The Litter of Quitters

Every now and then, while picking up trash in the front yard, I find a pack of cigarettes, almost full. I do a quick scan of my limited Biblical knowledge to remember if Revelation mentions anything about a plague of Pall Mall’s, but I know what really happened here. I live on a busy highway, which means my yard is the receptacle for the garbage our mouth-breathing motorists believe simply vanishes from existence when they toss it out of the window. And sometimes, among the Burger King and Trojan brand refuse, there is a fresh pack of smokes. This indicates that someone just “quit smoking.”

I’ve done it, maybe you’ve done it, too.That desperate, late night trip to Citgo to calm the shakes, only to succumb to self-hatred even as the first cigarette fills your soul with sweet relief. You need a dramatic gesture to signify your determination, so you hurl the remaining 19 cigarettes out of the car window and into oblivion. You’ve Quit Smoking. This time for sure.You’ll find yourself quitting this time for sure again next week sometime, but perhaps with the foresight to hold 3 or 4 cigarettes aside before you “quit” the rest of the pack.

I know this unsavory routine. I started smoking on a regular basis when I was 11 years old. Our neighborhood being a little on the seedy side, the kids got involved in all sorts of vices at an early age. Some on the playground were already addicted to PCP and my friend Larry ran a prostitution ring out of his 7^th grade math class. Okay, neither of those things were true, but we did smoke at a young age. In fact, I was so obsessed with cigarettes in elementary school that I used to roll fake smokes out of notebook paper and pencil shavings. I even colored the ends to look like Marlboro red filters. My teachers would begrudgingly critique these as “very creative,” while silently mourning the lost innocence of childhood past, with its rock candy and hoop skirts and polio.

The attraction isn’t so hard to fathom. The simple, undeniable truth is this: cigarette smoking, in spite of all efforts to propagandize the contrary, is cool. Causes emphysema, low birth weight, and stank mouth, yes, but cool nonetheless. And my boyhood crew, chain smoking our way through recess, didn’t need any kiddiefied Joe Camel ad campaign to sell us on this idea. Bogie smoked. Rod Serling smoked. Popeye smoked. Why, it was nearly impossible to identify coolness UNLESS it came with a smoldering cigarette attached. “So,” the schoolmarms among you will ask, “does that mean the risk of developing blackened, cancerous lungs is cool?” Unfortunately, yes, in the same way that Russian Roulette, five finger fillet (Google it), alligator wrestling, and flaming Tequila shots are cool. That which does not kill you makes you stronger. Except for maybe a stroke.

An adolescence and young adulthood spent lighting up prepackaged coolness every day creates an alternate reality. Eating becomes unimportant, since any biological urge is mistaken for nicotine craving. Sleep is something the smoker simply decides to do when he runs out of cigarettes, since any vague feeling of fatigue can be instantly negated with another cigarette. In fact, the smoker who manages to quit can be alarmed by any non-nicotine-related impulses, thinking mere sleepiness is the onslaught of some fatal, flesh-eating virus. The newly non-smoking individual may become acutely aware of previously unknown sensations, like being able to feel one’s hair growing. I recommend developing some repetitive, meditative exercise until these feelings subside, such as jabbing oneself in the thigh with a dull pencil until completely exhausted.

When I tell smokers I’ve been on the nicotine wagon for 20 years, they drop their façade of Marlene Dietrich cool and begin to stare sheepishly at their feet. “Yeah, I really should quit,” they mumble, as if confessing to a lifelong habit of dismembering nursing students. But then I relate to them the horrifying story of how I quit smoking, the one where my body rebelled from the sudden lack of nicotine and quickly developed from a bad cold to the worst case of strep throat in recorded history. I tell them how I couldn’t eat for a month, and lost so much weight that my nearly non-existent muscles atrophied to nothing, leaving me barely able to roll over and heave.

And I advise them, as I’m advising all you cool kid smokers out there now, that if there’s any chance you’ll have to go through what I did to quit smoking, by all means, keep lighting up. You look unbelievably cool, after all, hacking up green phlegm like that, and oxygen tanks are becoming a trendy accessory these days, just like Coach purses, skinny jeans, and crack pipes.

But if you do decide to “quit smoking,” in the traditional drive-by manner, I’ll hang on to them for you.