alexpgp | LJ Idol 6.18: Adored...

My first cigarette was filched from a pack my stepdad had left on the table next to his TV-viewing couch and smoked in a quiet alley far from the family hearth. After a few drags on the cancer stick, I could only wonder why anyone would deliberately do this to themselves every so often during the day, day in and day out. I concluded that smoking was, in the words my mother used in extolling the virtues of lima beans and broccoli, "an acquired taste."

As I grew up, I never really felt any compulsion or pressure to start smoking. My dad had smoked, true, but my exposure to him had been minimal before he and my mom had divorced and he died. My stepdad smoked, but the episode with the stolen cigarette only reinforced my resolve to be nothing like him in any way. Among my peers in junior high school, cigarettes were the badge of those who ran with the fast crowd, a somewhat exclusive group one did not so much join as become a part of though some arcane process unknowable to the rest of humanity.

The point was reinforced one teenage August day while attending a summer camp where the adult staff had adopted a policy of allowing the older and (theoretically) more mature campers to supervise the rest of us. This arrangement resulted in a mêlée of rule-bending, bullying, and hazing by the older campers that went unreported because of the universal imperative - one perhaps hard-wired into the human genome - not to snitch, but I digress...

I had been walking in a wooded area outside the camp's boundaries when I stumbled, quite literally, across a milk carton half buried in the soil. Intrigued by the artifact and the geometric precision with which it had been planted in the ground, I picked up the wax container and looked inside. It was filled with cigarettes and matches. Realizing I had stumbled across the counselors' stash, I replaced the carton as carefully as I could and walked away, thinking "no harm, no foul."

My bad.

That night, after returning to the tent area after dinner, I found my path blocked as I attempted to leave the toilet. The senior counselor stood in the door that led to freedom.

"We want to talk to you," he said, taking a step forward and pushing me back so that I was sitting on the trough that served as the urinal in the bathroom. "We" turned out to be the rest of the counselor "staff," which filed into the room after him.

"What were you doing in the woods this afternoon?" asked the senior counselor.

"N-nothing," I said. "Walking around."

"Find anything interesting?" asked another voice.

I figured there was no percentage in lying, so I answered, "A milk carton. I put it back. I didn't take anything."

"Uh-huh," said the senior counselor, taking a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket. He shook one out and offered it to me. "Here," he said, "have a cigarette."

"No, thanks," I said, giving my head a little shake. "I don't smoke."

"What do you mean?" he said, with feigned surprise. "I thought you just adored cigarettes!"

"Yeah," said another voice, from the lookout in the doorway, "especially those that aren't yours!" This elicited a ripple of subdued laughter in the small room.

"Take it!" snapped the senior counselor. It was not a request.

I took the cigarette and he lit it for me.

"Now smoke it!" he said.

"We want to see you inhale!" said another voice over my left shoulder.

"But..." I started to protest. Tears were already welling up in my eyes.

"I don't want to hear it!" the senior counselor cut me off. "And stop stalling! Since you like to smoke, then smoke!"

"And we don't want to see you breathing between drags, either," came the lookout's voice.

The rest of that night is a jumbled memory of tears, pleading, getting slapped and punched, stalling for time, and inhaling cigarette smoke. I remember being told that as soon as I threw up, the punishment would end. Unfortunately, I had mostly skipped dinner that evening, electing to eat only a plate of spinach soup, which had long since passed through my stomach. The best I could produce was dry heaves. By the time the punishment stopped, I had lost count of how many cigarettes I had been forced to smoke. It had seemed like a million.

For the rest of the summer, I walked lightly and kept a very low profile.

You would think that, with such a painful and embarrassing experience behind me, I would stay as far away from cigarettes as possible for the rest of my life.

You'd be wrong.

I began to smoke consciously, of my own free will, during freshman year of college, and then only for the best of reasons: to give myself the aura of an older, more worldly-wise person. Go figure.

Smoking did nothing for my popularity, but I was hooked, and I continued to smoke while in college and afterward. Like many people who start smoking, I found quitting to be the easiest thing in the world; by the time Galina was about to deliver our son, I had done so at least several hundred times.

I had made a particularly vehement vow to stop smoking by the time Drew was born, but like most such promises, it crawled into a corner somewhere and expired quietly. When we moved from New York to Florida, I tried to contain the urge and managed to confine my smoking to areas outside our apartment, but I could not quit. In fact, the harder I tried to quit, the more I was drawn to light one up. There were times I almost gave up the effort and tried to convince myself that I really liked to smoke.

One Sunday morning, I came down with some flu-like symptoms that kept me in bed, out cold, for the better part of three days. Galina told me later she would have called the paramedics had it not been for a neighbor of ours, who nursed me back to health, mostly with copious quantities of liquids.

One of the first things I did after getting out of bed was grab hold of my cigarettes.

Then I stopped, holding the pack in midair as if I was offering a smoke to an invisible guest.

I realized that I was acting out of habit, because I really didn't feel a need to smoke. So I put the cigarettes down, telling myself I would light up as soon as I felt I had to. It was Wednesday, a work day, so I got dressed and went to work. I took the pack along, just in case.

By quitting time, I hadn't felt the urge to smoke, but I knew I wasn't out of the woods yet. The local chess club met on Wednesday nights, and it just so happened that the first round of the annual club championship would be played that night.

With the exception of a handful of tournament games played when I was in high school, it had been years since I had played a serious game of chess without a cigarette between my lips. By this time, I could not imagine playing chess and not smoking. So, when I left for the club that night, I made sure my pack was in my shirt pocket, and I was prepared to light up at the slightest provocation, especially if it took the form of a struggle in a difficult position.

The tournament schedule called for me to play two games that night, and surprisingly, I won them both. Even more surprising, the thought of lighting up hadn’t even crossed my mind.

Those two tobacco-free wins gave me enough confidence to get to the next Wednesday night without a cigarette, but I still wasn't convinced. That next Wednesday, though, the pack stayed untouched in my pocket as I scored a win and a draw. My result after the first two weeks of play was the best I had ever achieved in the first four games of any tournament!

I forgot to take the pack to work the next day, and didn't even miss it. On Friday, I deliberately left the pack at home. The following Wednesday, I won the last two games of the tournament. The pack had remained home, sealed in a plastic bag.

Just in case I got the urge, you know?

A few years ago, I ran across that pack, still in the bag, in the bottom of an old storage box. I broke open the plastic, took out the pack, and shook out a cigarette. I held it the way I used to when I smoked, moved it to my lips and away again. I put the cigarette in my mouth and left it there. I lit a match and paused a moment.

Then I blew the match out, tossed all the cigarettes in the trash, and went on with my life.

Current Location: Pagosa Springs, Colorado

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

agirlnamedluna.livejournal.com

That is very interesting, because I've been sick at least 3 times where I quit smoking because I was simply too weak to even think about it (twice in the pneumology department for a week, once at home) and I started again, for stupid reasons. Like *after* doing all my exams without smokes (twice) but because one of the last had been stressful. And so on. Yet when I knew I was pregnant I quit immediately (I think I smoked 3 after the positive pregnancy test, one because I was thinking "OMG I NEED A SMOKE"). Haven't looked back since, no matter how stressful kids can be! However, had she not been there and I'd have had to play a chess game f.e. I'd have cracked immediately. Funny how that works!

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Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.

LJ Idol 6.18: Adored...

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