I think some people are just genetically wired to become smokers. Take me for instance; as far back as I can remember I wanted to smoke. Even when I was little I would hold crayons or pencils in between my fingers and pretend I was smoking while playing house or what have you. My parents didn't even smoke, and I didn't live close enough to the rest of my family to see them do it really. But when I did see my uncles, I remember hugging them and remembering how much I loved the way they all smelled like cloves. Then, being the crazy, drunken bastards they all are (that's why I love them) they would ask me to "keep this shit going" while they went to take a piss somewhere. So, of course there I was, twelve years old, sneaking puffs of their cigarettes and sips of beer foam.
Fast forward to age sixteen; I could smoke legally and I would. My friend Laura and I would stock up on beer, go to the park and drink on the swingset. She smoked, so of course I would try her cigarettes. She's the one who taught me how to really inhale. One time she told me to take a drag, and when I did she yelled, "OH MY GOD-IT'S YOUR MOM!" So of course, I inhaled and that's how I learned. We would lean out of window at night, drinking beer and smoking, throwing the remnants of our nights into the neighbors yard. The next year my friend Meghan and I would babysit for this super hot dad who smoked, and when he would leave we would steal some of the butts that had been put out really early and smoke them on the deck.
I stopped smoking for about two years when I went to Ohio, but it wasn't really my choice. The people I was hanging out with did not approve, so I just kind of stopped. When I stopped being friends with them, or rather, whenI got my life back, I started up again. I think this had to do with meeting my friend Elise. We had met in math and bonded over the fact that we were probably the only white females under the age of 35 that still listened to Sade. We both wanted to smoke like all the people we idolized ("Dude...Lou Reed smoked, so who cares?") so one day I scored one little Djarum Black Clove cigarette and we drove to a park and smoked it on the bench. I remember it because there was a lightening storm brewing, and we felt like such little rebels sitting in the pouring rain sharing a cigarette. For the next two years we would go to that park almost daily, smoke (mostly) cigarattes, and talk about our lives, our mutual love for Mexican films and drug-addicted rock stars (Oh, Iggy, how we loved you). It was our park and we felt kind of violated if someone else was there. Sometimes we would smoke an entire pack between the two of us in one sitting. I felt kind of ashamed that I liked the way they made my lungs tighten the next morning. Kurt Vonnegut said that smoking was the classy was to kill yourself, and I, for the most part, agreed.
Once, during a huge anti-smoking campaign in high school some cop made the remark that students who smoke are either uninformed, or just plain stupid. Well, as someone who took care of their grandmother as they withered away from cancer I didn't consider myself to my uninformed. I had a 3.3 GPA, so I clearly was not stupid. It's just that when I think about myself 50 years from now I like to see so me as some tan little old lady that lives on her own and makes the pool boys rub oil on her back. Oh, and I want to see a goddamn camel light in my hand, too. One day I will probably quit. No matter how many excuses I keep making for myself I know that one day, I will have to quit. But goddamn, sometimes I wished that I had grown up before the creation of the surgeon general warning. Ignorance is bliss, right?
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youalwayssing's journal
