I’m a lungfucker. It’s a niche community. People call themselves lungfuckers if they’ve chosen to destroy themselves by, only by, smoking cigarettes. For work, I do art handling at a blue chip in Chelsea. The gallery pays me under the table to move multi-million dollar paintings around. I have to remind them to tell me to come in and the assistant thinks I’m a complete fucking idiot cause she has a MA from RISD and I don’t. But I also make money by smoking. I take videos of myself smoking to put on the internet and a lot of people watch them. Usually, I take my shirt off and look in the camera and I don’t say much. I write captions like: ‘Lung Workout.’ They like coughing, they say: “more wheezing vids, that is the hottest thing of all.” They say: “I love it when smokers start to shrivel up. Reblog if u are a bad stroking Marlboro boy.”
I refuse to let the city toss me around, or to die strung-out in an instant without even knowing it. That’s why I quit drugs. When I was in detox at Woodhull I made good money filming myself smoking on various parts of the hospital premises, especially if any signs with the word ‘cancer’ could be spotted in frame. I’d say: “Leather Dave’s baby.” Dave, username ‘Leathersmokemi,’ was one of the first YouTube posters, a biker who’d make multiple videos a day smoking multiple cigarettes and cigars out both his mouth and nose. Always in the same dim room, updating everyone in the comments about his recurring cancer diagnoses and remissions, he started in 2006 and passed away in 2011. In one turbid webcam upload, Dave brandishes a military grade gas mask, straps it over his aviators, and proceeds to smoke ten Pall Malls, all crammed into the jerry-rigged filter hose, at the same time. Lady Gaga’s Alejandro plays from a radio.
All in all, I love smoking. I love how cigarettes taste different according to the moisture in the air, and the wind according to wherever in the world you may stand. I remember being pale and in college and the damp earth taste of the Dutch lowlands, or sucking in the dusty sun above the Malaysian countryside.
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Kurt Cobain’s suicide note was the least interesting thing he ever made. When I was young I found a book in my father’s office that said killing yourself is pointless because it won’t undo all the things that made you want to be dead in the first place. It’s giving up, rolling over like a puppy dog to a commanding voice. Smoking fifty cigarettes a day, I am surely making a mockery of the Stock Exchange. Stop saying bye, just say hi over and over.
A man solicited me on Thisvid for a tribute. I said: “about to light up and jerk it.” I closed the blinds in my bedroom, which is right across the street from my ex-coworker’s apartment, got a smoke, hit record on photobooth, and, as requested, jerked off standing up onto a full pack of Newports.
My mother and father are recently divorced. He was the breadwinner. She’s an American expat and I worry about her alone in Melbourne, growing frailer, making rent. She’s trying to be an actress. Though sometimes my boss doesn’t want me for weeks, this one I worked a little so I wired the 300 to my mom. After fees it probably came out to 410 Australian Dollars.
The man wrote back: “I love you so much. So handsome, heavy smoker. Smoker i dream about, smoker I envision as having it all. I can smell the cigarettes on you. Taste your cigarette breath. Kiss your yellowing teeth. Feel your tight chest as it coughs up the tar inside it. You’re mine.”
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I told Shay: “I love you more than you could understand.” She said: “you couldn’t love me this much if I didn’t love you just the same.” I believed she was right but I still wished that I could. I told her I thought maybe if we’d lived our whole lives in North Korea we’d be happier, love each other even better, but she disagreed.
I wish I was an Illegalist, or a terrorist under the Tzar, a beautiful loose collar of The People’s Will. Roy said: “could’ve been a warrior,” and I feel it too. I could’ve given my life to the bombshell, wrapped it in my white handkerchief and laid down in the smoldering snow of the Catherine Canal beside the emperor and the butcher boy. I could have killed the king.
In February, I took a small room in a house leased by the primary suspect of the 2008 Times Square bombing. Near dawn that March 6, somebody rode up, dropped a homemade grenade, and biked off before the blast shattered the facade of the Army recruitment center. Turned out, however, he was just an awkward, paranoid man collecting rent like a landlord, staying up all night watching movies and eating ice cream he’d stockpile from church food banks. Upon first visit we sat in the kitchen and he interrogated me thoroughly, believing he was the target of an organized, decade-long surveillance program by the NYPD. I said I wanted to help at the free store in the park he put together.
I’m not so stupid to mean that war is good. I mean I am maladjusted, that there seems a good chance I could manage a state of war, a simple one versus one equation, better than whatever I have now, wiping my eyes like a boy scout before a dowdy psychiatrist. Little boy scouts know nothing of the world but they think they’re learning all about it. Last time I visited his store my friend Boris, whose grandfather was born under the bolsheviks and fought in the Red Army, told me his family had a saying: “feed a dog for three days and she’ll remember for three years; feed a cat for three years and she’ll forget in three days.” I feel like a cat-person and I wish to be a dog-person.
The suffering of war is an awful thing and I’d want it for nobody but myself. I want to be a mercenary taking orders in a vacuum, in a picture book. I want to exist on the beach of Troy, look Achilles right in the eye and know in my heart that he’s my enemy and that’s all that matters. Young trojans and greeks ran headlong into the gruesome, pitiless deaths they were promised at birth, and they knew for sure that doing it made them superhuman.
I know this is impossible… just like I know I still want to do hard, just like I know that, though I’ve tried to try, the most I’ve ever really done is make a few girls, and even fewer boys, smile momentarily. Making strangers on the internet come is just a corollary in my pursuit of valor.
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Dylan Pountney was the prettiest, most popular lungfucker, and I got into it through him. But he wasn’t a soldier in the end. He started filming blood over intent rituals, trying to manifest his salvation by cutting his fingers and writing out placations in his veins like calligraphy. He was trying to die, just not forever. Then one morning, a year ago in Alberta, he made a video smoking some cigarettes with his father on the way to school, went to first period, and stabbed the girl sitting next to him in the neck.
That wasn’t courage and I don’t want to be saved. But I believe in you. I believe in everything in the world but myself. I fed swans with the squatters on the bank of that canal in Amsterdam; they cooked big dinners in their beautiful annexed buildings for the homeless and the crusts and the crusts’ dogs, and I stood at the end of the line and washed the plates. I do not believe in my role in the revolution, not besides the mechanics of my flesh and organs, holding a rag, or a door open, or a friend, until they need not be anymore. Like a cigarette, I am a means, not an end.