on smoking
an essay (?) about the doomed intersection between craving nicotine and craving beauty
A friend of mine told me it was getting better. On Monday she had smoked thirty-five cigarettes. On Tuesday, only twenty-five. Progress. At work, she takes a smoke break every couple of hours and chews Nicorette gum when she’s back on the till.
“What do you think it would take for you to truly quit?” I asked her.
“Pregnancy,” she said. “Maybe.”
Another friend of mine suffered from a debilitating ear infection a few months ago. It was all-consuming. Frustrated when he couldn’t overhear any of our pub banter (which really wasn’t worth overhearing anyway) because of his aching cochlea, he sent himself home early on Saturday nights. He couldn’t listen to Belle and Sebastian on the commute into the city anymore. So he read books I lent to him and studied French conjugation instead.
The other day, he told me he was looking up the most common causes for ear infections, and there it was: second-hand smoke. I apologised sarcastically. But it was true that he always kept me company on my balcony when I was craving the heavy flush of nicotine. In spring and in summer and in autumn, and in the bone-white bite of winter too.
“Are you crying?”
“No, not yet.”
A folk singer-songwriter asked me this when I was smoking on the weed-choked steps behind the green room at a music festival tucked away in the hills. From the green room I stole biscuits and sweet chilli chips and paper cups of tea topped up with coconut milk even though I don’t write songs. She picked three daisies and handed them to me and I tucked them behind my right ear. Then she left to sound check, and I was alone again. The daisies kept slipping away.
A red-haired child exploring in the undergrowth caught me smoking on the steps and looked so disappointed in me. I know, I wanted to say. I’m sorry. But there are many reasons that I do it, I wanted to tell her. I remember the way I used to make a show of holding my breath as a child whenever I passed the smoking section outside our local gelato shop. That poor redhead was probably searching for something mystical and she had found me instead, crouched on the stone steps, trying to hide a nasty habit.
I had lit the cigarette with the lighter I brought my friend back from Brooklyn. It is patterned with an illustrated moon crowning sketched skyscrapers. He probably knows that often I wish I had kept it for myself. I always grow attached to lighters, for whatever reason. Even the black plastic ones you buy for a couple of dollars at the servo when you forget to bring one on a night out.
The music festival was idyllic, complete with fruit trees and pop-up natural wine bars and wild-haired children who rarely made any sense when they chatted to me. During one of the sets, a five-year-old girl I’d made friends with pointed to the drummer onstage and whispered in my ear, “That’s your father.”
“No, that’s my friend,” I said. “We’re the same age.”
She shook her head. “That’s your father.”
It felt stupid to be sad in a place where I could freely pick cherries from the trees and spit the bloody pits into the bushes. But I had left my cigarettes at home and had to keep relying on friends to roll them for me. And so I couldn’t stop thinking about this craving in my lungs - which now seemed to persist even when things were golden - and what it might mean.
It was not until I had been smoking for years that I realised that I was, in fact, a smoker, that I had to say yes when healthcare professionals asked me if I smoke. And you might plan To Smoke, but I don’t know how often people plan to be A Smoker. I didn’t plan on being jittery, sore to my bones when I make it to 3 pm without having had a cigarette yet. I never planned to need to spend at least $50 a week (often more) allowing for the habit. Skimping on groceries, skipping meals to fiscally accommodate it.
I didn’t enjoy my first cigarette. I’m sure that most people don’t. When I was in France with my best friend from high school, I handed her my cigarette so that she could take her first drag, and after she was done coughing she shot me a look of hysterical betrayal. “You actually enjoy this?” she spluttered, and I wasn’t sure how to answer the question.
I know that I didn’t begin by getting much out of the nicotine, but I got so much, too much, out of the image I had of myself inhaling the smoke. My friends and I, young and giddy over our own aesthetic rebellion, would be sure to snap pictures of each other. Me at age nineteen, wide-eyed, lipsticked, smoking: the ultimate picture of corrupted girlhood. I would aggravate my neighbours by smoking on my balcony late at night and blasting Fiona Apple on my bluetooth speaker, a vision that would have had 2014 Tumblr in fits of ecstasy. And I always wonder if smoking is inherently, organically sexy, or if I’ve simply consumed so much media that tells me it is. Would Lauren Bacall have managed to seduce Humphrey Bogart in every movie they were in together if she hadn’t always been holding a cigarette?
I used to tell people that I wasn’t addicted to the nicotine, I was addicted to the act of smoking. I enjoyed smoking, but I could live without a cigarette, and I could definitely live without nicotine, so I wasn’t really a smoker. It was just another pastime, just another thing to do. But it’s a slippery slope, from a couple of borrowed cigarettes every now and then at the pub, to storing packs of them in the drawer of your bedside table and routinely smoking on the walk to the local supermarket, on the walk to the bus stop, to celebrate when life is going well, to soothe yourself when it isn’t. Now, I love the way that Marlboros make my fingertips feel helium-light.
All of a sudden, smoking becomes everything. There is nothing like a cigarette after three glasses of wine. It’s a breathing exercise. It is something to do with your fingers that isn’t going on your phone. It can sometimes be the only way to snag a break when working a twelve hour shift at an Italian restaurant. It can sometimes feel like the lesser of many, many evils.
I used to try and hide my nicotine habit at family functions. Then I just gave up, leaned into the persona of the Smoking Cousin. Last Christmas, I was vocal about departing every couple of hours for a smoke break (there are always relatives who will sneak away with you in the hopes of bumming a cheeky dart. Someone has to be the cousin who provides). One time, my aunt followed me out to the curb, carrying a tray of baked sausage rolls, and muttered as she witnessed me handing cigarettes to my brother and to one of her sons, “So I see this is the Idiot Section of the function.”
Eventually, I walked back inside, wafting smoke. I noticed a fresh cigarette burn on the hem of my party dress. Sitting down, I poked my index finger through the hole. One of my cousins, a medical student, asked me why I choose to smoke. There wasn’t a lot of judgement in her tone. It was as if I was a scientific study, something that she was genuinely curious about and wanted to understand. I was willing to help her, but I didn’t really understand myself.
My mother says she ate a tangerine every day of the month that she first quit smoking. She was a few years older than I am now. She had just moved to Japan, where she would birth me, name me, raise me, where she still lives now that I’ve left her behind. She says she would unpeel the tangerine in the morning, and have just one segment of fruit every time she craved a cigarette, all throughout the day, until there was no more fruit left.
When I was four years old, I caught her smoking a cigarette on Christmas Day out by the recyclables bin, and I couldn’t forgive her until well into the new year.
I always feel guiltiest about smoking when I’m in Japan, because it is where I grew up, where I lived until I came of age, and it is thus the physical embodiment of my childhood. All smokers know inherently that they should not do what they are doing.
When I spent autumn in New York last year, I convinced myself that I had to smoke incessantly in order to protect myself. I spent most of my time roaming the city alone, day and night, and so I viewed the permanent cigarette clamped between my fingers as vital in the cultivation of an intimidating don’t-fuck-with-me aura. Surely the fact that I was a smoker signalled that I had been around the block, despite my smallness, despite my femininity, and it ultimately wouldn’t be worth trying to mug me. Because I might just blow smoke in your eyes.
I told myself I was spending less money on food because I was smoking more. I was getting bodied by tipping culture and by the exchange rate. Living on cigarettes and cream cheese bagels and enough black coffee to have the same effect on my heart as partaking of a coke-fuelled Saturday night in the 1970’s would have - it was the economical choice.
It also seemed to me, for whatever reason, to feel culturally and emotionally necessary to smoke a cigarette every hour or so. I felt that it would have been an affront to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Candy Darling if I didn’t recklessly tar my lungs whilst roaming their dusty playground. And I didn’t know how else to commemorate visiting or experiencing personal landmarks in New York City. Just taken a piss in the Chelsea Hotel? Smoke a cigarette on the sidewalk to pay your respects. Just taken a picture outside of Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment door? Have a cigarette, you’re in the West Village for crying out loud. Just saw Andrew Wyeth’s ‘Christina’s World’ displayed at the MOMA? Have a smoke outside on West 53rd Street to allow yourself to contemplate the art more deeply. Have a smoke while you’re wandering around in the cold trying to find the nearest train that will take you back uptown at the end of the day - it will warm you up.
Smoking is one of my favourite things to do when I’m travelling alone, not just in New York, and I always manage to find some way to justify it. We come up with all these reasons for ourselves to do what we should not do. Our minds work harder at this than anything. At least, my mind does.
Cigarettes are deadly and dangerous. I know that. But anyone who wholesale condemns smoking or is unable to understand the appeal has never experienced the pleasure of sharing a cigarette with someone you’re attracted to.
When I was 19, my older brother, before he was able to understand the appeal of smoking a little too well, had just witnessed me share a cigarette with a beautiful woman. It was the first time he had ever seen me smoke. Exasperated, he said, “You would do any drug if someone attractive enough offered it to you.”
“Well, yes,” I agreed, unable to discern any kind of problem there.
My father asked me why almost every musician I interview smokes despite the surging Australian cigarette prices, and why I so often describe myself smoking alongside them (in share house backyards and on balconies and in pub courtyards) in the profiles I write. “We’re artists,” I explained (tongue-in-cheek and unhelpful).
But it’s true that there is - and historically has been - a culture of enthusiastic smoking amongst beautiful people who want to make beautiful things.
We all want to feel like our lives are worth living. We want to feel like our lives are worth writing songs about, like if our days were movie scenes they would be worth the reels of film. For some, self-mythology is for some reason made easier by picking up a smoking habit. Sometimes things, especially terrible things, are easier to bear if you have a vision of yourself as beautiful while bearing it all. In so many movies, a cigarette is narrative shorthand for distress. The smoke and the smoker are romanced by the camera; the lens renders it - though so often it is supposed to symbolise defeat - beautiful. If you are suffering, light up a cigarette, and you become beautiful enough to be worthy of film. Perhaps we hope that if we are beautiful enough the suffering will hurt less.
We know what smoking does to us, and we choose to do it anyway. For years now it’s been clear. We’ve all had a relative felled by lung cancer or emphysema. We’ve all seen that picture of Bryan. Famously, smoking kills.
But it’s a very human thing, to want to do something that makes you feel better, despite the consequences (especially if the consequences are seemingly so far away as to seem unreal). To bring yourself closer to death just to feel like you’re doing a better job of living.
Choosing to smoke is an insane decision. Quitting, oddly enough, feels like an insane decision too. You have discovered one of the greatest solitary pleasures life has to offer, and now you must give it up.
My friends and I had accidentally found ourselves on a knotty hiking trail in Kamakura, a seaside city in Japan, just south of the capital. Naturally, the question arose: if we were all stranded here amongst the gnarled roots, who would die first?
“You would,” my brother said to me. “On account of having no cigarettes on you to smoke.”
I rolled my eyes and kept hiking, breathing heavily. My lungs are not what they once were.
When I told a friend that I was thinking of writing an essay dissecting addiction and the reasons we smoke, he squinted at me. “Nicotine’s an incredibly addictive substance,” he said. End of essay.
I ashed my cigarette. We were sitting in the smoking section of a cafe. “Well, that’s not interesting enough,” I said.
I’m 21 now, and I feel incredibly old. Probably when I’m 26 I’ll feel so young. Already I’ve taken far too many smoke breaks just to write this article. And I know my youngest sibling has nightmares about smoking and what it might do to me.
I need to quit, Charlie, I know. I want to, I really do. I promise I will.
Bautifully written and very well said!
Beautiful article