On Cigarettes

A brief reflection on smoking.

I still remember the first time I coughed up a little blood. It was a couple weeks into moving to Chicago. I didn’t smoke back home—in LA it was taboo to have vices that weren’t clean, so the only thing that anyone ever smoked was weed. Frightened, I showed my roommate. I pointed at the sink in disbelief. Bloody phlegm oozed down the porcelain like a slug. He laughed, in that little-too-loud, all-knowing way. The kinda chuckle that a father forces out to comfort his son. “That my friend,” he told me, “is a smoker’s morning.”

Growing up my teeth were small, jagged, and gapped. They were the teeth of a child’s drawing. When I finally fixed them at 17, with thousands of dollars worth of orthodontistry and crowns, I swore I’d do everything it took to keep them clean. I brushed three times a day. Water-flossed every morning and every night. I wore my retainer to bed for two years straight. I was terrified of being hideous again.

So, I only smoked Lucky Strikes. The classic red-and-white box was the prettiest. I was convinced that made them taste better. “Oh um, no thank you,” most people would say after they asked me to bum and realized I only smoked Luckies. They reminded me of the beach. Of home. They felt dandy. Queer. Elegant. The homeless man who sat in the alley behind my dorm told me they reminded him of prison.

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When I was younger I always wanted one of those “Weeks Left” calendars. Those ones that have a box to scratch off for every week of the average human life. About four thousand boxes. Or 88 years. I had this grand compulsion to do at least one valuable thing a day. That way I could watch my life change and disappear at the same time, proud and certain that I was making the most of it.

They say that one cigarette takes about 20 minutes off a person’s life. I think about that some mornings when I wake up with my throat throbbing from having my first cigarette in weeks. I think about all the Newports, Luckies, Spirits, Marlboros, Camels, and flavored Korean cigs (the kind with lung disease ads on the cartons) that I’ve smoked. To kill time. Or kill stress. To cope with the Chicago cold or bask in its wet summer heat. To chase a swig of whiskey, or make a walk feel lighter. Outside of bars or mingling on college-party balconies, trembling from all that winter and all that fear, smoking just felt like the right thing to do.

The morning after a first-smoke-in-weeks is always brutal. Throat raw and sensitive—the throbbing aftermath of a bummed and wolfed-down American spirit. On those mornings I try to scrub the dry cardboard taste of Chicago out of my gums. Breath hot and reeking like a porta-potty. On those mornings, I can cough up a never-ending supply of phlegm. Saturated slime greens and mustard yellows and cherry reds. On those mornings, I tend to notice that my crowns are stained a slightly lighter shade of yellow than the rest of my teeth. As I stare, and scrape at the enamel with the tips of my fingernails, I sometimes guess the number of boxes my calendar has left.