I don’t smoke, but apparently I look like a guy who does. I’m always getting hit up. Today, a warm, breezy-blue, gorgeous day in Washington Square park, I was sitting on a bench, eyes half shut, listening to my iPod. I felt a gentle touch on my shoulder — a homeless man, polite as can be, “Could you spare a cigarette?” I gave him my most heartfelt sorry, my friend shrug. The man was past middle-age. He coughed and spat and shuffled off. I watched him make his way through the park, from group to group — frisbee players, sun-worshippers, dog walkers, football tossers. He finally scored — from a teenage girl. She gave him a cigarette, allowed the man to light it from hers, and he moved on.

Ten months ago, in the VA, a cadaverous fifty year-old made my acquaintance. I was in the sitting room, just a few feet from the entrance to the smoking porch. He came back in from the porch and asked me for a smoke. The poor fellow had clearly been out among the smokers and couldn’t mooch a butt. He sat down, breathless from his unsuccessful campaign, and we got to talking. I asked why he was in the hospital. He said he wasn’t sure, “seems like a lot of stuff is just shutting down.” He patted around his torso, indicating the problems were fairly evenly distributed among his internals. He was a black man from somewhere in Arkansas — twenty years my junior, but he looked to be eighty. We shook hands. He told me his name was John.

I didn’t see him until an afternoon a few days later. (The reason this all came to mind is that it was a day as beautiful as it is today). He scuffed on by in his slippers and I called him over. I asked him if he’d any luck getting a cigarette. He said he’d gotten a few over the days since we’d met. I had twenty bucks on me and handed him a five. Told him to go buy a pack at the PX, which was at the other end of the hospital complex. Probably close to a quarter mile. He set out immediately, and fifteen minutes later I reflected that he was probably sitting outside the cafeteria at a picnic table as the container ships slid in and out of the Golden Gate, his head back, smiling, blowing a thick stream of smoke up at the sky.

But I never saw him again. I asked somebody who I knew to be on his floor. I described John. “Oh, him. Yeah, that guy died the other night.”

My first hit was guilt. That pack of cigarettes was the last he ever had, I was sure. And I provided them. Then my emotion flipped. Damn, I’m sure he was happy as could be — having a whole pack of cigarettes to himself. My feeling went back and forth for a day or so, until I got off my case. He was obviously done for. I neither lengthened nor shortened his life.

I did smoke. I quit nearly 30 years ago, shortly after I quit drinking. I still want a drink lots of times, but within two weeks of quitting cigarettes, I stopped feeling the desire to smoke.

Today, though, I honestly did want a cigarette, just so I could give it to that man.