cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Smoking Cigarettes Cigarettes. I've tried to like them but can never manage for very long. I tried my first cigarette at the age of 8. My friend Tommy had swiped one from his mother and we smoked it out on the side of his house while his mother was at work (he was a latch key kid of divorced parents). Looking back, I strongly suspect that I didn't actually inhale the smoke. Out of ignorance. My next attempt at picking up nicotine was some time during middle school. I used to sneak out in the middle of the night to meet up with friends and get into all sorts of horrible mischief. Jesus, when I think about some of the awful shit that we did and got away with... Nothing violent. But petty vandalism and that sort of thing. We were 12 years old. What can I say? Anyhow, on these nights of trouble-making, usually Jason F. or someone would have a pack of cigarettes that they'd gotten somehow or other and I would smoke one every now and then. This was just me being a good member of the pack, of course. I didn't really take to it. However, I did feel the need to express a preference of brand. Camels. Soft pack. It was when I was 13 years old at the Halloween reunion for my summer camp that I got actually interested. Of course, this had to do with a girl. Nikki Guimond [sigh]. We had a wonderful sort of 2 or 3 day romance and unfortunately never saw each other again. We were magically drawn to each other starting within a matter of hours of arriving. We flirted around the bonfire that evening and did not leave each other's side for days until it was time to go home. I even slept with her in the girls cabin (adult supervision obviously went all to hell that weekend). Looking back, Nikki was the first girl who I ever fell in love with. Her face is still perfectly clear in my mind's eye. If only we'd lived anywhere near each other, I often wonder what might have happened. Maybe we'd be married today? Who knows. Such speculation is not ridiculous, since it was only 4 years later that I did actually become engaged. At the age of 29 I am still happily married to the girl I bought a ring for at 17. I think that some teenagers can be perfectly capable of forming serious, long term relationships. Anyway, the point is that Nikki dabbled in smoking. She took me by the hand and we snuck behind the pool house to smoke something or other. My head spun. In a good way. We lay on the cool grass in the dark together and passed the cigarette back and forth. Ahhhhh! Smoking was suddenly magical and special. Several days after my return home, I was confronted angrily by my parents. It turned out that my pathetic little sneak of a fraternal twin brother had been following and spying on us. When he got home, he tattled on me for smoking behind the pool house with a girl. Fucking wanker. I strongly suspect that he never even kissed a girl until he was at least 17, if not older. That fall, I determined to take up smoking in earnest. However, I could never manage to bring myself to inhale through the nose. Ugh. Actually obtaining cigarettes to smoke was difficult at that age and I just couldn't line up the kind of supply where I could make smoking into a daily habit. Middle school life was full enough, what with competing with each other to sneak the biggest knife into school (WTF were we thinking?), feeling J@mieDeMuth's tits in the back of frequent class assemblies and trying to get into Meredith P@ge's pants. [In retrospect, all I had to do to get into Meredith's pants would have been to ask. She was hot and fun and had a great ass and we liked the same weird music. We went to see The Cure together, along with some other friends. I hung out with her at her house all the time. We really should have dated and if I'd had half a brain and sufficient balls it would have happened. Oh well.] Then at the end of 8th grade we moved. During that summer before starting high school I went through an Outward Bound course. I came back rather different. Not that I was suddenly opposed to smoking. Just that everything had sort of reset for me. New city, new school, new friends, new attitude that I was one tough motherfucker who had climbed dozens of mountains in the pouring rain through night and day and nothing was beyond me. Few of my friends in my first year of high school smoked. The only times that whole year that I picked up a cigarette were when I was out at a concert or nightclub with friends and someone had a pack to offer. Yeah, I had a pretty good situation as a kid in high school. Even in 9th grade I managed to get out and about, going to concerts and staying out late. I was a guitar player back then, into old-school electric blues. Naturally my father wanted to encourage this, seeing as he'd been in a band in the early 70's playing similar music. He played briefly with one of the guys from Aerosmith, oddly enough. There's also a great story about the time he met Jimi Hendrix backstage, but I'll save that for another time. The point is that the only way that I could see blues acts like Danny Gatton, Gov't Mule (on their first tour before they even had an album) and Buddy Guy was by going to the nightclubs and bars where these guys played. And they usually started late. I met a lot of neat people around that time, including a guy named C0rey Harris who was playing totally authentic, Delta-style bottleneck blues in little dives or sometimes playing for change on the street corner. When he played at bars, his girlfriend used to let me in the door even when I didn't have the money for the cover charge. A few months ago Corey was awarded a McAurthur Genius Grant, which he totally deserved. But even hanging around in bars, I just couldn't quite pick up the habit of smoking. A year or 2 after that, probably around my junior year of high school, I had a job working the late shift at a malt shop downtown. Malt shop as in 50's style. One night I was closing up and found that someone had left an entire brand new canister of Drum tobacco at one of the booths. There were several packs of rolling papers inside the canister as well. Curious, I stuffed the the can in my backpack and took it home. Each night, after I was certain that everyone else had gone to bed, I carefully slid open the door from my room to the outside and sat on the brick stoop applying myself to the fine craft of rolling my own cigarettes. This made smoking so much more interesting. Of course, my early attempts were pathetic. But after a week or so I got pretty good at quickly rolling nice, tight cigarettes. It was very satisfying. As for the actual smoking of the things, it got me high as a kite. Eventually I ran through the entire king-sized container of tobacco and just never got around to buying another. A little after that I discovered clove cigarettes, which get me totally fucked up. Cloves and I have had a love/hate relationship over the years. Sometimes they hit the spot and make me feel lovely. But more and more, the very odor makes me ill. I smoked a lot of cloves when I got to H@mpshire College particularly. I smoked a lot of pot as well. Pretty quickly, I figured out that the places to be were any hall, dorm or event that allowed smoking. Because let's face it; that's where all the cool people are. And at social gatherings I would smoke. Sometimes I would buy a pack. But it never even occurred to me to smoke when I was alone. Considering how rarely I was alone that year in spite of having my own room, it's remarkable that I never got addicted. After leaving Hampshire for VCU, my tobacco use went to basically zero. Every now and then Trish and I would buy a pack of cloves, which would last us a month or longer. We were so broke that the idea of smoking even a pack of cigarettes a week would have been outrageously expensive. Me and tobacco had a brief reunion after college when I was going out to clubs every weekend. I'd always have a pack of cloves in hand for goth night. I'd downright chain smoke them sometimes. But only when I was out and about. Never at home. And I *still* couldn't bring myself to let any smoke through my nose. Once my clubbing days ended (I think that was when I was 23 and decided to completely change and improve my life), the smoking went out the door along with the horrid 1999-2000 era club wear. Sweet fuck, I hope that there aren't any pictures out there of me wearing that shit. Nowadays I don't always even smoke when I go out. My social smoking urge is waning. Sometimes I actually recoil from the odor of the smoke. So often I am left with a sensation similar to having a cold following a smoke. My body increasingly rejects the whole idea of cigarettes, although tobacco still gets me nicely fucked up every time. It's a shame, because nothing else in American culture does what smoking does, socially. If you get rid of smoking, then how will we know who the cool kids are? And what excuse will we have to sneak off behind the pool house and lay down on the grass with a girl? 12:38 - 2008-03-20 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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