Both my parents smoked. My father smoked almost right up to the time he died of lung cancer. My mother quit in the 1960s, but she had a ferocious Sen-Sen / Life Savers habit for the rest of her life.
As a kid I used to sit in the front seat of the car, between my father in the driver's seat and my mother on the other side. They both blew smoke in my face. I stared straight ahead into the overflowing ashtray and the cigarette lighter (both of which sort of fascinated me).
Despite all this, I never had any desire to smoke, until my boss and his wife took me to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park back in the early 1980s. Someone outside the park was giving away free packs of Lucky Strikes (get it? strike? baseball?). I took a pack home with me and put it in a drawer. I smoked one finally, but I didn't much care for it. Then I tried some of those noxious “Black & Mild” cigarillos that taste like the tobacco equivalent of flavored vodka.
Obviously, as you can tell, it was preying on my mind.
Soon after, in the Peace Corps, I discovered that everyone in North Africa smoked all the time.
I was up to two packs a day in no time. In Morocco, I smoked Koutoubia cigarettes. When I moved to Tunisia, I discovered Vingt-Mars cigarettes. Also Cristal. Also Koaqib, which tasted great, but made me cough like a TB patient. (I found out later they had snuff in them, which evidently liquefies when you smoke it, and oozes through your lungs like asphalt.)
And why? Because it was calming. Because it was a little moment of relaxation during the day. Because the smoke was strangely soothing.
I came back to the USA in 1987, still smoking two packs a day (now Benson & Hedges 100s Lights). This went on for another ten years.
Did I mention that my father died of lung cancer? Also my uncle Claude? Also a couple of other relatives?
I knew I stank of smoke. I knew that I was a fire hazard. I didn't much care. (Smokers don't really care. It's a strange state of mind.) But I'd made a promise to myself: I'd quit by the time I was forty.
In 1998, my forty-first year, I actually quit.
Even now, thirteen years later, I still dream about it. The dreams are strange: I find myself lighting a cigarette, and thinking: Oh no! If I smoke I'm hooked again! And I do, and I'm very disappointed with myself.
How very peculiar addiction is.
But I have a vivid memory of leaving the house on a lovely warm Tunis morning, and feeling the fresh air in my face, and lighting the first cigarette of the day.
And it was wonderful.
No comments:
Post a Comment