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Originally
appeared in Troika Magazine
"The
Benefits of Smoking"
I
don’t smoke anymore, but I did for many years, and I was
good at it. I smoked fifty Marlboros a day, every day,
and twice that number on weekends. I always lit up a
cigarette first thing in the morning and kept a pack or
two or three within reach all day long. I smoked before
and after meals, before and after movies, before and
after classes, before and after everything.
Sports did not hinder my smoking at all. On the golf
course, I smoked one cigarette per hole, and two on the
par fives. I played shortstop on a slow-pitch softball
team and kept a lit cigarette on the outfield grass just
behind me, for quick hits between pitches. For years I
was a high school teacher and coach, and I demanded the
principal assign me the classroom next to the teachers’
lounge, so I could pop in for a quick smoke after every
class. The football practice field I littered with
thousands of non-organic Marlboro filters every season.
I once smoked one full carton of cigarettes in a
twenty-four-hour period during an all-night poker game
in South Carolina. I also drank a fifth of gin and at
least a case of beer during the same twenty-four hours.
Near the end the gin, the beer, and the cigarettes all
tasted exactly the same: a dull, burning bitterness, but
one I could not do without.
I finally quit smoking on a bet. I bet my best friend,
who was also my roommate and therefore my sometimes
enemy, ten dollars that I could go one full week without
a smoke.
I challenged myself the very first day. I knew there
were three occasions when I absolutely had to have a
cigarette – while drinking, after a meal, and after sex
– so I called up a woman I knew and took her to lunch,
then out to a bar, and then to my apartment. I got
through that day okay and made the week by staying too
drunk to think about smoking, or anything else for that
matter.
Then my roommate, the dirty snake, insisted we go
double-or-nothing on a second week. The rest, as they
say, is history. I still consider myself a smoker. I
could light up right now and suck those magic vapors
into my nicotine-craving soul. I just haven’t had one
for nineteen years. I guess I’m running out the string
on a good bet.
In a way I miss my smoking years. I was popular back
then. I was cool. Booze and cigarettes made me a
sociable guy, or so I thought at the time. What I really
regret is the fact that I never struck terrible revenge
on all those cheapskates who bummed cigarettes from me
every day.
There is something predatory about a man who bums
cigarettes from another man. Why doesn’t he buy his own,
you ask yourself. He makes as much money as you do. He
probably has smokes in his jacket pocket. Yet he must
have yours, for some reason. You suspect he craves power
over you, the power the beggar holds over the
charity-giver. You could say no way, jerk, buy your own
damn tobacco, but somehow that makes you feel cheap and
petty. So you give him the smoke, for the very last
time, you tell yourself, and then he owns you, and you
hate him for it. He makes you want to hurt someone. You
want to go borrow money from your poor sick mother or
kick a small dog.
The highlight of my twelve-year smoking career, in
fact, was a four-month period when I was feared and
revered by all the cigarette-bummers around me. This was
way back during my basic training days at Fort Polk,
Louisiana. In the army, of course, bummers are legion.
Military days are so incredibly boring, you can’t get
through one of them without chain-smoking.
I had a friend, though, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, an
hour from the base, who brought me little tin containers
of cigarette loads, tiny explosive sticks that, when
touched off by fire, burst the cigarette in the smoker’s
face, just like you’d see in an old 1940s cartoon.
I loaded a few cigarettes in my every pack and marked
them ever so slightly with my thumbnail, for my own
protection. Soldiers who bummed smokes from me knew the
chances were approximately three in twenty that their
borrowed prizes would literally blow up in their faces,
the cigarette lining curling up in strips like cheap
paper daisies.
I had more fun watching the non-loaded cigarettes get
smoked than witnessing the exploding ones. The worried
faces sucking in with tentative lips and fear behind the
eyes were more entertaining than the stunned, fooled
expressions on those whose smoking pleasure was
shattered by luck and the odds of my retribution. Always
the anticipation of disaster in the human heart is worse
than the disaster itself.
My system of marking cigarettes, by the way, was not
foolproof. Occasionally my devious cigarette bombs blew
up in my own face, to the delight and wonderment of the
bummers. This made my cigarettes seem divinely loaded,
in the hands of a higher power, out of my or anyone’s
control. To these guys my smokes were like many of the
good things in life – money, booze, beautiful women –
all plentiful but dangerous. You never knew when you’d
get burned.
When I finally did quit smoking, I experienced positive
and negative results. I gained some health and lung
capacity, but I lost all my mannerisms. I don’t go to
parties since I stopped smoking. I can’t carry on a
decent conversation, because I have no gestures, no
cigarette-emphatic flair in what I try to say. I end up
staring at my hands, wondering what to do with them.
That’s when I started writing, by the way, after I quit
smoking. Just to have something to do with my hands. I
don’t know if I’ve gained anything. Writing is at least
as dangerous to your health as smoking is, and both will
wreck you financially.
Another setback to the ex-smoker is the loss of the art
of relaxation. How can you really kick back if you don’t
light up a smoke? And, of course, there’s the problem of
sexual intercourse. What do you do afterwards? Talk?
I found I have no personality, no individuality without
my cigarette mannerisms. The intensity with which you
draw on a smoke, the deadly stare you can maintain while
inhaling, the direction and velocity of the cloud you
exhale, these are meaningful gestures. They give your
conversation accent, importance, mystery, and pregnant
pause. Without them you become a boring guy like me.
Picture Humphrey Bogart without a cigarette and George
Burns without his cigar. You couldn’t pick them out of a
parade of English teachers. They’d show the flair and
pizzazz of convenience store clerks.
But the number one benefit of smoking is the chance to
lose some weight. The day I quit I weighed one hundred
seventy pounds. Two months later I rocked the scales at
two hundred ten. So it stands to reason, then, if I
light up tomorrow, I should be on my way to losing forty
pounds.
I have to wonder, though. Why this obsession in our
society with losing weight in the first place? Is it
narcissism? Do we long to gaze at our full-length
bathroom mirrors and ponder the beauty of our bony knees
and prominent rib cages? Or do we yearn to become more
attractive to others?
Suppose we do get skinnier, succeed in sculpting our
bodies into shapes that excite and tantalize others.
What then? Are we aware of the dangers and pitfalls we
risk? If we are married and get suddenly thinner, for
example, our spouses will accuse us of having an affair.
And probably rightly so. But why tip them off so easily?
For those of you who lust after extramarital,
extracurricular activities, I have some experience in
the matter and can advise you. Stay fat. If you are not
already fat, quit smoking and get fat.
If we are unmarried and get suddenly thinner and
more attractive, we must suffer the torment of
unremitting sexual advances and loss of privacy. We’ll
be forever denied the chance to sit quietly in bars and
get drunk. Bad-breathed lechers will constantly buy us
drinks and suggest strange overnight accommodations.
Aggressive persons will crusade to get naked with us, to
touch and poke and tickle and stroke our bodies, causing
us to get diseases, or married, or worse.
So don’t start smoking to lose weight without
considering the consequences. Overweight people are
people, too. I weigh one tenth of a ton, and my
brother-in-law, who used to smoke more than I did,
weighs an eight of a ton. We’re a couple of happy guys,
and you can be happy, too, no matter how much you weigh.
Think of the restaurants you patronize. High-priced,
elegant dining establishments feature tiny portions and
monstrous prices, and the meager food is administered by
scrawny, sour-pussed waiters. Envision the maitre d’ at
such an institution. He’ll be a small, thin, ugly
misanthrope with his nose in the air and his hand in
your pocket. He’ll smoke narrow little college-girl
cigarettes and look effeminate, but you won’t ponder his
sexual orientation because, male or female, homo or
hetero, you just won’t care.
Now picture the fat, happy manager of a Denny’s or
Perkins or some other cheap franchise carbohydrate
factory. He’s a lard-butt in polyester slacks who wears
his tie too wide, the wrong color, and way too short,
leaving a big belly gap between the tie point and belt
buckle. He’ll smoke Bull Durhams or Lucky Strikes
unfiltered, and you’ll wonder how much he’d weigh if he
ever quit.
But he smiles as you walk in, pausing from his task of
shouting orders at the long-haired, glassy-eyed
kitchen-hippies who cook at night. He grins and winks as
if it’s your little secret – this is where the big
servings are. You pile up small mountains of cheap food
from the salad bar and later chomp and stuff huge
portions of meat, bread, and potatoes. And fat girls
serve you here, friendly chubbettes with bright-colored
hair and too much eye make-up who talk dirty and let you
pinch their hefty bottoms. No confusion about sexual
orientation in the cheap restaurants.
When I’m not smoking, I’m a food whore. Very
promiscuous. Try to name a food I don’t like or won’t
eat in great volumes. I’m so horny for some foods, like
pork, potato chips, and Sloppy Joes, I’m dangerous. Let
me into your house and I’ll rape your refrigerator and
leave your wife alone. I’d rather spend an evening with
a gallon of beer and a pound of chips and dip than steal
your best girlfriend. Food, fat, fun, fried, and full
are the only “F” words I know.
I do believe a few cigarettes a day would constitute a
healthy regimen for me today, but I know if I smoke a
few, I’ll smoke fifty, so I stay away from them
altogether.
I also don’t know if I could afford to smoke these
days. I saw a sign in a grocery store last week - $27.19
for a carton of Pyramid Lights, whatever the hell those
are. If twenty-seven dollars is a sale price for a
carton of third-rate cigarettes, I’d be one broke smoker
today shelling out for two or three cartons of Marlboros
every week. I have to admire you folks who still smoke.
You must be rich, dedicated, and hooked.
I am seriously considering resuming my smoking habit,
though, as a form of social protest. Everywhere I go, I
see “No Smoking” signs. Well, don’t you tell me what I
can or cannot do. So to hell with my health and my
pocketbook. I’m ready to light up. Anyone have a
Marlboro I could bum?
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