Smoking Gun

When I was in Fife Park, smoking wasn’t the big social taboo that it is these days. Some people smoked and some people didn’t, and those that did were just smart people doing a dumb thing. A lot has changed in a decade. I heard some five year old ask ‘Mummy, why is that man smoking?’ on the street a few weeks ago. And she replied ‘Because he’s a bad man.’

The bad man was me, on another weeklong lapse in my commitment to not smoking. It started with that one fucking joint I smoked. Seems like nothing comes without a price these days.

‘I am not a bad man,’ I said to the kid.

Not that I really know if that’s true, but I’ll be damned if a cigarette’s going to inculpate me. There was an awkward pause.

‘Well, I’m not,’ I told the parent, who was looking at me like I was a rapist offering her gardening tips.

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she said. ‘You’re not a mother.’

‘Well shit, you’re not a smoker,’ I told her, which was the exact point at which I realised that I was going to have to go through the hassle of quitting again.

‘Ah, fuck it,’ I said.

‘Fuck!’ the kid said. ‘Fuck it, bad man!’

The kid was right. I have studied the art of quitting smoking for years, and I can tell you that ‘Fuck it’ justifies anything and stands for nothing. Fuck it, you say, and light another.

I remember one time I asked Frank what it felt like to need a smoke, long before I ever touched a deck of fags.

‘It feels like you need a cigarette,’ he said.

‘But is it like hungry?’ I pressed. ‘Or more like thirsty?’ He considered it for long enough to give a reasoned answer.

‘It just feels like you need a cigarette,’ he said. He lit up.

It didn’t sound so bad, and I let it creep up on me. It’s all meaningless until you’re there, of course. Most things are. For me, it is a little like thirst; maybe I put the idea into my own damn head. Whatever, it’s only there when you’re feeling the physical withdrawal, right when you’d be about to have another. That passes in days; a thirst of no consequence. Then, well done, you’ve quit.

But it doesn’t feel like thirst when you want one after that. When you want one every day – weeks after, months after, even years after, because sometimes it feels like it was all you ever really looked forwards to doing. Then it feels like a raw bitch.

Sure, you sometimes forget about cigarettes when you’ve stopped smoking them, but only till you remember. That’s when you get taken by surprise, and then you’re halfway to the filter before you realise what you’re holding.

I always quit again. It’s not the fear of cancer. You can take that for granted, and it doesn’t mean a thing. You get the odd panic attack or hurts-to-breathe scare, and then you get right back to it. Hardly any smokers can connect with the smoker’s death, not directly. It’s not the thought of dying that makes me quit.

It’s the embarrassment. The shame of it. The shame in my head when I imagine telling the people I love that I am sick or dying because a small pleasure was more important to me than everything else I’m worth. 

That works. I can’t easily see my death, but that I can see. That dark vignette is somehow too real to be my future, and then I think, how much more real is actually dying, than merely being in awe of it? That’s the break point. Then the whole dark, sticky, spewing end is made real through other eyes than mine, and in that reflection I can stare down the gorgon. And I don’t want it.

This unhardy sense of mortality is new, and not new. When I was 20 years old I was unlived in as a person. Every cigarette or joint was as safe as the first, which was safe enough for a while. But I had my eye on the future, even then. I was afraid of the things unlike myself that I might become, and maybe did, which is a kind of death.

Well, I don’t want to be the same person I was then, any more than he wanted to be me. But I want to feel his passion, his willing, his daily excitement. And I would like one concrete thing I can point at, and tell him why he was wrong to be afraid.