I won’t have had a cigarette in four years come next month. I recently mentioned this to a co-worker who remarked through clenched teeth that, if I had in fact quit permanently, I couldn’t have ever been a “real” smoker. Not for nothing, but I’m nearly twice this young woman’s age. I was sneaking cigarettes after math class back when her mother was deciding on whether or not to have an abortion.
…I know, too harsh. If I still smoked, I’d say I’d need one about now...
But I don’t –and so I don’t.
I shouldn’t say I was a smoker. I should say: I loved smoking.
I really loved it.
When I was in college, I smoked Lucky unfiltereds, at the rate of a pack and a half a day. At Cooper Union in the late 1980s, you could smoke in class. All my professors were shameless cigarette moochers. You could smoke in the metal shop. My friend Patrick practically smoked in his sleep. I used to smoke while I ate.
Did I mention that I used to love smoking?
I have fond memories of riding between subway cars on the number 2 IRT northbound train with my best friend Michael Davila, lighting up menthols on school nights if we didn’t have anything stronger. Smoking was something we did to take the edge off. It was our decompression from our days at a private school to the ironically lower P.S.I. of our South Bronx neighborhoods.
I was a nerd, I was an artist, I was a brainiac, but even at 12 years of age, walking up-street with a lit cigarette in my swinging fist, I was no one to fuck with. I scared older, tougher kids because they were scared of cigarettes and by extension freaked out by me. I knew this, and I figured it beat fighting all the time.
I knew this and I figured, “let this be my thing.”
A girlfriend once waited for me outside my high school, in a miniskirt, combat boots, fishnet stockings and my battered leather jacket. She was lazily smoking a cigarette leaning against a building’s corner on 81st and West End Avenue. My friend Jeffrey spotted her from a window and leaned over to me and whispered “Your girl is all day punk rock trouble.”
Fuck yeah momma.
I’ll never smoke cigarettes that taste like the ones of my adolescence. That taste of freedom, that taste of delinquency, that taste of procrastination… that taste of getting away with something isn’t an ingredient found in any cigarette I can buy today.
I occasionally have dreams in which I’m smoking. They are always the dreams in which I am being “cool.”
It’ll kill you.
It’ll stain your teeth and make your burps smell like wet ash trays…
It causes all kinds of cancer…
But it looks cool.
It makes doing average things look cool.
It looks cooler than anything else you could do.
That’s the thing that can never be taken away from smokers: it’s cool.
Smoking is fucking cool.
The more dangerous they say it is, the more “TRUTH” ads they put out there, the more likely they make it seem that smoking is something Darth Vader would do…
-and that is fucking cool, my friends.
About four years ago, when I was about to turn 37, I was struck with a very bad flu that nearly turned into pneumonia. For three weeks, I fluctuated between getting better, and then sinking back into sickness at night, breathing with great difficulty. At times it felt like I was under water. I quit smoking altogether about a week after pulling through.
Although I had stopped smoking for months at a time and for a full year during the 1990s, I was always white-knuckling it. From 1995 to 1999, I’d drink obsidian pints of Guinness at a bar called The Pageant and bum half a pack off of my good friend Mark Cassar in one single night.
Today, I can’t bring a cigarette to my lips without feeling a little nauseous, a little put off. Today, a cigarette tastes like a cigarette, -and only like a cigarette and nothing else, and I am left wondering why?
Perhaps it wasn’t the actual smoking itself that I loved after all, but some ineffable state, some dimension I stepped into as a youth whenever I bathed myself in the mercurial light of a match and drew in the sinful, sexy blackness from the end of a cigarette.
I think I was “cool” once upon a time.
…I know, too harsh. If I still smoked, I’d say I’d need one about now...
But I don’t –and so I don’t.
I shouldn’t say I was a smoker. I should say: I loved smoking.
I really loved it.
When I was in college, I smoked Lucky unfiltereds, at the rate of a pack and a half a day. At Cooper Union in the late 1980s, you could smoke in class. All my professors were shameless cigarette moochers. You could smoke in the metal shop. My friend Patrick practically smoked in his sleep. I used to smoke while I ate.
Did I mention that I used to love smoking?
I have fond memories of riding between subway cars on the number 2 IRT northbound train with my best friend Michael Davila, lighting up menthols on school nights if we didn’t have anything stronger. Smoking was something we did to take the edge off. It was our decompression from our days at a private school to the ironically lower P.S.I. of our South Bronx neighborhoods.
I was a nerd, I was an artist, I was a brainiac, but even at 12 years of age, walking up-street with a lit cigarette in my swinging fist, I was no one to fuck with. I scared older, tougher kids because they were scared of cigarettes and by extension freaked out by me. I knew this, and I figured it beat fighting all the time.
I knew this and I figured, “let this be my thing.”
A girlfriend once waited for me outside my high school, in a miniskirt, combat boots, fishnet stockings and my battered leather jacket. She was lazily smoking a cigarette leaning against a building’s corner on 81st and West End Avenue. My friend Jeffrey spotted her from a window and leaned over to me and whispered “Your girl is all day punk rock trouble.”
Fuck yeah momma.
I’ll never smoke cigarettes that taste like the ones of my adolescence. That taste of freedom, that taste of delinquency, that taste of procrastination… that taste of getting away with something isn’t an ingredient found in any cigarette I can buy today.
I occasionally have dreams in which I’m smoking. They are always the dreams in which I am being “cool.”
It’ll kill you.
It’ll stain your teeth and make your burps smell like wet ash trays…
It causes all kinds of cancer…
But it looks cool.
It makes doing average things look cool.
It looks cooler than anything else you could do.
That’s the thing that can never be taken away from smokers: it’s cool.
Smoking is fucking cool.
The more dangerous they say it is, the more “TRUTH” ads they put out there, the more likely they make it seem that smoking is something Darth Vader would do…
-and that is fucking cool, my friends.
About four years ago, when I was about to turn 37, I was struck with a very bad flu that nearly turned into pneumonia. For three weeks, I fluctuated between getting better, and then sinking back into sickness at night, breathing with great difficulty. At times it felt like I was under water. I quit smoking altogether about a week after pulling through.
Although I had stopped smoking for months at a time and for a full year during the 1990s, I was always white-knuckling it. From 1995 to 1999, I’d drink obsidian pints of Guinness at a bar called The Pageant and bum half a pack off of my good friend Mark Cassar in one single night.
Today, I can’t bring a cigarette to my lips without feeling a little nauseous, a little put off. Today, a cigarette tastes like a cigarette, -and only like a cigarette and nothing else, and I am left wondering why?
Perhaps it wasn’t the actual smoking itself that I loved after all, but some ineffable state, some dimension I stepped into as a youth whenever I bathed myself in the mercurial light of a match and drew in the sinful, sexy blackness from the end of a cigarette.
I think I was “cool” once upon a time.
I think I was in love with something harder to pin down and describe, something looser and more abstract than the cigarette smoke I drew in...
But I sure did love to smoke.
-SJ
But I sure did love to smoke.
-SJ
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment