I stared smoking when I was 20: Benson Hedges, in a silver pack, with lots of whiskey. I remember the night. I had just left my husband. I was at my co-worker Jennifer's house. She was married to a soldier at the time and they were having a party with lots of soldiers and a few other girls. Women, I mean. The room was full of smoke and laughter.
It couldn't have been my first cigarette, but it was the first time I smoked without coughing or getting nauseous. The whiskey was key to my success wi
th smoking that night.Over the years, I smoked Benson Hedges Ultra Lights, Phillip Morris, Camels, Marlboros, and whatever other people were smoking. When I moved to the woods, I took up rolling my own Drum. On special occasions, I smoked Dunhills, Kools and clove cigarettes. When I was trying to quit, I smoked Bidis. The most I smoked was a pack and a half a day.
Mostly I tried to quit smoking. I'd go without anything for a couple of days and then decide that I could probably just have one after dinner. Then maybe one after lunch. I'd go out drinking and smoke half a pack and then I was smoking again until a couple days later when I'd quit again.
What I really want to talk about is how much I love to smoke. Tonight, I miss smoking. I've been eating chocolate chip cookies, imagining pulling on my jeans, getting in the car, driving up to Mission and Youngblood to the liquor store there and buying a pack of, maybe, Kools (the luxury sticks of my final smoking days). I'd come back here and sit on the curb out back on Dufour and look at the full moon. And smoke.
Then I would feel like shit.
Not just guilty, but dizzy and pukey. To do it right, you really have to do it more than once in a while. Or you have to drink booze. Otherwise, it just makes you sick, and horribly disappointed.
The last time I smoked, I ended up feeling so sick and bad about myself I had to call my best friend and tell her about it and cry and say I would never do it again. I mean, Christ. I have cancer. People don't like to see people with cancer smoke.
Take my little brother, Daniel.
I'd quit smoking. Then he got pancreatic cancer, or I should say, he finally got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the week after he graduated from college at the age of 37. He'd had it for years. That's the fucker with pancreatic cancer: it's hard to diagnose. He was treated for back pain, tested for kidney problems, lectured about drug seeking, and finally after three years of pain and puking, someone thought to look at his liver: studded with cancer from his pancreas.
He lived about a year more and smoked most of that time, at least until his wife insisted that he stop. She didn't like the way it smelled.
I started smoking again that first time I came to see him after he got diagnosed. His 17-year-old daughter was our source. She was a smoker and we started bumming (and stealing) her Marlboro Reds.
First, we smoked on the front porch in front of god and everybody, including my brother's bishop (Mormons) who lived across the street. The next time I came to visit, we were sent into the garage where noone could see us. Then it was my brother's old car, parked in the back yard.
Then my sister-in-law said no, which made it more fun. We'd wait until she went on an errand and then we'd brush our teeth and wash and apply men's cologne. She'd come in and say "Have you guys been smoking?" And we'd lie.
At first, I just smoked when I went to Utah to see Daniel, which was nearly once a month. Then I started smoking in between.
Then he died and I kept smoking.
It was like a memorial every time I lit up. I'd think about the things we talked about while we were smoking. Smoking goes really well with talking. It's because secrecy and smoking, or maybe it's more like seclusion and smoking go together. Like in jail, back when you could still smoke in jail, the best conversations were out in the yard where the smokers hung out, and the guards (and the prisses) didn't.
Then I got cancer, or at least I got diagnosed with what had been making me feel like shit for a year or so. I thought it was just my brother dying that made me feel that way. And I kept smoking even though I was short of breath and had some tumors turning up in my lungs.
What the fuck? I'm dying, I thought. Why not?
It worked for Daniel.
It felt so good, especially with the pain medication. Outside of some of those last cigarettes with Daniel, it was the most pleasurable smoking I'd done in my life. Especially with not wanting to eat. Especially with all the bad news and the wanting to hide out. Smoking goes well with hiding out. It is also fine substitute for eating.
About the time I'd maxed out my credit cards, and realized that I wasn't dying anytime soon, I thought I'd better quit smoking. I was getting more and more paranoid about getting caught by my friends, who would have been horrified seeing my squatted on the curb in my pajama bottoms, my flannel jacket and my bald head, smoking my breakfast. I knew it couldn't look good: about as far from cool as I could get. And cool had always been at least one factor in smoking.
I love to smoke. I miss the hungry suck of it, the pure presence of heat and smoke rushing into my chest, into my blood, into my head, and blowing it out with everything that had seemed stuck in there. Free now, all of it, the thoughts, the fears, the oxygen. I love to smoke: the crack of the match, the dryness of the filter between my lips, the quick light in the dark, the inhale and exhale made visible. Tonight, I didn't go to the liquor store and I probably won't go tomorow either. Smoking is bad for me. I need all the breath I can get. I'm not dying anytime soon.
I know if Daniel was still here, I'd take one from between his thin fingers, lean into the flame of his cracked yellow Bic. We'd pull our collars up against the night cold, step behind a wall, or into a parked car where, laughing and talking, we'd smoke like we loved it more than life itself'
