I began (and ended) smoking in college, in 1982. Because I thought intellectuals smoked. Look at Jackson Pollock, his ubiquitous fag dangling from his bottom lip. His painting "No. 5, 1948" sold for $151 million and it was just a bunch of paint dribbles. If smoking was stupid, I wanted to be stupid like Jackson Pollock. Stupid like Georgia O'Keefe, Eugene O'Neill, Edith Warton... the Greenwich Village crowd. The reds, the anarchists, the social reformers. The left bankers. I wanted to identify with them.
I graduated from a class D school in a rural community. I say "rural," but that's out of politeness. The pastoral farming life died off with Michigan's auto industry, leaving in its wake drug use, apathy, an arrogant-ignorant mentality that the less nice people called "white-trash", the fallout of economic and social depression.
Nearly every kid in my class of 52 smoked. The drop-out rate was higher than the rate of non-smokers. I didn't smoke until college. Somehow I made a mental distinction: Smoking in high school was for go-nowhere losers, not me. Smoking in college was for intellectuals, like me. High-brow smoke couldn't kill you; or if it did, somehow it meant something: Poor, but by choice. Smoking the burnt-out ends of someone else's cigarettes and living on ideals.
But conformity is, by nature, hard to shake, especially in the early 1980s. In my non-conformity, I found myself conforming in practice to a lot of what I was rebelling against in theory. The fear of disease, especially HIV-AIDS, prevented me from smoking OP (Other Peoples) cigarettes. Yes, I know, HIV is not transmitted orally, but AIDS was new then and we didn't know and took no chances. The agony to my lungs prevented me from smoking unfiltered Camels (filtered cigarettes were for weak-minded fools).
The fear of looking like a booze hag prevented me from smoking pretty cigarettes like Virginia Slims or Eve. The irony that I always smoked at (or brought cigarettes to) the nightclubs we frequented did not occur to me. So I smoked "sensible" Merit and later Marlboro Light. On our occasional trips to Windsor, Ontario, I'd pick up several packs of Canadian Players cigarettes. American Players, in their elegant black box were acceptable, but Canadian was classier. I had very fuzzy but dogmatic bougie ideas about things like brand identity, color of cigarette box and how it said things about who I was and wasn't.
I clearly remember The Great American Smokeout, that first year of college. I was not about to participate, especially because I was finally able to master inhaling without collapsing in spasms of coughing. As time passed, however, and I grew wiser (and cigarettes got more expensive) I finally saw the error of my ways. I realized, alas, smoking didn't prove anything about me. That a halo of smoke around my head did nothing except make my hair, clothes and breath stink. So I quit smoking. This is really a much fancier term than it deserves -- because I had never really seriously started smoking.
(at the time of this writing) Thursday marks the 35th anniversary of the Great American Smokeout, brainchild of the American Cancer Society. My husband still smokes and has since our college days. Initially he participated in the Great American Smokeout; now, 28 years later, he no longer does. In theory, a no-smoking day is great; in practice, less so, because it must combat the instinct built up from years of daily and hourly cigarette smoking.
Now in edit, I'll add that my husband has quit smoking cigarettes and now vapes. I don't know if the Great American Smokeout still exists. I don't see the glamour of College People cigarettes that I once did. I am still a bit of an idealist though.
All Souls Day Stories: An Honest Little Boy
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