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Two Smokers                                              Written by David Chen                                   1 2 3

I am a sidewalk vendor. Sometimes I see weird things on the street. I will tell you two stories about two guys and how they hunted for a cigarette.

Story One

One afternoon when I took a coffee break, I saw two men walk past me. The first guy was a white man, at least forty years of age, dressed in a very pretty coat and a red tie. A cigarette was in his hand. He was followed by a man who looked liked an Asian in middle age, wearing a suit of dark brown with a pair on black leather shoes.

After a moment, the first man threw his cigarette butt aside onto the sidewalk. It was still lit. The guy kept going down the street. The second man suddenly stopped to extinguished and then he threw it away. He looked around and glanced at me. But I pretended I had seen nothing. We were quiet because I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me. And he went on his way.

But there were some questions that came to my mind. First, did he have any personal dignity? Second, was he afraid of being affected by disease from someone’s saliva? Third, if his boss, friends, wife, or his children saw him do that, how would he feel? So far I don’t know the answers.

Story Two

There is a man who lives in a hotel near my working spot in Chinatown. The guy is familiar with me, probably in his sixties. He told me his name is John. He was born in New York City. His father is a French man and his mother is an Arabian. He has pastime job and he is paid the minimum wage-five dollars per hour. He said he smokes a pack of cigarettes everyday. But I many times see him on the sidewalk holding seventy cents in his hand asking the people passing by for a cigarette.

One day an African-American young man held a cigarette in his left hand an two quarters in his right hand. He came to my pushcart and asked me, “I am hungry. Can I buy a bag of cakes have been packed already…”At that moment, John came over and said to the young man, “I will pay you one dollar and you give me the cigarette, O.K.?”

It was a good deal. Certainly the young man agreed. He gave the cigarette to John and took the dollar bill from him. But he did not buy my cakes and went over to the next vendor to buy chow-main (fried noodles). The man and John both felt happy. John put the cigarette in between his lips and deeply smoked. I said to him, “John, if I were you, I would quit my smoking.” He replied laughing, “Hey-Hey, you are right, you are right,” and then he walked away.

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