A few days ago, I was chatting with a lady I really respect when she happened to mention that she had recently quit smoking.
“Really?” I said, a little surprised that anyone as bright and health conscious as she is would have been puffing away on cancer sticks for most of her adult life.
“You probably didn’t even know that I smoked, did you?” she asked, no doubt noticing the puzzled expression on my face.
“No,” I answered, “but that’s great that you’ve decided to quit.”
“It’s actually been pretty easy so far,” she said, “and once I make a decision like that, I’m really good about not changing my mind. It’s only been 20 days, but I’m absolutely sure I won’t go back to smoking again.”
You’re definitely a stronger willed person than I am, I thought to myself, recalling how truly difficult it had been for me to quit smoking some 45 years ago this past Monday. And how do I remember the exact day, you ask? Well, first a little history.
I began smoking cigarettes at the ridiculously young age of 13. A few of my buddies were doing it, and since I was determined to be just as cool as they were, one night in a friend’s bedroom, I agreed to light up one of his Lucky Strikes (they didn’t have any filters back then) and puff away on it.
“No, that’s not the way to do it,” said my very cool friend as I sat around in the center of the cloud of smoke I had created, “you’ve got to inhale it! You know, suck it in before you blow it out. See, like this.”
His demonstration, especially the way he blew out two or three perfect little circles of smoke, was just about the coolest thing I had ever witnessed. “Like this?” I asked him, taking a deep drag on my Lucky Strike. When I had finally stopped coughing and choking about two or three minutes later, my cool friend patted me on the back and assured me that all I needed was a little practice.
And practice I did! I’d hide in my parents’ bathroom with the door locked, sucking away on my dad’s Pall Malls (which, when lit, smelled a little like the sewer water down in the ditch at the end of my street) or on my mom’s Salems, which left a strong menthol-flavor taste in my mouth and made me think that instead of having just done something really wicked, I had only brushed my teeth.
And not only did I religiously work on my inhaling, but I also spent countless hours improving my ability to blow smoke out of my nose (instead of just my mouth) as well as refining my Humphrey Bogart lip-hanging cigarette technique.
When someone would finally bang on the door, I would quickly flush all the evidence away and then very innocently stroll out of the bathroom, so dizzy that I would bounce off the hallway walls on my way to the front room. If the TV was on, the screen would inevitably start to sway back and forth in front of my eyes and make me so seasick I was sure I was going to throw up. Did I ever once consider that maybe my body was trying to tell me something? Never.
As I became an accomplished smoker (after also trying Camels, Winstons, Tareytons, Kents and Raleighs – I tried those because of the coupons) I decided if I was really going to be cool, though, I had to become a Marlboro Man.
Anyway, by the time I returned from Vietnam, I was smoking three packs of my beloved Marlboros a day and I finally decided it was definitely time to quit. I mean, my whole day was organized around cigarette smoking, and it was also getting to be pretty expensive. I tried cutting back, but that only seemed to make them taste better. I tried not buying my own, but that only made me a dreaded mooch. I tried only smoking outdoors, but that didn’t make much sense on cold, rainy winter nights. I tried smoking only after meals, but that left me with nothing to do on work breaks. I even tried smoking those low tar things, but they almost gave me a hernia trying to drag some nicotine out of the darn things.
Then it finally dawned on me. I needed a REAL reason to quit. The ones I had used before (someone once even convinced me that quitting smoking would improve my sex life — something about nicotine deadening nerve endings?) simply hadn’t worked. What could I use? There had to be something.
“The doctor says the baby could come any day now,” announced my wife one night during a very competitive Scrabble game.
That’s it, I told myself. Parents shouldn’t smoke! The day the baby is born, you’re quitting for good! And unlike New Years or some other date I was always picking out and then discarding, the birth of my first child was one that wouldn’t be coming around again.
So, the night my daughter arrived in this world, I puffed away like crazy on my Marlboros until the nurses let me see her and her mother. Then I slipped into the nearest bathroom, tossed the rest of my pack into a wastepaper basket, and told myself if I ever smoked again, I’d be lower than pond slime.
Not only did it somehow work, but now, some 45 years later, I’m one of those horrible, reformed smokers who is always telling people who light up that they’re probably going to die decades earlier than they should, and even worse, that their clothes and hair reek of foul-smelling cigarette smoke.
And the only memory I still cherish now from my smoking days is the lit Viceroy cigarette some very sweet nurse with incredibly kind brown eyes once offered me in an aid station in a faraway village called Lai Khe, Vietnam.