by Cecilia O’Mara
Sometimes walking to walk, to circle the swan boats paddling around the lake, to get a sparkling water from the gas station, I will notice a particular, masculine, ugly, red or black, cigarette package in the litter and leaves on the side sidewalk. Invariably, the front of the package reads, in Impact font: DENIMS.
“Who the hell smokes Denims?” I think each time. Like a normal person, when I smoked, I smoked American Spirit or Marlboro.
I notice Denims (always discarded, in the litter, never behind the counter) the same way you notice red cars are everywhere as soon as you start driving one. That particular frequency illusion had also happened to me the one year I drove a 20-year old red Cadillac with bench seats.
“Are you still driving that hot rod?” someone I hadn’t seen in a while asked me at a party.
I smiled. “I sold it to my brother’s friend when I was back home, I’m driving something else now.” But every street was still full of red cars for me.
All my memories in Los Angeles seemingly happened yesterday. That car marked a year in my life in Los Angeles. My season of the red Cadillac. I bought it for three and a half grand off the street, a sign in the window. Its oil was leaking. I just needed a car. Maybe instead of hot rod they said “honker” or “machine.” That machine, ye olde gas guzzler. The times I drove it listlessly listening to the same Townes record sticks with me too.
It was a year ago when I woke with a start about the Denim cigarettes. It was a year ago, I remind myself. With all the monotonous sunshine it could have happened yesterday.
Normally I would text my neighbor across the hall things like, “big dawg do you have pliers?” and he’d say “yeah, what do you need them for?” Things of that nature. We were friends.
That morning, he sent me a photo of a half-smoked cigarette and ash on my welcome mat. I was still in bed when my phone buzzed beneath the sheet.
“Hey this was outside your door, did you see this?” the text from him said.
LA apartments, especially the older ones, have this indoor-outdoor thing going on. Ours was just the hall but lucky people get a whole courtyard. But even with our outside hall the front of the building was gated and you couldn’t get in without a key.
Sometimes you couldn’t even get in with a key. The lock was fickle and especially troublesome after it rained because it became waterlogged. I was often outside with groceries in hand groaning while I tried to finesse it open in the damp. Ernesto from the first floor would come let me in if I was shaking the gate for too long. He’d be smiling. Sometimes a boy named Hayk would let me in. He was a good boy. But he never looked me in the eye.
I zoomed into the photo. “No, not me, what the fuck?” I would never smoke indoors and besides I didn’t smoke anymore. My face felt cold and that chill feeling broke through my grogginess.
I got up and went to my door to fix the second and third lock.
Someone had been outside the door smoking. Not my neighbor, my only neighbor on this floor, in the back of the building. If he didn’t know whose cigarette it was…
I wondered. Could it be? A dark figure in a hurry, only smoking half of his cigarette, looming in front of my unlocked door. Rash, trembling. Smushed into my welcome mat. You think you’re safe sometimes.
I tried to remember if I had heard rustling earlier or in the night. The walls are thin here. When my friends come to see me, I can hear them outside my door before they arrive. I can feel the floor get heavier when someone walks by.
There was a knock.
I held my breath a little then went to my door. For the first time I used my peep hole. It was just my neighbor. A sigh.
“Hey how’s it going?”
“Good, I mean, I’m a little spooked. What’s going on?”
“Do you know anyone who smokes Denims?”
“What the hell are Denims?”
“I went outside to look around and talk to the other neighbors. I didn’t see anything else besides the cigarette outside your door, and this empty pack of…Denims? It was just lying on the walkway, by Anahit’s apartment.”
I googled “who buys denims” and then, after reading some results for second hand jean shops, revised my search to “who buys denim cigarettes” and a couple things came up. A reddit post on r/libertines titled “it’s where cigarettes grow on trees and all benches are made of denim” (poetic) and a 2013 article from the Orange County Register.
Illegal cigarettes: quick cash, light penalties.
There’s a war in Marlboro Country.
Organized criminals are producing cigarettes that mimic American-brand cigarettes and selling them in predominantly ethnic Orange County neighborhoods at drastically reduced prices. It’s quick cash and smugglers face light penalties if caught.
Law enforcement says illegal cigarettes pose a health risk to consumers, cost millions in lost tax revenue and serve as a conduit for criminals to launder money.
California has the seventh-highest rate of cigarette smuggling in the nation, according to the Tax Foundation.
“I guess they’re kind of a cheap working class brand,” my neighbor said. I’d gotten used to early morning disturbances in this building.
One of my neighbors has emphysema. If I knew about him, I’m not sure I would have signed the lease. That sounds cruel but as I learned through gossip, his family was also sick of his coughing. So he comes outside to hack and cough and rattle his lungs. It’s a tremendous and terrible racket that echoes against all the buildings.
Sometimes someone else will come onto their balcony to rebuke the coughing. That’s worse.
The cougher doesn’t respond when this happens. He just lets them yell. I actually never heard him say a word, to me, or to anybody.
He won’t stop smoking either. I thought I’d get used to it and the hacking and whooping fits would become invisible, the way I grew used to the sound of the guard dog barking across the street every night. I never did. Hourly the gong of suffering and ill health.
He’s bored all the time. When he’s not coughing he’s going up and down our street with a needless leaf blower. When you get too quiet in life the only thing you are left to do is make noise. Hear me. I’ve screamed in my life. That must be it. I hear him.
There was another constant noise that failed to become background. Hayk was always outside my window at seven in the morning going through the dumpster looking for electronics. And then raucously scrapping them for parts.
“I spoke to Hayk about the early morning scrapping, not sure if he or his mom will stop,” my next door neighbor told me. He had been in the building since the 90s and was locked in with his cheap rent despite the complaints about the place, and in that time had become the de facto property manager. This is a “golden”-handcuff that is placed on the wrists of men who work on contract in the city I discovered. Cheap rent in a shitty place you can’t leave.
As rundown as it was, it’d be even more rundown without him. He was the only one fixing things, the only one managing our little conflicts. I had only told him I was being woken up so early by the industrial noises, complaining as one does to a friend. He’d gone to resolve things.
My neighbor relayed to me, “He said the part that was hard for him is that he has a job now and so he has to gather scraps for the day before seven so he can get to work on time…I asked, ‘Can you do it after work?’ and he said ‘No because it’s closed by that time.’ Then I asked, ‘Why can’t your mom do it after you leave for work?’ And he said, ‘Oh because she doesn’t like doing this kind of stuff.’ And I just looked at him. ‘So your mom makes you do this but she will not do it herself? Got it.’ It makes me a little angry but what can I do?”
People have to do what they have to do to get by.
Really I wish my neighbor had more leverage with the landlord to get our outside windows cleaned sometime.
My neighbor had been in the building long enough to have beef with Hayk’s mother in a way I couldn’t understand because the only English she would speak with me is the little hello or goodbye we’d share as I passed by the front of their place. She’d sit with a wolf fleece blanket on a plastic lawn chair with her espresso and phone with TikToks on at full volume, surrounded by bric-a-brac that also seemed to come from the dumpster. A faded plastic toy horse, rubber balls and party streamers jammed into the branches of our single untamed loquat tree, flowers in blue plastic school crates. It was like an aquarium with all that stuff on the pebble rocks.
The plastic detritus ebbed and flowed, always changing and being cycled out for different types of found garbage. A dirty neoprene coated five pound weight, laminated religious cards, a microscope at one point. I didn’t like the junk but it wasn’t hurting me and it was just enough to pique my curiosity from time to time. It somehow helped mark time passing. The weather never changes.
My neighbor told me she was a crazy lady though. Someone else in the building had put up a small flower memorial with tea candles for their sister who had passed. Hayk’s mother ripped it down and screamed about it. This was all before I moved in, though.
“You’re lucky she hasn’t snapped at you yet,” my neighbor said. “Good. Stay on her good side.” They would fight because she would often jam the metal front gate open with a brick and leave it like that. My neighbor diligently removed all the big rocks and bricks when the landlord wouldn’t intervene. They’d fight when she hosed down everything in the garage because my neighbor was keeping his work supplies and lumber back there by his car.
I liked my neighbor though, he was an honest and hardworking guy. Someone with principles. He knew everyone.
In my slippers we did a lap together outside to see if there was more evidence beyond the abandoned cigarette and the Denims pack, signs of an intrusion. Someone we didn’t know had gotten in.
A woman from the building next door, her hair in a ragged bun, came up to us from around the back.
“You guys hear what happened? The cops came and picked up some guy with a crowbar,” she said.
Someone had broken in and was trying to crowbar their way into a garden level window in the adjacent building. The people were all inside and they were terrified. They must have done something to intimidate him to get him to go. Flashed a gun maybe. It’s not enough to say that you’re calling the cops in Los Angeles if you’re trying to scare someone away. The cops won’t show up until seven hours after the fact and they don’t do anything.
Although both buildings were gated you could pass through the back between and get from one place to the other. I’d hear someone take their dog out on a schedule over there.
“He was hiding out by your door,” my neighbor said.
I thought about him, menacing, a crowbar in his hand, a cigarette in the other. Who was he? What was running through his head?
You can’t do cat burglary this early in the day, I thought.
Before, when I walked around the neighborhood on my way to the corner store or to see someone, I felt uneasy about the old mafia guys who would walk up and down the street. They wanted you to know that they saw you. When my dad was visiting and helping out with the oil leak on the Cadillac, out on the street because I didn’t have parking, the old guys stood in a flock across the way on a porch and watched him intently while he worked on the car. Every store around here was a front. The costume shop open only on Halloween and Christmas advertising BUY SANTA SUITS HERE, the light shop, the fake toy store.
Some of my friends, unaware, had gone into the toy store and were hassled by the shopkeepers. “What are you doing here? What do you want?” they asked. The shelves were practically bare.
“We were just looking! We’re going now!”
I’d walked into the light store when I moved in because I did desperately need a lamp. I was met with very tight lips. Nothing was for sale.
I did buy angel wings from the costume shop.
Now I feel a little less perturbed by the old guys on patrol. They know who lives here, I guess.
Nothing came of the guy with the crowbar after that.
A few months later there was a fire in our sister building. My neighbors and I stood on our walkway together to watch the firefighters. I said hello to Hayk’s mother and we tried to talk. We were quiet a long while in friendly understanding until she had something to say to me.
“I don’t want to be here in America,” she said.
“I’m here to take care of my husband. He is very sick.”
I never, ever saw him except once when she was changing his bed linens. His wheelchair was facing away from me, his bald head bowing forward and pale yellow shoulders that are all bones like an iceberg over the top of the back of the chair.
I was hauling a few loads of laundry to my car to take it to the coin-operated place a few blocks away. I felt ashamed of my youth and my bare legs and I didn’t turn around to look back as I walked by. I wonder if I should have. But I’m conscious of gawking, of looking at people when they don’t want to be looked at. I wondered if the sun felt nice on his skin.
Sometimes Hayk and his mother would leave the house dressed up. Him in a button down, her in heels. They’d walk out the front together and she’d wait by the gate while he brought the car around. Then they’d go off. She left her apartment and the pebble rock front yard so infrequently. She was always there to greet me when I came in and say goodbye when I left. Who knows where to. But sometimes, they would go, together.
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Cecilia O’Mara
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