"How to Start Smoking" by Rachel A.G. Gilman
Rachel A.G. Gilman's “How to Start Smoking” hooks the reader’s attention and does not let go. As our nonfiction editor, Tolu Daniel describes, it “reminds us of a famous saying about how good writing needs not only have a narrative element, but it must also hold the attention of the readers through the big and the small moments.”
Rachel has recently developed an infatuation. She calls the new object of affection Banjo Boy: not because he plays the instrument, but because, somehow, he embodies it.
Initially, when Rachel met Banjo Boy in her graduate writing workshop the previous semester, she hadn’t felt anything special. He’d once called her anti-Semitic (well, he’d implied it, criticizing a joke she’d made at the expense of Andre Aciman’s baldness), plus all of his work was about being sad. He’d had a girlfriend, anyway. Then came August, when Rachel arrived late to an event where she was representing the program’s literary journal, when she accidentally set up at the wrong table and had to move her abundance of promotional shit, when Banjo Boy walked over to her, not offering help.
His dark, mussed hair was slightly more dented on the left side and his facial hair was patchy. His body was slowly starting to lose its youth, the way that can happen as a person gets further from twenty and closer to thirty and has made some questionable decisions, when beer has a more prominent appearance in the belly and hiking doesn’t cut it as exercise, when vibrant tattoos start to fade and expand, when men start to look less like men and more like chickens. Rachel thought he was trying a bit too hard to pretend he wasn’t from New England: faded jeans, cuffed to expose mismatched striped socks on bony ankles; a white button-down with just two of the buttons done in the middle to show chest hair and silver chains with arrow pendants dangling down toward silver finger rings; bulky boots that looked like he wanted people to think they had seen some things. But still, there was something about his smile, its smallness, about the way his glasses sat on his face in front of warm, brown eyes, eyes that beamed as he tilted his chin upward in that way guys do when they want to seem moody rather than awkward.
“Hey Rachel,” he said. “How was your summer?”
Rachel’s brain short-circuited. “Oh, uh, fine,” she said, taking her hair down from the giant clip she had spun it into when she had not expected to see anyone important and fidgeting with the elastic in her off-the-shoulder blouse. “I travelled a lot.”
Banjo Boy’s eyes wandered over the new bits of exposed skin. “You look…so…tan,” he said. He asked about her semester plans and responded to her intention to hold three jobs whilst completing two graduate degrees by saying, “You’re kind of a masochist, aren’t you?”
Rachel then had a flicker of recall of his Hinge profile. She had seen it over the summer in between a sea of Matts and Sams wearing Mets jerseys to distract from their receding hairlines. Banjo Boy, five years her senior, had a sepia-filtered photo in the woods where he donned flannel and called himself a writer. Rachel struggled to think of a way to bring this up casually before someone approached the table, wanting to learn about the literary journal, the reason Rachel was there in the first place. Slowly, Banjo Boy walked away. Rachel’s eyes followed him, occasionally catching his gaze before darting off.
Because her brain has an expansive capacity for nonsense, in the following weeks, in between work and class, Rachel becomes consumed by thoughts of Banjo Boy. Off the bat, she assumes he’s a terrific kisser but a bit of a let-down in bed, which is exactly what she’s looking for right now.
Her impulsive need to keep her inbox tidy means she didn’t save emails with his workshop submissions. She remembers writing all over them in green ink that she needed to know what the fuck the narrator was feeling, that it wasn’t enough to be roaming around Los Angeles, picking up cigars for Jerry Bruckheimer and snorting cocaine off bars and being aesthetically depressed in the rain.
Trying again, Rachel remembers a circular tattoo on the inside of his wrist and the day he moved seats when a classmate had trail mix due to his peanut allergy. A big gap nagging at her from last semester, though, is what bag he carried. Was it the sort of standard black backpack that every dude is handed at about twelve and then expected to maintain for the next decade or two, or was it a tote bag? All the fuckwads have tote bags these days, Rachel notices, especially the dudes. It’s like they want to present themselves as being soft enough for women to feel comfortable talking to them—a big “look how woke I am with all my shit in this handled contraption sponsoring a cultural institution”—but not too queer so that women don’t understand that they want to sleep with them. Everyone wants to fuck everyone in the tote bagging community. Rachel, therefore, must conclude that Banjo Boy didn’t have a tote bag. She certainly would have remembered it, kind of like how she vividly remembers the scene in his manuscript where he lies to a woman at a bar about being a screenwriter, takes her home to have sex in his kitchen, and fails to get it up.
In between classes, Rachel steals a copy of the graduate thesis anthology from the writing office and rereads Banjo Boy’s contribution until she starts to think she attended the party described alongside him in his thrifted Hooters t-shirt and pre-owned Camry. She watches videos of Banjo Boy playing blues riffs on his guitar on Instagram until the day his account goes private. She wants to send him a request, but she doesn’t know what time of day would make it less awkward. She decides to connect on LinkedIn instead. No one flirts on LinkedIn. He immediately accepts.
A week or so later, Rachel attends a reading at KGB Bar that a former staffer of the literary journal invited her to where Banjo Boy will perform. She changes her outfit three times before settling on a pair of high-waisted jeans that do not make her stomach look as fat and the blouse she has decided shows the right amount of cleavage (any). Once in the bar, she buys herself overpriced cranberry vodkas and quietly sits on a chair that is too small for her ass, alone. Banjo Boy shows up at the last minute with some hipster dude and a skinny girl with dark hair and well-done makeup. After an hour he finally takes the stage with the hipster dude who is actually playing the banjo. As Banjo Boy reads about a detective who loves babka and his bubby, Rachel silently judges his vintage Cheers t-shirt, tapered green trousers, and sloppy hair, juxtaposed with new looking Doc Marten brogues. She ducks out early, too afraid to wait for him to take a smoke break to tell him it was good, to tell him she wants to pull all his clothing off then fold it neatly and stare at what she has accomplished.
The next day Rachel Googles “how to start smoking.” Just one essay appears in Esquire from a forty-six-year-old man, pontificating how much he learned from picking up the habit late in life. For the rest of the week, on her way to jobs 1, 2, and 3, Rachel passes smoke shops and bodegas and pharmacies, pausing, wondering if she should step inside and buy a vape pen, if that would help her to understand something about Banjo Boy’s brain that she currently cannot comprehend.
By Sunday, Rachel is Googling Banjo Boy in incognito mode, realizing she didn’t know the proper spelling of his surname. She finds his website, his by-lines. There is an essay from April 2017 at “The Good Men Project” about falling in love with a blue-haired girl he met on Tinder in LA. It reads like a love story covered in a noir veil: The dull thuds of windswept rain sound against my umbrella as I do my best to withstand the storm, he writes. Rachel rolls her eyes but carries on.
Blue-Haired Girl is a poet. Their first date is in a bookshop/café. Banjo Boy brings Blue-Haired Girl home on the premise of reading her a story he’s published. They kiss at red lights. They kiss on his couch. He thinks about kissing her whilst worrying if buying tea candles and condoms and her favourite bourbon is a self-canceling act (he spells it “self-cancelling” and it makes Rachel itchy in a brain place she cannot touch).
Rachel then digs through Banjo Boy’s Twitter. He shares articles about the inhumane way cops are treating people in subway stations and an essay about the limitations placed on abortions. He thinks he’s getting old because he thinks about sitting down a lot. He orders so much sushi at a restaurant that they bring him three sets of chopsticks. His parents’ love language is always having a lens cloth handy for the other. He retweets when his name is in the New York Times, even if it’s only a few sentences on real estate listings. Rachel would have to buy a subscription to read these and that feels like a lot. It’s not like Rachel dreams of having Banjo Babies.
Rachel actually cannot picture the two of them having anything more serious than a month or so of touching each other like teenagers. She knows he isn’t the guy to take home to her parents. They would never understand someone who has his childhood dog's favourite toy permanently poked into his body: a bright blue hippo, no less. Rachel just wants him now, his guitar-calloused hands slipped inside her coat, his pointed nose against her cheek. She thinks about it a lot at one of her minimum wage jobs, as she pulls sticky envelope tabs and writes pro-con lists about him on misprinted shipping labels (whenever the doorbell to the mailroom rings, she gets startled, and the UPS guy asks, “You good?”). Walking home, Rachel passes restaurant windows, looking inside just long enough that she might make eye contact with someone and imagines her and Banjo Boy sitting at one of the tables with a candle between them, thinking about the moment the waiter comes over and how she would announce his peanut allergy, how after the waiter walked away Banjo Boy would look back at her with a sexy smile and say, “You know me so well.”
Then, one day, Rachel receives a Facebook invitation: Banjo Boy’s Haunted Housewarming. She waits a day for her hormones to cool down, for the hot excitement to peter out of her stomach and chest, then marks herself, “Going.”
She picks out a costume that feels sexy but fun: Karen from Mean Girls—black dress, grey mouse ears, dopey yet fuckable expression. She buys black glitter eyeliner instead of dinner and cuts her bangs. She checks the directions on Google Maps, planning to coolly arrive forty-five minutes after the scheduled event. The R train slumps from the Flatiron district through downtown before crossing the river and curving into Park Slope. Banjo Boy lives up an unfortunate hill. Rachel takes long steps and lots of pauses. Being breathless isn’t sexy, at least not upon arrival.
Eventually, reaching the home nestled in a neighbourhood with children and elaborate decorations, Rachel rings the doorbell; a girl with a flower crown and a Heineken bottle answers. Rachel steps inside and Flower Crown looks behind her. “Oh, is there nobody else?” she asks. Only truly cool people show up to parties with friends.
The living room is a purple haze of bodies in thrift store cobbled clothing: a lizard, a New Yorker tote bag, and a few half-hearted cats (discernible from the ears). Their faces are familiar in the way that most Brooklyn hipsters are to Rachel, so she nods in case they her. Everything is so loud that the voices sound like Disney characters. Rachel eventually sees two people she definitely knows. They ignore her at first, busy talking about the narcissistic first-person “I” in prose. It is almost too stereotypical of a party full of MFA candidates to be believable. Outside of the conversation she stands and uncomfortably floats.
Then, finally, her eyes land gently like a butterfly on him: Banjo Boy. And his eyes have landed on her, too.
Rachel looks away, pretending to engage with the people who have finally let her into their circle. When the woman asks who Rachel is, she shyly replies, “I’m Rachel,” and then the woman says, “No, I mean your costume.” Before Rachel can respond, the woman has moved on, digging around in the bottom of her purse for change to bum a cigarette from a dude un-ironically wearing a cardigan and a yarmulke.
Banjo Boy then touches Rachel’s shoulder, doing his nod of a greeting. They hug, but their bodies do not really have enough space to untangle, pushed into the kitchen counters so Rachel’s hand touches the right back pocket of Banjo Boy’s trousers, grazing his butt before finding its way to her side. She is mortified. She wants it to happen again.
“It’s good to see you,” Banjo Boy says. “I like your costume.”
Rachel performs a natural-looking smile. “Do you know who I am?” she asks.
“Um…Ratatouille?” Banjo Boy gives a gentle grin, his teeth well-shaped and not too white.
“I’m Karen…from Mean Girls?” Though all things considered, Rachel does feel more like a fat rat.
“What’s that?” Banjo Boy leans down so Rachel can stretch into his ear to repeat, to catch another breath of him. He smells unexpectedly clean, making her toes tingle. He then leans back in an “oh” of recognition. He gets me, Rachel thinks.
He pushes the shoulder-length dark curls of the wig he is wearing away from his ear. “Do you know who I am?” he asks, turning slightly.
Banjo Boy is wearing a red floral, maybe somewhat Hawaiian, button down short-sleeve shirt. It’s mostly unbuttoned with a white tank top underneath, tucked tightly into black jeans. A checkerboard-patterned belt featuring a white buckle wraps around his waist. A silver palm tree pendant dangles from a chain around his neck into chest hair. The jeans are pegged above a pair of white Converse high tops that are exactly the right amount of dirty. He has a circular watch on his left wrist fastened with a khaki band and a silver right hand pointer ring. His dark brown, circular glasses sit back on his nose. Rachel has always preferred men in glasses. It’s so much easier to make eye contact with them.
He stares down at Rachel as she stares on, having sort of forgotten he is live in front of her. She looks into his brown eyes, straining the corner of her mouth into confusion and shaking her head.
“I’m Weird Al!” Banjo Boy says.
Rachel finally understands and shows it a bit too animatedly with her arms. What does it say about her that she’s attracted to Weird Al?
The conversation flows before his roommate’s small black dog, Daisy, scampers into the kitchen and runs a circle around their legs. It sets Rachel slightly off balance but not enough to run into Banjo Boy in true rom-com fashion. She kind of wishes Daisy would stage the scene again.
After the dog leaves, Banjo Boy continues staring at Rachel. “Can I get you a drink?” he asks. “We have beer, wine, rum, rum punch…”
“I’ll try the punch,” Rachel says.
Banjo Boy places his hand on her shoulder before making his way to the drinks table. Rachel hangs between conversations, thumbing her cell phone. The Virgin Mary walks past with Sun Goddess, balancing hand rolled cigarettes between fingers. A couple dressed as hippies or just wearing very nice vintage clothing take turns pushing each other up against the kitchen wall, flicking the light switch on and off. Someone who’s either Elton John, Austin Powers, or Liberace slops his arm around a blonde go-go dancer three inches taller than him, attempting to avoid the dude dancing in the inflatable unicorn suit. The guy donning a fitted bed sheet with two haphazard holes cut out for ghost eyes delivers the news that the neighbours called the cops. Rachel leans against the stove and knocks over an empty pizza box, trying not to turn on the gas burner. This, she assumes, is what she missed out on in high school.
Banjo Boy returns, wearing a sexy pout. “I actually don’t know where the punch went,” he admits, ruffling the back of his hair and sending his wig ajar. He bends down to open the refrigerator door filled with Coors Light and condiments: Costco-sized ketchup bottle next to fancy-looking relish.
“Let me take a look at the table,” Rachel says. She won’t explain that she never learned to pretend she likes beer.
They make their way into the hallway and Rachel reaches for the bottle of rye whiskey that resembles something kept in medicine cabinets. “Good choice,” Banjo Boy says.
Rachel doesn’t admit that she has no idea what straight whiskey tastes like, or that she is only choosing it because it feels more badass than the beer the hotter, twiggy girls at the party are slurping, that she feels she needs an advantage over them despite all of the feminism she has spent her life consuming saying otherwise.
There is a bag on the table of squished blue SOLO cups, despite what Rachel understands as hipsters in Brooklyn being required to fucking love the environment. Taking one, she struggles to pull the top off the whiskey bottle, not realizing it has a cork. Eventually, she gets it and taps her cup against Banjo Boy’s beer, making certain not to show any reaction on her face as the liquid slides down her throat.
“So, do you like your new job?” she asks, the booze making her chatty. “I mean, working at the New York Times?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’ll get to apply for a better position soon, but like, right now, the coolest thing I’m doing is selecting the headlines on the website’s homepage.”
“No way!”
Banjo Boy smiles, a sort of boyish look on his otherwise scruffy adult face. He lets it resonate before bringing a Juul to his lips and taking a hit. A cloud of nicotine surrounds the two of them like some sort of party high dream.
Rachel sips more whiskey and leans toward his ear, unexpectedly brave. “You know,” she starts, “I actually saw you in September.” She pauses. “Well, I mean, I went to that reading? With the music and stuff?” His face searches for any idea of what the hell she is on about. “I left kind of early,” she says, backtracking.
“Oh, yeah,” he says, as if he gives so many readings he cannot keep track of them (he doesn’t). “I was really drunk that night.” He does that throaty chuckling thing again, rubbing his patchy chin hair. “My roommate, he was the guy playing the banjo.” He points into the living room at a small man with a smaller moustache wearing a bedazzled Budweiser leather jacket and black sunglasses indoors at night, directing an old school video camera at Virgin Mary and Sun Goddess as they purse their lips. She figure’s he’s supposed to be Ultimate Douche Bag.
“Yeah, I was so drunk,” Banjo Boy says again. “Did you stay long enough to see the guy heckling people?”
Rachel looks down at the scuffed toes on her Doc Marten boots, trying to emulate the cool, whiskey girl persona. “I stayed through your reading,” she says.
Banjo Boy takes another Juul hit, its little blue light flashing. He looks pensively to the room, or as pensively as anyone can look when dressed as Weird Al. “The story I read, I had written it such a long time ago. I had forgotten, like, what it even was.”
“I appreciated it,” Rachel says. “It isn’t every day you get noir and Jewishness together.”
Banjo Boy laughs, allowing an almost cheesy smile. As he comes down from it and their eyes connect, it seems to Rachel like a moment in the way poets romanticize the word “moment.” She holds the gaze and feels a blush down to her stomach. “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” starts playing, and she can sense all the possibilities percolating. Banjo Boy leans away from the hallway towards her and opens his mouth. He gestures toward the staircase, the secret upstairs she has dreamt up on nights with just her and her vibrator.
“I think I’ll go to the bathroom,” he says.
Rachel nods as Banjo Boy turns out of sight. She throws back the whiskey. This is her cue. She weaves through the party’s crowded living room, determined.
Eventually, outside, she reaches for her phone, ordering an Uber home.
Rachel A.G. Gilman’s work has been published online and in print throughout the US, UK, and Australia, including JMWW, The London Reader, and Minetta Review. She is the Creator/Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Creature, a columnist for No Contact Mag, and was the Editor-in-Chief of Columbia Journal, Issue 58. She has an MFA in Writing, Nonfiction from Columbia University and (when the world stops ending) will graduate from the University of Oxford with an MST in Creative Writing. She lives in New York and works in publishing. More at rachelaggilman.com.