Up in Smoke

Reflections on my many cigarettes.

It’s the night of the first cigarette, my older sister, Jess, my Aunt Carrie, and I drink from a bottle of my mom’s vodka in Jess’s room downstairs. Carrie had been the cool teenage relative my two sisters and I looked up to as kids, but as time passes we grow closer in age. She takes us to the mall while mom is at work, shops at the same stores as us, and doesn’t mind going into Contempo Casuals to try on seven outfits and not buy anything. Carrie is blonde with Grandpa’s tanned Italian skin and is meticulous about how she presents her 5’3” frame.

Aunt Carrie, Uncle Pat and baby Rayanne are the young, fun family that we share a house with. Together, Carrie and Pat are always laughing. I thought Patrick was my age the first time I saw him in a recliner, 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.

Some nights, we sit around the table and Pat offers us money to eat disgusting things. He’ll 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 have a tear-inducing sourness that is beyond the natural pucker one would get from a lemon. He is a plumber, takes multiple showers a day, and makes daily runs to Circle K for candy. Carrie stays home and cares for sweet baby Ray.

The house is asleep except for us. This year, we shave our heads and wear ripped fishnet tights. We search for any kind of identity that makes us less invisible. Slipping into the role of girls who “party” is an easy way into any kind of belonging. I have been feeling like a ghost, vanishing from every new group of friends after a few years of moving. We ping-pong between our parents’ houses in different cities while they start new lives with new partners. Friendships are lost to letter-writing and long-distance phone calls on land-lines…eventually they disappear.

I’m not pretty or thin enough to captivate potential friend groups with my looks. I’m not focused enough to stand out for my intelligence or grades. I’m too shy to even introduce myself, and I 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 amfascinated with drug culture. The idea of a “gateway drug” seems like less of a foreboding cliff’s edge and more like a portal to a brighter, better world. 

As we pass the bottle of liquid fire, Carrie tells us how much she’s craving a cigarette. I have no understanding of this desire, but I think she is cool so wanting a cigarette must be cool regardless of the amount of times I have begged my mom to quit smoking. My mom and stepdad are in a non-smoking phase, but Carrie has a feeling he has a stash hidden in his truck. 

With a buzz on, we all sneak out the side door of the garage. We are the only activity under the amber glow of the street light as we gather around Terry’s truck. Carrie pulls a half-empty pack from behind the bench seat. 

“I knew it. I knew that little weasel didn’t quit!”

The first drag sears my airways and tastes even worse than it had smells when I watch my parents light up. That burn is now in my throat, and the head-rush from the nicotine is spectacular. It feels like the time when I inhaled too much helium before my cousins birthday party and felt like I might fall—a pleasant sensation somewhere between sinking and floating.

Carrie says that the cigarettes aren’t even stale which is proof that my stepdad had bought a fresh pack and was lying about having quit. This is confirmation that our belief that he was not for my mom was correct. I thought staleness was only something that chips or bread could be. There is so much about tobacco that I have yet to learn.

We smoke his cigarettes and bond over a mutual disdain of the guy we all agree isn’t good enough for our mom and Carrie’s sister.

My introduction to my stepdad, Terry was after a date when he and my mom had come back to our Thousand Oaks house. I was lying 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 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 is just barely school-aged, and we are all disgusted with the way Terry babies his son.

I don't pick up smoking as a habit right away. I go weeks without even thinking about cigarettes, and then I start hanging out with friends who are already habitual smokers. It is everything to have friends. I'm sure they had a head start in middle school just like they already have had sex and boyfriend…I haven’t even kissed a boy yet.

There are so many ways I need to do to catch up. I smoke with my new friends for the first time outside of the Johnson Dr. food court. I relish that little rush. It isn’t long before I am doing it everyday. I can’t become a full-on “smoker” because I count on bumming from other kids who are able to buy from particular liquor stores and have a steady stream of allowance coming from their parents.

I make a promise to myself that I will never get addicted to cigarettes. Smoking out of need is what my parents do. They are the addicts who can’t get through life without their precious cancer sticks. When I do it, it’s different. I smoke in the cool way of a teenager who throws her butts on the sidewalk and puts them out by spitting on them. I will never need a cigarette.

I try my first attempt at quitting during my born-again Christian phase. My friend Mary and I make a plan that we will smoke an entire pack in one night and make ourselves sick. The theory is that the memory of the sickness will disgust us and make us never want to smoke again. The next night we see Get Shorty (a film full of cigarettes) at the movies with friends, and the memory of the sickness means nothing. I tell myself I will only smoke until I am 18 because after that I will be an adult and legally allowed to buy cigarettes. If I am an adult smoking cigarettes, I will 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.

I become addicted enough to push past the shame of it, and I steal cigarettes from her purse. When she finds out I smoke, I cry, but I carry on. Eventually, we smoke together.

When I’m sixteen, mom comes home from a play, or her shift at the bar, and we smoke on the bench outside of the apartment. She becomes so permissive about it that my older sister and I smoke in the house when we feel lazy. Sometimes, I come 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.

My own battle with nicotine lasts into adulthood. The breaks feel soul-crushing.

Even when I’m not enduring the blind rage-inducing headache of physical withdrawal, I walk around feeling like something is missing. It’s like an integral part of myself is locked in a cage and pounding on my body and mind from the inside. The first inhale always provides instant relief. The calm pours through my body as I take those deep soothing breaths of fresh smoke.

During the first trimester of my pregnancy, I share a room with my younger sister, Trish. The pain of the nicotine withdrawal alters me to a point that I emotionally abuse my young sibling. On a three hour drive home from Riverside, I become angry that she couldn’t share in the driving responsibility because she doesn’t know how to drive a stick shift.

I pull off the freeway and try to force her to learn until she cries.

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 pick them back up when I wean her and have my body to myself. Freedom from the burden of sharing my nutrients with my child means I can 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 don’t brazenly smoke whenever I want, like my mom and dad. I cover it up and lead a double-life. I volunteer in Karli’s classroom, and on the most desperate days I go to Circle K during snack to “get a coffee,” but I am just getting in my car to smoke. I drive through the neighborhood hoping none of the other parents see me. One day, when I get back to school, little Dylan tells me I smell like a cigar.

I reply to him, “That’s weird.”

I am Terry explaining things to a kid with coffee and cigarettes on my breath.

After years of trying the gums, patches, and will-power, I am alcohol-free and thirty when a friend recommends 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 has either been an escape into someone else’s fictitious world or the dramatic Facebook status changes of my friends and acquaintances. I know self-help books exist, but they aren’t something that I dabble in.

Carr’s book is my gateway drug. It is written in a format that brainwashes me back into thinking like the nine-year-old that begged my mom to quit. It uses repetitive language to undo the damage that the nicotine made when it built the need for itself into my neural pathways. I am instructed to keep smoking while reading the book, so I chain-smoke while reading in the alley behind my apartment. One by one, Carr dismantled the lies I had tell myself in order to keep believing that cigarettes are 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 is still there during the quitting process, but there is a greater understanding of what is going on physically and how it warps my thought processes.

I am the last smoker in my family.

Until the vapers start. 

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 moves to outlaw the sale of food products with red dye no. 3 because it has been proven to be toxic. I happen upon the attention-grabbing headline while scrolling Instagram on a break at work: “Skittles Ban in California,” and can’t help but laugh.

Five years after using Carr’s book to quit, I restart the old habit of drinking at the party of a friend. It isn’t long before drinking’s best friend, smoking, steps 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 are built on the foundation of smoking and drinking. I have friends who tell me that when they think 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.”

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. 

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. My doctor opens up one of our appointments by informing me about the important part close social connections plays in health and longevity. It gets 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 find 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. I had my first cigarette with her, and now Carrie and I have full adult children. We have run in marathons, Spartan races, and and rafted on rivers made of melting glacier water together. At the end of the summer, we plan to climb Mount Whitney together.

Will we ever smoke again? Maybe when we are in our eighties and nineties, and all the grandkids have kids of their own, we’ll sneak out out of the house and light up under a streetlamp, but for now, there’s just too much life left to live.