a strict vegetarian. I was still smoking up to twenty cigarettes a day. The question was, could food prevent a heart attack? “Well, beets might help,”I told myself. That’s exactly how I felt. ■ I glowed. People were looking at me differently. Smiling. That’s because I was smiling. My battery had a positive charge and my eyes were on “bright.” My flesh had risen from the dead and I could feel the air circulating through the pores of my skin which was breathing where once it had been a limp encasement for my thoughts and emotions. It was time to start writing again. I took out the script I’d been working on before I quit smoking. I put some paper in the typewriter on my desk. I sat down in front of it. And sat. And sat. About twenty minutes into the sitting I realized I was paralyzed. You could have held a cashier’s check for one million dollars in front of my nose and told me it was mine if I typed four coherent pages—but I would not have been able to do it. For two hours I sat staring at the blank page in my typewriter. I found I could not put any words on paper without smoking. I wanted to take a puff, lay the cigarette down in the ashtray, blow the smoke out of my mouth as I typed a paragraph, pick up the cigarette, take a puff. Without cigarettes writing wasn’t going to be fun anymore. So I fooled my brain. I brought a foot high stack of smoke books with me to the cafe every day and merely scanned them. I took simple notes on what I thought was interesting. I told my brain, “No harm here. See, we’re just plagiarizing! We’re not writing." My thinking process was learning how to walk all over again. I was teasing forth thought. It worked. Within several days my brain was taking those first few awkward steps alone; little spasmodic fragments of ideas that it had thought of all by itself. I was careful to pretend I hadn’t noticed and continued copying modestly. Cynthia Morgan and her nineteen year old daughter Sybil live in Santa Cruz, California. This story is excerpted with permission from If You Love Somebody Who Smokes—Confessions of a Nicotine Addict, ®1987 Cynthia Morgan. Available from City Miner Books, Box 176, Berkeley, CA 94701. $6.95 postpaid. Artist Tim Braun is designer for the CSQ and an illustrator for many regional and national publications. He lives in Portland. The ideas for how to construct this book came out—one, two, three steps. . fall down, get up. . .one, two, three.. .god I wish I could smoke a cigarette. Five weeks later the fits and starts had subsided and my brain was forming whole paragraphs, the fifteen minute span of attention had stretched to two hours during which I nursed my goblet of Borgia as if it were gold. This was not a cafe to me now but an office. I figured my monthly table rent at about one hundred and twenty dollars—two Borgias a day at one dollar and seventy-five cents each and two twenty-five cent tips. One hundred and twenty dollars a month for coffee! Next year I can write a book about quitting caffeine. SUBSCRIBEC Q L U IN A T R T T O O E N R L S Y T. Name: Receive FREE With a 2 year subscription Close harmonies and a wry fascination with sex roles fills the songs of Tetes Noires. They play songs about religious cultists, male prostitution, wet T-shirt contests, makeup and nuclear war — songs that are both catchy and double-edged.” Jon Pareles N.Y. Times “The Tetes sound is minimal, melodic, guasi- garage, always interesting and vocally intricate.” Cream Magazine SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIPTION FORM SUBSCRIBE SEND $16 per subscription Address: _ C i t y : S t a t e : ___________ Zip: □ VISA □ Mastercharge □ CHECK Credit Card# Exp. Date SEND TO: Clinton Street Quarterly Box 3588, Portland, OR 97208 Clinton St. Quarterly— Fall, 1987 25
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