On Berlin, Lucia

I want to light your cigarette. You, the woman who shares her surname with a city romanticized by the likes of Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed. Berlin. Wunderbar. 

I want to light your cigarette even though I've always been deeply allergic to something in cigarettes. Smoking never worked out for me, which knocked off a few cool points in the punk rock circles I ran in. Kids used to pop Vicodin. I popped Zyrtec.

While on the subject of punk, let's note your fascination with the subculture. I've counted mentions of punk at least six times in this paperback collection of your stories. You always seem to bring punk up with a sense of amusement and fascination, never judgment or disdain. What captivated you about the young punks of the ‘70s and ‘80s? Did you see fragments of this new youth driven movement in the jazz musicians you ran with, the ones you married? Heroin proclivities certainly overlapped.

And if we're going to talk heroin, let's talk addiction. The same disease that bit my father took a chunk out of you. This book of yours, the one you never held with your own hands because they had crumbled to dust before its publication—the book with a cover slathered in accolades and uplifting blurbs you'll never read—is roughly 400 pages and does not go long without mention of alcoholism. One story, “Silence,” ends in confession: “Of course by this time I had realized all the reasons why he couldn’t stop the truck, because by this time I was an alcoholic.” A proclamation of addiction that almost reads like a plot twist. And sure, a writer can write about diseases and not be a sufferer herself, but I also know how certain pieces of a writer always worm their way into their words, unshakeable. What is more unshakeable than the body's demand for poison?

I'd like to think I'm not one to pour lighter fluid onto an already raging fire, so I lack the desire to buy you a drink, but I would still like to share a cigarette with you, the woman who had her first cigarette lit by a prince.

Berlin.

Characters in your stories are named Lu, Lucille, Lulu, LB, and sometimes just plain Lucia. As if you're not even trying to hide it. At the literary journal where I work, we're discussing what makes a work fiction or nonfiction. This meridian distorts more often than those of us who declare our work as anecdotes of our truth would care to admit. The parameters of genre are a limitation; you understood this in the way you presented your stories as fiction, even though I can see the truth in them. The pain, the joy, and the mundanity. Lucia in the laundromat. Lucia the alcoholic. Lucia working in the doctor's office and Lucia the molested and Lucia living in New Mexico and Lucia watching the Oakland A's when they were still the Oakland A's (I'm glad you didn't live to witness that betrayal) and Lucia the writer, teaching the incarcerated how to tell a story.

Lucia who always worked another job while she wrote. Lucia who had four sons to support. Lucia who needed drinking money. Lucia, bearing the scars of a sister lost to cancer. Lucia with a punctured lung brought on by scoliosis. That same organ where your own cancer eventually permeated.

Was it the smoking or drinking that killed you at 68? Probably a little of both. You're a ghost now. The devastations of mortality can no longer harm you. What a relief it would be to palaver with a ghost. I want to see you. I want you to tell me that these corporeal vessels we call bodies are just a way station obstructing the catharsis we strive to achieve with our little words in what little time we're granted. So please, let me light your cigarette. 

Lucia washing diapers. Lucia with a bottle under the mattress. Lucia speaking Spanish in Mexico City. Lucia watching Mildred Pierce. Lucia cleaning rich folks’ mansions. Lucia admiring Rickey Henderson and Lucia in her back brace, trying to straighten her spine.

I've fallen in love with the mystery of you—these morsels of intel I’ve stitched together like a spy. There's more allure in the unfinished jigsaw puzzle—the pile of misshapen pieces, the act of hunting and assembling—than there is in a complete picture.

I fiddle with a lighter in my pocket. A gadget of refined taste, not some cheap plastic disposable. Silver, butane, engraved with a dedication to and from people I never knew. I bought this lighter at a flea market years ago. I like to believe the pair of initials in this engraving represents lovers. They lived all their years together, their passion for one another never fizzling out. They died hours apart, in the same hospital.

 Listen: the lighter isn't real. It's the idea of the lighter that’s important, the idea of me sliding it from my back pocket and offering the dancing flame to your unlit Camel. Come to think of it, what was your preferred brand?

Take my hand and let's walk in a long, winding circle through a forest or some place in the Bay Area you adored. Just make sure to blow the smoke away from my face. It makes me cough and my eyes itch. It tickles my nose. I might sneeze. Let's walk in this circle, you smoking, me flicking the top of the lighter open and shut. Open and shut. Open—

While we walk, while you exhale nicotine up toward the moon, tell me something about yourself. No, I don't want to know the date you were born or the color of your first car. Tell me a story. Speak to me about laundromats and whiskey. Speak to me about child rearing and medical procedures. Don't tell me what's real and what you've imagined. I'll pick and choose. And while we're walking, in this place between fact and fiction and life and death, would you mind giving me a drag of that cigarette? Yes, I know what I said about my allergies. But maybe I lied. Maybe. Let me smoke with you. Here, take my lighter.

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About the Author

Travis D. Roberson is a New York based writer and artist originally from central Florida. His work appears in The Iowa Review, Cutleaf, Pithead Chapel, Juked, and many other publications. You can follow him on Instagram @trashorphan.