Smokin'!

The same Reneé that used to beat me up began to be a bit of an influence on me as we got older. Reneé had begun smoking cigarettes, and though she was not exactly what one would call glamorous, one day I was bitten by the bug – watching her do it, I thought smoking was cool.

It didn’t hurt that my mother was also a smoker, had been since way before I was ever born. In fact, I was a smoker in vitro, as in those days, doctors didn’t see any reason to warn mothers-to-be about the dangers of their babies’ absorbing nicotine as their bodies and brains developed from scratch. Plus my Bubbie, with whom we spent much time, also partook, as did so many of the other adults I grew up around. I really didn’t see anything wrong with it. And I was sure that if you did it yourself, you wouldn’t choke on the smoke as much as you did when someone else was blowing it out around you. Yet, even with all this encouragement, it wasn’t until one fateful evening when I was about 14, that I had ever seriously considered it.

On this evening, Reneé and I were taking a walk around the neighborhood. At this time in our lives, I was rather chubby, while Reneé had developed into a buxom young woman who wore her pants awfully tight on her little behind. She laughed when a passing car full of boys yelled out at her, “Hey! Does a hamburger come with that shake?!” Then she shook some more. For our walk this night, she wore tight, white jeans. As we moved away from our block, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.

I always felt a little awkward around Reneé. She had started to seem worldly to me, someone who could handle things, like cars full of boys shouting at her, without so much as batting an eyelash. I, on the other hand, had no reason to ever handle those things, because the only thing that cars full of boys yelled at me was, “Fat ass!” Next to Reneé I felt lumbering, clumsy, and naïve. I didn’t necessarily look to Reneé as a role model, it was clear that, with her horrible temper, time done at Children’s Village and ever-growing reputation as a burnout, she was not someone to aspire to, but in some small way I wanted to be a little bit more like her and a little bit less like me.

As Reneé lit her cigarette, she let me in on a little secret. “There’s weed in this,” she said. I was stunned and afraid. Weed in her cigarette?

“Really?” I asked, not bothering to hide the awe and fear in my voice and looking over my shoulder for the cops. “How?”

She told me that a friend of hers had taken out some of the tobacco and replaced it with pot every few centimeters. Then, to prove that it was true, every few minutes she’d inhale deeply and say in the raw voice of someone trying not to let out the smoke in their throat, “Oh! I hit a doobie!”

This was amazing. Of course I had never smoked pot and I never planned to. My parents had told me in no uncertain terms that if they ever caught me doing drugs, they would turn me right into the police. I had no intention of doing jail time, so I intended my future to be drug-free. But watching Reneé be so brave as to not only smoke cigarettes in public, but to smoke cigarettes that had drugs stashed in them, seemed so secretive, brave and cool.

(I know now that there was no way that she could have been smoking pot in that cigarette, as it was not hand-rolled and it was perfect. There’s no way anyone could have removed the tobacco, laced it with drugs and put it back together so well.)

Soon after, I rooted around in my mother’s cigarette cupboard in the kitchen, went to the back door of our house, and lit up. After one puff, I, nauseous and dizzy, stamped it out and staggered back inside. It was disgusting and it made me sick. Yet I was determined. And soon, successful.

By the time I was 16, I was a pro, smoking over a pack a day. This helped me to not eat so much. I thought this was much better than eating and doing nothing with the extra time I had on my hands, the time I used to spend eating. This way I would be able to do something while I didn’t eat, combating the inevitable boredom that would surely ensue.

For the next eight years, I smoked, whether I wanted to or not. Sometimes I smoked even though the idea of smoking made me sick. I smoked through the good times and the bad, through thick and through thin. I hated smoking, but I was mired in addiction. I felt somewhat vindicated once when I heard someone say that they heard that cigarettes were more addictive than heroin. I believed that. I was firmly, utterly, hooked.

One morning I awoke at about 4:30. I lay in bed in my dark room thinking about my morning smoke. 4:30 a.m. was early even for me. Then suddenly, my body went cold and hot at the same time; I trembled. I was wracked with a fear that had come seemingly from nowhere. I was 24 years old and I just knew that I might die of heart disease or cancer within the next 10 years. My mid-thirties was just too young to go – there were too many things to do that would take way longer than that.

I never smoked again.

Although I had fished broken, dirty cigarettes out of the trash on prior occasions when I had tried to quit, this time I ran the rest of my pack under water, watching them turn into a runny, glue-like mess before throwing them away. Then I promptly went to the drugstore to find something to do with my mouth. I thought maybe a package of plastic straws to chew on would be good, but instead found what would turn out to be a godsend – a fake cigarette.

It came encased in plastic on a piece of cardboard which extolled the virtues of this dummy smoke. You couldn’t light it, of course, because it would stink and you couldn’t smoke it anyway, unless you were a depraved and desperate prisoner who would also drink nail polish remover as a booze substitute. I bought it and soon it became soggy with my saliva. I “smoked” that thing day and night until I didn’t need it anymore. I was teased by everyone who knew me, still I didn’t put it down. That silly thing and some amazing willpower did the trick.

Now it has been 20 years, one month and 27 days since I’ve smoked a cigarette. Once in a great while, I miss it and if I am around someone who is lighting up I will inhale for a second. Then I realize how much I hate smoking and get away as fast as possible. I am grateful for my ability to quit; ten years have passed by my perceived day of certain doom. My Bubbie died of lung cancer, 73 years after her first cigarette, about 10 years after her last. Sure, she had a lot of time on this earth, even as a smoker, and before she died she said that even if she had known that she would die like that, she wouldn’t have changed a thing about her smoking habits, she loved it that much. Wow. I don’t think heroin is so far off.