The way we wereThree of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.At the time I first read this - my senior year of college when I ought to have been working on my then-long overdue thesis - I was myself a committed smoker, already at my apex of roughly a pack a day. It was a habit that I had flirted with at first during my freshman year of college, a flirtation that intensified into a fling during my sophomore year when I began to associate with more and more people for whom smoking was an occupation rather than a hobby; a mere year later I consummated the relationship, taking up the habit full-time as a result of having to play a character who smoked (well, a character whom the director believed should smoke) in a production of David Mamet's The Cryptogram. Well, I would like to believe this last part, as it provides a sort of alibi for my decision - "I sacrificed my health for my art, you see" - but the fact of the matter is that few people play with fire as long as I did without being consumed by it.
I was a committed ideological, pathological smoker for about three solid years. My brand was Camel Lights; Parliaments or Kamel Reds would do in a pinch, American Spirits for a brief change of pace, but I abhorred the cardboard proletarian taste of Marlboro Lights. I smoked them anywhere/time I could: in between classes, during a break in a three-hour seminar, out on the "balcony" of The Arch (Penn theater!), during intermission of plays I was watching, during intermission of plays I was in (there I was, standing outside in the snow in an alley next to the Annenberg Center dressed like a redneck between acts of True West), surreptitiously leaning out the window of my shared dorm room (sorry, Steve), unsurreptitiously in the single apartment I had my senior year. I, like all smokers, structured my life around my habit: I avoided places I wouldn't be able to smoke for long durations, and always tried to ensure that I would be appropriately, and when possible, cheaply supplied. The high point of this determined routine was when I was at a 7-11 on 42nd and Walnut one evening, buying a pack: a woman wielding a butcher's knife chased a man inside, during what seemed to be a domestic dispute; I calmly prompted the cashier, temporarily paralyzed with fear, to hand over my Camel Lights and change before I walked out the door. (For the record, I did not call the police, and to my knowledge, everyone survived.)
At that time, I had nothing but contempt for non-smokers who condescendingly chastised me for what they perceived to be either my stupidity or suicidal impulse. "Lung cancer! Heart disease! Emphysema!" they'd say; "Go fuck yourselves!" I'd reply. Smoking brought out the libertarian in me: why couldn't others just mind their own goddamned business? I contorted logic to defend what few easements remained for us smokers, such as the besieged right to light up in bars and casinos, even though I knew in my heart of hearts that the infliction of second-hand smoke on others was unconscionable. My outward facade of intractable defiance towards the non-smoking world was a manifestation of my well-deserved insecurity; cigarettes made me a hypocrite, but it was a small price to pay for the passion we shared.
I knew I would eventually have to quit, of course. Like the Second Coming, I knew not the day or the hour, but I knew that it was inevitable. Even at 23 years of age, I could feel what cigarettes were doing to me: my breathing was becoming more labored, my nicotine-stained hands would begin to shake, I was coughing up phlegm routinely and getting sick more often, and some mornings I would wake up and it would feel like there was a man sitting on my chest. Occasionally, especially after a period of illness, I would try to give up smoking, but like one of those abandoned dogs you read about that traverse half the country in search of their rightful owners, cigarettes always seemed to find me in the end. Faced with such admirable persistence, I would give in, telling myself that I would cut back or some other such ameliorative; it was all bullshit, of course. Big Tobacco always won in the end.
Until, one day, it didn't. It was August 7, 2005, and I was lying in bed, sweating profusely, my heart racing, considering the larger issue of my own mortality. I don't know why, but I imagined that doctor's visit, The One, the one where he pulls out the results of the biopsy, gesticulates at the otherwise unremarkable white dot on the x-ray, and tells me, "It's malignant." Sure, there will be courses of "treatment" available: chemotherapy, surgery, a transplant, an amputation, a tracheotomy, whatever. But all of it is a mere formality; he and I both know that I'm going to die. And what's more, we both know that I deserve it. I thought about where I might be at that point: in my eighties, with the better part of my life well behind me? In my sixties, with my children mostly grown up and out of college? In my forties, with my children barely in their teens yet? What would I tell them the day I got the news? "It was worth it?" "Sorry I fucked up?" I was afraid of dying an idiot's death.
The next morning I read that Peter Jennings had died of lung cancer. I crushed a half-full pack of Camel Lights and threw them away, started chewing Nicorette, and went cold turkey. It wasn't easy: that first day smoke-free stretched out like an ocean of banality, devoid of the spark that punctuated even the most mundane task, my great reward for simply enduring. The nicotine proved easy to conquer; it was the habit, the routine, the ritual that vexed me. But I beat that, too. It's been two and a half years and counting since I picked up my last cigarette.
Just as there is no such thing as a former alcoholic, no one is ever truly an ex-smoker. The intervening years have done nothing to sever that elemental, ineluctable connection between me and the flame. In my dreams I put the next cigarette to my lips again and again, the guilt of failure drowned out by the sweet rush of endorphins that feels more real than real; in my dreams I cradle the smoke in my lungs and return from a self-imposed exile. My subconscious conspires against me still. I continue to burn.
