When Nate and Danny’s mother is killed by lightning on New Year’s Eve
1987, their eccentric father copes by inventing the Nicotine Gospel – his
theory that a man’s cigarette choice reveals everything. Desperate for
connection, the boys embrace his odd teachings. But as Nate thrives and
Danny spirals, the cracks in their family deepen. Years later, the estranged
brothers reunite for a road trip to their father’s funeral, confronting grief,
memory, and each other along the way. The Nicotine Gospel is a darkly
funny, sharply observed novel about family, loss, and the strange rituals
we cling to for meaning.
2011
Divine Parentheses
The men in my family were known as the Lucky Boys, but not because good things happened to us. We were the Lucky Boys because my brother and I were brought up to measure all things, and I do mean all things, by a pack of cigarettes.
Dad was a Lucky Strike man, and that’s the only time I will refer to these cigarettes by their full name. He never would: to Dad they were Strikes or Luckies, the sticks of the future, the cigarette of Billy Joel and Tom Waits, mass-produced tobacco at its finest, a man’s entire character rolled neatly into seven centimetres. I’ve heard it said that the stomach is the way to a man’s heart but the route my brother and I took was by the lungs. And that’s why the three of us were the Lucky Boys. Whether we liked it or not, that red circle on the box was our family crest.
If 1987 is the beginning of the Lucky Boys, then 2011 is the end, our entire story contained inside lightning strikes like divine parentheses. The past is a collection of many things, but in 2011, there are only three things you need to know. You’re discovering them all in one go, which is fitting because I discovered them the same way.
One: I received a phone call to inform me that my father, Esben Muesli, had died. My father had been exiled from the world of the living by abnormal electronic activity in his brain. I stood, unable to speak, while the voice through the telephone told me the official cause was a sudden unexplained death in epilepsy. They can call it what they want. It was lightning.
With the phone pressed against my ear, I imagined my father sitting alone beneath a naked light bulb as a moth slowly descended in a spiral and alighted on his forehead, its tiny weight the fatal catalyst. During the neural storm that followed, the moth briefly morphed into the image of my mother standing in front of him, much younger than he was, smiling, with one finger lightly pressed against the bridge of his nose. I prefer this imagined death to the medical version in which Dad fell and writhed on the floor, his teeth pressed together with hydraulic force, strange sounds and foam issuing from the corners of his mouth as his body clenched briefly and violently around his soul before letting go.
Mia found me standing in the doorway holding a pack of Luckies, the family brand, Dad’s brand, a lit cigarette trembling between my lips. The moment I shut my eyes and inhaled, she plucked the cigarette from my mouth and threw it out the door like an unanchored Catherine wheel.
Two: When I asked why she’d done that, my wife placed both hands over her face. I held her tightly as she cried, but owing to that curious universal law that limits emotions per capita, I could hardly feel anything at all.
‘You’re going to be a father,’ she said. ‘You have to quit. For real this time.’
I wanted to tell her I found it too far a coincidence that the world had reduced its count of fathers by one, only to replace a lost father with a new one. I wanted to tell her I didn’t feel like a father, that the life I’d contributed towards was just information to me, a thought sealed inside too many layers of her for me to feel it.
‘Promise me,’ she said.
I promised.
Three: Dan called later that same day. My little brother had grown up and was no longer Danny. I had no firm idea of what growing up had cost him, there are probably no words to explain these things, it had been at least two letters, five points on the Scrabble board. Dan had called to arrange for the two of us to drive to the funeral together. Our father had spent the last four years living in Fish Hoek, a small seaside suburb on the Cape Peninsula. It was roughly a 1 500-kilometre drive from Durban, most of it along the coast with a brief detour through the Eastern Cape. The plan was to split the drive over two days and then, upon reaching our destination, we’d set our father on fire, turning him into a human cigarette as per his final wishes. After the basic details were discussed, I asked my brother what he thought Dad had believed about death.
Dan’s voice was far away, propelled through unknown lengths of cables, and bounced off satellite dishes that orbited the planet as we spoke.
‘Dad said there was probably no smoking in heaven and no cigarettes in hell.’
Mom had taught us that God breathed life into man, and Dad taught us that when man dies God inhales him back into His lungs. This had seemed mystical at the time, but what was once numinous now felt unhealthy.
I leaned my forehead against the kitchen wall and shut my eyes. As always, an image of my father materialised in the gloom. He sat motionless, smoking, with a million moths circling above his head masquerading as his private disarray of thoughts, and he beneath them a divining rod for all the world’s madness.
“We concentrated on his lessons as best a pair of boys with an aggregate age of ten can concentrate, squinting as much against his cigarette smoke as his instruction.”
1987
The Lucky Boys
According to my father, an eight-by-five cardboard box containing somewhere near twenty machine-made cigarettes would tell you all you needed to know about a man.
To a regular person buying groceries or a pack of gum, the shelves behind the cashier are full of cigarette boxes, assorted brands stacked beside the batteries and condoms. To Dad the boxes and brands were denominations, and even the very shelves that housed them were less shelving than altars on which to denominate. In 1987, the knowledge of good and evil stacked on those shelves was priced, not unreasonably, at six rand ninety-five.
My father wrote novels for a living, or rather had written one very famous novel. Dad didn’t like to talk about it. As children we were under strict instructions not to bother him whenever he was locked in his study. Some days the writing went well and he’d emerge triumphant, a lit cigarette clenched between his teeth. On those days he’d ruffle my hair or wink at Danny as if there was a secret only the two of them shared. On the days the writing didn’t go so well, my brother and I would hide in the garden, curling shongololos around our fingers and rescuing ants that had become hopelessly stuck in the melting tar of the road.
It was unclear to me whether my father was well known in Durban or South Africa or even perhaps to the world at large. There were clues. Newspaper articles. Awards in drawers. Multiple copies of his book were scattered around our house. They sat, coffee-stained, on side tables. They were kept unceremoniously on the bookshelf beside all the others. We weren’t allowed to read Dad’s book, but I would flip through the pages, pausing to run my finger over the dedication: to my wife, and then flipping to the photograph at the back: a black-and-white image of my father seated at the kitchen table, cigarette in hand. He was dark-haired, hazel-eyed and always slightly dishevelled as if he’d woken reluctantly from a dream. His posture was relaxed but the intense look in his eyes suggested, at least to me, that it was a dream you might never have. That photograph was taken long before the Nicotine Gospel was conceived, but I suppose it was always inside him, waiting.
Nineteen eighty-seven was the year we stopped going to Sunday school with Mom and started attending Dad’s church instead. Church, God, Sunday School, each habitually followed by an ice cream, had been Mom’s thing. To us, ice cream and God were so closely linked that Danny and I still refer to Choc-Mint as the flavour of the gods. Mom would laugh and insist we change it to flavour of God. Everyone loved the way she laughed. I remember that. It was a perfect contralto, the sound of a clarinet.
Both gods and parents became singular on the first of January and we were abruptly delivered into Dad’s world, an uncertain place with its own shifting physics and barometric patterns. My brother and I were left to surmise the physics of our new world, and of Dad, and we did this the way boys do everything, by trial and error, our results a collection of data as indecipherable as our father. We could sense shifts in his temperament, that part was easy, but the low-pressure zones that revolved like some metaphysical vortex around him played havoc with our instruments and caused us to behave less like boys than weather balloons floating uncertainly into a darkening sky.
Durban in the late Eighties was an interesting place, or so I learned after the fact. As far as I knew, I lived in a subtropical playground, hot in winter and hotter in summer, a town built around a harbour that straddled the Capricornia fault line, our lamp posts dangerously oxidised, a single seagull seated atop each one, watching as men standing on giant pylons caught fish by the river mouth. A place for sweat and stubborn people, of birdsong and the proliferation of rust. A crumbling city of dreams, physically voluptuous but wild and senseless. The sea was the only landmark and would constantly change colour like a child’s mood ring, from light blue to grey to almost black, which brought giant cumulonimbi rolling in over the Bluff, followed by waves crashing over the piers and short but violent thunderstorms that visited us with the fury of deific revenge.
Oblivious, we were involved in the all-consuming business of boyhood in Natal, pre-reclamation, pre-KwaZulu. At the time, Durbanites were called Banana Boys even though there was more sugar cane than there were banana trees along the coastline. The sea of sugar stretched from uMhlanga to Tongaat, and when Danny and I got bicycles and were free to explore we would often stop to cut a stalk with my pocketknife, chewing and sucking at the sweet juice as we rode on. Later, the international airport would be named after King Shaka who, we were taught, made his soldiers dance on devil thorns. I never quite reached the thickness of heel of a Zulu warrior, but back in 1987 my bare feet had been conditioned to withstand the hot tarmac, which achieved midday temperatures so high we named the streets God’s Frying Pans. Danny was the one who thought to ask the important question: What exactly was God cooking for dinner? The answer was something we both agreed not to think about. In my young mind I imagined the divine battle for our souls being waged by a god in a chef’s hat and a shadowy man with a back crooked from spending his days crouched and sprinkling thorns across the country.
After Mom died our lives changed completely. Dad came up with the Gospel and those lessons were the only time he paid us any attention. For this reason, we concentrated on his lessons as best a pair of boys with an aggregate age of ten can concentrate, squinting as much against his cigarette smoke as his instruction. That’s how it went. Dad would buy a pack of Strikes and we three would sit outside sweating in the Durban heat, watching who bought what, who smoked what, and how they did it. And when we’d seen all this, we’d be called upon by name to answer his questions. Instead of reciting Bible verses for sweets, we were reciting Dad’s verse, for the feel of a single hand that spanned the width of our small backs. The shockwave of approval his hand transmitted was the first drug Danny ever tried and the last one I did. That’s how it was done, pack by pack, stick by stick. That’s how our family bible was written but not on paper. The Nicotine Gospel was written on my brother and on me in fire and ash, with the holy smoke hovering over Dad’s polystyrene coffee cup as witness.
Extracted from The Nicotine Gospel by Sven Axelrad, out now.
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