smoke-'em if you got-'em
Part VI

Phase VI of my personal smoking saga... The big one. Redd Foxx. He was faking it, I wasn't. Well, I guess that he wasn't faking it, that last time, offstage, heh. Anyhoo. November 15th, 1989. I'd been to see my doc about epigastric pain that I was occasionally having. I would sit down, eat some tums, and it would go away. He said that we'd do a stress test, then a GI series, and then, he said, he'd send me to a shrink... I was *that* healthy. I flunked the stress test. They only let me walk about two minutes and they stopped me. I went back over to the hospital to kill some time before I could see the cardiologist, he was busy doing heart caths. I hung out at the front desk, talking to the receptionist. And then.... Left main, 99% occluded, hurt like a bitch. No other way to describe it, really. Well, hurt like a motherfucker comes to mind. I survived it, obviously. I was on the table in the cath lab getting TPA'd in about fifteen minutes. I'm one lucky SOB, I am. I was in the hospital for ten (10!) days. No smoke there, of course. And then I went home and gave all of my pipes away to Gaylen Garinger, who would probably appreciate them. Probably a thousand bucks worth of pipes there. Several really nice meerschaums. All but one. And then I gathered up all of the ashtrays, and got all of the old dried-up tobacco out of them, and put it in the pipe that I had secreted away... and smoked. Yeah, I know. Dumb sonovabitch. Gaddamned things damn near killed me, and here I was, again worshiping them... again. Stupid, stupid, stupid. That word kept echoing in my brain. Stupid, why you do dat? You're fucking stupid. Almost kill you, and then you do dat. You fuckin' stupid. Yeah. So. Cigarettes. Down to about two packs a day. Stupid. Fuckin' stupid.

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIIII
Part IX
Part X
Part XI
Part XII

All material ©1998-2003 by Doug Franklin

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