Nicotine Bitch

There was this dude at the movie theater today—

Let me explain, this little theater I’m talking about is nestled in the ghetto all funky and crumbly and local and cheap and uncrowded and scary and wonderful.

So there was this dude—handsome surfer type—flirting with the ticket girl as I came in to take my mom to see Dark Shadows for a belated Mother’s Day. (Sidebar: the serial killer waiter at Black Angus prevented us from going on our first attempt.) So this dude was there semi-flirting with the ticket girl while at the same time being a total douche making her call her boss to confirm that indeed he did get two free tickets to the show because he had his SAG card on him. Now, the thing is, if he were a little further from L.A., perhaps the ticket girl, myself, and all the other people he told in the theater about his SAG card and how he had met Johnny Depp and Laurence Fishburne on set and how they were odd, odd fellows—maybe if he were a little further away from L.A., that SAG card and his stories might have been more impressive, but he doesn’t live further from L.A. and, as any good So Cal-er knows, a SAG card is a fairly common article. You basically just have to sneeze in the general direction of a production—and pay your union dues—in order to get one, so, needless to say, no one was impressed. In fact the tension among the twenty or so theater goers was almost palpable as his boisterous posing got even more ridiculous with every single minute of the extra twenty minutes it took the reel-master to get the projector running and the sound right because, as I said, this is a funky little ghetto theater and shit like that happens.

So this dude—this preening, pompous, jackass dude—this friendly dude in front of me in line at the movies got two free tickets with his SAG card, turned around, smiled and handed one to me.

And all the heinous, evil thoughts I had about him after he showed me this kindness are the reason I bought cigarettes today and intend to start smoking them later. Listening to myself internally nicotine-fit-bitch about the shortcomings of this poor, kind, lonely man trying to break the ice with strangers by sharing with them his proudest achievement—makes me like myself less.

I like myself less—smokeless.

-M.