May

6

Don’t Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

May 6, 2008 |

People are sometimes shocked when they learn I used to smoke. Well, it was a very brief period in college, and while I could say I gave it up for my health or because it’s awful for the environment, the simple truth is I gave it up because I realized it just wasn’t for me. For one thing I could hang out with my friends who smoked without smoking, but my non-smoker friends didn’t want to be around me if I were smoking. And I didn’t just smoke cigarettes. I smoked cigars, and even some smokers don’t like cigar smokers. I can’t explain the appeal of cigar smoking. While my mother smoked cigarettes on a regular basis, my father would, about once every six months or so, smoke a cigar. I’d have to say the look of smoking a cigar had as much to do with it as anything else, though–in other words, Groucho Marx was a big influence on me. At the same time when it came to joining the Smokers’ Club, I should have remembered that Groucho once said, “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.” Besides, a cigar might be a great stage prop but in life all it does is make you really unpleasant to be around. One of my happiest memories of smoking doesn’t really involve smoking, but a night when a friend who also smoked and I realized we were out of cigarettes and between us we had thirty cents. We could get a pack of the extremely generic brand for a buck fifty, so we set out across the campus at nine o’clock pestering everyone we met for money. It quickly turned into a game: how long will it take to harass someone into giving us money? And somehow we developed this unspoken rule that we couldn’t accept anything larger than a nickel. That getting the money was more fun than getting the cigarettes was more fun should have told me something.

sedaris.jpgI thought about this reading a recent essay in the New Yorker by David Sedaris called “Letting Go”, about his life as a smoker and the day he gave it up. Sedaris is unflinchingly honest in his essays which makes the fact that he’s now a former smoker–as he puts it, finished with smoking–surprising. This is a guy who, in his essay “Bend Over And Say Ah”, from Me Talk Pretty One Day, asked a hospital nurse for an ashtray, and since he was in a French hospital, got it. Sedaris is even more brutal when he talks about betraying his fellow smokers:

Though I wish it were otherwise, I’m actually a very intolerant person. When I see a drunk or a drug addict begging for money, I don’t think, There but for the grace of God go I, but, rather, I quit, and so can you. Now get that cup of nickels out of my face.

I, though, can’t bring myself to be so harsh. I take more of what I’d call a Cuban cigar approach–smooth and subtle, apologetically saying, “I’m sorry, I haven’t got any change,” while thinking how much it’s all about change. For me quitting smoking was an easy change, but I don’t know what it’s like for the other person, what their circumstances are. Maybe they want to change and are finding it harder than I did, and while giving up smoking was easy, I’ve tried to make other changes in my life that were harder. Change can sometimes be hard, and sometimes it’s just nickels.

Related: Thank You For Not Smoking.


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