There’s no smoking on the bus, you death-breathed, slope-headed, oozing, ambulatory stack of week-old medical waste.
OK, you’ve complied with part of this law: you haven’t brought a lit cigarette on board. But that’s incidental to the intent of the law, you diseased and dying penis polyp. The actual focus here, if you can marshal your fourteen remaining brain cells long enough to understand what I’m saying, is that there is to be no smoke on the bus; not simply no cigarettes. Complicated, huh? Read it again; I’ll wait.
May I continue? Thanks.
What this means is that you’re fooling no one, not even the blood-drunk ticks that make you their home (and you thought your head was just naturally lumpy) when you approach the bus gulping one last gimongous cloud of smoke; filling your blackened, phlegm-beslimed lungs like a swimmer about to dive into the English Channel, and holding the noxious fumes long enough for them to pick up the flavor of rot at your center, and long enough to sit across from me and blow sulfurous ash like Mount St. Helen’s.
Here’s what I want you to do for me:
I want you to die of cancer. I want it to slowly fossilize you, until your last remaining healthy cells are sloughed off from your intestinal walls as you shit yourself on the street.
But first, I want all your children to die before you, through your own personal lack of responsibility: I want you to leave your 18-month-old strapped into a car seat in a closed car in the parking lot of your place of employment, and for you to forget she’s there until your wife calls frantically care to tell you the child was never dropped off at daycare that morning.
I want your two-year-old to drown head down in a filthy wash bucket while you’re supposed to be watching him, but you’re passed out drunk on the couch—with, let’s say, a porno tape running—when your wife comes home. She’ll leave you that night, beating on your face with her fists while you struggle to disentangle your pants from around your ankles.
I want your twelve-year-old to die of a heroin overdose after he watches you, on your every other weekend together (which he dreads, by the way), shooting up on the bathroom floor.
I want your sixteen-year-old to be grabbed by a serial killer when you make her walk the last half mile home because you’re supposed to meet some buddies at the women’s-oil-wrestling bar. I want her to be mailed to you piece by piece, and for the police to tell you that each separate bit of flesh was apparently ripped away from her by human teeth.
Then I want you roam the streets, homeless, while the cancer continues to eat away at your flesh. I want you to be the victim of a roving group of skinheads, who beat you because they don’t like the way you smell, until you’re utterly unable to get up, and you begin your last days lying in the alley behind a cheap Chinese restaurant whose dumpsters overflow (oh, did I mention? this is the height of summer) with chicken skin and cabbages.
I want your mother to pass this alleyway with a flock of her society friends, and for the two of you to make eye contact and share a spark of recognition, and for her to hurry on, urging her friends to beware of the sick and dirty homeless people that choose to clog the streets and alleys of the city, which is certainly falling apart at the seams compared to when she was a child.
I want ants to crawl in through your anus, and then cockroaches, and then rats, who begin competing with the cancer for their claim to your meat. I want feral dogs to begin eating you from the feet up and from the hands in, and for rats to nibble away at your nose, your lips, and your eyelids. I want this to continue over several days until all that’s left is your head, with your skull showing brightly through in rat-bite patterns, and your feverish and festering lungs, and most of your central nervous system, which has until the last carried all the signals of physical sensation from your unnumbed body to your unsleeping brain.
Then, just before you die, I want a paperwork-weary cop to stomp on your head in order to make it fit through the wide and grinning mouth of the sewer, which has been your only source of cool air during the time it’s taken you to die here, in this alley, and which will become your final resting place when there’s nothing left of you but little white grains of bone providing much-needed roughage and calcium to the sewer’s rats.
But more than all of this, I want you to sprout just enough conscience and consideration to simply turn your head and blow your ciggie dregs over your shoulder before you get on the bus.
Thanks for your kind attention to this matter.
(A post script: I was jotting this note on the bus, sitting across from its intended recipient. At one point I had to transfer to another bus. This second bus had completed its loop a few minutes early, giving the driver time to take a break and to fill the bus with choking opaque tobacco smoke. This letter is therefore addressed also to him.)
