Yea I know its killing me
Yea I know I know I know I know I know I know I need a
Last cigarette, last cigarette, last cigarette, one before I go to bed..."
- Dramarama, "Last Cigarette"
At my worst, in my junior year of college, I was on a two pack a day habit. Stop and think about that for a moment. 20 cigarettes in a pack means 40 cigarettes a day. To maintain that level of smoking, I had to pretty much constantly have a cigarette going. And I pretty much did.
My smokes were always within arm's reach of the bed when I
went to sleep at night – you know, for those
wake-you-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night cravings – so the morning routine
involved having my first smoke of the day lit and half gone before I even got out of bed. If it
was a weekday, there were the before and after class clutches of smokers to
join in with. I smoked while I walked
between classes. I smoked before and
after meals in the dining hall. I smoked
while playing pool in the commons building.
I smoked while I studied back in the dorm room. If it was a weekend, well, there were parties
all over campus, and you couldn't have a drink without a smoke. Hell, I even mastered the art of smoking in
the shower.
Back then, though, most people I knew smoked. I knew more people who smoked than people who
didn't. It was something we just did. It was relaxing, stress-reducing. It was a social activity. It looked cool and chicks dug it, or so we
told ourselves. Hey, what better way to
break the ice with a cute co-ed than to ask if she had an extra smoke – or better
yet, to come to her rescue with an extra of your own if she was smokeless and nic-fitting.
We coughed up black stuff, we hacked and wheezed, we smelled
like chimneys, our clothes were permeated with the stench of stale tobacco, our
fingers were yellowed with nicotine stains.
And yet we smoked, smoked, smoked and smoked some more.
I had smoked on and off pretty regularly since I’d guess
about age 13 (confession: as a third or fourth grader I had experimented a
little bit thanks to neighborhood friends’ older brothers and sisters letting
smoke some of their cigarettes – usually as part of the pact made with the
younger siblings in exchange for their silence around their parents), but it was in college where I became a true
smoker. Never mind my terrible sinuses
or semi-annual bouts of bronchitis – smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!
One year, a particularly bad bout of bronchitis brought my
smoking to a temporary halt. I
physically could not breath in regular air without launching into an extended
coughing fit, much less inhale a lungful of tobacco smoke. After about a week, I was at my wit's end,
decided I was feeling well enough, and broke down and had a smoke. And another.
And then another. As coincidence
would have it, the bronchitis had run its course, and within a day or two I was
feeling much more like myself again. When
I recounted for anyone who would listen that finally smoking was surely what
had cured me, my roommate simply shook his head and said, “Bryan, you
have no friend in the Surgeon General.”
After college I wound up spending a few years in the
restaurant industry – again finding myself among a group of people who
smoked. Heavily. By now I was down to a more manageable half a
pack a day, but still I smoked. My
girlfriend at the time and I lived in a tiny two-room apartment, and we both
smoked - she probably more than I, although with a drink or two in me I could
still run through a pack or more in an evening if the mood was right. We’d tell each other that we really should
quit; we’d make pacts to quit together, but we never did quit.
Now, fast forward a few years. That girlfriend and I had split up; I was out
of the restaurant biz and doing very well in my marketing career. Well enough, in fact, that I was ready to
move out of that cramped apartment and buy my first house. As my friends and I were moving things out of
the apartment, I saw a sight I will
never forget. We pulled the sofa away
from the wall, and there was a nearly perfect outline of the sofa on that wall –
clean wall where the sofa had been, soot- and smoke-stained wall where it had
not. I vowed at that moment that I would
not treat my new house that way. I made
a rule for myself that I would not smoke in the new house. I would go outside
to smoke.
Over the course of the first two or three years in the
house, that's exactly what I did. There has
never been a cigarette smoked inside this house since I've owned it. I either went out on the front porch or the
back patio if I wanted to smoke. Slowly, over time, without realizing it, I was finding less and less
desire to stop whatever I was doing to go smoke a cigarette. Soon I was pretty much only smoking at work on
lunch break.
The Day came at the end of week's vacation from work. As usual for me, it was a stay-at-home
vacation. One night I went out on the
patio and lit up a cigarette. After just
a drag or two, it occurred to me that this was the first cigarette I had lit up
in a week. Not intentionally, not
consciously, it just hadn't occurred to me to smoke; I hadn't needed to smoke. “I don't need this!” I said to myself and
crushed out the nearly unsmoked cigarette.
That was September 4, 2004.
Ten years ago. I have not smoked
another cigarette since that day.
I vowed that I would never be one of those militant
ex-smokers. I’m of the live and let live
school: you want to smoke? Go ahead,
enjoy. Believe me, I know how good that
smoke can be. You're trying to
quit? Believe me, I know how hard the
habit is to break. But I am living proof
that it can be broken – for good.
Ten years smoke free.
That’s worth celebration.
