I had my first cigarette with my aunt Carrie. She had been the cool teenage relative my two sisters and I looked up to during childhood. When we were in the throes of adolescence, she was a new mom in her very early 20s. Carrie was blonde but had the tanned Italian skin of my grandpa. She was meticulous about how she presented her 5’3” frame, and she took us to the mall often. It was the best thing you could do for a tween at the time. She shopped at the same stores as us, so she didn’t mind going into Contempo Casuals to try on seven outfits and not buy anything. Even when she didn’t have a car, we would walk miles to the mall together, and it felt like we were adventuring without supervision but still safe.
We were two families living in one home. Aunt Carrie, Uncle Pat and baby Rayanne were the young, fun family. Together, Carrie and Pat were always laughing. I thought Patrick was my age the first time I saw him. He was sitting in a recliner chair playing Nintendo with a baseball cap on. He was quiet at first, stayed inside and didn’t interact much while we skidded across the backyard on the slip n slide and tried to give ourselves natural highlights with Sun-in. When we moved in together we would sit around the table and Pat would offer us money to eat disgusting things. He’d say, “I’ll give you five dollars to eat that,” and point at the bacon grease left over from breakfast. Or, “I'll give you a dollar to eat all five of these,” gesturing to a pile of wrapped Warhead candies. They had a tear-inducing sourness that was beyond the natural pucker one would get from a lemon. We made a little bit of money off of taking his dares. He was working as a plumber, took multiple showers a day, and bought lots of candy. Carrie stayed home and cared for sweet baby Ray. We didn’t know it at the time, but my sisters and I were getting a lesson in what goes into being the young mother of an infant.
On the night of the first cigarette, my older sister, Jess, Carrie and I had been drinking from a bottle of my mom’s vodka in Jess’s room downstairs. The house was asleep except for us. Jess was a sophomore, and I was a freshman in high school. That was the year we started shaving our heads and wearing ripped fishnet tights. I searched for any kind of identity that would make me less invisible. Slipping into the role of someone who “partied” was an easy way into any kind of belonging. I had been feeling like a ghost, vanishing from every new group of friends after a few years of moving between my parent’s houses in different cities while they built second-try families with new partners. In those days, moving out of town meant friendships were lost to letter-writing and long-distance phone calls on land-lines…eventually disappearing. I didn’t consider myself pretty or thin enough to captivate potential friend groups with my looks–which if you watch any movie from the 80s or 90s was the ultimate way for a young girl to be considered a person. I wasn’t focused enough to stand out for my intelligence or grades. I was too shy to even introduce myself, and I had spent almost the entirety of 8th grade skipping school and reading or watching TV. I read Go Ask Alice in the parking lot of the Ventura mall across the street from my Middle School instead of attending class. I became fascinated with drug culture. The idea of a “gateway drug” seemed like less of a foreboding cliff’s edge and more like a portal to a brighter, better world.
When we were drinking with Carrie she kept talking about wanting a cigarette. I had no understanding of this desire, but I thought she was cool so wanting a cigarette must be cool regardless of the amount of times I had begged my mom to quit smoking. My mom and stepdad were in a non-smoking phase during this era, but Carrie had a feeling he had a stash hidden in his truck.
With a buzz on, we all snuck out the side door of the garage. The neighborhood was on the East side where yards were bigger to make room for growing families. We were the only activity under the amber glow of the street light as we gathered around Terry’s truck. Carrie had grabbed his keys so she and Jessica could rifle through it. Sure enough she pulled a half-empty pack from behind the bench seat.
“I knew it. I knew that little weasel didn’t quit!”
She was just as satisfied to have her suspicion confirmed as she was to find the thing that would relieve her craving.
The first drag seared my airways and tasted even worse than it had smelled as I watched my parents light up throughout my childhood. That burn was now in my throat, and the head-rush from the nicotine was spectacular. It was just like I wanted. Already having a buzz from the alcohol, the extra pizazz from the puff of the cigarette was the altered state within an altered state that my little Go Ask Alice-obsessed mind was searching for. Carrie said that the cigarettes weren’t even stale which was proof that my step dad had bought a fresh pack and was lying about having quit. This was confirmation that our belief that he was not for my mom was correct. Having no frame of reference, I didn’t know whether the cigarettes were stale or not. I accepted the analysis, though because any proof that my stepdad, Terry was an asshole was welcome and affirming.
My introduction to Terry was after a date when he and my mom had come back to our Thousand Oaks house. I was laying on the couch nursing a gum injury I had sustained after running up the block at full speed in the dark of night. Someone had metal poles sticking out the back of their pickup truck at the height of my head, and I caught it in the mouth before I hit the ground. My gums were bruised and I was laying on the couch when this tiny gray-haired man in a chunky sweater squatted down to my height and gave me words of comfort that I don’t remember. What I do remember was the pungent odor of coffee and cigarettes that came out with every word he said. On weekends we would go to Terry’s brother’s house where he and my mom would smoke and play poker in the garage, gambling quarters and relegating us kids to the den because we couldn’t be in there for more than five minutes without getting sick from the air quality. Terry was a nice enough guy, but had little traits that became irritating to my sisters and me. He watched way too much football and said, “trip on that,” at least fifteen times a day. While he was watching the Kansas City Chiefs, he would suck on his teeth and pick the corners of his eyes with his pinky finger. When they were at the deepest level of connection, he and my mom bought matching purple and turquoise track suits that swished when they walked. He had two kids of his own. The youngest was a considerably younger, little boy just barely school-aged, and we were all disgusted with the way Terry babied his son. We were at the height of our meanness, so it didn’t take much to disgust us.
I didn't pick up smoking as a habit right away after that first taste. I went weeks without even thinking about cigarettes, and then I started hanging out with friends who were already habitual smokers. It was everything back then to just have friends. I'm sure they had a head start in middle school just like they had already had sex and relationships…I hadn’t even kissed a boy yet. I felt like I had all these things I needed to do to catch up to them. I smoked with my new friends for the first time outside of the Johnson Dr. food court. I relished that little rush that filled my body. I continued for a short time having one before school in the Sav-on parking lot, and then one after school. It wasn’t long before I was doing it everyday. I couldn’t become a full-on “smoker” at that point because I counted on bumming from other kids who were able to buy from particular liquor stores and had a steady stream of allowance coming from their parents.
It was an act of rebellion that cost the health of my lungs as well as mind but profited Phillip Morris. I made an initial promise to myself that I would never get addicted to cigarettes. Smoking out of need was what my parents did. They were the addicts who couldn’t get through life without their precious cancer sticks. When I did it, it was different. I smoked in the cool way of a teenager who threw her butt on the sidewalk and put it out by spitting on it. I would never need a cigarette. I tried my first attempt at quitting during my born-again Christian phase. My friend Mary and I made a plan that we would smoke an entire pack in one night and make ourselves sick. The theory was that the memory of the sickness would disgust us and make us never want to smoke again. The next night we saw Get Shorty (a film full of cigarettes) at the movies with friends, and the memory of the sickness meant nothing. I told myself I would only smoke until I was 18 because after that I would be an adult and legally allowed to buy cigarettes. If I was an adult smoking cigarettes, I would just be stupid and not a rebellious kid.
In early childhood, I perceived the smoking I witnessed as just an annoying thing that grown-ups did until they started teaching us about the dangers of cigarettes in school. That is when I started worrying that my mom, the most beautiful and nicest person in the world, would die. I became confused as to why she would do something that might kill her. The worst thing that could possibly ever happen was my mom dying, and she was actively doing something to hurry the process. After the years of worry and begging her to quit dragged on, came the disdain. In my least forgiving moments, I figured she must not really care about anything if she kept smoking. She didn’t care about me or my sisters. When I became addicted enough to push past the shame of it, I stole cigarettes from her purse. When she found out I smoked, I cried, but I carried on. Eventually, we smoked together. Starting when I was 16, mom would come home from one of her plays, or her shift at the bar, and we would smoke on the bench outside of the apartment. She became so permissive about it that my older sister and I would smoke in the house when we felt lazy. There was an era during my junior year when I repeatedly came home from school to find my sister and her friend watching Jerry Springer and using plastic Jack in the Box ranch cups as ashtrays on the coffee table. In our 20s, we would smoke and drink with Mom and her new girlfriend on their patio. They always had a fridge full of Newcastle and wine. They smoked American Spirits. With Terry it had been Marlboro lights, and with the guy in-between, it was Camel Wide lights because he smoked Camel non-filter wides.
My own battle with nicotine lasted well into adulthood. The breaks felt soul-crushing. Even when I wasn’t enduring the blind rage-inducing headache of physical withdrawal, I was walking around with a feeling that something was missing. It was like an integral part of myself was locked in a cage and pounding on my body and mind from the inside. The first inhale always provided instant relief. The calm poured through my body as I took those deep soothing breaths of fresh smoke. During the first trimester of my pregnancy, I shared a room with my younger sister Trish. The pain of the nicotine withdrawal altered me to a point that I emotionally abused my lovely and amazing young sibling. On a three hour drive home from Riverside, I became angry that she couldn’t share in the driving responsibility because of her inability to drive a stick shift. I pulled off the freeway and tried to force her to learn until she cried, and I gave up. You would think that getting through the physical and mental withdrawal during pregnancy and being on the other side of it after Karli was born would mean that I was done with cigarettes. You would be wrong. I picked them back up when I weaned her and had my body to myself again. Freedom from the burden of sharing my nutrients with my child meant I could start up again with my precious.
I wonder what it might have been like to live a life in which I didn’t spend a portion of time tucking into shameful corners or rushing through moments so I could get to my next cigarette. I didn’t brazenly smoke whenever I wanted, like my mom and dad. I covered it up and led a double-life like a respectable parent. I volunteered in Karli’s classroom when she was in elementary school and on the most desperate days I would go to Circle K during snack to “get a coffee,” but I was really just getting in my car to smoke. I would drive through the neighborhood hoping none of the other parents saw me. Once, when I got back to school, little Dylan told me I smelled like a cigar. I just told him, “That’s weird.”
I was Terry explaining things to a kid with coffee and cigarettes on my breath.
After years of trying the gums, patches, and will-power, I was alcohol-free and thirty when a friend recommended I try reading Alan Carr’s, The Easy Way to Quit Smoking. I’ve always been a reader, but my relationship with the written word up to that time was either as an escape into someone else’s fictitious world or the dramatic Facebook status changes of my friends and acquaintances. Self-help books had always existed, but they weren’t something that I dabbled in. Carr’s book was my gateway drug. It was written in a format that brainwashed me back into thinking like the nine-year-old that begged my mom to quit. It used repetitive language to undo the damage that the nicotine made when it built the need for itself into my neural pathways. I was instructed to keep smoking while reading the book, so I chain-smoked while reading in the alley behind my apartment. One by one, Carr dismantled the lies I had told myself in order to keep believing that cigarettes were something I should keep using. Carr writes, “The only reason any smoker lights a cigarette is to try to end the empty, insecure feeling that the previous cigarette created.” The pain was still there during the quitting process, but there was a greater understanding of what was going on physically and how it was warping my thought processes. I was the last smoker in my family. Mom had used Wellbutrin to finally quit when she was in her 40s, and everyone else seemed to breeze through the quitting process. The book worked like a miracle pill for me for years, until it didn’t.
Now that I’m on the other side of my nicotine addiction, I get to watch my 21-year-old daughter kick her nicotine habit. She started hitting strawberry-flavored vapes at the same school where I was sneaking behind the locker room to smoke Marlboros. When she was sixteen and playing water polo all winter and competing in swimming during the spring, she would tell me stories of kids taking huge puffs while the teacher’s back was turned to the class. I was appalled that the tobacco companies found a way to hook the next generation of addicts but smug in my belief that my student athlete was taking care of her body like the healthy and responsible human I raised. The naivety of parents is amazing.
I found a box of cartoon-colored vape pens filled with amber liquids in her closet during her senior year. I was not the kind of parent that snooped around in my kid’s room, but I was looking for art supplies. I lost my innocence when I found her stash. I stared at the contents, which I had expected to be markers, in disbelief. My little angel athlete child was vaping? How was this possible? I had assured myself that I had parented better, and my kid would escape the traps I had fallen into. I was humbled by the truth of my own daughter’s habit and realized how misguided I was in believing that my sneaky smoking habit would prevent Karli from lighting up as readily as I did. Later that year, Karli’s doctor put her on an inhaler because she was having lung spasms. We rented bikes to ride around Portland and she had to stop several times, she was so winded. Those lungs of hers which I grew so perfectly, that took her back and forth across a pool during water polo matches and swim meets–those precious and delicate lungs were damaged. I’m still angry when I think about it…not at her but at the world.
The California legislature is moving to outlaw the sale of food products with red dye no. 3 because it has been proven to be toxic. I happened upon the attention-grabbing headline while I was scrolling Instagram on a break at work: “Skittles Ban in California,” and couldn’t help but laugh. Sure, it’s great to keep the money-grubbers of the food industry from putting poison into consumables just to give them a color that pops, but cigarettes and vapes, which provide no value except to those who would profit from their sales, are still being sold. This is one of the many areas where capitalism falls short. We shouldn’t have to make a law against selling products that are designed to create an addiction, but when profits are God our sense of morality gets lost in the transaction.
It was less than a year ago when I had my last cigarette. Five years after using Carr’s book to quit, I restarted the old habit of drinking at the party of a friend. It wasn’t long before drinking’s best friend, smoking, stepped back into my life. The hardest thing during those early years of quitting had been losing these easy tools for connection. I spent a lifetime meeting up for a drink, sharing a bottle of wine, having a beer at the beach, asking for a light, and stepping outside to bum a smoke. Entire relationships were built on the foundation of smoking and drinking. I had friends who told me that when they thought of me, they thought of cigarettes. I’ve been in more than one relationship where I knew that I needed to quit drinking and smoking. My body would be begging me to get off the roller-coaster, but another voice inside me would be saying, “They won’t love you if you quit.” I still struggle with thoughts that because I don’t drink alcohol people will think I’m a boring judgy square and not want to hang out with me. I spend many of my nights off at home alone with my cats because I’m still trying to figure out how to have friends.
Last year, while I was still smoking and between quit attempt number 57 and 58, I would look in the mirror and wince at the death pallor over my face. It was as though I had slipped on a mask that tinted my skin gray. I was struggling with the knowledge that I needed to quit everything, but that I would lose my partner if I did. George and I met through a mutual friend, and he asked me out while I was in a blackout at a bar. Our connection was fueled for years by warm bellies full of whisky and long conversations around puffs of smoke. It’s fair that the relationship ended. I’m not the person that he met anymore. I’m a kid again.
I’m practicing filling up the empty space of life with everything I was too poor or too afraid to do in childhood. I’m tap-dancing, chasing waterfalls and wildflowers, swimming in the ocean, and building a secret garden. The pain of quitting smoking subsided months ago. The color is back in my cheeks, and I’m collecting more freckles. I am beating all my old personal records during the half-marathon training I started after I smoked my last cigarette. I am uncovering a superpower that I had all along and building a wall of protection around that kid inside who was damaged by taking dirty shortcuts to intimacy with others.
Finding and eradicating these shortcuts has proven to be like a game of whack-a-mole. At my most recent visit to the doctor, he opened up the appointment by informing me about the important part close social connections plays in health and longevity. It got me thinking about how smoking could be replaced with gambling, scrolling, complaining, gossiping, having casual sex, or eating loads of sugar. Seeking out these dopamine hits in the company of others doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with any of us. It is the most human thing of all to constantly be seeking connection with each other, and if the dopamine hit is high enough and easy enough to get, well hell, why wouldn’t we do it? I find myself wondering if everyone was still smoking–mom, aunts, uncles, and all the parents at the PTA, would I still be doing it? It’s a question I can’t honestly answer. I actively participate in the current addiction of choice: social media. Unchecked, I could sit and scroll the feed for hours…another dirty shortcut to connection, but I have to actively place time limits on myself. I am finding that the further I get from all of that, the more effort I put into being with the people I love, the deeper joy I find in the present moment. Humans have so outsmarted ourselves out of struggle that we now have to struggle our way out of ease to find the best versions of ourselves.
One of the biggest lies that the culture told us was that the people who smoked, drank excessively, and did drugs were bad people who would wind up in jail or rehab living on the streets and selling our bodies while hooked to oxygen tanks. The truth is that the choices we made of the tools that were available meant that we ended up taking the long way back to ourselves and each other. My aunt Carrie, since being one of my first conspirators in drinking and smoking, is the fitness coach who signed me up to run my half marathon at the beginning of the year. I recently spent the day at the beach with her grandchildren building sandcastles and making mermaids. Instead of looking for crop tops at Contempo Casuals, we delight in finding rare and exotic plants for our homes and gardens.