I Need a Fucking Cigarette

When I was a kid I moved around a lot with my mother from apartment to apartment, but the most memorable one of these was one we spent about three years in, from my second to fourth grade. It was a basement apartment in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia, about three blocks from where I went to school. It was a miserable little place with hard linoleum tiles intended to look like wood. Sometimes kids would break into the back alley behind our windows and you could see them, or at least from their feet to their waists, as they basically ran through our living room. It was dark, it was damp, all the wood in the house would bend from the moisture in the summer and straighten out in the winter once more. My mom was getting her grad degree in social work at Temple at the time, working a full shift at the Financial Aid office to pay for everything. She spent all night talking on the telephone, drinking Pepsi, and smoking True Greens. This was her social life. I sat next to her and watched TV till it was time to go to sleep. The windows were always closed (because otherwise someone might climb through them) and the room was engulfed in a menthol fog by 7:30pm. I usually didn't go to sleep until eleven. (Second-hand smoke hadn't been invented yet.)

For the most part I avoided smoking outside the house; to me there was no glamor in it. So I made it through high school and college without getting hooked. Even at the University of Wales-Swansea, where all my friends smoked, I made it without the slightest temptation. Smoking was just something that other people did and I didn't.

After college I was a Watson Fellow, jumping around Europe and Africa. Mostly though, I was jumping around London, and it was while I was there that I started hanging with "K." K worked the graveyard shift at a video warehouse, a boring, undemanding job that could only be made bearable by being stoned out of his head. The thing is, spliff was expensive in London, and usually came in the form of hash bricks, so it had to be sprinkled into a tobacco cigarette and re-rolled. I spent months like this, going over to K's at 6pm when he woke up, shooting the shit with him as we passed the joint until it was 11:30pm and he was off to work and I was off to a club or bed.

When this era was over, and I was back in Philly and on the verge of a massive depression, I found that to top everything off I was going through, I was going through withdrawal too. Not from the cannabis, which is what I had been conscious that I'd been smoking, but from the nicotine I hadn't given two thoughts to.

Without even realizing I was joining the hellbound club, I had become a smoker.


I never fully gave in to the urge, or at least accepted my reality. Usually, while in grad school, I would buy a pack, or two, or three, or damn all the way up to five, and I would smoke them obsessively, smoking till I was sick, all the while telling myself that I was getting my fill and that this would allow me to stop. And I would stop, for a month or two, maybe even three. And then I would have one more and then I would be back puffing again. Trying to quit after this pack, or trying to quit after the next one. I have never been good at moderation with anything in my life. If I were one of my own fictional characters, that would be my tragic flaw. This over the top obsessive behavior is what makes me good at writing novels, and not good at life itself. I tried cold turkey, and it didn't work (it never does). I tried acupuncture, which kind of turned me on in a kinky way but that was about it. So I smoked and stopped and smoked and stopped, for a decade. Squashing it at home and binging on the road. Hating myself for it but doing it anyway.




When I went back to London last spring, I didn't see K., but I did see "B.," his ex and my friend. When she saw me light up at a little cafe in Brixton, she was shocked that I was smoking, something I actually didn't do when I lived there. When I told her how K. had hooked me, she told me that K. had quit a decade ago, right after I left for the States and was just getting started on my habit. The fucking bastard.

Worse yet, all of London was going smoke free. The gray city itself, the place where people smoke everywhere and cancer seemed like a nasty rumor started by the Germans, even London was moving on without me.

So Vic and I went to a pub, and we drank our pints, and then I left my pack of Nat Sherman MCDs on the table there. Left them to disappear into the nicotine cloud behind me.

And I haven't smoked since.

THE END[ing is not here]

Wouldn't it be great if that's where the story really did end? Well it would but it didn't because you can't turn desire off and on like that. It's not that I've smoked since: I haven't, I really fucking haven't. But shit I want to. I want to bad. I want to so bad that an improved chance at an extended life means little to me. Be around to see my grandkids? Shit, I don't even know them. Live a better life? What good is a life where you can't have what you want? Life is overrated to beginning with, with all of its loss and disappointments. Give me a fucking cigarette.


But still, I'm not smoking.

You know what's keeping me from smoking? I'll tell you. It's not love, it's not responsibility, it's not all the little mortality facts that assholes tell you when you've got a fag in your hand, it's not having to stand out in front of bars and restaurants on cold days to get my embarrassingly little nicotine fix. It's that first cigarette back. That first cigarette back after you've quit for a while tastes like pickled cat shit. And not only does it taste horrible, reminding you of what a crap addiction cigarettes are in the first place, but on top of that you get hit with the crushing wave of guilt because once again you fucked up, you couldn't hang, you couldn't hold out, and even though that first cigarette tastes absolutely awful you know you're going to smoke another one right after. Because that's how it works. And then, no matter how long you stopped or how bad you tortured yourself, you're right the fuck back again.

That's what keeps me from smoking. Because without the crutch of a cigarette to lean on, I don't think I could handle that shit.


(Smoke'em if you got'em.)