Joshua Wetjen

Marlboro Man

I make sure he’s in the kitchen getting coffee and talking to my mom—hearing the cup clink on the counter and the sounds from the coffeemaker and their grown-up chatter—then I tip-toe into my parents’ bedroom to steal two cigarettes from the pack of my dad’s Marlboro Reds sitting on his dresser—the more expensive brand he smokes now that we’re living in Hong Kong.

I shake one out, then the other, and tuck them both in the right-side pocket of my new green Esprit windbreaker.

We’re riding our loud, rumbly, bus, one of four going to our field trip with all the other seventh graders from the American International School. I check that the cigarettes are still there, patting my pocket lightly so they don’t break and so I don’t look too suspicious as we roll through the big buildings.

The bus turns, and I see an enormous cigarette ad on a billboard. I’ve heard it’s the largest Marlboro Man in the world. Until now, really looking at him, I wouldn’t have thought a cowboy could be handsome. To me, handsome is being glamorous and living in luxury, like my friend Mariana’s dad. And her mom, who is gorgeous.

But the Marlboro Man looks like he’s making some joke before he saves the day, which is “alluring,” a word they’d write about a celebrity in one of my mom’s magazines. His jaw is square as a saddle’s edge. And his long cigarette is bright white, like a message from heaven.

Our bus zips down into the Cross-Harbour Tunnel where polluted air gets trapped.

Kids stand up and push the windows closed. They know to do this if they’ve ever ridden the school bus in Hong Kong, making a big deal to the other kids who just sit there. Then things in the tunnel are green and black and dark and quiet. A row of lights on the ceiling becomes a line as we speed up to catch the bus in front of us.

We pull up into the sunlight again, through the buildings on Kowloon Side with their rows and rows of air conditioners popping out like warts, and their bamboo laundry poles like pointing fingers, or dangling cigarettes, and we go up into the hills, and the windows are open, and the air smells like the sea.

After another half hour, our buses park on a cul-de-sac near the village gate and we’re stuck there as teachers talk through bus windows and check things and put their fingers on clipboards and stare at open manila folders of permission slips. Everyone is ready to get out. The bus gets loud with our voices. I can see the pretty red decorated village gate above Mariana’s head, through the front window of the bus. She’s three rows ahead of me because of assigned seating. We do goof off in class together. Most of the teachers know it. She gets on her knees so she can see over the seat and looks back and makes a pretend cigarette smoking motion at me with two fingers, pressing her eyelids together.

We unload from the bus in a line under the gray sky. Ahead of us is the big village gate, and the buildings behind with lanterns on their fronts, but the buildings themselves also look like lanterns.

Sung Dynasty Village is a living history place, like they have in the U.S. where you meet people pretending to be farmers and shop owners and blacksmiths from a hundred years ago, but this is from further back in the past, and the idea is seeing wealthy landowners in one of China’s golden ages. We’re going on this trip because we’ve been reading The Good Earth in school, a book about China written by a white lady. Our Chinese culture teacher helped organize this trip, even though she didn’t teach us the Good Earth unit which was in English. Mrs. Wong. And really, Sung Dynasty Village doesn’t have much to do with what happens in The Good Earth.

I let Mariana her put her fingers into the pocket of my windbreaker when the kids in front of us are not looking and Mrs. Wong is directing everyone where to sit. “You brought them,” Mariana whispers as we bunch up to get into the courtyard for the kung fu.

“Yes,” I say.

Mariana makes a little happy sound, like steam coming from a tea kettle in a dim sum place.

We sit the bottom of some steps in the courtyard with both our aerobics Reeboks high tops—we wore them together today to match—and their soles rest on the scrabby grass. Mrs. Wong is watching our area. She doesn’t feel like bothering with splitting us up, even though I know she might want to, because she looks at us and frowns. Mariana waves at her and smiles. Mariana says, “she won’t do anything to us today,” like she can know the future.

I feel bad rebelling a little, but a little rebellion is also like smoking, and it’s the feeling I get with Mariana that makes me feel taller and bigger and more beautiful than I probably am. Before we got to be good friends in homeroom, I know some of the girls used to laugh at me behind my back with the clothes I had before I learned to dress well—the ones I had from Target and J.C. Penney in the U.S. that I’d like to forget I even owned. I listen to better music now, like Depeche Mode and The Cure. I even notice that when I talk to Mariana, more of the boys look in our direction and come to annoy us—like David Harrington, who is tall and athletic and probably the cutest one in our grade.

Mariana pushes against my shoulder, then taps my arm, so I’ll look at what’s happening in the show. An acrobat lady with slick hair pinned back in wonderful twists in a yellow silk outfit bends over backwards on a chair like she’s made of rubber, and another lady in an orange outfit balances on top of her. Next a kung fu master in black silk throws a chopstick at a wooden board and it sticks right in, like he’s offering it a cigarette.

How it feels to smoke—the lightheadedness and everything going into focus at the same time, like on my dad’s camera when you turn the lens for a long distance shot like I once did for an art project—that’s magic. After Mariana brought me on a boat trip with her family, we got back to her house in Tai Tam with wet hair and mouths sticky with Dairy Farm ice cream Nutty Nibbles and went up to her roof to let our swimsuits dry and we each smoked one of her mother’s menthol cigarettes—anyone who has an actual house in Hong Kong is a bajillionaire, and so I was one too, letting the smoke escape from my lips like a glamorous ghost, like I’d seen her slender, beautiful mother do.

Then coughing. But the feeling all over was like a spell from a good sexy witch.

And I did almost throw-up. I felt it coming on, and didn’t finish the cigarette but held it there, dangling between my fingers, trying to look like I owned my own very cool life. I felt sick like I would die, but my head swam like I was in love.

“Next time, we smoke yours,” Mariana had said then, with the hills and the green Tai Tam Reservoir behind her like a sad goodbye scene in one of my mom’s favorite episodes of Falcon Crest. She winked. I thought she was playing around, like her dad who pretended to drown on the boat trip when we all swam to shore, scaring me, when he was treading water and joking.

“We smoke yours next. Right?” she asked.

She was serious, very serious, there in her gorgeous, damp curly dark brown hair and big eyes like hazelnut chocolates.

Why wouldn’t I return a favor? I do want to be loyal, like I’m in the Schiaparelli family, to be with them selling and designing luxury watches and spending a lot of time at Club Med. That’s not just like dating Apollo, but like living on Olympus and eating ambrosia.

The kung fu part is over and Mrs. Wong is talking to one of the women who works for Sung Dynasty Village who is in a costume—a red cheongsam across her body that makes her look like the stem of a flower. We then line-up to go into the dining hall for the noodle demonstration. The guy starts with a ball of dough and whips it around and twists it like a giant cinnamon twist glazed donut and whips it again, hitting it on the table, throwing more flour on it, and he does this until he’s magically got hundreds, maybe thousands, of strands of noodles.

We each get to taste some of the noodles from the demonstration and we also have some glazed lemon chicken and Chinese broccoli which a lot of kids don’t eat but I do. I like the saltiness and the garlic and oyster sauce—sweet and a little fishy. Then it’s recess time.

Mariana waits near the edge of a building—near a red column with a lantern hanging over it. Girls in front of her—Jenny Davis and Amy Chen—are starting to jump rope. They’re in my advanced science group where we had a long lecture once about evolution. They’re so nice. They’re even nicer than I want to be. They wave me over to play jump rope. I say “Sorry!” and stand next to Mariana.

She looks around to make sure no teachers see, especially Mrs. Wong. “Follow,” she says. Then we sneak over past some dumpsters to the back of the building where we had lunch.

Behind the building is crumbly cement, not like wealth from the height of the Sung Dynasty but like modern American parking lots. There’s even gray green mold on it, which isn’t weird for Hong Kong where there is mold almost everywhere but still, it makes everything a little creepy and there are also mosquitoes buzzing around that we swat—so many at times they make a cloud near our heads. We hear the voices of all the other kids playing. We’re in the cool shade, which would be nice, but it feels wrong. The ground is muddy, gushy, and damp. We get our Reeboks dirty.

I swat a mosquito on my arm, and it leaves a squished body and spot of blood. “Now,” Mariana says. I look up. She says, “I promise the smoke will scare the mosquitoes away.”

I pull out the two cigarettes. One is a little bent, but not snapped. That’s the one I take, and I hand the other one to Mariana, and I light hers first, and she takes a drag, coughs once, then cocks her hip to the side with her hand in a fist resting on it, which looks cool with the sweatshirt and skirt she’s wearing. She lights mine. The mosquito clouds get less dense, but the buzzing is still all around us.

“Wonderful,” Mariana says.

“Right,” I say. I cough twice. I try not to cough again. I cough about five times. I take another drag and cough one more time. My head spins, from the coughing or the smoke, the world like a carnival ride from the county fair my cousins take us to in the U.S. I try to focus on a patch of mold on the wall that looks like Florida or a witch’s finger. It stops spinning. I feel good. I think. “Marlboro Reds,” I say. “The strong kind.” I cough again.

“Are they Marlboros? We’re like cowboys! Cowgirls!” Mariana says. “This is Marlboro country!” she says, making her voice lower and more American, like the ending on the commercial they have on T.V. in Hong Kong with the orchestral music my dad once told me was from the old movie The Magnificent Seven.

Mariana takes a big, long, confident drag and blows the smoke up into the air like a rich princess on a yacht—like her mother did when we were on the boat trip, her mother who wore a red two piece under a sheer cover-up like my mother never would and had big giant sunglasses like a James Bond lady.

“Did I tell you? My mother is probably going away for a couple months. France or Switzerland. Not Italy where my dad was born. That’s for sure. A couple months. Maybe longer,” Mariana says. “I don’t know for sure if I’m going with.”

It sounds like she’s reciting words from a movie. She takes another drag and taps the ash so that it falls through the mosquitos and onto the muddy ground. “It’s true,” she says.

“Sorry,” I say. I want to say, “If you go, I’ll miss you,” but I wait to see if she says it first, because she’s being so cool.

“It’s to live with mémé—my grandmother—in Arcachon, her home village. That’s where maman is going. Because Papa’s in trouble.”

“Oh,” I say. My own father gets in trouble for leaving his socks around, or for not closing the balcony door all the way when he goes out for a smoke, or for forgetting to buy milk, but whatever the trouble Mariana’s dad is in seems more dramatic. “Your dad’s in trouble?” I ask. I want to know, even though I believe Mariana would just come out and tell me if we had more time. “We have to hurry up,” I say, thinking that if someone is doing a head count, they’ll look around for us and that by now, our smoke is drifting into the courtyard.

Mariana looks at her Swatch. “We have a couple more minutes. Come on.” She smiles. “When I leave Hong Kong, I’ll miss you,” she says.

“Thanks,” I say, holding my cigarette, watching the hot orange dot get dimmer. I wave it around at the mosquitoes, but mostly they keep biting me, especially my legs poking out from my shorts, my calves sticking out for them like big hams at some cartoon feast. “I’ll really miss you,” I say.

“Yes. It’s sad. I’ve done it before, though. Gone away from friends. You’re special—different than other friends. You know how to get us cigarettes!” she says. “I’ll tell you about the trouble. Papa did a vacation with the woman who used to be our nanny. Maman found out when she smelled the perfume which she said was ‘vulgar from a bitch.’ She said it in French. Chienne! Chienne! Chienne!”

“How can your nanny be prettier than your mother?” I ask. “She’s the prettiest woman I know.”

“Thank you!” Mariana says. “I have her eyes. My father’s nose, but her eyes, so that makes up for it.”

“You’re very pretty, like her,” I say. “Even your nose.” I dream about looking like Mariana. I never once thought her nose wasn’t pretty.

But after I take one last drag and cough a couple more times the pulled noodles are swimming in my stomach, like eels, eels in soggy ash, like what my mouth tastes like. I have the lightheaded feeling, like the world is filled with energy and dreams, and I also have a sick eel ready to splash out of my mouth.

“You’re pretty too,” Mariana says. “You have good legs. Your cheekbones look like that lady on the Duran Duran video.”

I smile. Then I throw up. Pink. Some of it gets on Mariana’s shoes—her Reeboks like mine, but they were in even better shape when the day started.

“Chienne!” she says. About me. Which is very mean.

Then Mrs. Wong turns the corner to find us. She rips the cigarettes from our mouths and tears them both in half and stomps them out into the mud. Mrs. Wong gets mud on her own shoes—nice green ballet flats—and she says “no!” and then I think I hear her say another Cantonese word under her breath, a bad word, then “aiyaa,” which people say all the time in Hong Kong. She drags me to the bathroom and pulls Mariana along by her hand while I try to use paper towels to clean up and rinse my mouth.

We ride back at the front of one the buses with Mrs. Wong between us. Then Mariana throws up too, into the little trash can in the front of the bus, right before we go into the tunnel. The sound Mariana makes when she does it is loud and horrible. We all smell it for the rest of the ride, especially when we close the windows against the pollution.

No one else throws up on the bus ride even though it’s stinky, but it’s something everyone talks about when they get home—after I get grounded for two weeks, my mother hears about it from some of her friends who play tennis.

And I get ugly, red, sore bumps all over my legs from the mosquito bites. I won’t get the stereo I want for my birthday. Calling me a “bitch” was mean, especially saying it in French.

We watch a film strip on smoking in our health class. The diseased lungs look like rotten vegetables in an alley near a market in Wan Chai. I picture them in my dad’s body like that and I felt sick and sad. I smell it on my favorite Benetton sweatshirt and Trapper Keeper, and the watermelon lip gloss he brought back from a recent trip to New York.

But everyone in Hong Kong smokes, it seems like, and that includes beautiful powerful people, who look more beautiful and powerful when they do it. I was excited to become one of them, like Mariana and her family, who live like royalty and belong on perfume commercials.

A couple days after the field trip, even though I’m grounded, my dad tries to make me watch The Magnificent Seven movie with the cowboys on VHS with him. I fall asleep on his lap. It’s all so slow. And brown, like clothes stained by cigarette smoke.