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99 New: Smoked
I quit smoking because we adopted a baby with asthma.
Before that, I smoked all the time, sometimes having a lit cigarette going while I was in the shower, reaching out with wet fingers to take a drag. It was an all-the-time thing, my cigarettes and lighter as constantly near to me as my phone is now.
There was a lead-up to quitting. Numerous stops and starts. I quit for a long while and then flew to Nicaragua to pick up the asthmatic baby. In the parking lot of the Managua airport, I bought a pack of Marlboros from a 8 or 9-year old boy hawking smokes along with gum and lifesavers. Unbeknownst to me, my husband, who had quit right along with me several months before, stopped at a gas station on his way home from sending me off at the Milwaukee airport. We were essentially puffing at the same time but keeping it secret which wasn’t hard because communication between Milwaukee and Managua was the stuff of papery thin airmail letters and diplomatic pouches back then.
After I came back, my friend, Karen, and I began smoking Djarums, which we called clove cigarettes because they smelled like pumpkin pie day gone mad. They also made me break out in hives. I smoked them anyway. It felt righteous somehow to smoke a spice rather than tobacco but the smell was heavy and thick, your worst nightmare of junior high perfume, like Emeraude or something like that. To smoke a Djarum was to be declaring one’s profound oddness to the rest of the world.
My yearning for actual cigarettes never stopped so I smoke both for a while, sick to my stomach a large part of the time. It was a toxic mix – tobacco and pumpkin pie spice. Then Karen and I went to a hypnotist. We drove to his office in my 1978 Toyota. I remember this because I remember the little pull-out ashtray and the old time cigarette lighter that glowed in whatever dark you were in. We took our last puffs in the parking lot of the hypnotist’s office and then went in.
He hypnotized us at the same time. I remember closing my eyes, listening to him, and thinking, Karen, are you hypnotized? Because I knew I wasn’t hypnotized or I wouldn’t be wondering if Karen was. The hypnotist talked like the ones I used to see on TV dangling a watch on a chain in front of increasingly sleepy subjects. He talked about cigarettes, how we would not need to smoke anymore, how cigarettes would no longer entice us, how we would breathe easy without cigarettes, and how our lives would be better.
Then we went back to the car and dug butts out of the ashtray to smoke.
After that, I quit buying my own cigarettes and just bummed from people at work. My work buddy smoked Kool 100’s. These are super intense menthol cigarettes that your mama could have strapped on your chest to cure pneumonia. Or cancer. A Kool bummed from my friend was the last cigarette I smoked. I stood in the hallway outside our office, struck a match, and inhaled the menthol right down to my socks; a Kool was a cigarette that macheted the way through your veins, slash by slash, like a real cheap Bourbon might.
After that, I threw up in the ladies room. It was the perfect end to my smoking life.
I loved smoking in so many ways and miss it still. When I was single and had no new babies with asthma, I loved the feel of a cigarette in my hand, the flicking, the unconscious reflexive flicking of ash, the moroseness of my cigarette in an ashtray, the smoke rising in a thin line to curl at the top, the inhaling, the sighing that followed, the constancy of friendship, the time it took. But I’ve loved a lot of things and people and places that I don’t have anymore and don’t want. That doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes miss them.
___________________
Photo by Philippe Goulet on Unsplash
11 Comments on “99 New: Smoked”
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My husband tried several times to give up. We tried cutting down, NHS give-up clinics, nicotine patches, books… I stopped mentioning it because I began to feel like a nag (I never could smoke – felt I was choking).
If he’d spent as much effort trying to give up as he spent hiding his packs from me he would have succeeded.
In the end it was his hip replacements that stopped it. He thought they wouldn’t operate if he didn’t give it up, so one day he said, ‘on Tuesday I’m stopping’. And he did.
Actually they’d only said he had to give up for two weeks before the op, but even two days had been impossible before. He still has that one cigarette he kept for emergencies (Otherwise he’d panic and have to go buy a pack.)
After two hip replacements and a triple coronary bypass, he’s had the sense not to start again. But wnenever we pass a group smoking outside a pub or outside the hospital, he edges closer…
Reblogged this on Red's Wrap.
One of mentors was as he called himself a ” professional smoker”. A physician. But he could use those cigs for the best drama in a meeting, he could pause and think, or show distress, puff quick, like he could not wait to disagree with you, or heavens, point at you. He did quit, used the gum. Unfortunately, died of lung cancer.
Yeah – people now have NO idea how much smokers used to smoke. There was smoking everywhere and no one thought a thing of it.
Good going.
Quitting smoking was the hardest thing I ever had to do. I had a boss who had to give up crack. He was still smoking cigarettes. He said it was WAY harder to quit tobacco than crack.
I’ve heard the same thing. Quitting took a long time in terms of getting rid of the urge. Getting sick with my last cigarette helped, though. I still walk past a smoking person with a little bit of envy.
My middle school girlfriends and I bought a pack of Kool cigarettes from a vending machine in the back hall of a Shopko store in Green Bay because that’s the kind of cigarette Ponyboy smoked in The Outsider. We passed that pack around and took turns hiding it under our mattresses for months. I think we smoked one cigarette out of the whole pack. Such rebels!
I never had the cigarette bug. I remember trying Camels back when I wuz 19 or 20. I studied myself, ciggie dangling from my mouth, in the mirror. I wuzn’t impressed. I didn’t look like Bogie. And, I didn’t get a “buzz”. Later, I tried Old Gold to see if I could taste the flavor. Nada. I tried the Paul Henreid bit, lighting two cigarettes in my mouth and handing one to a young woman I admired. She laughed at me.
I wound up smoking a pipe for many years. I enjoyed it, Could smell the the stuff I was smoking. It had a nice aroma. People thought I was a cosmopolitan guy, smoking a pipe and not saying much.
In the 70’s and 80’s, The Boston TV newsroom was always thick with smoke and the stink of cheap booze. My assignment editor and I had myriad arguments, with pipes in our mouths and “traveller cups of booze” in our hands- head to head confrontations which entertained everyone. (In the late 60’s, during my tenure at ABC News, EVERYONE smoked. Lots of people had pixs of Ed Murrow, ciggie dangling from his lips, on their desks.)
I gave up the pipe around the time I bid adieu to booze, my real passion, about 14 years ago.
I still wonder how people in those old movies could see through all through the smoke. How did they exchange those passionate kisses with cigarette breath?
Light up a Lucky!
I’ll miss smoking until the day I die, which presumably will be later than what it might have been if I’d continued. When I’m really stressed, I dream about smoking. Nothing has ever relaxed me more than that first drag. And I’ve done yoga and meditation. Still, as you say, we love a lot of things and people that are no longer in our lives. Usually for good reasons.
I’m really glad you were able to quit.