I have no desire to get either political or preachy about cigarettes or the tobacco industry or anti-smoking laws or whatever here, so consider this your standard disclaimer that all of the following are just my opinions and experiences, to be taken for whatever they’re worth. Just a meander down memory lane specifically focused on the little cancer sticks, to commemorate the day that I quit.
It’s easy for me to remember the date because I chose it with great deliberation and rare forethought. On October 1, 2004 I turned 30, and as that birthday approached I knew that once I was 30 I didn’t want to be a smoker anymore. I believed on a fundamental level that there was nothing wrong with smoking if you were in your 20s. 20-somethings are bulletproof. Nobody dies from smoking in their 20s. (There are two ways to read that last sentence. They vary in the degree to which each is verifiably, scientifically true, but I mean it both ways. Again, I’m not as interested in facts as I am in my personal experience.) However, people who smoke in their 30s get lung cancer and die. So as that very clear line in time approached, with my 20s on one side and my 30s on the other, I knew I was going to cross from being OK with my smoking habit to being absolutely certain it was going to kill me. I don’t want to die at all, but especially not from lung cancer and special-especially if it’s within my power to prevent it. So I smoked until the day before I turned 30, and never since.
My grandparents and my parents all smoked, at one point or another, but my parents and two out of three grands all quit when I was fairly young. (My mom’s mom smoked basically her whole life, and she did eventually die from cancer, but she also lived a sedentary lifestyle and ate fried red meat for dinner every night and lived to a ripe old age, so it’s hard to say what exactly killed her and if it’s any better or worse than random telomere decay. The only takeaway I got from her death was “you never know.” She died when I was about 26 and obviously I kept smoking for years.) When I was a kid (and here I’m defining kid as “up to age 18”) I was never tempted by cigarettes – not in the abstract sense of wondering what the grown-ups in my life or on TV were doing, and not in the literal sense of anyone waving an open pack under my nose and exerting the dreaded pressure to fit in with one’s peers. I know I’m part of the first generation that was raised after medical science figured out that the smooth, rich flavor of a Winston was not necessarily the greatest thing to put in your body, so I was constantly bombarded with cautionary tales and general disapproval, but I just don’t remember it being that big of a deal. But like I said, I just kind of lucked out that I wasn’t offered cigarettes on the playground in the first place, so I don’t consider it any great moral victory that I stayed smoke-free until college.
I was pretty much alcohol-free until college, too, but that changed in a hurry. I think there’s a lot of overblown terror-mongering out there with regard to “gateways” but I know for a fact in my case that social drinking led inexorably to social smoking. I think there were two things that got through whatever passed for my defenses at that point. One, when I went out drinking socially I would get drunk. (well, duh) Being drunk lowers your inhibitions, but what that really means is that it suppresses your fear. You’ll stand on a table and screech along to Whitney Houston’s “Queen of the Night” if you’re not afraid of being laughed at or judged. And I’ll smoke a cigarette if I’m not afraid that it will instantly and irrevocably give me deadly malignant body-wide tumors. (My “20-somethings are bulletproof” theory/rationalization evolved over time.) Two, I had always had a certain mental image of smokers my age and I dissociated myself from it. (I’ve quit smoking, but classism is a vice I have yet to relinquish.) In my high school (or my perception of it) there was this kind of bell curve of coolness. The height of the in-crowd, the biggest part of the curve, was the average jocks and the cheerleaders, and then in one direction you had coolness start to diminish as you went through the overachievers (the student council, the female athletes, the honors students) and in the other direction you had the equally-but-differently-uncool underachievers (the hangers-on friends of jocks and cheerleaders, the loners, the burnouts). And the cool kids didn’t smoke, nor did the overachievers. (At least, not brazenly and publicly. For all I know lots of otherwise “good” kids were sneaking cigarettes and I was oblivious. But I truly believe, for my weird little small town, I’m mostly right about this.) Smoking was the refuge of the burnouts, the kids who were actively looking forward to dropping out at 16 so they could work full time down at the garage. I was in an extremely thin outlying arm of the coolness bell curve, myself, but it was the opposite one from the smokers. Then I went to college, which multiplied the size of the student body around me by a factor of fifteen or twenty but pulled them all from the same approximate area of the high school hierarchy, my geeky neck of the woods. And I made a bunch of new friends who I thought were cool, in some cases even empirically cool in a way that would have crushed the homecoming court back in my tiny hometown, and a bunch of them smoked. This probably makes me sound extraordinarily dense (because I am) but at the time it was a revelation – people like me smoked cigarettes. Finally being able to identify with smokers opened the door for joining them.
And it was purely social at first. I only smoked in bars, which meant I didn’t smoke every day (except during those stretches where my friends and I went out to a bar more or less every night). And I didn’t smoke during the day. And I didn’t buy my own cigarettes – I was forever bumming them off people at the bar, which proved remarkably easy. Sometimes I felt bad enough to toss someone a couple of bucks and split a pack with them, but in my mind this still made it true that I never bought my own. And I still wasn’t a smoker, I was just someone who occasionally (frequently) smoked. I didn’t feel like an addict. I didn’t wake up craving a hit, or crave it at any other time. It just always seemed like a good idea when we were out drinking, but certainly something I could live without. And for whatever it was worth, more than a few of my friends were playing by more or less the exact same rules, smoking socially but not self-identifying as smokers.
I promised myself that smoking would be a college phase and I would quit when I graduated, but that didn’t happen. I still wouldn’t say I was addicted, but I found reasons to keep lighting up. For a few months after graduation I waited tables at a family restaurant chain. (Hint: it rhymes with Zapplebee’s.) There were no provisions for the waitstaff to take breaks on shift, but smokers were allowed cigarette breaks. I could keep swearing off cigarettes, or I could take smoke breaks – no brainer. I still wasn’t buying, because most smokers hate smoking alone and would much rather offer someone a cigarette to entice the non-carrier to join them out back. I took full advantage of that fact in my fellow nicotine-fiend waiters and waitresses. It meant I ended up smoking a few truly foul menthol cigarettes if that’s what Nene was carrying, but still – five minute smoke breaks kept me sane.
Then I moved from Jersey to Virginia and roomed with heavy smokers. Because we were renting a house and weren’t allowed to smoke indoors, every time my roomies had a cigarette became an opportunity to invite me outside to join them, and I often did. I slid pretty easily from “only when I’m out drinking” to “only at work” to “all the damn time” and that’s when I would say I got hooked. Before that, don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the buzz I would catch from cigarettes. I didn’t smoke for the social acceptance or the reckless daredevil associations or the conversational prop (or at least, not exclusively for those very understandable reasons) – I smoked because it physically felt good. It also didn’t seem to be doing any physical damage, since I never developed a horrible hacking cough or anything like that. I still didn’t buy cigarettes very often, but I did start buying them. Camel Lights were my brand, mostly because of the simple circumstance of being so common when I was bumming them off other people.
Ah, Joe Camel, you magnificent son of a bitch. I can’t say that smoking ever made me feel like a tuxedoed secret agent catching submarine rides to spearfishing dates in the tropics with wetsuited blondes. But it always felt pretty good. I’ve talked to other smokers who described reaching the point where a single cigarette no longer provides any kind of lightheaded chemical rush. It just settles the needy monster of the addiction itself. In other words, it doesn’t transport them from normal to good, it just restores them from bad to normal. I never got to that point, luckily.
I tried to quit smoking several more times but it never really took. I would cut back for a while, then I would binge for a while. My ex was vehemently anti-smoking, which only meant that I smoked less and took heroic measures to cover my trail when I had been smoking. When we got divorced, which came on the heels of me getting laid off, that was the closest I ever came to being a pack-a-day-every-day smoker. I would smoke in the car in the morning on the way to my shitty new job, take smoke breaks at work, smoke on the way home and smoke here and there in the evening. When I went out to bars I would basically chainsmoke. If I hadn’t been addicted before that particular rough stretch, I no doubt was after.
But life got better and the future got more appealing and I wanted to enjoy as long and healthy a future as possible. I entertained the thought of just cutting back. A lot of my friends still smoked at the time (and a lot of them still do) but several of them had adopted the stance of “I don’t want to stop smoking, but I want to smoke less” with varying degrees of success. But by age 29, having smoked more or less continuously for the preceding decade, I knew that the cutback model wouldn’t work for me. Anything I indulge in has a very high chance of being something I overindulge in. Most of my previous attempts to quit had slowly deteriorated into attempts to cut back, and then I would find myself out drinking and wanting just one cigarette, which I gave myself permission to have because that still counted as cutting back, but no one around me would have any so I would have to buy a pack, and then after I’d smoked one I would have nineteen left over which would go to waste unless I smoked some more that night and the rest the next day or two, and that’s not exactly cutting back … I learned my lessons. There is no such thing as an occasional cigarette for me. It’s either one that inevitably leads to more, or zero.
And I chose zero, although I dragged it out to just about the last possible moment. At the end of the work day on September 30, 2004, I shut down my computer and took the elevator downstairs with the buddy I was carpooling with. He also smoked. We stepped out of the lobby of the office building, lit up on the sidewalk, and shared an amiable after-work smoke, which was not at all out of the ordinary. But I told my buddy that would have to be my last ever cigarette. I couldn’t smoke once I turned 30 the next day. He was supportive, but probably skeptical. Still, I managed to stick to my resolve.
I quit cold turkey, which sucked a lot at first but eventually got better. I still want to smoke every once in a while. Like I said, it was never about stifling the withdrawal symptoms, it was always about the fact that it felt good, a feeling that I remember and kind of miss. But I know I’m better off without it, and even if I get hit by a bus when I’m 40 I won’t think “Man, I should have smoked in my 30s.” (Well, probably not. Much more likely is “Man, that bus came out of nowhere!”)
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