Don't Call Me A Quitter

For a long time, I smoked cigarettes.

I started around the tag end of my senior year in high school, right after I turned 17. My father smoked. My mother and aunt and their friends did for a while as well. In fact, my mother was a nurse, and I remember as a young boy visiting her at work. There, I would watch five nurses, in the room behind the nurse's station, all firing up Tareytons and Virginia Slims not 10 feet from where people checked in to visit their ailing friends and family. This is on, God's honest truth, a cardiac wing.

I was working at an auto parts store where almost everyone who worked or shopped smoked. Most of my new friends were suburban street punks, who would sooner be caught wearing a pink angora sweater than without their blood red and pale white crush-proof box of Cowboy Killers and a Zippo lighter. It was as much a part of the uniformity of townie nonconformity as a clapped-out American car and a problem with authority.

At some point in college, during the mid-80's after smoking had ceased to be cool around academia, I persevered. I took my personal brand identity from it. It made me a rebel, in an unpleasant sort of way. The way TRUE rebels want to come off. Went perfectly with a post-adolescent identity crisis. So combine bad posture, a persistent negative attitude, poor grooming, and a inability to dress with a cloud of smoke following me down the ivy-covered halls, and you can guess how far I got up the social register. But hey, at least I had an identity.

At no point had I ever disliked smoking. I just plain enjoyed it. Never really even wanted to quit. I had stopped for a few weeks to try to impress a girl, and that pretty much went as well as you'd think something like that would go. Tara didn't really smoke when I met her, but within a year of meeting me, she was smoking regularly too. Yes, I know, there's a special place in Hell for me, thanks.

But starting a few years ago, the Tobacco Polizei gained firm control and the last throes of the pro-smoking insurgency had been pretty much crushed. By the time I qualified for my 20-year "Thank You" pin from the folks at Philip Morris (which I never got, mostly because they don't actually give them out), nobody I hung out with smoked, the things cost $7 a pack in Manhattan, and you couldn't smoke anywhere in public anyway (although there is a cool place down on 1st Ave around 11th called Sahara East with an outside garden that will rent you a big water pipe and a plug of flavored Turkish tobacco with your felafel and baba ganoush). And my father, whose first heart attack was during the Carter Administration, went through (and continues to battle with) a series of serious health crises that probably wouldn't have happened had he decided to quit earlier than he did.

So with all that, combined with Tara's "I wanna quit, so now you have to" speech, a free nicotine patch giveaway by the City of New York, and a Costco-sized bottle of Zyban, my path was made clear. On July 5th, 2005, I joined the health-ridden ranks of the Non Smokers of America. Not quite as much rebellion or brand identity. But, admittedly, less emphysema.

It was pretty ugly at first. I would get pissed off at people if I didn't like the way their blood was circulating. I couldn't stop eating. I started chewing gum, which I must not have been very good at since I was biting my tongue twice a day. I was a nicotine patch away from shivving some dude for standing in line the wrong way at the Post Office. It sucked. It sucked hard, and it sucked for a lot longer than I thought it was going to. But after six or seven weeks I stopped using the patches, and about a month after that I stopped taking the pills. It took almost a full year for the cravings to go away. Oh, I backslid once or twice along the way, but didn't fall back in.

It'll be seventeen months on Tuesday, and I'm at the point where I was annoyed when we sat in the smoking section of the Cracker Barrel in Altoona, PA last week. But news of a new smoking wonder drug in Britain just showed up, and my dad is feeling way too crappy for a guy his age. Therefore, today's good deed for the day ought to be for you to grab the nearest person you know who used to smoke and show some support for their efforts. The holiday season is bound to be tough, with more parties, more liquor, and more old friends who you used to smoke with than normal. But just make it one day at a time, don't kill yourself if you backslide for a night, and whatever you do--don't smoke around me while I'm trying to eat my hashbrown casserole at the Cracker Barrel. That's just friggin' annoying.