The Smoking Man- An Annie story.

*

   I’m at the bus station an hour early waiting for Annie in the little restaurant. There’s a guy there, sitting, smoking. That’s all he’s doing- smoking very slowly, puff puff puff, puff. The cigarette is held quite daintily between his index and middle fingers at their ends (I wonder how it occurred to him that that was the easiest way to hold a cigarette? Surely there is less chance of it being crushed if you hold it in a v, like Churchill and his cigar?). He holds the smoke in for along time. His lungs must be big or his throat long or both, because it seems forever before the smoke comes out, first in a long jet of smoke, like the smoke form a steam train.. Then after a while, it drifts out in a soft cloud. It lingers there. The face of the guy isn’t sad but somehow I imagine that it ought to be. I wish I weren’t like that, thinking people should be sad for no reason at all. It’s so still in the restaurant that the smoke hands around lingering before it disperses too. I guess it’s what he likes doing most. He’s got some beer in a bottle there, but he’s not sipping. Annie won’t be here for an hour but I couldn’t think of anything better to do than wait in the bus station. I thought that maybe if I went to the bus station I’d be closer to her.

*

Man Smoking 2

Man Smoking

A series from the bus station. Would these images be stronger in black and white? Sometimes black and white can become rather relentless, and it often seems a lazy way to designate a photo as "art", without adding any other specific qualities to it.

Bus station

This place is full of Steinbeckian characters. It's a brutalist building, very generously proportioned, but it manages to sustain the seediness that seems everywhere to characterise bus stations.