NATIVE TONGUE Bafana Khumalo
SHE stood at the doorway, the night casting shadows on her face. The elements promised to be kind to us tonight — the wind was not less overwhelming than it had been the past couple of days. We were grateful at the Lord’s kindness; he was kinder than our fellow human beings, who had cast us out as they had cast out lepers in the days of old.
She looked into my eyes and I into hers and both our faces broke into warm smiles of kinship. She was older and I younger but those differences were of no consequence to us, for ours was a bond that transcended all man-made boundaries. Even race did not matter to us.
She held out her hand and I cupped my mouth to protect it from the gentle breeze which was blowing. She came closer and started sucking. She was beautiful. I loved her and she loved me too. We were an endangered breed in America — smokers. True and proud practitioners of our art who, on a daily basis, had to deal with being hounded out offices, restaurants and sometimes even hotel rooms.
If there is a place on this earth where smoking is seen as a blemish, nay a communicable, notifiable disease, it’s got to be the land of apple pie. There is no place at all for smokers in the United States.
I suppose I understand that people who don’t smoke have rights too, but I believe that the no smoking lobby is taking it a bit too far. I have got used to not lighting up because most public places are covered by no smoking ordinances backed up with the threat of legal action ranging from a simple fine to a complicated prison sentence. The idea of spending time in an American prison doesn’t appeal to me at all, seeing that they have a fair proportion of their share of big strong sex offenders, and I believe that I am a particularly good looking boy.
So the cigarette that was a permanent fixture at the corner of my mouth has been replaced by an I-am-in-a- very-bad-mood-sneer. This only disappears the moment I get to my hotel, for here I can smoke to my heart’s content without anyone looking at me as if I were a pornographer.
At least that was the case in the first world of New York. But when I arrived in the backwoods of Washington, I realised that New York has liberal policies when it comes to smoking.
Washington is a different cup of tea altogether. Here smokers are hounded out of everywhere, which I discovered when I signed into a hotel. The front desk clerk forgot to ask me what bad habits I had and just assigned me to a room. I wasn’t really interested in chit-chatting with him after a three-hour train trip, so I just walked up to the room. I had been in a good mood, looking forward to relaxing and forgetting all the bad-mannered children I had encountered on the train — until I got to the room. On the door was a sign screaming at me: THIS IS A NON- SMOKING-ROOM. I felt the corridor close in on me, for when I looked around, I discovered that the entire floor had been designated a non-smoking area.
“Dear God,” I asked, “is there no end to this? What else do they have here, a non-smoking country?”
Usually, such disregard for my human rights would provoke a self-righteous diatribe from yours truly, but not now. I sheepishly went back to the front desk and, with a degree of shame, confessed: “Forgive me, clerk, for I have sinned. I find myself in a non-smoking room and I smoke — may I have a smoking room?”
The dear clerk looked at me with a mixture of pity and disdain and touched a few buttons on the computer — and my less-than-holy smoking backside was saved. I found myself in a room with the view of a chimney, but it said on the door, like an indictment: THIS IS A SMOKING ROOM. Somehow I felt it was really saying: this property is condemned and contaminated by the black plague — enter at your own risk.
The only other place I can smoke is in the street, although even here I am not safe from the stares of hatred coming from people united by intolerance. And I have not as yet found a restaurant that allows me to light up. Some are quite creative in trying to explain why smoking is not allowed inside. One sign read: “No smoking: Our freshly baked bagels taste better when the air is clean.”
Okay, I understand. I am so browbeaten that even if the sign had said that smokers had to take off their pants to get into the restaurant — you see the smell of cigarette smoke on their clothes makes the bagels taste less fresh — I would do it.
As I leave the land of the free, the strongest image in my mind will not be that French woman with a light held aloft, inviting the world to deposit its hungry, ragged and huddled masses at her feet. It will be an ashtray, filled with lipstick-smudged stompies, placed outside an office block, like an offering to a pagan god. Next to this offering will be a few dedicated disciples. I am one of them.