A cigarette would be good right about now. I don't smoke but I used to so I know what I'm missing. Neither of my parents smoked cigarettes by the time I came along. My father partook of White Owl cigars especially Saturday afternoons when he was working on something around the house and Half & Half pipe tobacco evenings when he sat listening to a jazz LP or reading a book. The cigar smoke was a bit strong, but I would sneak whiffs of the spent tobacco in the pipe bowl occasionally -- I liked the smell but the habit mystified me. I think the ritual and the paraphernalia appealed to him. It was especially puzzling that his smoking took multiple forms because at least for our benefit he was as anti-cigarette as my mother, herself an ex-smoker. My dad was officially an ex-cigarette smoker as well, but I remember on a couple of occasions the scandal that would erupt when my mother found a pack of cigarettes stashed away in his sock drawer. "I'm quitting after this pack," he'd tell her. Her skepticism was alarming but to my knowledge he kept his word and he certainly talked the anti-smoking talk to me, condemning it as a "filthy habit." The cigar and pipe smoking persisted without mention.
My mother's antipathy to smoking was no doubt inspired by her own mother's habit. My grandmother, a great beauty in her day, was a rather shriveled and bitter lady, old before her time by the time I knew her, but she still fancied herself glamorous though she was the daughter of Eastern European peasants. It took seven torturous hours crammed into the backseat of the station wagon to get from our house to hers, so visits were rare. She would sit in her armchair the whole time, inscrutably scanning us through cat-eye glasses, a Winston cigarette accumulating ash as it bounced between her wrinkled lips or lay smoking away in the crook between her first 2 fingers, occasionally requiring a tap with the index finger to jostle the continually forming shell of spent leaves at the tip into the ashtray, as she complained in an arch, slavic way about everything. Sitting in her throne, she'd crush the butt of one cigarette in the ashtray to extinguish it and immediately light another. Her voice sounded like smoke, dry tongue smacking as she enunciated every word, parched lips sticking at the corners of the mouth. Her laughter (always a bit forced, pointed and inappropriate) rattled her lungs in a distressing way. But the all-consuming habit which engulfed her and suited her personality perfectly was hypnotic for a child to behold.
After each visit my mother would complain bitterly about her mother's smoking. The implication of an opportunity for disapproval if I were ever to take it up myself was not lost on me. Somehow she wasn't reassured by my insistence at 10 that I'd tried it and knew it was not something I could ever want to do myself. I had tried it. One day during a visit to my grandparents that coincided with the moon walk, I somehow found myself in the same room alone with one of my grandma's cigarettes burning away in an ashtray. I couldn't resist the opportunity to see what the fuss was about. I lifted it between my two fingers like I'd seen her do a thousand times, moved the filter ringed with the still wet, wrinkled imprint of her hot pink lipstick toward my lips and started inhaling. My lungs filled with fire. I couldn't set the thing down fast enough. Knowing I could never possibly take up smoking myself based on that experience, I was filled with a newfound respect for my grandmother.
I guess I was destined to be a smoker after that. I had a friend as a kid whose gregarious, gravel voiced father was the stereotypical 60s smoker-- a huge enticing selection of cigarettes-- Kents-- carefully removed from their packs and neatly arranged in a glass dish on the coffee table as though they were peanuts, fancy ashtrays and lighters within easy reach no matter where you were situated in the house. Being driven to baseball practice or for an overnight stay at my friend's family camp in his big fully automatic luxury car was where I first learned about the incomparable aroma of a cigarette freshly lit from the glowing coils of a car's lighter-- a delight unknown to anyone born after 1996 when the smoker's convenience was replaced with an electrical outlet in the standard equipment of most new cars. The glamour of this activity inspired us on occasion to steal away with a handful of Kents from the bowl, break into a home under construction in the neighborhood and try them for ourselves. They never tasted as great as they smelled, and for that reason remained merely a very rare excuse for delinquency until college.
I became a smoker in earnest during my failed freshman year. It was a revelation when I realized no one was going to stop me buying packs from the cigarette machine in the student union. I worked my way through all the brands-- the place names (Winston, Raleigh, Salem, Newport) the pretentious (Bel Air, Viceroy, Parliament, Chesterfield, Marlboro, Tareyton, Pall Mall), the exotic, evocative and romantic (Camel, Old Gold, Lucky Strike, Kool, True), the nonsensical (Doral) and by the time I'd tried each I was hooked . I slept all day through all of my classes and smoked all night. I didn't belong there and didn't pick up anything else*. But smoking stayed with me.
I met my wife at my second more successful stab at college. She was a smoker (Vantage Menthols) herself for a while. I was aware that smoking was liable to kill me eventually-- I did not have the kind of luck that would ever allow me to be the centenarian with the lifelong pack a day habit, and I did not want to end up burping sentences through my tracheotomy like the old guy who performed the feat for us annually as an anti-smoking public service at junior high school assemblies-- so I was susceptible to my mother's plea that if I was going to smoke at all I should at least stick to light cigarettes. I wasn't particular. My habit revolved around what I was comfortable asking the counter person for. Low tar brands at first. Merit Menthols for a while. Then the ultra low-tar beige-packaged Barclays with the tightly packed filter that was impossible for a weak lunged smoker to draw any smoke through-- the laughingstock of my smoking friends. When I worked in a full service convenience store in the heart of the student ghetto in my university town, I no longer had to ask for my smokes so again went through all the brands, occasionally splurging on the upscale imports-- Players, Export A, Dunhill, Gitanes, Sobranie. I finally settled on a brand that cleaved closely to the pop glamour I was seeking to emulate from the 60's: L&Ms.
I quit cold turkey in my 30s following a deep depression, and my life turned around. I started exercising, lost weight, took Arabic classes, composed music, learned to program, discovered I loved my life and my work. My wife and I decided to have a kid. Then one day, on my long walk home from work I happened to spot a pristine and perfect cigarette lying on the street. I picked it up without thinking. After a few steps I realized I had no way to light it. I stared at it long and hard before throwing it in the nearest trash can so no one else could have it but leaving it intact to leave open a contingency for changing my mind. Within a week, unable to shake the image of the pristine beauty of the found cigarette tube and unsuccessful at willing the procurement of any others by chance in the interim, I bought my own pack. I found excuses to sneak off for a daily smoke, thinking I'd be done after 20, but wouldn't you know, I was hooked again.
Before the birth of my daughter my wife and I bought a house in the suburbs. A small post-war cookie cutter just outside the city was all we could afford, but it hearkened back to my earliest days in the suburbs of New York. I was living the dream. Somehow the brand that went with the vintage and decor of the house was Lark. I "did my best" to keep my habit away from the kid.
For some reason, the activities we consider adult are among the least savory -- porn, strip clubs, liquor, gambling, smoking. Only a kid wants to be that kind of adult. The adults who engage in such activities can't help themselves. Smoking was my shame. It was a louche habit that no one approved of, they were never shy to tell you. Once ubiquitous and cheap, it became outre and increasingly expensive. Sticking smokers with steepening vice taxes became just as habit forming for municipal technocrats across the country as the addictive chemicals in cigarettes were designed to be for their captive tax base. They loved the revenue but hated the second hand smoke. Cigarettes were banished from workplaces first, then restaurants, then even bars. The long slide of airline travel from the jet setting glory days of the 50s and 60s accelerated with the end of smoking on planes in the 90s. I think the straw that broke the camel's back for me (so to speak) was one too many trips to the airport smoking lounge. Dismal, smelly places full of hacking, wheezing, stressed, unhappy losers. Of whom I was one. Too weak to tough it through a few hours without a smoke. Outside of travel, speaking the phrase "A carton of Larks" aloud to the jaded drugstore clerk became a dreaded weekly chore -- my own experience of being a clerk as a younger man which had shaped my habit had also informed me of the tell-tale stench that preceded the tobacco customer, which I was no doubt perpetrating for a new generation of counter help. What's more, it galled me that unlike some of my acquaintances who could take it up and drop it on a whim, I was enslaved to the habit. I quit for good--cold turkey again over a long holiday weekend-- after another 10 years.
I never became an anti-smoker. I still crave them from time to time. I agree with one writer I read while giving them up, who was herself in the process of quitting, that the truly lamentable thing about forgoing cigarettes was giving up the meditative aspect of smoking, especially acute in an era in which local ordinances required you to exile yourself from conventional society in order to indulge in the habit. To ease the pain of the transition I continued to take "smoke breaks" for a time, going outside to the smoking area without lighting up until I didn't need even that anymore. I don't think I'll backslide again. Not for the foreseeable future.
I had a colleague once who was an avid smoker. She had worked at a law firm that had Phillip Morris as a client in the class actions era. She would announce every smoke break to everyone in her corner of the department like a rooster crowing up dawn. She would signal where her mind was at in long, dull meetings by stacking her lighter atop her pack on the conference room table. Word of my colleague's enthusiasm for smoking got back to the client somehow and in a show of gratitude, she was gifted with a rare trinket that marked her as a true cognoscente-- a model of a fetus smoking a Marlboro (her brand!) which she justifiably proudly displayed on her shelf for all to see.
I hear she was cremated. I wonder who got the smoking fetus.
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* I did "pick up" a rich girlfriend (and wonderful person) whose father (a great guy) made his fortune as a distributor of candy and tobacco products. Exposure to his merchandise had made him a health fanatic and rabid anti-smoker by the time I met him. Wealth had made him a hypocrite.
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