Close, but no clove: I’d always been taught that smoking was wrong. Not just bad for your health, as they told us in health class with the help of graphic images of clogged and cancerous lungs and people breathing through tubes in their throats. No, actually wrong, the kind of thing that could put you in H-E-double-hockey-sticks. Section 89: And God said unto Joseph Smith, “Thou shalt not drink or smoke. Or have a cup of coffee. Not even decaf. But especially, don’t smoke — look, I made it bad for you, too.”
I’d always been taught that smoking was wrong, and I believed it, but by my senior year in high school I’d developed an affinity for eccentric losers and brainy almost-dropouts — in other words, the smokers. And I was taking this wacky Russian class across town four afternoons a week, a wrinkle in the Albuquerque Public Schools’ otherwise bland regime that allowed a few students to take odd courses in super-advanced physics or obscure languages in an environment that resembled a small college more than a high school.
One afternoon I was sitting outside on break with the Russian-class smokers. Someone lit up a sweet-smelling cigarette. “Oh, a clove.” “Ooo, I haven’t had one of those in years. Can I have a bit?” So it started around the circle, almost everyone taking a drag.
The clove got to me. It looked interesting. Smelled interesting. Was it really a cigarette? Should I? “Er, uh, no, uhm, no thanks.” I was this close to taking it. But I didn’t. I continue to believe, years and years later, that if I’d taken that drag off of that nasty clove, everything would have been different from that moment on. But I didn’t, and it wasn’t. Different, that is.
The first time: I was in Prague. I’d just learned to drink, barely, and was doing my best to get in some more practice. My friend and traveling companion Matt knew how to drink and smoke. I was secretly impressed. “What’s smoking like?” I asked. “Don’t try it,” he said. “It’s no good. I hate it that I want cigarettes so bad. It’s nasty.”
We were at a bar in the the Old Town. Matt got up and went to the bathroom. (I never knew you could pee so much before I had my first beer.) I took one of his cigarettes from the pack on the table, lit it, brought it to my lips. I took some smoke into my mouth, and blew it back out. I figured there must be something more to it than that (I didn’t know how to draw it into my lungs), but I tried again.
Then I noticed it. I had an erection. An undeniable, insistent erection. I felt so guilty, but the guilt felt so good. I kept smoking, bringing the smoke into my mouth, trying to get it back into my lungs, sitting there at a wooden table in a bar in Prague with a hard-on.
(Come on, who among you hasn’t responded similarly when you sucked something forbidden for the first time?)
Claire Daines: Later that evening Matt and I were walking, kinda drunk, through Old Town when we came upon the set of a movie. Les Miserables, the one with Liam Neeson and Claire Daines. We decided to hang out with a couple of beers and watch the filming. I went to a kiosk and bought a pack of cigarettes. “Marlboro,” I said, trying to be understood with a fake Czech accent slurred by an afternoon of drinking. The guy looked at me funny, blinked, and handed me a pack. “DÄ›kuji,” I said, very proud of myself. Later we saw Claire Daines do a scene.
A couple of days later, at the hostel, I was having a drink with a Japanese girl and some guy — Spanish, maybe? — and he asked if I had any cigarettes. I offered him a Marlboro and took one for myself. We smoked for a minute and he said to me, “You don’t smoke much, do you?”
Down: I was living in Salt Lake City in the basement of a little duplex that cost next to nothing in rent, with no car except when my uncles conspired to have me borrow my grandfather’s decrepit little Toyota pickup for a month at a time to keep him off the roads. I had a few friends but was leaving soon and so wasn’t really putting down roots. I’d ramble around town. Every once in a while I’d go to Mass at the Catholic cathedral up on the hill — just something to do, right?
Mostly I drank cheap 3.2 percent beer. And that meant, often as not, smoking a cigarette or two. My roommate didn’t smoke at all when he was sober but went up like a chimney when he drank. I’d usually have one, maybe two cigarettes when I drank with him, being social mostly, a pattern that continues still.
Every once in a while I’d smoke sober. It seemed appropriate only at night, only when I was struck by a particular noir urge. I’d go out front and light up, and within a couple of drags the oxygen deprivation from the carbon monoxide would have me squatting on the curb of my ultra-wide Salt Lake City street. Even standing, though, I’d feel my perspective had been lowered, brought down to earth, more attuned (to be slightly Heideggerian where it’s probably uncalled for) to being-in-the-world. The orange high-pressure sodium streetlights shone a little clearer, the black of the night sky got a little darker.
That guy with the pipe?: In grad school I bought a pipe. I didn’t want to be a cigarette smoker, but I’d always loved the smell of tobacco smoke, and fragrant pipe smoke best of all. Plus, I was looking down the barrel of a life as a philosophy professor. I’d grow into it, I figured.
I looked (where else?) online for instructions, then went to my green Maryland back yard and packed my first bowl of tobacco. It’s a tricky thing. If I remember right, you’re supposed to pack the lower half fairly tight, then looser higher up. I did my best, then, per the instructions, charred the surface; the little tobacco shavings curled up, and I tamped them down flat. Then I lit up, trying to get a nice even smolder going. It took a lot of brief sucks and puffs, but I managed to smoke it for a few minutes.
Then it went out. I lit it again, struggled some more, but had to give up. Pipe tobacco is damp, it turns out, and as you smoke it the moisture is drawn down into the tobacco below and into the body of pipe. I ended up smoking maybe half the pipe (probably less on that first attempt) and the rest of the tobacco was a soggy mess.
I tried quite a few more times, but I never figured out the right way to pack that bowl to get it to smoke down all the way. Eventually I gave up and later, cleaning out a drawer, I threw the pipe away. A few weeks ago I was walking through Madison Square Park in Manhattan and saw a guy my age with a beard and a serious-looking paperback, sitting on a bench and smoking a pipe. Dear god I made the right choice — I definitely didn’t want to be that guy with the pipe.
Cuba para siempre: That same year in grad school I tried a Cuban cigar for the first time. I was at a party and some drunk girl had one, a gift from her father. (Yeah, yeah, I know.) She didn’t like it, so I ended up smoking most of it. Pure cream, cream in smoke form, cream flavored with honey.
I smoke cigars rarely, less than once a year. But a good one, especially a Cuban, is pure pleasure, no guilt.
Est-ce que j’ai besoin?: I had a roommate in grad school who was (and remains) a fervent libertarian. One thing I gathered from living with him was that most good libertarians are in favor of Big Tobacco. I never quite figured out why this is, but there are a lot of things I don’t understand about libertarians.
Anyway, he decided, based on some Cato Institute paper or other, that tobacco addiction was a myth. To prove his point, he started smoking. Not just the occasional social cigarette at a party or a bar, but a pack a day, a concerted effort to get himself addicted.
Of course it worked. It’s years later and, last I saw him, he was still a smoker, a real smoker with that nicotine-hungry look in his eye and an eager step to the front porch for a smoke.
Oddly, I’ve never become addicted, though I’ve smoked on and off for years. I can go months without a cigarette, then have a couple during a night out, some more the next night, and go another month without one. My brother (who still devoutly believes that cigarettes are Wrong Saith the Lord) told me he’s sure that if he had just one he’d be addicted for life. He’s a nervous type, he says, and needs something to do with his hands. Just as well, then, that he’ll probably never take a drag.
There are a few circumstances in which I’m more likely to smoke. In times of stress, for example, I sometimes think to myself that I ought to be needing a cigarette, so sometimes I’ll have one, although I’m just as likely to go for a walk or meditate or indulge in my preferred vice, single-malt Scotch.
But if you want to guarantee to have me jonesing for a smoke, there’s only one thing you can do: Show me a good French film, or maybe Italian. I love French cinema, and those people smoke so beautifully. I love the layered nuances of tobacco in French movies: Most of the time in my favorite Goddard films the characters smoke to seem like American gangsters or detectives or movie stars, yet nothing could be more French than they way they imitate Bogart and Dietrich — insouciant, knowing, and innocent at the same time. I know better now than to go to the Film Forum without a pack in my bag. It’s not that I need to smoke after these movies so much as I desire it, and maybe it’s not that I desire to smoke so much as I desire, and smoking seems the only activity both earthy and immaterial enough to satisfy me.
I hope in all our heartfelt keening over Lisa’s leaving that we appreciate what an amazing post this is–I really loved it, perched over some random screen in a hotel gift shop chuckling like a loony. Very cool words, Mr. Barber.
I miss smoking in Maryland, with you, in that green backyard. In retrospect it was pretty unhealthy … but it was a lot of fun being careless with our health. At least we are now living in cities where smoking inside is unlawful, and helps to curb the impulse. This is a very lovely-to-read post.
Hey Nicole! I didn’t know you read this site. Yes, good times. I think that first year I was in Maryland I was at my all-time peak of smoking, one cigarette every evening after dinner. All because of you, my dear.
The first time I smoked a cigarette — meaning, really inhaled, very slowly so as not to die in a paroxysm of choking coughs — I felt so high that I thought, “I can’t believe people are allowed to DRIVE while using these things.”