Reveries of a Mostly Retired Smoker
Just as there are no ex-Marines, there are no ex-smokers. You may retire from active service, but if you ever smoked, you are a smoker, and always will be.
—John Derbyshire
I vividly remember my first cigarette, or perhaps I should say the sensation it produced, which I can only liken conjecturally to one which I happily haven’t experienced, that of being stabbed in the throat. I believe it was a Salem. I know the event occurred in a car driven by Andy S. (his parents’, no doubt), and that I was fifteen. Andy, a childhood friend, a year older and in possession of a driver’s license, was probably also the provider of the cigarette. I think my brother David, who had already been initiated, was also there, and he and Andy both got a good laugh out of my startled choking.
Why in the world did I ever smoke another one, or even take the second puff on that one? The obvious and only reasonable explanation is also the correct one: adolescent bravado and status-seeking. I have no memory whatever of the steps by which I progressed from that first puff to a full-blown habit, or how long it took. I do know that in my last three summers in and just after high school I worked on the family farm, and that I smoked heavily then (sometimes over two packs a day). A lot of the work consisted of driving a tractor, which was pretty monotonous most of the time and left one a lot of leisure to daydream and smoke.
Part of the cachet to be gained by smoking involved knowing what one liked, having a favorite brand and looking down one’s nose at others. This could be treacherous, as selecting an unfashionable brand could open one up to the sneering and jeering which is such an important part of teenage social expression. In this I can say I was to some degree my own man, for I discovered, after a period in the wilderness, that unfiltered cigarettes tasted better. Unlike the initial smoke, this preference was not a gesture of masculinity: I really did like unfiltereds better. They were too strong for most people and so even if it wasn’t a fashionable taste it seemed to get a little respect. Camel, Pall Mall, Chesterfield—these names still have a friendly sort of air about them in my mind, especially the last (it had a flavor that hinted at sweet or nut-like, which I remember perfectly) and carry with them a sense of great pleasantness, like the thought of a favorite food.
But the cigarette I remember most fondly is one that almost nobody else liked, and is probably no longer available: the unfiltered Kool, a short cylinder of stout tobacco marinated in menthol that delivered a sharp, stunning blow to the taste buds.
I smoked all the way through college and into my mid-twenties, and I often wonder how much it may have blighted my youth. I was relatively small and definitely puny and would no doubt have been that way under any circumstances, but smoking can’t have helped.
With a bit of maturity I began to think it was a habit I should drop, and about that same time, my mid-twenties, I realized I was not enjoying it all that much, and was in fact tired of it. By then I had given up the unfiltereds, probably out of some dim attempt to make peace with the instinct of self-preservation, and was down to only half a pack a day. I recall thinking that if I wasn’t going to smoke any more than that I should just go ahead and quit, and one day I did. I think I was twenty-seven.
I really didn’t find it very difficult to stop. As best I remember, I was tempted, much less than overwhelmingly, for a few weeks, and after that had no problem. I can only attribute this to some matter of body chemistry, as my will power is certainly in general not very strong. I watched other people struggle desperately, even to the point of having physical symptoms, and often fail, and counted myself lucky.
It was roughly ten years before I smoked tobacco again, and I remember the occasion well because it showed me how quickly the weed can re-assert its influence. On the birth of his first child a co-worker took up the old custom of giving out cigars. I started to refuse the one he handed me, then took it partly out of courtesy and partly because a thought something like it might be nice flitted through my mind. A few days later I smoked it, found it mildly enjoyable, and thought that was the end of it.
But within a day or so I found myself thinking about buying another cigar. Then a day or two after that I dreamed about smoking, and realized the hook was in.
That was, I think, roughly twenty years ago. Since then I have smoked perhaps, on average, two cigars a year. I have an ancient box of cheap and stale Tampa Nuggets, and now and then I take one out. Now and then one of my sons buys me an expensive cigar for birthday or Christmas or Father’s Day. And after my daughter’s wedding last fall, when all the guests were gone, my sister-and-brother-in-law lit cigarettes and I asked for one, my first since roughly 1975, over thirty years ago. I had to smoke it like a cigar, the nerves in my throat being now very much alive, as when I was fifteen.
My father smoked for decades. I think he was in his forties, maybe his early fifties, when he gave it up for good. We were comparing notes about it once and I remarked that I didn’t really feel much temptation to take it up again as a regular habit. He shook his head. “If I were to go to the doctor,” he said, “and hear that I only had six months to live, I would stop on the way home and buy a pack of cigarettes.” In the event, when he actually did have only months to live, he did not, as far as I know, resume smoking. I didn’t think to ask him about it, but I assume the illness took away the appetite, which seems unjust. As drink to lechery in the porter’s speech in Macbeth, it provoked and un-provoked, but with the poles reversed: if it provoked the performance, it took away the desire.
I don’t have the craving for tobacco that my father retained, but I look forward greatly to the occasional cigar with a glass of bourbon—nothing but bourbon seems to complement the smoke as well. Call me a retired smoker, then, but one who keeps a hand in. Every few months I find the desire growing on me, and then I plan the occasion, as I did last week, promising it to myself and then anticipating it through the work week, until yesterday when I sat out in the yard swing at dusk with a Tampa Nugget and a few fingers of Old Crow. And though I am rarely tempted by cigarettes these days, given an unfiltered Kool I would light it up in an instant.
By the way, my epigraph is taken from Derbyshire’s column “The Straggler” which appears once a month or so (every other issue, maybe?) in National Review. I disagree with Derbyshire on many political and religious matters, but “The Straggler” is almost always a pleasure. This very engaging installment is called “Keep Hope Alight!” and is in the April 16 issue. Hitler, it seems, loathed tobacco.
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