Smoke 'Em: A Love Story

When the world is burning, it's good to have friends, even if they're only in your AirPods. Here's how I found mine

by Sarah Hepola

I was rifling through dusty postcards at a vintage store in Austin when my phone flashed a name: Nancy Rommelmann.

“I have to take this,” I told the stranger who’d been rifling alongside me, though he was less of a stranger now, the two of us chatting as we dug around cardboard boxes for — what, exactly? Nostalgia, distraction, fleeting beauty. Old postcards were a habit of mine, one he and I bonded over, but I quick-stepped into the afternoon sunshine and swiped the unsmiling mouth of my phone to summon a voice that was familiar but only from a podcast.

“Nancy Rommelmann,” I said, and she said, “Sarah Hepola,” and that was how we met.

Her voice was wise and girlish at once. I started rambling about a peculiar light-up rose I’d placed behind the sales counter. It had filaments that changed colors, reminding me of the late 70s, though I stumbled over the word filament, and was vaguely aware I made little sense, but Nancy rolled with it anyway, and I needed a listening partner like this. Patient, kind, curious.

It was strange we didn’t know each other already. We’d both started at alt-weeklies (LA for her, Austin for me), we wrote in similar lanes, at least about the complications of women’s sexuality, but I’d only learned her name listening to The Fifth Column podcast, which had become something like must-see-TV for me in the turbulent years since the summer of George Floyd. I had crushes on all three guys, each one calling to some different aspect, and I remember the day they mentioned Nancy’s name, plugging her reporting from Portland, a city that once reminded me of Austin and now reminded me of societal collapse. Later I looked her up online, expecting a dowdy middle-aged woman (Nancy) and finding a swashbuckling babe with striking, nearly cartoonish eyes and a chic like Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde. Not fair, I thought. Not fair to be a great reporter and a foxy one at the same time.

She loved my Atlantic essay. “You’re the tits,” she’d written me that morning, a Monday. That essay, about muting myself in a censorious age, had published on Saturday, and I was still sifting through the fallout on Twitter. The previous evening, I’d stumbled across a friend (but not a very good one) ripping me in a series of subtweets so righteous in their fury (“get your head out of your ass” was the phrase that startled me) that I sat on the side of the road, chain-smoking in my red Honda, my fingers trembling as I typed a short email asking her to call me, and I was careful to keep my tone non-confrontational — hey, I’m around tonight, wanna chat? — but she never responded, and I guess I knew she wouldn’t. Each time I bypassed the public execution chamber of social media and tried to look a person in the eyes, they didn’t seem interested. Performance was easier than connection, I guess.

Nancy understood this. I walked down the block toward a state cemetery so I could light my Parliament away from the good customers of Room Service, and I sat on the crumbling sidewalk as she told me a story: 2019, Portland, she’d written a critique of #metoo leader Asia Argento (a real piece of work), and the blowback was so ferocious her husband lost his coffeeshop. All three, actually. I hadn’t known this tale, which she told with the casual efficiency of someone who is in a very different place now. A tear slipped down my face as I sucked down the smoke and released it in a white line against the eye-blue sky, and I had an intuitive blast that Nancy was a person I needed in my life, and she was here now.

There had been other fallouts for me: Former colleagues, writers I’d mentored (or thought I had) who’d taken a cautious step away. I couldn’t sleep past 4:30am, I chain-smoked in darkness, scrolling through the wreckage as I played songs on repeat in my AirPods, trying to keep my body from shaking, though I rarely did. I felt radioactive, even as my career crested a new peak. There had also been private messages from writers I’d admired all my life, job opportunities that boggled my mind. I’d never felt so high and low at once.

“The hard part is that I’m losing friends,” I told her, as I swiped a tear with the back of my hand. My voice sounded small, tentative.

Nancy’s voice sounded confident, steady. “But you’re making new ones,” she said.

I’d wanted to do a podcast since I knew podcasts were a thing. It was 2006, and I was living the broke freelancer existence in Brooklyn, and on hungover Saturdays, I’d load up my hot-pink iPod with hours of the Ricky Gervais podcast, which I listened to as I walked across the Williamsburg Bridge into the Lower East Side with its bargain storefronts and cool dive bars. I developed a crush on Ricky’s conversational partner Stephen Merchant, because he was straight-man funny and gently deprecating, and because I can’t listen to 30+ hours of people talking in my ear, so close it feels like I could touch them, without developing a crush on someone.

Intimacy was what I craved. New York was supposed to expand my circle, and in some ways it had, but in the lonely valley between dinner parties and fancy restaurants, I felt exiled in my hipster section of South Williamsburg. Most of my friends were married. They had each other, for better worse, and I had an over-loved tabby named Bubba, who made for outstanding company except for the part where he couldn’t talk.

Talking was my thing. Talk-talk-talk. I listened to episodes of This American Life, and developed an attachment to the calculated clip of Ira Glass, and I listened to Adam Carolla, even though I didn’t tell anyone (because Adam Carolla), and I listened to a show called Jordan, Jesse, Go!, which was basically two dudes talking, and one of them wasn’t married, so I crushed on him. In 2010, I got sober, and plotted my escape from New York, where I was living the broke editor existence in a tiny West Village studio, and I listened to Marc Maron’s WTF, slowly packing my life into large cardboard boxes I walked down to the post office, wondering if Marc Maron would make a good sober boyfriend, though I suspected the answer was no.

It never occurred to me I was only listening to men. I was just listening to shows that sparked my imagination. Funny, challenging, real. But podcasts were becoming a deeply male enterprise, even as my own lane — personal writing, memoirs, etc — flooded with women. In my job at Salon, I mostly dealt with women’s voices, women’s stories, women’s concerns and anxieties. It was only after I moved back to Dallas, and began streaming long, meandering lectures on purpose and spirituality by a psychologist/professor named Jordan Peterson (long before he became a much-hated figure for reasons I could never quite devise), that I began to wonder if the podcasts were a way to seek balance. That in the years when men had become scarce in my life, I’d found surrogates.

I put out a book in 2015 called Blackout. I spent the following years giving interviews that were often the most connected parts of my day. I gave speeches at colleges, where I tried to ignore the fact that “woman talking about her sobriety” was not a hot sell. You should do a podcast, people told me. I even had a few offers, but they never seemed right. I started doing short audio essays for NPR’s Fresh Air, which felt like a dream someone else was having, and I recorded them in a Carrolton studio wearing the squishy headphones that felt official, and the producer on the other end of the line sometimes said things like, wow, you’re good at this, or you’re a natural, and it made me suspect I really should do a podcast, but the notion of talking into a microphone, all by myself, was too lonely to contemplate. I’d been talking by myself into a microphone for much of my adulthood, though I called it personal essays.

I started listening to Joe Rogan, before I knew that was a thing I was Not Supposed to Do. I bristled when people knocked him, which happened quite a bit. Had they listened to any of his shows? No, they mostly knew him from Fear Factor, from early stand-up, which was like hating someone for their lousy college picture. I liked the closeness he created in those hours-long rambles, such a counterpoint to the bursts of outrage that clogged my social media feed. I listened to the New York Times podcast The Daily, and I crushed on host Michael Barbaro until I realized he was gay, but then he married his female producer, but so anyway, he wasn’t on the market. I knew the world felt like it was cracking open, and the world felt secure when I listened to those podcasts, where I was spending more and more time each day.

In the summer of 2020, I was listening to Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable as I weeded my little pandemic garden. One day she mentioned her appearance on a podcast called The Fifth Column, and I thought: I do not need another podcast in my life, and I was right, but soon I had one anyway. I plotted my garden on my hands and knees, pulling up roots with a pop of gratification, and I listened to those guys talk about the troubled state of journalism, the troubled state of race relations, you could call that podcast The Troubled State. And when I listened to them, I felt calmer, I felt smarter, I felt grounded at a groundless time. Maybe it was distraction, maybe it was escape, but I liked to think of it as something else.

I’d found my people.

I was sitting outside on my smoking couch, where I do an alarming amount of business these days, when Nancy asked me to do a podcast with her. Ever since our first phone chat, we’d become text buddies, who’d recorded three different conversations, a number that didn’t seem like enough.

“I have something to ask you,” she told me over the phone, and I got a fluttery sensation like the cute boy in math class might ask me to prom (a thing that never happened). Nancy and I had an easy flow, and in the days since our first podcast dropped, I’d gotten a note from my mother, a good friend, and my agent telling me how natural our conversation was, how it sounded like I was assured and laid-back at once. Nancy was a good partner. She’d reported from Ukraine, but she’d taken a road trip to meet serial killer John Wayne Gacy. A woman who can go high and low, be funny but serious, a woman who was tough and soft at once.

By this point, I had done my own podcast, an eight-part series called America’s Girls about the lost history and cultural impact of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. I had an ace creative team, but the stress/overwhelm/terror of failing (me and everyone who trusted me) nearly broke my spirit. It was the hardest project I’d ever done, and I’m including a memoir whose final edits left me writhing and sobbing like a woman giving birth. Not all podcasts are created equal. Some require research, heavy editing, teeth-gnashing finesse, and some are like releasing a pretty helium balloon into the sky (something we should no longer do). Conversations with Nancy fell into the second category. They were conversations I wanted to have anyway, more delight than obligation. If there is any advice I could give a young, struggling creative in this blasted industry, it would be to monetize the thing you already love doing.

Substack, she explained, and I nodded. Media/pop culture/sex/men and women, whatever we want to talk about, she explained, and I nodded. It was spring, and my neglected garden had a bush that had blossomed absent of my care and feeding. It had white buds that smelled (more than one person noticed) of semen. My mother told me it was called a bridal bouquet, and every time I saw it from afar, I understood why. It delighted me that a woman who’d never managed an actual marriage had such a salutary greeting in front of her house, but I’d found so many other fruitful relationships over the years.

“Let’s do it,” I said.

I finally met Nancy in the white stairwell of her third-floor walkup in Chinatown, though we’d met many times in many alternate corridors. I was lugging my overlarge suitcase, because I could never figure out what Future Me wanted to wear. “My daughter overpacks, too,” she said, taking the suitcase, or my laptop carrier, I can’t remember which now, I only remember it was easier to climb those steps when we did it side by side.

She looked like her pictures. Uncommonly pretty, a runner’s figure, though she claimed not to run much. Her pad was cool and spacious, a curated mix of art, tidy. My pad in Dallas was jumbled as a vintage store, but Nancy was good at making choices. She made us tea as I nestled on her couch, telling her about a lovely meeting I’d just had with my editor at Random House/Dial Press, where we talked about the memoir I was planning to revise this summer. Dating, singlehood, that whole deal. My second book had been a long haul, but things were finally slotting into position, and the podcast would be a nice pressure-release valve during the long dry season of sustained and solitary work.

“You have a balcony,” I said, staring out the window at a wrought-iron railing.

Nancy laughed. “It’s called a fire escape.”

She opened the window and situated an off-white pillow on the rusty metal landing so I could sit and smoke in comfort. One of her nicknames is Nancy Mommelmann, because she has such maternal energy. She handed me a round ashtray that looked like something from the golden era of flying, and it reminded me of an ashtray I had back home from the Stardust Hotel. Same mid-century aesthetic, same decadent vibe. I sat three stories above the bustle on Canal Street as she perched herself in the window so we never had to stop talking.

I’d picked up smoking during the pandemic. I’d quit back when I quit drinking — June 13, 2010 — and living without booze was hell, but living without cigarettes felt like nothing, because I’d only craved them when I was drinking. More than ten years into a solid sobriety, though, I’d hit a wall. I needed wildness, I needed escape, I needed … something. And the cigarettes did the trick, even if they worried people who loved me. To be an old-fashioned smoker in a landscape of binge drinking, pot smoking, and random tobacco bans made me something of an outlaw, even as I was often the most clear-eyed person at any party. My cigarettes even inspired the name of our podcast. I can’t remember who said it first, only that it clicked. A philosophy, a mandate, a stiff arm to convention. Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em.

“It’s a cool name, but I can’t tell what it’s about,” a friend told me, and I figured that was OK, since Nancy and I weren’t sure what it was about either. We only knew we wanted to talk: About the soul corrosion of celebrity, the switchbacks of love and sex, about music and culture wars, about everything once-solid now crumbling. The New York Times, Roe v Wade, Hollywood.

“I brought wigs,” I told her when we were back inside her pad again. I’d brought a lot of things: Pop Rocks!, face masks, a gift basket from Terry Black’s BBQ (though I had to toss the sauce at airport security, duh). The wigs had been acquired during the late-drinking stage of my mid-30s, and I had them in many colors — neon red, hot pink, glossy black, platinum blonde — possibly another attempt at wildness, possibly an attempt to be someone else, or possibly an attempt to be me, in all facets.

Nancy wasn’t sold the wigs. “They don’t look good on me,” she explained, as I teased the tangles from a long auburn wig with my fingertips. But I told her wigs look good on everyone; you just had to situate them properly or you’d look insane. “This is gonna make you look like Ginger from Gilligan’s Island,” I promised (I loved Ginger from Gilligan’s Island), as I secured the auburn wig over her streaked-pink hair, but the wig didn’t make her look like Ginger at all. She squinted in the big full-length mirror, unconvinced.

“Try this one.” I handed her a black bob, the kind secret agents wear in the movies, and she negotiated it on her head as I tucked my blonde hair under the auburn wig, and actually, I was the one who looked a bit like Ginger, though I had Mary Anne’s petite stature. Nancy stood beside me, taller and leaner in snug jeans and a sleeveless black shirt, her legs spread and torso tilted back, like a dude playing guitar. “I like Iggy Pop,” she explained when I pointed this out, and she futzed with the bangs until she stepped back to admire herself.

“Oh I like this one,” she said.

“That looks amazing,” I said, watching as her cartoonish eyes delighted to find this alternate version of herself.

“But I’m still not wearing it to the party,” she said, and I told her that was fine. I was booked at Dry Bar for a blow-out the following morning anyway.

That night, I slept on a fold-out couch in the studio inside Nancy’s second bedroom. She built it in her nightgown, a detail she always used when telling the story, though I was never sure why she hadn’t changed. Middle of the night? Comfy cotton? Didn’t matter. I liked the image of her and Reason writer Matt Welch, her friend and co-conspirator at Paloma Media and one-third of The Fifth Column, puttering around that empty space, affixing the spongy soundproofing to the walls and setting up lights that looked like flat white screens wearing blinders, giant blinking peepers with flat eyelashes. The sound board sat in the middle of a table, and the red and green lights danced in the darkness, and I thought about how that sound board recorded all those episodes of The Fifth Column I listened to as I weeded my garden, and I thought about how strange and curious life can be, and I took pictures of the sound board, which flashed like an 80s arcade, but they didn’t turn out very well, because the light kept smearing, a streaky halo effect that reminded me of my favorite bad movie Xanadu.

The party was the next evening. We smuggled my suitcase into Nancy’s bedroom so the trio from The Fifth Column could record an episode while everyone else chatted outside. The boys invited me to join them, something I wasn’t sure they would do, and I clapped the squishy headphones on my head as I took a seat across from Michael Moynihan and in between Matt Welch and Kmele Foster, three strangers who’d become folk heroes to me, only because the world felt so far away at a time I could carry them wherever I went. We talked about drinking, we talked about Johnny Depp, we laughed hard and often, and it wasn’t so easy to be the fourth leg on very solid three-legged stool, but I still had a feeling, familiar from the bar, that I belonged.

I woke before dawn. 4:30am again, goddammit this kept happening. I situated myself on the balcony that was actually a fire escape, and I smoked ‘em because I had ‘em ($18 at the corner store, yikes). I listened to an old episode of a podcast with Nancy, which was slightly self-involved if not straight-up narcissistic, but I didn’t care; I was calmed by the sound of our voices finding each other.

Nancy rustled from bed around 7am, and I wasn’t alone anymore. We got to talking, we always did — women as villains,  that was the bone we were chewing on — and Nancy suggested we record. We sat across from each other at the table where so many great conversations had taken place. She was in her Pucci nightgown, and I was in a loose cotton frock I’d thrown on before the sun rose. I watched as she fiddled with the sound board, one finger nudging a grey knob upwards till I could hear the sound of my own voice, and Nancy started the way she always did.

“Hi Sarah Hepola.” A girlish voice, but also wise.

“Hi Nancy Rommelmann.” A husky cigarette alto, but also sensitive.

“See usually we have to do this across the great divide that is our great country,” Nancy riffed. I never knew what she was going to say, which was part of the adventure. “But right now I’m just looking at you across the table.”

“I could touch you,” I said, stretching out my hand only to discover it didn’t reach as far as I hoped. “If I was a little bit taller.”

And we didn’t know quite where we were going, but we were on our way.