A month or so ago, I had this really weird dream. I'll spare you the bizarre, surreal details, except this one: Me and Kevin Costner standing in a Wells Fargo way station. (I know, just go with it.) I had just taken out a cigarette; Kevin thought it was for him and took it from me, but then he saw that it was a Virginia Slim or Benson & Hedges -- something menthol, at any rate, long and skinny, from my real-life smoking past -- so he flipped it and stuck it in my mouth with a smirk. I reached in my pocket and pulled out an oversized pack of Marlboros in the red and white carton and he took one. It was like this funny little personal moment of comedy between us. Then he took a silver fliptop lighter and lit us both up. In the dream that cigarette was so good! I haven't had an entire tobacco cigarette since the '90s.
But that sent me on a total reverie about my smoking past.
I smoked cigarettes on and off for at least 20 to 25 years, surprisingly. In the 1970s black folks in the NY hood by and large smoked menthol: Kools, Salems and Newports. It was pretty ubiquitous. All the cool kids smoked. In high school, along with other grown-people habits this babyfaced good girl attempted to adopt, I started buying Newports from time to time to pose with in the smoking bathroom at school and at parties.(Yes, amazingly, we had a smoking bathroom where occasionally things besides cigarettes were consumed and where I knew many of my friends could be found.) I didn't inhale my cigarette, just puffed and blew. It gave me time to practice how to light and hold the thing.
My then-boyfriend Paul, a Jamaican born in England, was a smoker and I got to observe how he managed the habit. Cigarettes are delicate things -- they're made of thin paper and shredded tobacco, they break, get wet, come apart, and you gotta be careful not to set yourself on fire, get live cinders on your clothes, burn your fingers, or inhale the filter once you light 'em up. Because they need to keep their shape so you can suck air through, you can't put a death grip on them -- though I've seen some people pinch the filter flat to hold -- so you're prone to dropping them or flipping them across the room. When you accidentally dropped that last cigarette into a puddle, or tried to drop ash out the window of a moving car and either sprayed yourself with cinders or had the wind suck it completely out of your hand, that was a sad, pathetic moment.
One summer when I was 15 or so, I had a Jobs For Youth job at the Young Filmmakers Foundation down on Rivington Street in Manhattan. Jobs For Youth was a city program for summer jobs; Young Filmmakers had received grants to document youth arts programs around the city, with plans to broadcast on the local public service channels once they were produced. My boss Lillian and the main camera man, both Hispanic, smoked. I got coffee and snacks, carried equipment and sometimes monitored the audio, setting up the boom mikes and running the audio recorder. One day we were in a Harlem brownstone to film a group of congueros in a drum circle. On a break I asked the cute camera man for a cig. I was trying to impress this 20something Peruvian with my inordinate cool. Nobody had a light so I went to the stove. Instead of sticking the end of the cigarette into the flame till it caught and then inhaling, in my inexperience I put it to my mouth, leaned over and turned on the burner. Poof! As the flame shot up it singed off my eyelashes, eyebrows, and bangs in one whoosh. My face was only mildly burned, but I was brushing crispy bits of flash-fried hair off my shirt for the rest of the day, and I had to use makeup and hats for weeks to cover up my hair loss. Stupid kid.
I date my true smoking experience to my 19th birthday. I had just gotten back to Simmons for sophomore year during orientation week, purportedly as a volunteer to help incoming freshmen, and somebody, I don't remember who, brought me some herb as a present. I hadn't smoked much of that before. My freshman-year roommate Donna was a marijuana master, so it might have been her gift; freshman year she had kept a journal to document The Smallest Roach Ever, burnt pieces of rolling paper taped into a notebook with the date and the names of all who partook, but she figured out quick that I was only wasting the smoke and barred me from her sessions. Anyway, one of my two sophomore roommates was there, and some other girls from the dorms, and I got schooled in how to actually inhale. Up to then I didn't understand how to get the smoke into my lungs! Once I figured it out and was good and toasted, I remember jumping up and down saying "Ooh, ooh -- gimme a cigarette!" Because now I could stop perpetrating.
From then on I smoked. I smoked after meals, I smoked while studying, I smoked out at clubs and parties. As I recall, I smoked Newports to start, but then to I began with the Virginia Slims because they were longer and thinner and had a richer finish. We all smoked, most of my friends. Relationships with guys could start just through asking for a cigarette or a light, and of course you could still smoke everywhere in the '70s and '80s. It gave me something to do with my hands, and the nicotine fix kept me from being too tense. There was something incredibly calming and grounding about performing the ritual of pulling the cigarette from the pack, putting it in your mouth, finding a light, getting it lit, inhaling and exhaling, tapping the ash, configuring it in your hands. Today, people fiddle with their phones as their performance ritual, but without the physical interaction with the smoke.
So I was in the smoking culture at school in Boston and back in NY, but not around my family. If I came home to the Bronx reeking of tobacco smoke, I could always say it was because I'd been at a club or a party. I always had a pack of cigarettes in my purse, sometimes Newports, often Virginia Slims, sometimes Benson & Hedges, very rarely Mores (which were distinctive for their brown paper). They were relatively cheap back then -- 2 or 3 bucks a pack. I liked collecting matchbooks from the numerous clubs and restaurants I frequented across Boston and New York; I wasn't that good at keeping lighters, which always got lost. When I was home from college in the summers, I sometimes splurged on a pack of English Dunhills. The menthols came in a gorgeous double-wide forest-green package rimmed with gold, and being European to boot, they looked pretty damned sophisticated when you brought those bad boys out at parties. But I actually didn't like smoking Dunhills that much; they were dense and took forever to smoke (so dense that if you left one lit in an ash tray for too long it put itself out rather than burning to the filter), and they tasted thick too. Some of the crowd went further with the French Galoises, which were impossibly strong; and the bohemian crowd liked the clove cigarettes, which smelled interesting but gave me a headache. I liked my Virginia Slims.
Graduating from school and coming home to my parents' place in New York for good put a crimp on my smoking habits. I could only smoke outside of the house, and even while working I don't remember being able to light up at my desk. Smoking was basically for socializing only. I would go out for drinks with friends, or on dates, and we would smoke the night away. I remember sucking down a lot of kir royales and White Russians in those first months home from college in the early '80s, cigarettes at the ready.
When I met my former husband, the teetotaler, I had to whittle back my cigarette habit. Fortunately, and I don't know how I was so lucky, it was easy for me to cut back. I wasn't physically addicted, suffered no withdrawal, cravings, or other ill effects. I became a non-smoker during the early years of my marriage, but once I got to Billboard and entered the music industry, where every other person I met smoked, I started buying my own smokes again, if only to stop bumming off of people all the time. And life was fast paced, pressure filled, and there were too many parties and premieres, too many free drinks, too many people lighting up around me, and of course my marriage was in the toilet, so my smoking habit escalated. By the time I got my own place on Central Park West, working at Arista Records, I was a morning-noon-and-night smoker again.
I moved to Los Angeles in 1994, smoking habit well entrenched. Still, if it wasn't convenient or appropriate to whip out a cigarette, I was OK. I'm not sure that I would have been such great friends with certain people who became dear to me at that time if I smoked in front of them. But once again I could smoke in my own apartment, and did; I think even as I lost 40 pounds on Jenny Craig, I was still sucking on those cancer sticks.
I'm not sure when I finally put the cigarettes down for good. It's not clear to me when the final moment arrived. Those surgeon general warnings were pretty intense, and in Los Angeles the restrictions on smoking indoors were becoming more pervasive. It wasn't as easy to light up any and everywhere. And cigarettes also began to get crazy expensive. After paying 3 or 4 dollars for a pack for years, suddenly in LA my Virginia Slims shot up to 8 or 9 bucks. I noticed that there were certain people who reeked of smoke, you could smell them from afar, and I didn't want to be one of those folks. Plus, more and more people I met and liked were not smokers and rabidly anti-smoke. So I just stopped. I didn't miss cigarettes; it was a pain to always keep matches, to argue with people who complained about me lighting up, to get the smell out of my hair and clothes, to spend the money on keeping a supply.
After five years or so my weight started creeping back up and work got insane; I don't know why I thought it would be a good idea, but I wanted to go back to a ritual that would calm me down and might even burn off a few pounds. So I went right to the corner doughnut shop one morning and purchased a hard pack along with my coffee. I remember sitting at my little white kitchen cafe table in my Cochran Street apartment, with my little crystal ashtray, and determinedly whipping out that first cig from a fresh pack -- oh! that lush tobacco smell! -- and lighting up. And it was godawful. So nasty. I couldn't even finish it. And I was mad! But I also couldn't believe that I'd ever smoked at all, or had smoked for YEARS.
And that was pretty much it for me and cigarettes. Thank God.
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