When the Cigarette Was Burning

A cigarette was Nick Edenetti’s trademark when he was working the clubs, a thin tendril of smoke curling up through the spotlight and into the darkness.

He used it to create a mood as he sang, moving it in a kind of wavy motion to the rhythms of the music, its glowing tip zigzagging through the edges of the light.

More than simply a prop, smoking was Nick’s addiction as well as his trademark. He was a four-packs-a-day man, and you rarely saw him without Joe Camel lounging at his side.

He’s been a saloon singer for 35 years, playing clubs and restaurants from Miami to L.A., performing before the kinds of audiences that do more eating and talking than listening.

I first saw him at a small restaurant in Burbank called the China Trader. I was having some chicken chow mein and an eggroll or two when suddenly there’s this big announcement and Edenetti comes on.

He does a few unfunny jokes and then begins to sing. I look around and there’s no one else in the place, but this guy is up there performing like he’s at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

I mean, he’s giving it his all doing the great Johnny Mercer tune, “Make it One for My Baby,” sounding a little like Sinatra, the smoke from his cigarette lacing the lyrics.

That was maybe a dozen years ago. Nick doesn’t sing anymore and he doesn’t smoke. Now he gasps and coughs and sucks on oxygen and wonders how much time he has left, because the king of the saloon singers is dying.

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When he told me he had terminal lung cancer I couldn’t believe it. Like a damned fool, I said, “You sure?” because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and he said, “Yeah, I’m sure.”

I made him show me the paperwork anyhow and there it was all right, standing out like red neon, “Terminal lung cancer.” Good God.

It was diagnosed two months ago when Nick was having trouble breathing and ended up in the V.A. hospital in Westwood. He’s a Navy veteran.

“They did all the tests,” he said, gasping for breath as he talked, “and they came up with this. It’s in the lungs and there’s a tumor wrapped around my heart. What’ve I got, three months, a year?”

Then he begins telling me that the Friars Club is going to put on a benefit in September to help him out financially. It’s strange because Nick is saying it with great enthusiasm like he’s been booked on Broadway or Tony Bennett has just agreed to appear on the after-midnight public-access TV show he used to have.

I feel like saying Nick, do you know what’s going on here?, but then I realize he knows when he says in a voice full of pain and wonder, “I can’t believe this is happening to me . . . “

It’s like he’s onstage suddenly realizing there’s no one there. The club is dark and the audience is gone.

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Nick is planning volunteer work for the American Cancer Society in his final days, telling kids what Joe Camel has done to him.

“I’m D.O.A. at age 59 because of smoking,” he says. “It’s suicide.”

He’s getting radiation treatment five times a week but admits that the effectiveness of the treatment is minuscule. “Still,” he adds, “if it keeps shrinking the tumors just a little . . . “

Ever since our first meeting in that little corner of nowhere I’ve watched Nick perform around town in everything from spaghetti houses to tropical clubs with plastic palm trees overhead.

I’ve seen him onstage when the power’s gone out and the mike’s gone dead, pressing ahead in the grand tradition of performers who won’t abandon their audience no matter what.

Once in the middle of his act the spotlight caught fire and Nick hesitated only long enough to tell someone to put the fire out. Then he sang in the dark, a shadow figure perceived through his music.

Most of the time the audiences have been small and guys like me end up clapping wildly out of pity and Nick responds with an encore whether we really want one or not.

I like him because he’s one of the town’s great characters, a part of the city that exists without much notice, when night falls and the streets are empty. He’s been the voice in the saloons of L.A. for a long time, and it saddens me that the voice can’t sing anymore.

I keep seeing him in the spotlight, but my focus isn’t on Nick. It’s on that goddamn cigarette in his hand. I can’t take my eyes off of it.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com