September 28, 2003
History
1: 12 years old. Sitting in an office where my father had some business. His cigarette is smoldering in the ashtray, and when he leaves the room I pick it up, put it to my lips, and inhale. It tastes like dirt. Following this I walk around and try and imagine the addiction that is moving through my veins. Feeling nothing, I don’t smoke again for several years.
7,396: In high school sit on the south lawn of our school and smoke. I wore a long black trench coat. which, in later years, would have ID’d me as a potential school shooter, but which, at the time, was kind of cool. We used to sit out there at lunch in the sun and smoke and smoke and fill our lungs with sweet dead ether.
7,809: My father and I are driving to see my grandmother in the hospital and I casually light up a cigarette. “So, you’re smoking now,” he says. “You know, I quit because you asked me to.” I am teenaged and sullen so I don’t respond. He is getting angry, I can tell, so I throw the cigarette out the window. “You’re only smoking so that you can learn how to smoke pot aren’t you? Stay away from that stuff.” I haven’t the heart to tell him that I’ve been smoking pot longer than cigarettes.
8,900: After seeing my grandmother I excuse myself and walk to the outside of the nursing home. I light a cigarette there, and an old woman rolls up next to me in a wheelchair. “Have a light?” she croaks. Her fingers are stained yellow, and she shakes as she leans up to the flame and ignites her chesterfield. “Those things will kill you,” she jokes.
15,699: In the car we listen to the radio and smoke and consider our options for the evening. I want to go to the coffee shop, but she wants to go wander around under the viaducts. Instead we go to the train yards and stand around admiring the glow of Union Station in the distance.
21,909: While driving over the Continental divide on the way back from Carbondale Colorado where I had been admiring my aunt and uncle’s chickens, I tried to ash out a car window, bumped into the glass, dropped the cherry onto my lap, and then furiously beat about my crotch in order to put it out. This caused a circular burn on the crotch of the pants, and a small lesion on my inner thigh. This will happen seventeen times during the course of my smoking.
43,090: My first attempt at quitting smoking. I’m twenty-two, in New York City, staying at a fourth floor walkup. It’s a pain in the ass to walk downstairs to smoke. Instead of smoking, I decide to stay drunk. Whenever I crave a cigarette, I drink, the stronger the urge, the more I drink. Two weeks later I am shaking, sleepless, and hazy. Smoking, at this point, seems like the healthy decision. When I light up it is like falling into a warm bed.
51,589: We are sitting outside on the metal benches in the square smoking. We are wearing the blue aprons that they require us to have on at all times. The windows look down into the shop, and we make fun of the new manager as he stands befuddled in front of the Docutech 5000. The girls from the shoe shop upstairs join us occasionally, but our aprons mark us as slackers, and out conversations are short and meaningless. We can’t get the electric sound of the pages copying out of our heads.
65,785: After the phone call I sit at the window and light a cigarette. I don’t feel it at all. The smoke comes in and goes back out as simple and obvious as breathing. There is a family of stray cats in the back and they bat at each other good naturedly. When I cough they scatter into the brush.
73,989: Current. I am smoking a Marlboro light, my second of the day, sitting in my bedroom, listening to the trains go by, typing absentmindedly on the keyboard.
