Category / Personal

by Edward Champion

My Terrible Thirty Year Love Affair with Cigarettes

For thirty years I was a slave to cigarettes, falsely believing that nicotine could disguise (and even cure) my anxieties and insecurities. But there was a real and better me beneath all that the entire time and I am now ready to tell my story.

I

I was twenty-one when I first put a cigarette to my lips. I was oh so stupid, swiftly addicted to the bursts of artificial dopamine that nicotine seemed to guarantee. Cigarettes fueled my writing, my conversational energy, and, pathetically, my reason to be alive. In my early twenties, three thousand crisp and witty words spilled out of me with libertine glee every Wednesday night, with a few late lead dispatches or an eleventh-hour interview transcript on a Thursday. I documented the week’s film releases with verve and eclat and I would chain smoke as I happily banged all this madness out of me, operating in some fumy fugue state.

I would pore proudly over the remains of fifteen to twenty cigarettes in my ashtray as my 56k modem emitted that telltale screech of an Internet handshake. And when I connected, I would send a triumphant email gravid with Word attachments to my editor. I delivered such clean copy that there usually wasn’t much of a punch up.

We’ll never see the likes of those days again, now that writing long and lavish thoughts about books and film seems to have fallen by the wayside with eight-track tape, zines assembled with scissors and Sellotape, and video store clerks who memorized the Leonard Maltin movie guide with Talmudic resolve. Years later, I would learn how much my weird knack for accessible intellectualism aggravated and angered my colleagues. The more envious and invidious practitioners often read through my work for gaffes so they could announce what a charlatan I was in the comments. It was truly amazing how many enemies you could make in the literary world by simply having a fun time or writing with genuine passion and exuberance. Hopeless and humorless hacks wasted astonishing amounts of their spare time shit-talking and spreading unsubstantiated falsehoods about me to anyone they deemed “important.” Had they possessed any true idea of how fragile and uncertain and self-hating I was at the time, they might have raised their sniper rifles and instantly murdered the maniac who wrote as rapidly as Lester Bangs, but who somehow did so without Darvon and Nyquil. But I did have the cigarettes. There was enough of a command in my writing voice for me to carry on. And for a long time, as recently as last August, cigarettes were so poisonously intertwined with my good faith efforts to deliver something original in words.

When the late great Roger Ebert was extraordinarily gracious and commended my writing in those puckish and punkish days, when writing online was akin to being some top-tier leper that no legacy media practitioner roosting in a high place wished to talk about, I didn’t believe him. I stupidly assumed he was praising the latest fresh hard pack of Lucky Strikes or Marlboro 100s I had tapped four or five times against the edge of my palm before ferociously ripping off the foil which protected my vile babies. I had precious little self-esteem in those days and I would learn decades later that I was carrying a remarkable amount of accumulated pain and trauma that contributed heavily to my many failings. This made me an easy mark for tobacco. And I told myself that it was the cigarettes, not me. It never occurred to me that I could write well or live better without cigarettes. When I met other writers who smoked, some of them believed the same thing.

The cancer sticks were there for every victory and every loss. Almost like a long lost uncle who would never leave you. Lovers bolted. Friendships dissolved. Prospects fizzled. But the cigarettes always stayed. And that security — the extremely lethal reliability measured out in lots of twenty — seemed to overshadow the yellow teeth and the bad breath and the nicotine stains on my fingers and the wretched odor that settled upon every article of clothing I donned and every piece of furniture I reclined on. Every time I fired up a gasper while shivering in the cold, puffing hard and greedy upon the five packed inches of deadly tobacco rapidly reduced by selfish sucks into soft sprinkles of ash, I would tell myself that I was warm and that this atoned for how winded I felt whenever I climbed multiple flights of stairs.

In my younger days, I was incredibly shy and awkward and sensitive. Still am today to some degree, though I am better at cloaking it when I am in the presence of the baleful and the obnoxious. Since cigarettes seemed to provide a solution to every problem, I deferred to their sham expertise. I could plant myself on a barstool, ask the barkeep for any drink I had the bread for, put one of those hideous sticks between my lips, light it up, and watch the blue smoke flutter in an upward whirl that reminded me of all the great noir films that I wolfed down like some starved animal eating Thai or Indian food for the first time in years. But my great hunger for cigarettes, all part of an insidious scam manufactured by malevolent bloodthirsty capitalists in the tobacco industry and their chemist accomplices, soon eclipsed that relatively harmless addiction.

The nicotine screamed within my bloodstream like some coddled toddler demanding candy packaged in seductive multihued paper. Cigarettes were my answer to those sweet goodies stacked right next to the supermarket checkout line as all the poor single people begrudgingly waited in line to buy their Saturday night pints of Haagen-Dazs or their bottles of merlot while suffering through the piercing tantrums of a child pointing at a brick of Kit-Kat waiting for an adult with a fat wallet. Oh yes. That was nicotine and me, except that I was a petulant addict without the parents to blackmail or the audience to terrorize.

You see, nicotine is one of the most addictive alkaloids ever created by mercantile men. And back when I first started smoking in the mid nineties, the cigarette companies began to increase nicotine levels through improved chemical technology. It was the worst time in American history to become ensorcelled by these dreaded coffin nails. The tobacco conglomerates added ammonia, sugars, additives, and other nasty chemicals to ensure that the nicotine was sent faster to my brain and that tobacco smoke settled more smoothly into my lungs.

The tobacco companies had this sinister idea of profiting by creating millions of lifelong addicts, who would become dedicated consumers until just before the tombstone, smoking their way into COPD, emphysema, heat disease, and lung cancer and hopefully passing on the addiction to their children. Even the Nazis, who actually had anti-smoking programs in place, didn’t go that far. (But let’s not pat those evil bastards on the back. Especially as we chillingly repeat history in this wildly awful immigrant-detaining and Iran-bombing age.) It became so difficult and unpleasant for smokers to quit that some drug addicts have described cigarettes as more addictive than heroin.

No matter how hard you tried, you’d eventually go back to smoking.

II

I first started smoking while walking the streets of San Francisco by myself. Scratch any addict and you’ll see that it starts as a temporary cure for loneliness or anxiety. I was hooked on the ironically pure-white scags within a week.

I started smoking in the twentieth century with a decidedly twentieth century brand: unfiltered Lucky Strikes. This was a partial nod to my father, who smoked Pall Malls. But Pall Malls weren’t easy to find in the nineties. Lucky Strikes were the closest thing.

My father had smoked more or less to the end of his life, dropping dead at the age of seventy-three during the pandemic. The probate attorney who informed me of his passing told me that the furniture around him had been pocked and riddled with careless and prolific burns. She told me over the phone that there came a point in which my father just didn’t have the will to live. He gave up, much as he had given up writing sometime in his forties, presumably having little more than smokes to soothe his paranoia and his bitterness. And this spooked me. I didn’t want to be a cynic. And I very much wanted to live. In large part because I needed to write. I wanted to live even as I was puffing away while the attorney squawked more details through the tinny Android speaker pressed to my ear. Here I was. Still slowly killing myself and not quite knowing what to feel about the man who had abused me for years, the man whom I had cut myself off from three decades before for my own protection.

After I said my goodbye to the attorney, I imagined a future twenty-five years from now in which I might suffer the same fate. That’s the irony of cigarette time. Backwards and forwards. Forwards and backwards. Sex or a meal punctuated by a rapaciously inhaled toby rib. The nicotine muddling your memory and sending you into a terrifying future. My dad. Me. Seventy-three. A face as dour and drained as Kerouac near the end, underappreciated at forty-seven after the booze finally got him. No reason to carry on. Puttering around. Becoming indifferent. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Dropping half-smoked cigarettes onto the floor with learned negligence. Burning holes in anything that had not fallen apart. Giving up. Did he finish his last pack before he passed? I suspect he did. He was always a committed smoker.

And then a bolt back to the past. The waft of tobacco that curled from the open gate of the pipe shop in the mall. Yes, believe it or not, they had pipe shops in malls near the end of the seventies. The days in which shady men hoped to hook kids on lung darts, paying off the Salkinds with forty grand to have Superman tossed by General Zod into a Marlboro truck. I recalled my father’s daily saunter into the convenience store, with me tagging alongside him as a scrawny kid. I remember the frightening roar of the fan, insecurely mounted just above the entrance. My father would buy beer and a pack of cigarettes, grunting and looking sour and never thanking the congenial Indian man behind the counter, who gave me the kindly smile that my father was supposed to tender to me. And I would look up at the fan, worried that it would fall down and chop my gaunt underfed little body into tiny bits. In a way, the fan did fall on me. Because two decades later, I would be the one repeating my father’s beer and cigarettes convenience store routine, though I would improve upon my father’s sullen demeanor by making small talk with the guy behind the counter, always thanking him for selling me highly addictive goods that were designed to kill me.

Cigarettes weren’t just an addiction with my dad. They were a weapon. He burned me with the bright red ends when he wasn’t filling the living room with blue smoke. Despite all this, I romanticized my father, preferring to remember his better moments to bury the pain he burned into me sometimes daily, which obviously extended beyond cigarettes. And when I took up cigarettes as an adult — or, more accurately, a foolish and desperate infant of an adult — they turned out to be a brilliant accessory at inhuming sizable portions of my humanity. I didn’t know that three decades ago, but I know that now — nearly two hundred days after puffing on my last cigarette.

III

Near the end of my deadly smoking run, which ended shortly after my fifty-first birthday, I was reduced to hideous but cheaper Newports picked up through the black market trade at my bodega. These tasted like filthy mint, with the smoke crackling like a crumbling pillar within my heavy lungs, slicing my alveoli like fine crystal daggers. I was just one of an estimated 28.8 million American smokers who did this to himself. Most of us want to stop. Most of us can’t.

I had always been contemptuous of cigarette regulation, in large part because the overly tanned and smugly speaking men who declared cigarettes evil really seemed to have no significant understanding of how viciously addictive cigarettes are. Instead of helping nicotine addicts by regulating cigarette production to reduce the addictive qualities (akin to the 3.2% beer during Prohibition) or offering free nicotine replacement therapy, local and state governments preferred to profit from gasping gasper junkies like me by raising cigarette taxes. It was a bit like Trump’s tariff scam. Pass on the costs of the grift onto the addicted consumer and have him feel the biggest pinch. Big Tobacco profited either way.

When I started smoking, a pack of cigarettes cost $1.50. At the end of my on again/off again smoking career (I have no exact number, but I’m pretty sure I “quit” smoking at least two hundred times), I was buying contraband smokes at eleven dollars a pack. Now if you didn’t know a guy who knew a guy (or knew a bodega who knew an illicit trader), you’d have to purchase cigarettes legally, which would set you back $18 to $20 here in New York City. And if you smoked one pack a day, that would add up to $600 a month: roughly the cost of a CUNFON RZ800 electric scooter. (By contrast, a pack of cigarettes cost twenty cents in 1940. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $4.65, a far more manageable luxury at $139/month.)

But it was especially difficult for me to quit because of the permanent nexus between smoking and writing. I’d usually scarf down a cigarette every two or three paragraphs. And if I was really hardcore, I’d chain smoke while slicing through my sentences with a pen. When I was a smoker, I could write a one thousand word essay in about two and a half hours.

But if you quit cold turkey — and I didn’t want to be a vampiric Maron hording nicotine lozenges — this godlike superpower slips away for many months. Because even when your physical cravings disappear, you’re still contending with the psychological attachment to cigarettes. You’re still dealing with a damaged brain in which the receptors, which not so long ago were pummeled relentlessly by the slings and arrows of outrageous nicotine, need time to heal. The scientists say that it takes three months of not smoking for your dopamine levels to return to normal. But the last time I quit before I finally stopped, it was more along the lines of four or five months before I felt that I could read and write like my former self. This is one of many reasons why it’s difficult for creative people, who often rely on dopamine, to quit smoking. When the great Lady Gaga became a smoking apostate, she claimed she saw Jesus for an entire week. I fully believe that she did.

Last summer, I had reached a point in which I needed to quit. I had quit before. And then I started right back up with the ciggies after a Polish woman gaslighted me and broke my heart. (She had two kids. So it was like breaking up with three people. I had given the trio every bit of my heart and I was damaged goods.) Then, when I was finishing up the editing of “Libromendel,” I started feeling a strange pain near my left lung. This was it, I thought. All those years of smoking were coming back to bite me in the ass. What hideous diagnosis could be awaiting me? Would there be a mask and an oxygen tank in my immediate future?

I had also seen Weird Al Yankovic perform live in Bethel and it was one of the best live shows I had ever seen. I had been utterly astonished at how spry and alive he was as a performer. The dude performed nonstop for three and a half hours, complete with costume changes, and never once sang a wrong note. And the man was sixty-five. Weird Al’s indefatigable energy was so deeply inspiring that it became an instrumental part in persuading me to quit. I wanted to be a goofy old dude with that level of energy.

So I stopped smoking. Not quit. Stopped. There’s a difference. And I saw many doctors and I got everything looked at. I found a primary care physician who was hilariously brutal with his data-driven analysis and who informed me that I had to take up a quasi-pescatarian diet. I responded by showing up to a followup appointment and saying, “Yo, doc, I ate a bacon egg and cheese before arriving here just to spite you.” He patiently repeated the data — his eyes rolling gloriously like those alphanumeric characters on an old Solari board — and said, “Do you want to live long?” And I conceded that he had a point. So I (mostly) went back to the diet, with occasional deviations. It turned out that the pain was a pulled muscle, not my lung. I didn’t have cancer. I had moved a 200 pound piece of furniture up four flights of stairs with a bit too much fervor. Sorry, I’m a man. And any honest man will tell you that he approaches his life with some stupid variation of stubborn male pride. At least I wasn’t one of those hopelessly hateful and ditch-dirt dumb and feebly aimless and lamentably illiterate Trump fuckheads claiming to be a phony victim of the mythical “male loneliness epidemic” because he doesn’t know how to shut the fuck up and listen to women.

I applied my deranged obudracy to staying off cigarettes. It helped that I was hell-bent on outliving my enemies. Yes, my mind was gone. I couldn’t write much else other than “Thank you for meeting for lunch” or “Say, that was a pretty good episode of Only Murders in the Building.” I was so profoundly idiotic that I felt very much like Dougie in Twin Peaks: The Return and even considered buying a lime green blazer that was several sizes too big on me.

After two months of functioning like a veritable vegetable (and failing to find a Dougie style blazer that matched the color of chayote sequash), I refused to smoke cigarettes, but I couldn’t take this new lifestyle in which my ability to write was so deracinated. I had to write not just from need, but out of spite. You see, I have sadly watched so many bright and burning lights decline and dim into zestless and soulless hacks as they made the shift from blogs and alt-weeklies to the more vanilla and unadventurous pastures of corporate media. But I have always loved writing. And I adamantly refuse to bore an audience or phone it in. I am Sammy Davis, Jr. singing a number from Golden Rainbow before the soft drink companies appropriated that marvelous ode to authenticity. When these same commercial outlets hired me to write pieces for them, I fought them with great feist or won them over with a barrage of jokes every time they tried to neuter my voice. Most of the writers I once knew became no different from corporate drones who saunter the earth with that dead “fuck my life” look in their eyes. The soulless husks you see on the subway who are about two bad days away from mimicking Hemingway’s final act with a twelve-gauge. This is a deliberate decision that happens around the age of forty. And I have always stubbornly resisted this. I’m the guy who defiantly wears floral and paisley shirts into an office, leaning with unpunctured felicity into some early form of my Mister Furley years. If you don’t rock it on the fashion front until your final day on this mortal coil, you’re doing life very wrong.

I didn’t smoke, but I had no mind. So I came up with a workaround. I began to ride my exercise bike every day to generate dopamine.

And it worked.

Twenty minutes at around 20 miles per hour generated around five hundred words that were close to my former smoking self.

So I rode and I wrote. And I rode and I wrote.

And now I don’t even have to ride the bike to write. The brain fog is gone. And most of this essay has been written, au natural, sans cigarettes. Eat the inner pieces within the deepest recess of my posterior, RJ Reynolds!

IV

But there has been something else I’ve learned.

What nobody tells you about smoking is that, much like any drug, you learn just how much you’ve pushed down a lot of your emotions by cleaving to the stimulant. In the last few months, I’ve felt more. Happiness, sadness, anger, hypersensitivity, an evermore burgeoning worry about the future of my nation. I’ve cried a lot more in the last six months than I have in the last six years.

And then I met a woman near the end of last year. An amazing woman. Tall, gorgeous, beatific eyes gleaming with ambition and mischief, gloriously weird, delightfully quirky, tremendously kind, incredibly smart, hilariously intense at times, sweet in ways that demand me to be more emotionally present, adorably loud like yours truly.

Our first date was rocky. Our second date was better. By our third date, we started to have some inkling that we were meant for each other. And now? We are inseparable and we are forging mighty plans. Every night that she is not in my arms is deeply painful. But we love each other. What can I say? When you know, you know. And I know. And she knows. I have told her all the terrible things about me and she’s still around. How? I have no idea. The universe has been so relentlessly against me that I did not think I would ever catch one of the luckiest breaks of my life. But I have. And I also have to give myself a little credit.

If cigarettes remained a part of my life, she would not be here.

If cigarettes remained a part of my life, I would not have the courage to let her in.

I needed to quit smoking because there was so much of me buried under peat moss.

I needed to quit smoking so that the real man, the real writer trapped within me, could at long last reveal himself.

V

Thirty years with cigarettes (1995-2025) is a very long time. Longer than most marriages. But when you grow up with a toxic and abusive family, as I did, you develop a narcotic attraction to toxic elements. You may even give off some uncanny aura of toxicity when you’re holding the door open for a stranger or helping a mother carry her stroller up the subway steps. Because it takes such a long time for the contamination to clear. A contagion enters you and announces to surrounding parasites lurking about for a new host that this emotionally bruised dude is a ripe mark to maim.

There have been a number of bad actors, pathological liars, and outright prevaricators who have tried to destroy me with falsehoods. In their own way, they were just as poisonous as the cigarettes. They have spent an inordinate amount of time obsessed with me. I’m still fending off two stalkers, one of whom has created six dozen accounts to intimidate me on TikTok. A talentless lowlife who works at a Penske Media outlet spent a week on social media harassing and spreading lies about me last year. And in the last weekend, I was physically assaulted by someone who resented the happiness and purpose that I had finally found in middle age. But I refused to be a victim. I refused to strike back. After I was attacked, I dusted myself off and wrote this essay.

I am not afraid to lean into love and empathy and the far more meaningful realm of being sensitive and giving and vulnerable. The important people in my life know who I truly am. The rest is just noise. The haters latch onto me because they have no lives of their own, no ambition or beauty or purpose that they can summon. And I now realize they see something in me that they covet but will never find within themselves.

I can say all this now because I finally removed cigarettes from my life. I’m the real deal now more than I ever was before. I stopped being an addict and I raised the barrier for entry into my life. I finally became myself. Who knew that this was the real tough guy move?

by Edward Champion

David Lynch: A Personal Tribute

David Lynch meant more to me than any other artist in American culture. His art inspired me to embrace my inner weirdo. But when I met him, he planted a creative seed in me that I will be forever grateful for.

David Lynch has passed away. He was 78 years old. And he was a genius in every sense of the word.

If I had to name the artist who influenced me the most, then the name I would serve up – without a moment of hesitation — is David Lynch.

There was nobody else like David Lynch. Nobody. And there never will be again. He was an ambassador to the weird. A chronicler of the real America, particularly its dark and dreamy underside. He was a champion of outliers, misfits, and outcasts. A brilliant on-set improviser who would see someone interesting — such as stagehand Frank Silva, who played Bob in Twin Peaks and became part of the labyrinthine storyline simply because Lynch liked the way he was looking upwards while crouched — and work him into what he was making at the time. An indefatigable practitioner of the strange who spoke in a reedy high-pitched voice that not even the many cigarettes he smoked could seem to dull. (He employed his thespic talents as the hard-of-hearing and constantly shouting FBI Agent Gordon Cole and, to gut-bustingly comedic effect, for his final short film in 2017 — “What Would Jack Do?” — which featured Lynch with a talking monkey. You can also see him as John Ford in Spielberg’s incredibly underrated film, The Fabelmans. Of course, Lynch steals the movie.)

It is difficult to articulate just how important David Lynch was – not just to film, but to American culture. Because make no mistake: his loss leaves a continent-sized hole that will take hundreds of wild and unapologetically expressive artists to fill. Lynch had so many talents (he painted, he put out music, he wrote an incredibly entertaining memoir Room to Dream, and he even taught himself Macromedia Flash to create DumbLand – a willfully crude set of eight hilariously warped animated shorts), but perhaps his greatest gift was to introduce avant-garde to mainstream audiences and thus inspire shy kids like me to push the expressive envelope as far as we could and seek out many of the same bizarre influences.

In 1990 — an age long before viral videos, smartphones, and broadband Internet — David Lynch grabbed our collective lapels with Twin Peaks, perhaps the most revolutionary television series in American history. He served up sound, images, and characters that had never been seen before on the boob tube. The Log Lady. The Man from Another Place. Sound willingly reversed. The Black Lodge, with its red curtains and its zigzag carpet. All set to a seductive Angelo Badalamenti score that, for a brief time in the early nineties, seemed to be playing in every other cafe.

I think Twin Peaks became the cultural phenomenon that it did because we all had the underlying sense that something audacious and alive had been missing from television. Sure, the normies were scared away near the start of the second season, when it was perfectly clear that the question “Who killed Laura Palmer?” was not the actual reason behind the show. My parents initially loved it and then hated it. Me? I stuck with it the entire time and, as a teenager, I had to go to friends’ houses to see the new episodes, where I recall other kids making out on couches and one of us somehow procuring beer. We would talk about each episode for a long time after it aired, dissecting every strange image and symbol that had improbably been transmitted to a mass audience. I remember vivacious conversations with fellow all-black wearing theatre kids in high school about this brilliant, life-changing show.

What other crazy shit was out there? And why weren’t we allowed to see it? It is a question still germane to this very day as the American government has decided to ban TikTok — a sui generis platform for the wild and the weird — on Sunday. David Lynch somehow had the finesse to skate past the unspoken artistic prohibitions — whether corporate or governmental — and was nimble and charming enough to persuade big studios to finance his films. (The Straight Story, a deeply moving masterpiece of a dying and disabled man traveling by way of a John Deere lawnmower across America, has never failed to reduce me to tears and was, believe it or not, financed by Disney. You can still watch it on Disney’s streaming services. When the MPAA gave the film a G rating, David Lynch replied, “I’m sorry. You’re going to have to say that again. This is probably the only time I’ll ever hear this.”)

David Lynch inspired me not just on the film front, but on the sound front. (To this very day, as I’ve been working very hard on the new scripts for the third season of my audio drama — close to two thousand pages of creative labor so far — “Lynchian” has often been used as shorthand for sound cues.) During the third season of Twin Peaks, Lynch credited himself as sound designer as well as director. His extremely underrated television show, On the Air, was a love letter to old time radio. And so, for that matter, is Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, which is arguably the most deranged work of genius that anyone has ever produced for television. (All black and white. Footage of nuclear explosions. And who can forget the Fireman rasping, “Got a light?” I certainly didn’t when I lost my voice for a few weeks two years ago and impersonated the Fireman on the phone to amuse friends.) And if you were fortunate enough to see Wild at Heart on the big screen, you know very well that it was as much an accomplishment of sound design as well as cinematic achievement. I’ve frankly never seen another movie in which the strike of a match sounded so crisp and alive. (I also strongly recommend this podcast interview with Lynch sound collaborator Dean Hurley.)

But I have to thank Lynch in another sense. I didn’t truly understand I was a weirdo and I really didn’t start to embrace this side of myself until I was in my mid-twenties. I grew up in an abusive household in which one was expected to conform to the Great American Lie when it came to culture.

Read The New Yorker every week. Be serious. Vote Democrat. Pay your rent and your taxes on time. Only involve yourself in the legal drugs. Get involved in relationships that led to marriage and 2.2 children.

God, I wince remembering how much I tried to be a hopeless square back then when this obviously wasn’t who I was. But I would make up considerably for my diffident youth in later years.

It was extremely clear that what I was doing creatively and what I believed in stood in sharp contrast to what I thought being an American should be — or, more accurately, what was drilled into me. I was nearly arrested in film school for demanding to be enrolled in a cinematography class that would give me access to 16mm film equipment that would permit me to shoot and cut celluloid. (I will always remember the vile and heartless authoritarian Larry Clark at San Francisco State, who did not even permit me to stick around and watch and help out after I asked to. Word of my punkish exploits circulated across campus, with many other students commending me on the cojones I had displayed, and I was thankfully allowed into the cinematography class the next semester with Catilin Manning, who was a kinder and far better teacher. Although when our group decided to spend our spring break spending every waking moment shooting film, returning to class with far more reels than any of the other groups, our film footage was so warped and unapologetically original that Manning just sat in her seat confused while all of us laughed. Her only feedback: “too grainy.”)

Years later, I became a cultural journalist entirely by accident. And I somehow had enough sway at the time to land an in-person interview with The Man Himself. (You can listen to the show here.) I met David Lynch at the Prescott Hotel (now the Hotel Zeppelin) on his birthday — January 20, 2007. I told the publicists that, out of a sense of great deference to Lynch, I would need to hold onto our conversation for the 100th episode. And they were gracious enough to not have any problem with that. Because Lynch was that important. He needed that round number.

I showed up to the hotel with a birthday gift — Tyler Knox’s Kockroach, Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” told in reverse, which was the weirdest new release I could find at City Lights. And I cannot even begin to convey how kind and generous David Lynch was to me. You know the old mantra “Don’t meet your heroes”? Well, it did not apply at all to David Lynch. It turned out that he was a gentleman as well as a genius. He liked me a lot, laughing at my jokes and taking particular interest in my microphones. (Of course.) He even offered me some technical suggestions. Because he completely understood what I was doing with The Bat Segundo Show. He also spoke with me well beyond our allotted time. (As much as David Lynch’s voice was spellbindingly warm and quirky in clips, it was evermore so in person.)

As a personal rule, it had never been my practice to take photos after the interviews. I did my best to operate by a code of conduct that honored conflict of interest . But this was David Fucking Lynch. So I asked Lynch if he could take a photo with me.

And do you know what David Lynch did? He spent five minutes pacing around the hotel. He wanted this photo to be shot absolutely right. We finally found a spacious room that Lynch insisted had the best colors.

Then Lynch spoke.

“Say, Ed, I want you to put your arm like so. And since you’re a little taller than me, I’ll put my hand on your left shoulder. And it will be a good picture!”

Holy shit. I was being directed by David Lynch. But the man saw artistic opportunities in everything.

The kind publicist shot the photo that you see above.

I then shook David Lynch’s hand, thanked him, and told him that his work meant so much to me.

“Ed, I don’t think you’re meant to just be an interviewer.”

“What?”

He smiled and said, “You’ll figure it out.”

And then Lynch, in his impeccable suit, walked off. And that was it.

Of course, David Lynch was absolutely right. I did figure it out. The audio drama I have produced has changed my life, my writing, and my art for the better. It has made me a better person. I’ve discovered ideas and feelings inside me that I didn’t even know I possessed and that the brilliant actors involved with my independent project have instinctively picked up on.

And that unfathomable kindness — that casual manner in which Lynch saw something in me — meant everything to me and still does to this very day.

And that is why I took David Lynch’s passing so hard yesterday and why I am misting up even now as I write this.

Never meet your heroes? Well, in most cases. Certainly there are authors I’ve met who I’ve admired but who proved to be unkind. But not David Lynch.

Rest in power, sir. And thank you. I will never forget you and your great work.

by Edward Champion

My Father is Dead

Three weeks ago, I learned that my abusive father had passed away. This is a reckoning.

My father is dead.

I learned the news three weeks ago. He had been dead for a year and a half. Nobody had thought to inform me about this until a legal matter forced certain third parties to inform me.

My father was a monster. He choked me. He bit me. He pressed the embers of his unfiltered cigarettes into my pale sensitive skin. He saw a scrawny underfed kid, a bright and budding soul that he had sired, and he knew that I was white trash. He memorialized it with his abuse. I wore long-sleeved shirts to school to cover up these burns and bites. I got into fistfights with kids who bulled me. Kids unaware of what was happening to me at home. The girls, at least, were sweet and sympathetic to my shyness and they detected my sensitivity. Women have always understood me better than men. Most of my friends now are women.

I returned home from these scuffles with black eyes and gashed knees and scrapes and bruises. It’s amazing in hindsight how both of my parents looked the other way. Why did my mother stay with him? Well, I’ll deal with her when she dies, as we all eventually do. She had her reasons and she’s a piece of work too. People who have never taken the time to get to know me have sometimes declared me a piece of work. I can’t say that I blame them.

We are all some inexact sum of our parents, but we are different. It took me twenty-five years to learn that.

I have never wanted anyone to feel sorry for me, but I have insisted on respect. You would too if you had lived what I went through. I despise being a victim and I am often fierce towards malefactors to ensure that I am not a victim. I would rather burn a bridge with the fiercest fire rather than endure any further maltreatment. I’ve had enough abuse and hurt to last four lifetimes. I wouldn’t wish any of the pain I carry on anyone. But what makes my vengeful impulses any different from my father burning me with cigarettes? These terrible lessons I practiced in most of my adulthood were planted by the people who were supposed to take care of me. Who were supposed to love me. I sought father figures in my adulthood. And when these men wouldn’t do, I turned to dead male writers to learn how to become a man. An imperfect resort, but books have always saved me during every downward spiral.

I wasn’t much of a man for a very long time. Not until after forty, when I lost everything and I was left for dead by those who were closest to me and I rebuilt my life. I’m still not sure where my stubborn tenacity comes from. I suppose it emerged because it was the only way I knew how to survive. Or maybe it was a better version of the unearned stubbornness and the shameful entitlement that my indolent do-nothing sad sack of a father always had. Knowing I could never count on anyone other than myself. Or so I thought at the time. I have since learned otherwise. I have learned that more people love me or wanted to love me than I was willing to perceive or admit. And for the ones who I scared away, I am so sorry. You didn’t deserve that. I am still trying to understand why anyone would love me, but I am getting better at accepting that people do love me. I built a new family from my friends. I remain grateful every day that I have this. I remain especially grateful to those who stuck it out with me for the long haul and who continued to see what even I couldn’t see. Blindness and obliviousness to my positive qualities has been the way I have always survived. Because I truly didn’t want to become like him.

Before I learned that my father was dead, I had not seen or spoken with my father in more than two decades. When I told my closest friends that my father had died, I was stunned when they reached out to me and they let me ramble about my conflicted feelings. Boisterous friends spoke in soft voices that I had never heard before. I told them, “No, he hurt me. He abused me. He warped me. He taught me the wrong lessons. He was a monster. He was an asshole. But he was still my father.” And they sweetly offered me drink and pot, which I politely declined. Because I had to consider all this with sober eyes. And on the night that I learned that my father died, I went to the karaoke bar and sang all the songs that he had once sang to me in his better moments. I hadn’t heard many of these songs in more than two decades. Corny songs from the 1970s. I somehow still knew all the words by heart. And I cried as I sang.

At night my father would drink. And I would be beaten again at night. My father at night. The kids during the day. There was a shed in the backyard of one of the homes we lived in and I recall nearly passing out from the redolent waft from all the empty beer bottles horded there. I binge drank as an adult to deal with my demons. And I was often mean and unpleasant. Like my father. Though not like my father. I didn’t physically abuse anyone. I was more interested in hurting myself. There was something strangely magnetic about creating scorched earth. These days, I don’t drink nearly as much as I used to. A few beers on the weekend and frequently none at all. But I do have to be careful.

His brain wasn’t all there. He had been in a terrible car accident because he refused to wear his seatbelt. And it impaired him. Fremont’s answer to Phineas Gage. The abuse escalated not long after this. But even before this, my father hurt me. When I was an infant, he tried out a homemade baby formula that sent me to the hospital and nearly killed me.

He was tall and lean. Like me. Although I’m still saddled with the belly on my mother’s side that I can never entirely melt down with brisk exercise. He was near-sighted and wore glasses. Like me. While my expressive face largely came from my mother’s side, the highly focused and contemplative look I have is definitely his. I inherited his reedy voice, which helped me in various creative capacities as an adult, and helped to cancel out some of the regrettably forceful qualities of my voice that I inherited from my mother’s side. But I suppose it all works out in the end.

The memory of his nimble hands. Like mine. But worse. He played the guitar. I learned to play the guitar because he had played the guitar. I became a better guitarist than he had ever been. And I have written countless dozens of songs on that guitar. But those same hands tried to suffocate me. Those same hands grabbed a pillow and smothered my tiny face. Those same hands delighted in the horrific sounds I made when he choked me. I still remember all the terrible times in which I couldn’t breathe and I suspect this is one of the reasons why I never entirely took to neckties as an adult. (Bright floral shirts? Happy red shoes? All the way.)

So how I can still mourn him? Stupidly. Maybe I mourned what I didn’t have.

When I learned that my father had died, I began making calls. I wanted to know when and why and how. And the details were sad. Dementia. 71 years old. He was not the only family member to suffer from dementia. Is this my future two decades from now? Jesus Christ, I live by my wits. Physical decline. No real reason to live. He had accomplished nothing. His domicile was little more than furniture pocked with cigarette burns. I guess he always needed some object to burn, even if it meant objectifying his own blood. An aspiring writer. But I actually got published in magazines and newspapers. He never got to tell his stories. But against all odds, I did. When it was clear that none of my work was ever going to be published in book form, I wrote scripts, created a rep house of dozens of actors, and produced my own audio drama and won awards. My seven part epic tale, “Paths Not Taken,” which spans nearly thirty years, is the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. And I still get emails from people about it. I hope I can do better.

I telephoned my father’s brother, who I had not seen or spoken with since I was a child, and asked him questions and told him that my father abused me.

He refused to believe this.

He blamed me for cutting off ties. He blamed me for never reaching out to my father or my father’s side until he was dead. Somehow it was all my fault. When my father’s brother gave me a sad story about how my father couldn’t find work, what I didn’t tell him was how I had applied to 1,500 jobs during a rough time and somehow didn’t give up until I landed a decent paying job. Not only was my father determined to be a victim, but his family was determined to paint him this way.

I asked my father’s brother if he had ever thought of me.

“To tell you the truth, he didn’t think about you at all.”

And that’s when I knew I couldn’t speak with my father’s brother again.

Here’s what my father couldn’t do and I did. I learned how to be humble and gentle and empathetic and positive. I learned to love in ways that were beyond him. I learned how to take care of others, to put aside my own problems to be there for other people when they needed me, and to do any number of secret good deeds which nobody knows about.

I want to be clear that I’m no hero. But I did something that a lot of people couldn’t do in my situation. I became a better man than my father. And I’m only just getting started.

by Edward Champion

The Man in the Yellow Shirt

In which your writer’s happy cafe sojourn is interrupted by a strange man in a yellow shirt.

I hit a cafe on the edge of Prospect Heights, a place where I knew I would not be bothered. If another writer who knew me entered through the doors, then he would almost certainly ignore me in this cafe. There are some venues in Brooklyn that possess such an innate social code, one that is ideal for introverts and one that was particularly suited to the misanthropic headspace I had willed myself into.

For a good ninety minutes, I occupied my table with unabated joy, reading and writing in blissful peace. I knocked off the remainder of Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This in one greedy gulp. Then I cracked open my Dell laptop and wrote two pages of the script for a live show I am staging in mid-October. Two pages of moral philosophy cloaked in salacious banter. What fun! This was a first draft that I had nearly finished, but that I was slightly behind on. Still, I wasn’t about to self-flagellate myself. I could leave such lacerations to the online trolls who still pestered me from time to time. And if they got too unruly, I could always block them. I was in a fairly happy place. The script would come from my head and heart, as all scripts inevitably did. The hope was to complete the draft before the end of Labor Day Weekend, a three-day period that most people seemed to agree was the final nail in summer’s coffin. While others would fritter their time away catching the last gasps of the sun, I would be a productive monkey — even if this involved hunkering over like a marsupial while walking up and down Flatbush Avenue and eating an inordinate amount of bananas. There are always madcap methods you can summon to meet your quota.

That’s when the man in the yellow shirt arrived.

Now I know enough about color theory to understand that yellow is considered the color of happiness and the color of jaundice or pestilence. And the man had the aesthetic duality of a coin: cadaverous and gaunt from the back, disheveled and corpulent in the front. One expected some deity to pluck this incongruous man into the air with two giant fingers and flip him over in order to determine which of the two most problematic continents should be decimated first. Would it be the plumper side or the deader side of the man that would seal the deal? This was obviously a question beyond my mortal understanding.

Wispy sideburns crawled down the sides of the man’s face like bushy birthmarks branded by some baleful demon. The man looked somewhere between fifty-five and seventy years old. And he unsettled me. Because he insisted on standing. Standing in a position so that you would never quite see his face, which instinctively escaped all light and disguised his natural and joyless crags within some gentrified penumbra.

There were plentiful tables in the cafe, but he refused to sit. He had the obduracy of a Lovecraftian manservant who was prepared to lead you into some ghastly underworld populated by bestial brutes, who would then proceed to tear your flesh apart with their bare claws. And he stood with his arms constantly behind his back, with his left knuckle clenched in a strange symbol whereby his thumb and forefinger forged a strange circle — almost as if he was part of some secret society responsible for most of the world’s ills.

The man in the yellow shirt stood two feet closer to me than I deemed comfortable. Social distancing has certainly rejiggered the norm of what was acceptably close, but you could usually count on your fellow human beings to intuit what was right. The man in the yellow shirt operated outside of natural instinct and I was forced to conclude that he was a messenger sent by Belphegor.

There was a woman at the table near the window. The woman had spent much of the time sighing stertorously. She resented reading her book and wanted everyone in the cafe to know it. This was, of course, the most passive-aggressive display of narcissism that one sees in cafes.

Meanwhile, the man in the yellow shirt stood in place. He didn’t even sip the coffee that he had ordered. He had placed it on the edge of the cabinet that housed two trash receptacles. He was as frozen and as expressionless as a stone sentinel. As I was to later observe, he had actually ordered three hot beverages. But he only seemed to possess only one beverage at a time. Did he simply order hot beverages as a pretext? He stood as if he was born to wait. A more advanced and rehearsed version of the “fuck my life” look that you see on people over forty who commute to a corporate job that they clearly despise. Perhaps the man in the yellow shirt had arrived as a warning.

The exasperated woman packed up her things. And I seized the table near the window with the legerdemain of a subway commuter snagging the last available subway seat during rush hour. It seemed as if I was in the clear.

But then the man in the yellow shirt adjusted his standing position so that he was exactly two feet too close to me at this new table! And he turned his back to me. The man’s mathematical precision unsettled me further. And I did my best to bury my nose in the next book in my pile.

I wondered if the man in the yellow shirt was some version of me from the future. But he was slightly taller than me. And he had a full head of hair that was a disastrous mop of white. If he had come from the future, I suppose it is possible that scientists fifteen years from now could have corrected my male pattern baldness and extended my height. But I knew myself well enough to know that I would never assent to such cosmetic assaults on my authenticity. I would grow old gracefully, thank you very much.

I considered politely asking the man to back off. But given the way that he seemed to know the exact distance with which to unsettle me, I nixed this option. For all I knew, this was only the beginning of his subtly invasive moves.

I closed my eyes for a second and, when I opened them, the man in the yellow shirt had disappeared without a trace! Had I imagined him? Reader, I had not! As you can see, I did successfully photograph him while sitting at the second table.

I do not know if the man in the yellow shirt is targeting other cafe regulars in Brooklyn. But let my report serve as a warning. Who knows? Perhaps he just wanted to be loved.

by Edward Champion

Work Ethic

What good is a work ethic when a scammer takes away your self-worth?

We tell ourselves that there is virtue in hard work. That if we push ourselves beyond our limits, it will somehow pay off. But there’s always some con man out there who can get you: a villian who is willing to punch lower than his colleagues, who knows no bottom level of cruelty, and who defies the baseline of what any decent human being should never do.

It happened to me. And I hate myself for it. I was fleeced. Of my pride. Of my confidence. Of my identity. I fell victim to an identity thief because I wanted to believe that I was worth something. Because I wanted to believe that I was good. Because I try to have faith in people. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a work ethic that rivals a Victorian sweathouse. Well, that work ethic is gone. And I don’t know when I’ll find it again. I feel raped. Listless. Unemployable. My future gone. My potential extinguished.

It wasn’t always like this.

I’d started the year with such promise. I had turned my life around. I was in demand. People were hiring me. Recognizing my talent. Seeing that I was a fun and decent man. And they were employing me at what I was best at doing. What I loved doing. What I’d be doing anyway even if there wasn’t a paycheck attached. Audio production. Writing. What I lived and breathed. What I poured all my heart and soul into.

After six years of toiling without complaint at office jobs, I’d finally summoned the courage to freelance again, stumbling onto the magic formula that allowed me to pay my rent. I was cleaning up copy for a television network. I was serving as a story consultant for a podcast in development. I was writing voiceover scripts. It all happened so fast. February now seems so long ago, but it’s important to remember that, before wearing a mask became part of the social contract, it felt like a time in which you could do anything. The editors I spoke with over the phone loved me. I felt like the luckiest man alive. Not only was I immensely grateful for all of these opportunities, but this work gave me pride. Meaning. Purpose. Hope. Faith. Friends noticed I was so much calmer and more pleasant to be around. I honored the universe’s generosity by working myself to the bone. By being the kindest and most thoughtful man I could be. By being the guy you really wanted to have on your team.

Then the pandemic hit. And all the gigs evaporated.

I had some savings. So I decided to ride my way through the pandemic. It would only last a few months, right? I worked twelve hour days. I didn’t want a pandemic, much less anything, to stop me. I edited and released thirteen episodes of my audio drama, sometimes summoning my then girlfriend (now friend) to record some goofy background characters. She was more of a natural ham than she knew. And I wanted her to be included in my creative life.

A writer friend -– bless her soul for her mischievous machinations –- egged me on to write fiction. So I wrote a 75,000 word draft of a wild comedic novel in three months. I would spring from bed at 5 AM and write, accompanied by my girlfriend’s cat, who would often lay at my feet as I typed. The cat had become one of my biggest fans. When I finished another 1,000 word installment, I would read the latest chapter of my book-in-progress to my girlfriend, often offering a breakfast in bed option, watching her smile and observing the points where she laughed, which was often, for later revision. Then I would edit my audio drama for another eight hours or so before cutting myself off from my creative labor to make dinner and spend quality time with my girlfriend. She was a savvy news junkie who was good enough to fill me in on the latest developments. We looked after each other for weeks. Beta readers – including a number of published authors who are not easy to impress — told me how much my writing had improved and how this novel was going to be the skeleton key for people to finally understand my oddball empathy-driven soul. Beta listeners offered similar feedback on my dramatizations for the ear. So I stayed busy. I worked. I made things. I found peace in making things. There were a few nights in which I drank too much wine. But who didn’t buckle a little bit under the pressure? I kept at it.

But I had a finite amount of savings. I needed a job. I couldn’t keep at this forever.

It turned out that my girlfriend and I worked better as friends than lovers. It was nobody’s fault. I returned to Brooklyn in late April, feeling ashamed for fleeing my beloved neighborhood. This was my city. This was the place that turned me into a workhorse. This was the city that made me. It was also the city that had nearly ruined me. But I found the resilience and the humility to bounce back. And the city rewarded me for my pluck. Because that is the covenant of living in New York. If you work your ass off here, you will make it.

There came a point in early summer in which I knew I would need to look for work. I had once pulled myself out of homelessness and into a marvelous one bedroom apartment through sheer tenacity and indefatigable resilience. My life could be summed up as a historical record of overcoming countless challenges. Surely, I could emerge victorious over this one.

And so I applied to jobs.

330 jobs, according to my spreadsheet.

Mostly nothing back. Sometimes a form rejection letter.

The toughest job hunt of my life.

In October, I came very close to landing a dream job as an audio producer. It was down to me and another person. I busted my ass to show that I was the best. I sent endless show notes and ideas and audio cuts and guest lists. I carried on as if I had the job already. The executive producer – a very kind and talented journalist — was impressed. But he went with the other person. To come so close to something I was so right for and to not get it. Well, it was crushing. But I was greatly honored to have been considered and to have made it as far as I did.

Still, I was demoralized. Back to square one.

Enter the scammer one week after I learned that I didn’t get the producer job. He had enough information for me to corroborate against the company’s website. The COO’s name was Ed Sople. “Ed Sople” was also the name of the scammer. The company was Dellbrook JKS. The address he used matched up. The logo he used matched up. The names he used matched up. It seemed curious to me that he never wanted to talk on the phone. I actually left a voicemail for the real Ed Sople, pleasantly introducing myself as his new data wrangler, but he never called me back. I figured that the guy was just some weird eccentric in Massachusetts who didn’t like to use the phone.

The con man promised me a job. A job that would pay my rent and carry me through 2021. It turned out to be a lie and a scam. I learned later that the guy had bamboozled three other people. He used a Gmail and a Telegram account. I reported the account to both. But, of course, I never received an acknowledgment from either company. And there is, of course, no phone number at either Google or Telegram that I can call. No person I can speak to. That’s how these scammers operate. They find the services in which they can’t be shut down because these libertarian techbros believe they know best and extirpate all customer service options. And the scammers steal from victims with impunity.

The racket was this. You get an offer letter that you sign so that the scammer has your signature. You give out your address and phone number, as well as a copy of your driver’s license – which is natural, because you generally need to submit two forms of identification for a job anyway. You are told that you’re going to get a check in the mail to set up a home office for a remote position. You receive a list of equipment. But the check in the mail doesn’t arrive. The scammer says that the department is going to send along a debit card. That never arrives. You ask about direct deposit. But that somehow isn’t an option. Then the scammer asks if you have a credit card and says that he wants to wire you $5,000 into your account. Could you send the front and the back of the credit card?

I needed the job. But this was a huge red flag. So I sent him the front and back of the card and called my credit card company to cancel it. Once, the scammer had my card, he then asked me for the last four digits of my social security number. I asked if this was something I could give him over the phone.

I called Dellbroook. Heard back from the real Sople and the human resources person. It was a scam. A scam they knew about. A scam that they haven’t reported on their website to help protect other victims.

I was smart enough to catch on to the scammer before he had too many of my details. But I still feel so incredibly stupid to have been suckered along as long as I was. He had enough of my details to do some damage if he wanted to. I’ve spent the last 24 hours cancelling credit cards and talking with the authorities when not drowning myself in Maker’s Mark. Because I’m too hurt, too wounded right now to go through the terrible process of applying to jobs I’m highly overqualified for and hearing nothing back. But I have no other choice. I need a job. But then so does everyone. I can’t get through to the New York unemployment people through the telephone or the website. In a world in which scammers have no shame and a deadly virus is unstoppable because too many maskless yahoos believe they are immune, you’d think that there would be reliable resources to provide for the people. But there isn’t. Because the new way of life is government leaving people in the cold. Letting them starve. Letting them die.

And I’m angry. This scammer stole weeks of my life that I could have spent job hunting. Vital weeks before the holidays. Weeks that count that are now gone.

I am debt-free right now. Next month, I won’t be. I weep knowing that I may be facing a significant financial hole through no fault of my own. I’m a hard worker. I don’t want to owe anyone a thing. When I got a job after a nervous breakdown, the first thing I did was pay back anyone who had ever given any money to me during my tough times. I worked hard to pull myself out of debt over two years after losing everything I had. I lived like a starving grad student. Skimped out on anything really to get the balance to zero as swiftly as possible.

I know others have it much worse off than I do. And I feel ashamed to complain. But if I don’t say anything, I’ll never be able to discover some shred of self-respect. Other people have invented lies about me online, even weaponizing these fictions on social media to strip me of any dignity and to belittle my work. But this scammer went one step beyond the cyberbullies. He made me believe that I was worth something. And now I don’t know if I’m worth anything at all. What’s the point of having a work ethic if the people who hold the purse strings tell you that you have no value? In 2020, a work ethic is no better than an empty whiskey bottle.