what?” Underneath the table, Thug One handed Patsy One a wad of sugar packets.

“Shut the hell up. What’s the matter with you? You are so stupid. Don’t look around. Don’t look suspicious. Don’t make a scene. Jesus, how did you ever get into prison? Hell, you don’t know the first thing about being a convict. Just shove ’em down your pants so the pigs won’t feel ’em if you get pat searched — right next to your balls.”

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Suess, All Smoking & Drinking Issue | Link to this Entry

Up in smoke

November 1st, 2006

BY TOBY TOMPKINS

“Went to my doctor yesterday,” as Paul Simon sang. “She said I seemed to be OK. She said, ‘Man, you better look around. How long you think that you can run that body down? How many nights you think that you can do what you been doin’? Who… who you foolin’?’”

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Tompkins, All Smoking & Drinking Issue | Link to this Entry

Inhale. Exhale. Ash.

November 1st, 2006

BY SAGE COHEN

At Nancy’s birthday party at Eleni’s, the long, narrow table was divided equally into two camps: current smokers (who were outside smoking) and previous smokers (who were inside complaining about how much they missed smoking). Technically, I suppose I could be counted among the ex-smokers. When I lived in Manhattan from age twenty-four to twenty-six, I was in a graduate program with two dozen other displaced urban youngsters. Overall, I’d say we were en masse accomplished at two things: writing confessional poems and smoking.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Cohen, All Smoking & Drinking Issue | Link to this Entry

Exfoliation

November 1st, 2006

BY SAGE COHEN

A chorus of fat nervous birds
jitters on the rim of my table.
I offer them nothing.
Flimsy chairs scrape pavement.
A wind could take them. Underneath
bricks and bricks and bricks.
Along the endowed buildings
a neat stretch of fat flowers
combed into rows of receding color,
groomed pinker and pinker each spring.
But now it is fall and the statues are serious.
A copper horse, back arched, bites her tail.
She is green in her deep places.
I ask everyone who passes
if they know what exfoliation means.
Black and rivered says the first guy.
A skin condition says the next.
And finally I’m just here for coffee.
Cigarettes punctuate everything.
I light one and leave. Walk until I see
Washington Square Park’s arch
standing two-pronged over the park.
A woman passes. She smells fake
like roses. Overalls mute the mercy
of her breasts. •

Posted by: The Editors
Category: Cohen, All Smoking & Drinking Issue | Link to this Entry

True Confession

November 1st, 2006

BY DAVID MACLAINE

Okay, I confess it. I’m one of those annoying people who starts coughing when the cigarette smoke drifts over from the cage where the nicotine addicts have been forced to cluster, and am also one of those who says “just water, thanks” and so lets the waiter know that the tab and tip will be smaller than expected. We abstemious types can put a real damper on things, I understand, but what are you going to do?

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Maclaine, All Smoking & Drinking Issue | Link to this Entry

Where there’s smoke…

November 1st, 2006

BY CERVINE KAUFFMAN

There’s fire. Smokers are sexy, smokers are uninhibited, smokers drink, sensual smoking-and-drinking persons combine alcohol, tobacco, and sex in the most amazing combinations… An Irishman once told me that two things will get you through life when nothing else will: sex and drink.

That has not been my experience. I wish it had.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Kauffman, All Smoking & Drinking Issue | Link to this Entry

Skoal!

November 1st, 2006

BY JOEL HESS

To grasp the importance of intoxicating agents to our culture, one need only turn to the word “drunk” in the thesaurus, where you will be greeted by a large variety of alternatives: inebriated, bombed, plastered, schnozzled, tipsy, crocked, snockered, in one’s cups, smashed, fried, shitfaced, three sheets to the wind, crocked, stewed, half in the bag, besotted, sloshed, toasted, polluted, pickled, lit up, stewed, and dozens of others. Alcoholic beverages exist in virtually every society, and here in America we are lucky — or cursed? — to have access to the full spectrum.

That our Anglo-Saxon forebears fully appreciated their happy hours is evident in such words as “beer,” “ale” (Old English ealu), “mead” (from meodu, “honey”), “stout” (in the sense of “bold,” as in “stout-hearted men”), and “wine,” related to such Indo-European cousins as Latin vinum (source of “vine”) and Greek oínos (whence “oenolog”).

England, though, early on began importing from its closest neighbors, and so today we enjoy whiskey (Irish usquebaugh, “water of life”), brandy (Dutch brandewijn, “burnt wine”), and, more generically, booze (Dutch bousen, “to drink to excess”).

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Hess, All Smoking & Drinking Issue | Link to this Entry

An S&D Reader

November 1st, 2006

Below are nine nuggets of wisdom regarding the subject of this special issue of Black Lamb, Smoking & Drinking, ranging from little hunks of prose to lyrics and other bits of versification.

Posted by: The Editors
Category: All Smoking & Drinking Issue | Link to this Entry