The idea was simple and convoluted in equal measure. At the age of 19, some seven years after my babysitter had bummed me my first cigarette and a year after I had celebrated the freedom of moving out of my parents’ house and into a run-down apartment in Iowa City by taking up the habit full time, I made my first real attempt to quit smoking. I’d been dabbling with the idea for weeks, intentionally not buying cigarettes when I knew I was low and seeing how long I would last once I’d run out before caving in and making the short drive over to the Quik-Trip on Burlington for a new pack. Un-self-aware as I was at that age, I still recognized that if that was all the effort I needed to put into starting back up, any bid I’d make to quit would be doomed from the outset. Clearly, I needed a better strategy.
At a time when a pack of so-called premium cigarettes would only set you back $3 or so, I was generally broke enough that I had to budget1 for the cost. If I was completely out, that expense was easy to justify. On the other hand, if I still technically owned cigarettes the simple fact of my lack of monetary resources would be enough to keep me from being drawn inexorably back to the QT—or so I figured. I’d break the cycle, and just like that I would be smoke-free. I only had to find a way to make the pack I still had feel somehow within my grasp but just out of reach at the same time. I couldn’t hide them from myself because I’d obviously know where they were, nor could I ask someone to hide them for me because that would psychologically be no different than giving them away. That would only lead me back to buying more. What I had to do, I reasoned, was to find a way to make retrieving them unappealing enough that I’d think twice before committing to it. And in thinking twice, surely I would come to the proper conclusion the second time around.
This is how I found myself in the late afternoon of one clear October day in a lonely part of the vast cemetery on the other side of town, stuffing a half-empty pack of Kamel Reds into a gap beneath a particularly ostentatious and creepy stone monument that was slowly being overgrown by gnarled, untended shrubbery. These were my cigarettes, obviating the need to buy any more since reclaiming these would be as cheap and easy as stooping over to pick them up—but in order to do so, I would not only have to drive across the small breadth of a midwest college town, but then visit a graveyard, forcing me to wrestle then and there with the specter of my own mortality. No doubt, I would see the folly of the smoker’s life, destined as it was to be cut short by its one and only virtue: relief from the agony of not smoking. A return to cigarettes would now end in the same place physically as it already lead metaphorically, and I would come to my senses before I even left my apartment. It seemed so simple yet so exquisitely clever, this teenaged attempt to manipulate the inborn fear of death that I reasoned must be latent somewhere in the innermost self of every living thing. It couldn’t possibly fail.
Except that it did. Of course it did. Like, immediately. It was a logical plan—if admittedly ludicrous—but addiction is not a logical process. That night, I tossed and fidgeted in bed as the horrible, insistent, scraped-out feeling inside my veins kept me wide awake. As my thoughts became monomaniacally focused on how good just one cigarette would taste, how it would calm the riot of nicotine withdrawal slowly boiling inside my blood, and how I could then finally fall asleep, there followed no rational progression that lead from smoking to the grave and onward to a renewed determination to avoid both. In the end, the knowledge of a ready and available pack of cigarettes ate away at me, until there was nothing left of the resolve in which I’d been so confident only a few hours before. I drove to the cemetery in my pajamas and walked its looming midnight shadows under a full moon half-concealed by clouds. The effect was dramatic spooky—the sort of graveyard scene you’d see in a B movie from the 1950’s—but I didn’t pause for a moment. I felt a sudden, stomach-churning bolt of panic when I found my cache empty, but quickly figured out that I was looking in the wrong place. As soon as I remembered which stone I’d hidden the pack under, I had my cigarettes in my hand once more. The relief was immediate, even before I smoked any of them. At least I waited until I was back under the glow of the arc-sodium lights on the sidewalk before lighting up.
In the years since then, I have gone through this process at least a dozen more times with varying degrees of success.2 The most productive attempt was also the least instructive, coming as it did amid a landslide of lifestyle changes I made on a whim for no better or loftier reason than because I was 20. By the time the summer following the cemetery incident had rolled around, I had given up meat, marijuana, and alcohol. I avoided heavily-processed and fattening foods and I had become a casual but rabidly-enthusiastic cyclist. I don’t understand what made that season so special, but for whatever reason by the time I chose to quit smoking, it was a fait accompli. I was just done, with no thought, no planning, and almost no effort—and I stayed more or less done for the following two years. I told myself at the time that I had finally “really decided” to quit (whatever the hell that meant) and that’s why it had been such a fast and painless process compared to my struggles just the previous year. I just hadn’t been really, like really, ready before. As I look back on that summer with the insight of the intervening years, I still can’t say I understand how impulsively cold-turkeying at that (or any) age turned out to be such an easy thing to do. I can only say that, as I would eventually learn, it would never be that easy ever, ever again.
But I wasn’t aware of that when, two years later, I went from dabbling with herbal “stage” cigarettes, to dabbling with “real” tobacco cigarettes socially behind the back of the non-smoking girlfriend I had picked up six months after quitting, to using our messy and protracted breakup as an excuse to jump face-first off the wagon and into a pack-and-a-half-a-day habit. I didn’t find any actual solace in smoking, but I took to it with a fervor so zealous I probably convinced several of the people around me to give it a try. It helped that the owners of the overpriced cheese-on-cardboard pizza joint where I worked3 had devoted themselves quasi-religiously to ignoring the city’s recent ban on smoking in food-service establishments. And since Tiny Tom didn’t want to put out his trashfire-smelling cigars just because he was rolling out dough for the pies the restaurant sold to the local elementary schools, you could chain smoke all the American Spirits you wanted in that place—just so long as you made a good-faith effort not to get any ash on the pizza.
Several years passed before I’d try again to quit in earnest. After several months without gainful employment following my termination from the cheese-on-cardboard joint for a burglary which had fairly obviously been committed by another employee (whose work history, it would come out, was riddled with questions over disappearing cash), I was too broke to buy my own smokes even after landing a job as the overnight clerk at an adult bookstore. I spent the next few months bumming pack after pack of the discount variety favored by my boss, something called Liggit Light 100s, that I had never heard of before (and haven’t actually seen since). As the man must surely have been able to afford better quality cigarettes, I suppose he must have actually preferred a brand that smelled like someone was trying to burn an old pair of jeans. Iowa City had at that time no prohibition against smoking in porn shops, so he and I whiled away our respective shifts legally stinking that place the heck up. It was preferable in any case to the nauseatingly clinical smell of the industrial-strength cleaning agents used by the janitorial staff.
When I moved a year or two later to New York City and learned exactly how desperate and hopeless a job search could really be, I discovered a tier of cigarettes that existed even below Liggits and American Golds. This lower rung included Top’s and Bugler’s discount brands of roll-your-owns, which even the mid-aughts sold for as little as $1.50 per pouch (rolling papers included!).4 These, along with the 99¢ 40oz bottles of Ballantine’s brand of gut-rot malt liquor available at the bodega around the corner from my apartment, were among the few comforts of a period of my life otherwise marked by taking 90-minute train rides to fill out applications for jobs that had already been filled, and a landlord who both controlled the heat in my building and insisted in the pit of winter that I needed to stop calling him about the temperature in my apartment because “40° is warm enough to sleep.”
By the time I’d enrolled in the free smoking-cessation program offered by NYC, I had finally landed a job putting price tags on books5 and was (just barely) making enough to buy modestly less-expensive cartons of factory-rolled cigarettes during visits to neighboring states with less aggressive tax rates on tobacco. Even those cost way too much for my limited means, however, and it was ultimately a combination of concern for the health of my wallet as well as that of my lungs that lead me to sign up for what amounted to a care package with three months worth of nicotine patches and an audio cassette full of encouraging advice. The city-sponsored patches were well-intentioned, but they didn’t so much end the ever-gnawing need for a cigarette as stretch out the withdrawal process so that it lasted the entire summer. Still hooked on nicotine after months without a smoke, I felt guilty as hell when I walked out of a neighborhood bodega with a pack in my hand one autumn night but the relief I felt at ending the months of anxiety and deprivation washed all of that way. Cigarettes in NY were still pricey as hell, though—and it would still be over a year before I’d discover an Indian reservation from upstate that sold them online tax-free.
Most quitting ventures didn’t last even that long—a more typical attempt would be over in less than a day. Far from my experience as a 20-year-old, when quitting had been only as hard as the making the choice to do it, I found that life quickly became impossible to navigate with the added burden of nicotine withdrawal. I had shit to do, and I could barely get through the day as it was without that constant, maddening distraction. If I quit in the morning, I could pretty much be counted on to be smoking again by mid-afternoon. So it was that my life revolved around the pursuit of the cheapest name-brand cartons I could find, while every so often going through six or so hours of misery before giving up and lighting up in frustration. Most of the time, I didn’t give it much thought: quitting seemed hopeless, so I simply gave up hope. By the time I left the wilds of New York City for the sedate landscape of Seattle, I just sort of assumed that I was going to smoke forever. It was unequivocally terrible for my health, but at least I still enjoyed it, so on balance things could have been a great deal worse. And then—much as it chagrins me to admit it now—I got into vaping.
1. An admittedly generous term to use in regard to the 40-year-old version of myself—let alone the teenaged one—but applicable in this case, nonetheless
2. Though never again did I involve a graveyard in my ambitions to lengthen—or more accurately, “cease actively shortening”—my own life
3. Applying my newly acquired BA in Theater Arts by working as a very half-decent cook and a very half-assed shift supervisor
4. I have picked up some some truly pointless skills in my time on the Earth, but honestly I am to this day not as disproportionally proud of any of them as I am my mastery of the temperamental art of the hand-rolled cigarette, or rollie
5. This was, no exaggeration, the entire job for eight hours every day. Whatever glamor pops into your head at the phrase “New York City bookstore,” let’s dispel that shit right now. I volunteered to clean the customer bathrooms every week just for the opportunity to do literally, absolutely anything else.