Here’s a picture of Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous author, and poet, puffing away. Read on, and you’ll understand why.
The nurse always asks me if I am a smoker during my health visits. My reply is not since 1980 when I turned thirty. Between 1969 and 1979, I was a smokestack.
I tried a cigarette for the first time when I was sixteen, but it wasn’t for me. Then I started dating, and my New Jersey girlfriend said she couldn’t see me next weekend. She would be at the beach. OK, how about the following weekend? She planned to be at the beach all summer. The message got through; I was a “dumpee.”
That devastating fact, combined with the counterculture years, being an English major, and finally discovering the tragedy of life, started my serious smoking days. Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus smoked Galouise cigarettes, so I joined their ranks. Ugh!! Unfiltered, stubby cigarettes were not for me. Filtered Winstons became my brand.
College classrooms allowed us to smoke in class, and I remember one impressive Sociology teacher who would stand up the butts of the nine cigarettes he smoked during his lecture, all neatly aligned on his desk. Cigarette vending machines were everywhere, and forty-five cents and a pull of a metal handle – “kerchunk” – would bring me my fix. Some folks took the pack and banged it into their hand, supposedly packing the tobacco down tight. I just unwrapped the cellophane wrapper and lit up. One to three packs a day.
Open flames and burning tobacco aren’t part of any safety training. I was watching an important movie in a cinema on Third Avenue when I sniffed a smell that reminded me of my mother burning off a chicken’s feather stubble over her Caloric range. It wasn’t chicken, but the long hair of the young lady sitting in front of me smoldering. I managed to tamp it out gently without her noticing. A couple of my cars had cigarette burns on the upholstery, and I remember having to spray Windex on the inside of the windshield to get the yellowed schmutz from smoke off the glass.
What were the benefits of smoking? Strangers would say hi! and ask you for a light and smoking went great with alcohol. A cigarette after a big restaurant meal was ever so satisfying. The cigarette smoke added to my tragic look if friends knew I was a “dumpee” from a recent relationship. I amassed a small fortune of pennies and nickels when I would take the cushions off the couch, desperately looking for a cigarette at midnight.
After college, I joined the corporate world of smoke. Smoker cars on the railroad. Ashtrays on my office desk. I sat in the smoking section of planes, which was a comical idea for the non-smokers who shared the same cabin. Cigarette butts covered city sidewalks. I left my office building one lunch hour, and beautiful young women stood outside offering free sample packs of Marlboros. Sorry – I was a Winston man. So many photos of me from the 70s show me with a cigarette hanging from my lips. The morning ritual of hacking coughs was part of the price for these treats.
When we found out we were expecting our first child, I wanted to stop, and this coincided with the wellness offerings of one of our corporate subsidiaries. There I was in a class of twenty colleagues, listening to our coach prep us for the gradual end of our addiction. We filled out health questionnaires that asked about our lifestyle. Based on my answers, the coach told me that, although I was chronologically thirty, I had the physical body of a seventy-year-old man. That was plenty of motivation for me to think about my need for cigarettes. I chewed so much gum, suck cinnamon sticks, and reduce my smoking, gradually changing brands until I tried to suck smoke through the plastic tips of low-tar and low-nicotine cigarettes. Then it was Cold Turkey time.
I made it. One weekend, my wife and I had a disagreement, and I said that her stubbornness made me want to get in the car and buy a pack of smokes. She clearly and adamantly wasn’t buying into that guilt trip and told me she wouldn’t be my scapegoat. OK, OK. I got it. I stopped.
Food started to taste delicious, and I awoke without coughing, and I now found it difficult even to walk through the smoker car during my commute. Life had plenty of bumps and surprises waiting for us in the future, but I didn’t go back to smoking.
In 2009, I got a call from my doctor. My recent tests showed that I had a dark spot on my lung that had to be investigated. I recovered from the partial removal of one of my lungs and was fortunate to have no further lung cancer issues. Now that I’m an old man, I want to go up to that kid who bought a ten-dollar pack of smokes at 7-11 and tell him my sad tale, but I don’t think I could persuade him. Thousands of warnings from the Surgeon General on those cigarette wrappers didn’t dissuade me. The addiction helped me get through breakups, personal uncertainty, and the incredible transition from being a free spirit to the reality of the corporate world. Addiction fills a need. My PSA is: Find out why you’re killing yourself. Solve that, and the addiction will end.
Very similar smoking story, except no cancer, thankfully . . .