Nicholson Baker: Traveling Sprinkler

“You mean those little cans?” said Tim. “Oh God, no. If you’re going down the tobacco road you should smoke a pipe. It’s more your style.”

“My grandfather smoked a pipe and it wasn’t good for him,” I said.

“What about cigars? Mark Twain was a huge cigar man. Not to mention Castro, and JFK.”

“But then you have this big brown thing sticking out of your face. I don’t want to be wreathed in plumes of smoke.”

“I can understand that,” said Tim. “But Skoal is for rednecks.”

I took a bite of sandwich, thinking about cigars. “Amy Lowell smoked cigars all night,” I said. “She smoked cigars and wrote poems, and boom, she was an Imagist.”

“There you go,” said Tim.

“But Imagism wasn’t that great. Anyway I’m done with poetry.”

Tim scoffed. “You’re not done with poetry.”

“Yes, I am. I’m going to play the guitar.”

“Ah, the guitar,” Tim said. “I know two, no, three people at Tufts who’ve taken up guitar. It’s the middle-aged thing to do. At faculty parties they sneak off and play Clapton Unplugged and Blind Lemon Jefferson.”

“Exactly,” I said. “I want to get back to music somehow. I miss it.”

“That’s true, I forgot, you used to play the oboe.”

“The bassoon, but yes.”

“Maybe you could write songs.”

“Maybe. While I was driving here I was singing a song about seaweed.”

“Leanin’ toward the carrageenan, eh? Any protest songs? Antiwar songs?”

“No, but I’ve been working on some political poems. I’ve got a long bad poem in the pipeline about Archibald MacLeish and the CIA.”

“Sounds unwieldy.” Tim wiped his mouth. “What we need is an anti-drone anthem. Something to sing on the barricades, like Dylan’s ‘Masters of War.’”

I asked him what he thought was the best antiwar song ever.

He considered the question, chewing. Donovan’s “Universal Soldier” maybe, he thought, or Lennon’s “Imagine.” No, the best antiwar song, he said conclusively, was by somebody named Bagel.

I looked dubious. “The guy’s name is Bagel?”

“Bogle. It’s about World War One.” He put down his sandwich and pulled out his phone again. “There’s a great version of it on YouTube, by this young kid who just sings the hell out of it.” He poked at the screen for a while, frowning, but couldn’t find the video. “I’ll send you the link. I guarantee you will shed a tear.”

I asked Tim if he’d been on any dates. “Nothing on that front,” he said. “I’m saving all my love for Medea Benjamin.”

I drove back to Portsmouth, up Route 95, with my tires going around and around saying the same things to the road over and over again. The road never gets it, never learns. When I veered toward the edge of the lane, my tires drove over the intermittent white lines. The sound went fft, fft, fft , like paper leaping from a copying machine. I saw a sign, SLOW TRAFFIC AHEAD, and I made a tune for it. I sang, “She said there’s slow traffic, slow traffic, slow traffic ahead.” I sang about thirty variations of that, till my voice felt scratchy. I saw the sign for the state liquor store that’s lit like a prison. I didn’t turn in the entrance. I thought about the kindness of Roz’s mouth.

• • •

AT IRVING CIRCLE K, I bought a purple can of Skoal Berry Blend and a green can of Skoal Apple Blend long-cut tobacco. At home I watched a YouTube video called “First Dip Video Skoal Cherry Longcut.” A seventeen-year-old boy stuffed a mass of cherry-flavored tobacco into his cheek and spat into a jar as he talked. He’d quit smoking and now he was dipping. “One of my friends who dips says you can live without your lip but you can’t live without your lungs,” he said. “I support that.” I watched several more first-dip videos — there are hundreds. Some of the dippers had special saliva receptacles called mud jugs. They expertly shifted enormous “hammers”—wads of wet tobacco — around in their cheeks and said “awesome” a lot. They compared flavors and brands — wintergreen versus apple, and Grizzly versus Cope, or Copenhagen. A kid named Outlawdipper filled half his face with Cope Wintergreen. “My gums have been killing me,” he said. “My fricking gums are all the way receded. Maybe I should stop dipping. Nah.” Talking rapidly, his personable young face deformed by the giant plug of tobacco, Outlawdipper demonstrated various styles of mud jugs available on Mudjug.com — the wood-grain mud jug, the red-bandanna mud jug, and his favorite, the carbon-fiber mud jug. “Looks gorgeous,” he says. “Just messes with your mind and your eyes.” A man who called himself Cutlerylover took an oversize dip. He started rubbing his temples with his fingers and said, “Ugh, I’m getting really buzzed, I definitely don’t like that feeling.” He turned off the camera and was gone for a while to throw up. When he came back he said, “I will never ever ever ever do that again in my entire life.” I went to Mudjug.com — selling “the only spitter good enough for the Armed Forces.” A sergeant in Iraq wrote a testimonial: “When we are on those long convoys, crammed inside our vehicles like sardines, there is just no where to spit without hittin’ somebody,” he said. But his mud jug changed all that. “I have carried this thing through some pretty rough times all through the Middle East and when the fire fights are all over, me and my Mud Jug are still there, waiting for more. It’s a tough little spittoon I’ll say that. God bless. Hoorah!”

I went outside and sat at the picnic table with a paper towel. It was about one a.m. After rapping smartly on the lid of the tobacco can the way you’re supposed to, I sliced around the edge with my thumbnail to cut the paper seal. And then I grabbed my lower lip and made a little trough and stuffed a hairy lump of Skoal Berry Blend in there. It tasted a bit like Skittles — like a box of Skittles found after a flood in a dirty basement. My mouth began pumping out remarkable amounts of saliva, which I spit, feeling ridiculous, on the grass. I lost control of my packed hammer — bits of tobacco began drifting around the inside of my cheeks. There was no mental effect — no rush — and then suddenly, holy mindfuckery of corned beef and cowbell, my brain converged tightly on itself and blew open. My cheekbones began singing spirituals and I laughed. There was a needly coldness in my fingers. I had a strong inclination to retch, which I mastered. Interesting how the body takes over. It seemed important all at once to spit out the brown mess and wipe off my tongue and lie down on the grass. I lay there panting for a while, saying, “God help me.”

The high was extreme but short-lived. It was an unthoughtful sort of joy — too violent. No doors of perception opened. I thought of John Candy, in Splash , saying, “My heart’s beating like a rabbit.”

• • •

HOW DO YOU DO? I’m officially a resident of the United States of America. Millions of other people live in this country with me, and I don’t know their names. I have lots of words in my head, bits of pop music, phrases, names of places, and scraps of poetry and prose. “Tough stuff.” “Rough trade.” “Party hardy.” “Cheez Whiz.” “Telefunken.” “Matisyahu.” “Znosko-Borovsky.” “Misty moisty.” “Serious moonlight.” “Mud jug.”

I have this recurring problem with my jaw that I very much want to tell you about.

But maybe not now.

No matter how hot the night, if you go out in a T-shirt and you lie on the grass for a while it’s eventually going to get chilly and you’re going to want shelter. That’s my hard-won truth of the night. That and that Skoal Berry Blend isn’t the drug for me.