Driving through a cold spring drizzle, I noticed a young woman, smoking. She was standing under the eaves of a non-descript office building, wearing heels and a short, clingy black dress, her arms, neck, and chest naked and exposed against the cutting edge of the wind.
Look at her, she must be freezing. Barely lifting his head as I spoke, my husband nodded indifferently. I gazed at her with pity through the rain-flecked windshield—her addiction to nicotine was conspicuously on display, standing in the cold and wet like that.
But there was something about her stance—one arm flung protectively around her waist as the smoke drifting off her cigarette caressed her throat—that made me catch my breath a little.
I love cigarettes. I know that’s not a popular thing to say anymore but it’s the God’s honest truth. And even though I haven’t smoked since 1987, I miss them.
Over the years, I’ve sometimes thought if a new report came out, saying, hey, we were wrong, only kidding folks, cigarettes are actually not harmful at all, contradicting decades of careful epidemiologic and biological research, I would be the first in line to buy a pack of Benson & Hedges menthols, the faithful companion to my twenties.
How I loved smoking back then. I loved everything about it. The calming ritual of it, how tapping out a fresh white cylinder, as new as the day, from under its gold foil canopy would make me feel focused and alive each morning. And how, in the evening, striking the red phosphorous tip at the end of a match and watching it flame, fizzing and flaring, would give me the sensation of contained danger and the endless possibilities the night might bring. That feeling that anything could happen. That something just might.
I can still recall inhaling deeply, half squinting while the minty tobacco smoldered and the smoke curled upwards, giving me the time and the mental space to think. I could then ponder, for example, whether I wanted to squander my money on the shrimp cocktail or settle for the French onion soup. Or maybe even decide, finally and not a minute too soon, that I had best leave my latest boyfriend before we both slid into hell together on the seat of a flaming toboggan.
My years as a regular smoker began innocently enough at the age of twenty when I worked as a waitress at a popular restaurant in Waikiki. After a few weeks, I discovered that the only way to get a break was to ask another waitress to “watch my tables,” and head over to the collective ashtray in the kitchen. There, you could share a smoke with the sous chefs and at least ninety percent of the waitresses. By then, I was sick of covering everyone else’s tables and I wanted in on the (non)action.
But I didn’t anticipate just how much I would like that jolt of nicotine or how perfectly it would fit into my life. Had a rough night? A cup of coffee and a long drag on a cigarette can gird you for the day ahead, giving you the will to slap on your lip gloss, slip on your power jacket, and face the demons head on. Had a bad day? A glass of wine and a borrowed Marlboro Red can relax you and allow you to quiet down for the night, re-playing those idiotic conversations in your head so you can reassure yourself that the other party is the one being unreasonable, not you. No, definitely not you.
Once, years ago, I read a study that purported to show that cigarettes had the ability to induce varying psychotropic effects depending on how quickly or how slowly you inhaled. So, when smokers smoked quickly, as one is apt to do in the morning or when in a hurry, the psychoactive components would result in chemical activity in the brain that helped you pay attention and made you feel more energized. Whereas when smokers smoked in a more leisurely fashion, such as one would be apt to do at the end of a workday or when out with friends, the active ingredients would cause biochemical and neurological reactions which would be more likely to induce a state of relaxation.
I cannot vouch for the specifics of that study (or even the accuracy of my memory about it) but I clearly recall reading it and thinking what a seriously clever product cigarettes were—one that does it all, whatever you require, at just the perfect time. If you think I’m exaggerating, try smoking some hash before a critical meeting where you will be grilled about the third quarter numbers or having a double espresso before heading home to drift off to a dreamless sleep.
And back when everyone was smoking, and believe it or not, there was such a time, it was imbued with a dark seductiveness. We referred to cigarettes as “cancer sticks” but who’s afraid of getting cancer in your twenties? That was as unlikely to happen as getting older or forgetting your youthful dreams.
And then there were all those delicious accessories to play with: the engraved lighters, the leather cases, the slim cigarette holders that my girlfriends and I would trot out for each other. We would practice the art of holding a cigarette in one hand while gesturing and talking, weaving circlets of smoke in the air like hazy daisy chains. We had lots to say, yes, we certainly did, on every conceivable subject—such as why our mothers were so clueless or why the worst women were asked out by the nicest men.
Or we might brood and go silent and flick a lighter looking bored while assessing the men on the dance floor, where sadly, most of them did not quite measure up.
I smoked straight through college, where cigarettes helped me study late into the night, and I smoked through medical school—I know, I know—where I was one of a small cadre of dedicated smokers, a friendly group from which I could cadge a cigarette or borrow a lighter without embarrassment.
I only decided to quit smoking when I married the man across the hall from me in the med school dorm and we decided to conceive our first child. Smoking is harmful for fetal development, and, believe me, I didn’t need that on my conscience. Plus, I didn’t want to be one of those mothers, tugging a sobbing toddler by the arm while cigarette ashes fell from a still-lit ciggie in my mouth.
I quit cold turkey, spending the first few weeks trailing smokers or entering rooms where they’d just been, to breathe in their second-hand smoke. But slowly, I started losing the urge. And becoming pregnant stubbed out any lingering desire. Nothing tasted or smelled good back then, especially not stale cigarette smoke.
I smoked for around ten years, a respectable amount of time, certainly longer than a lot of first jobs or second marriages. And I confess I didn’t anticipate how much I would come to rely on cigarettes when I took that first puff.
But those years of smoking were like the best love affair you can imagine. I did all the taking and my cigarettes did all the giving. They supported me, gave me courage, and believed in me, never once asking for anything in return. They revved me up when I needed revving and calmed me down when all seemed lost, listening sympathetically while I sobbed through a hard night. Aside from my husband and my children, I was never in love with anyone or anything else for quite so long.
I know what you’re thinking. Yes, I know it’s bad for you. I was a pathologist for over twenty years, and I’ve seen first-hand what smoking does to lungs. In an unspoiled state, lung tissue is loose, pink, and airy. But years of smoking will turn them black. Eventually, the larger airways become distended with mucus, and with the development of emphysema, large irregular holes appear where normal lung tissue should be. My own father died of the disease, despite the combined efforts of my family to get him to stop smoking. It’s a terrible condition where your lungs cannot absorb the oxygen you try to breathe in since you’ve destroyed the delicate walls of your alveoli, the basic units of breathing. And, unlike your liver, say, your lungs do not regenerate. And unlike your appendix, children, your lungs are necessary for life.
And to be absolutely, incontrovertibly clear, I’m grateful for a lot of things in this life but very high on that list is the fact that neither of my children nor my husband ever smoked and that I quit when I did. Like life, smoking catches up with you eventually.
And yet. Sometimes I’ll find myself alone on a random Tuesday in the late afternoon as the day slips from pale gold to cobalt, sitting at my computer and peering into the misty fog in the woods behind my house. The wind will rustle the leaves back there and my mind will suddenly travel without me to a time when I was still young, and everything was green and new and filled with possibility.
There I’ll be, standing in my own clingy black dress and high heels at the bar of Matteo’s Italian Restaurant, waiting for a customer’s drink order while my ever-present cigarette burns in the ashtray, right next to the lime quarters and stemmed fluorescent red cherries. The smoke working to create an eye-stinging haze, a no-fly zone meant to ward off men with sad stories and too much time on their hands. Drifting from the end of my cigarette, it would form a smoky barrier to my heart, while the untended ashes would drop off suddenly, and without warning, like the years arrayed ahead of me would do.
But from time to time, a man’s glance, instead of bouncing off of me, would stick. Then, I would casually hold a fresh cigarette to my lips as a stranger’s hands cupped my own and we would both wait for that phosphorous glow to leap from his hands to mine.
Lynda Rushing is a former pathologist turned labor attorney who now writes. Her creative nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in River Teeth, Brevity, Saranac Review, Indiana Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Formerly from Honolulu, Hawaii, she currently lives with her husband in northern Massachusetts and gratefully credits support for her creative work from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.