When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,89
too much trouble, I was able to tell him that I liked it. “Korrree gaaa sukiii dessssu.” The following morning I offered a few pleasantries to the concierge, who politely told me that I was talking like a lady, an old, rich one, apparently. “You might want to speed it up a little,” he suggested.
A lot of people laughed at my Japanese on that trip, but I never felt that I was being made fun of. Rather, it was like I’d performed a trick, something perverse and unexpected, like pulling a sausage out of my ear. When I first came to France, I was afraid to open my mouth, but in Tokyo, trying was fun. The five dozen phrases I’d memorized before coming served me in good stead, and I left the country wanting to learn more.
This led me to a second, much more serious instructional program — forty-five CDs as opposed to just one. The speakers were young, a guy and a girl, and they didn’t slow down for anybody. The idea here was to listen and repeat — no writing whatsoever — but that, to me, sounded too good to be true. It wasn’t advised, but at the end of each lesson I’d copy all the new words and phrases onto index cards. These allowed me to review, and, even better, to be quizzed. Hugh has no patience for that sort of thing, so I had my sisters Amy and Lisa do it. The two of them came to Paris for Christmas, and at the end of every day I’d hand one or the other of them my stack of cards.
“All right,” Lisa might say. “How do you ask if I’m a second-grade reading teacher?”
“I haven’t learned that yet. If it’s not written down, I don’t know how to say it.”
“Oh, really?” She’d then pull a card from the stack and frown at it. “All right, say this: ‘As for this afternoon, what are you going to do?’”
“Gogo wa, nani o shimasu ka?”
“‘What did you do this afternoon?’ Can you say that in Japanese?”
“Well, no —”
“Can you say that you and your older sister saw a bad movie with a dragon in it? Can you at least say ‘dragon’?”
“No.”
“I see,” she said, and as she reached for another card, I felt a mounting hopelessness.
It was even worse when Amy quizzed me. “How do you ask someone for a cigarette?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you say, ‘I tried to quit, but it’s not working’?”
“I have no idea.”
“Say ‘I’ll give you a blow job if you’ll give me a cigarette.’”
“Just stick to the index cards.”
“Say ‘Goodness, how fat I’ve become! Can you believe how much weight I’ve gained since I quit smoking’?”
“Actually,” I said, “I think I’ll just do this on my own.”
Eleven
In the months preceding our trip to Tokyo, I spoke to quite a few people who had either quit smoking or tried to. A number of them had stopped for years. Then their stepgrandmother died or their dog grew a crooked tooth, and they picked up where they’d left off.
“Do you think you were maybe looking for a reason to start again?” I asked.
All of them said no.
The message was that you were never really safe. An entire decade without a cigarette, and then . . . wham! My sister Lisa started again after six years, and told me, as had others, that quitting was much more difficult the second time around.
When asked how they made it through the first few weeks, a lot of people mentioned the patch. Others spoke of gum and lozenges, of acupuncture, hypnosis, and some new drug everyone had heard about but no one could remember the name of. Then there were the books. The problem with most so-called quit lit is that there are only so many times you can repeat the words “smoking” and “cigarettes.” The trick is to alternate them, not to reach for your thesaurus. It bothers me to read that so-and-so “inhaled a cancer stick,” that he “sucked up a coffin nail.” I don’t know anyone who refers to tobacco as “the evil weed.” People in the UK genuinely say “fags,” but in America it’s just embarrassing and self-consciously naughty, like calling a cat a pussy.
The book I was given used all of these terms and more. I read the first hundred pages and then offered Hugh the following summary: “The guy says that choking down lung busters is a filthy, disgusting habit.”