I will always remember the first time I saw Humphrey Bogart holding his cigarette between his fingers in Casablanca—how he would gently bring it to his lips and take a long drag, softly inhaling the smoke while raising his glass of whiskey with his other hand to take a sip.
For days, I practiced in front of my bedroom mirror with a cigarette and a glass of water tinted with coffee to give it colour. I knew his monologue by heart, and looking at myself in the glass, I would repeat, "I'm waiting for a lady," though I had no idea which lady that might be. The one thing I was sure of was that if any lady did show up, it would be my mother, and she wouldn't be pleased at all to see me smoking.
After a few weeks, I had learned to swallow the smoke without feeling as if I were suddenly running out of air and about to choke to death, so I began putting on my grand performance in front of my classmates. Sometimes, if I thought one of the girls I liked might hear me, I would get so carried away that I'd slam my fist on the table and ask if it was six in the evening in Barcelona, what time would it be in New York?
Soon, most of those who knew me thought I was missing a screw and began to pull away in fear, whispering among themselves about the strange things that were happening to me. Triggering all those reactions in my peers ended up making me feel ashamed of myself, so I quickly stopped doing it and went back to being who I had always been: just one more of the crowd. One more statistic in the annual records of lung and laryngeal cancers published by the Spanish Ministry of Health—that was all I had left.
Free adaptation of a short-story by Sam Shepard from Motel Chronicles (1982)
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