- empty can of Copenhagen Long Cut dipping tobacco
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In recent months I've come across six or seven of these, always in the grass by the sidewalk on the hill, always the same brand. So it's the same guy. I have a relationship with him now, an arrangement. He turfs the containers when he's done and I come by later to pick them up.
I've decided his name is Randy B. and he's in his 30s, medium height and thin. He wears a long-sleeved shirt (no matter how hot the weather), cuffs unbuttoned, and grubby slim-cut denims that are baggy on him and hang low. His hair is just-woke-up style, sticking up in places and flat to his scalp in others. He'd have acne scars if it weren't so cliché, but it is, so he doesn't. He is unemployed, though, and can't afford real dope, hence the dipping tobacco.
Two or three times a week Randy B. walks hands-pocketed and hunch-shouldered down this foothill to buy more "Cope" at Allen's Supermarket on highway 89. He "guts" his tobacco-spit, which is why I never see brown stains on the pavement.
I placed the hockey-puck-sized can in the bag and an image came on like a pop-up. It's a poster I saw a dozen years or so ago on the wall at a counseling center where a friend worked. On the left side is the 'before' picture of a teenaged boy smiling at the camera. On the right is the 'after' with the same kid in a hospital smock, a tube up his nostril, his lower jaw misshapen and bulging to one side. The caption reads along the lines of Jason chose to do snuff. He then got oral cancer but chose not to have half his face removed. And he chose to be photographed for this message before he died. "Don't do snuff like I did," he writes on a notepad, because he can't speak anymore. You can't choose not to have cancer once you've got it. So choose not to do snuff in the first place. Something like that.
But if I were to show the poster to Randy B. it would have no effect at all. He'd ask if I had any spare change before shuffling off, packing a lip as he goes. So in a way, Jason died in vain.
As I reached for a plastic Dasani bottle under a stunted bush (with Loreena McKennitt's elegiac "Caravanserai" playing in my ear) I saw Jason's terrified 'after' eyes again. But the warning was wasted on me since I would never have dipped chaw anyway.
Well, I see I finally got to use elegiac -- everyone's favorite word of late, de rigueur for book blurbs, movie reviews, and pretentious blogs.
Boy, I'm long-winded. Especially recently.