The best part about being a
newspaper
delivery man was that Andrew got to
people watch
. You saw all kinds of people on this job. Not that all kinds of people read the newspaper. Only a fringe of the population now touched, let alone read the newspaper. But the ones who did Andrew liked a lot. Not that he had some over friendly relationship with his customers. Their interactions were akin to the quiet
cowboy
stare accompanied by a grunt Andrew saw in the old school spaghetti
Westerns
. Mostly men. Tough in some inexplicable way. Maybe he liked these men so much bedcause he felt like one of them.
He was delivering the paper to the
Vietnamese
restaurant, whose owner smoked only one cigarette a day now because he was having trouble breathing. Andrew didn't know this fact because the owner had told him. It was his wife, who spoke very friendly and loud and more often than not forced Andrew to eat a cup of pho before going who had informed him.
Andrew had quit smoking completely when he was just 25. That's when his dad was diagnosed with lung
cancer
. It actually wasn't that hard. He had smoked enough cigarettes for a lifetime already by then. He thought he would live the rest of his days craving it. Thought he would relapse a few times and never actually quit for good. But he never did. Hadn't smoked a single cigarette since that day his dad told him the news.
He didn't know how he ought to feel about other people smoking. He knew how he did feel. He felt pity. He pitied that they had to subject themselves to it. That they couldn't get out while they still had the chance. But was that how he wanted to feel? No of course not. He didn't want to live a life full of judgment. He'd learned to be an instinctual judger from his job seeing so many walks of life. The tough cowboys who still stuck to newspapers, although few in numbers, lived scattered across the city. Andrew would see all different stratums of the socio economic sphere making his rounds. 37 years now he had worked this job. Delivering newspaper. Finally he wanted to stop judging. Stop trying to figure out how it had all gone wrong in somebody else's life... and begin looking at his own.
"Take some pho!"
"No thanks. Really! I've just eaten."
"Why you eat already? Eat here next time!"
Andrew nodded and smiled as he walked outside past her husband who nodded at him before taking a drag off his cigarette. Andrew crossed the street and it began to rain all the sudden. He took cover under the hospital's patient pickup/dropoff space, which had a roof over it. While taking out his rain jacket he saw a kid come out. He looked young, still in high school. Somewhat tall, gaunt. He took a pack of
cigarettes
from his pocket. The kid used one of those transparent plastic lighters. The ones that real smokers never used. Between drags he kept the cigarette too close to his face. Kept his elbows bent, stiff. Andrew could tell that the kid wasn't a real smoker. Was still acting the part.
Maybe the kid was going through a tough time. It wasn't the nicotine the kid was craving at this point, but rather a ritual that felt alleviating, or was supposed to feel alleviating.
Then a thought came into Andrew's mind for the first time in 25 years. He thought he ought to have a cigarette. He looked over at the kid, who met his gaze. The kid wasn't even out of high school and yet he still had that cold, yet direct stare of a cowboy.
"You okay, son?"
He said nothing. Just stubbed the cigarette out and threw it into the trash before walking off. Into the rain with no umbrella or rain jacket.