In Memory of Peter Jennings: My Love Affair and Subsequent Abusive Relationship with Smoking

I come from the place from where American tobacco comes. In fact, we have a town called Tobaccoville. Cigarettes are a part of life in my Southern town and in Southern culture. You often see bumper stickers and liscence plates that say such things as "Tobacco pays my bills." An immense irony is that many of the local hospitals' buildings were built with donations from the tobacco company.

My father worked for the tobacco company--in Tobaccoville--for a large part of his life, until he was recently laid off. When my brother and I were growing up, our dad smoked. My uncles smoked. My aunts smoked. My paternal grandfather smoked and my maternal grandmother smoked. Somehow my mother managed to never touch a cigarette to this day. But everybody else always smoked. Smoking was something I associated with adulthood in general and manhood in particular. My brother, who is a few years older, picked it up eventually. Then, seemingly inevitably, so did I--knowing damn good and well that it ruins your health. Oh, to be young and invincible once again.

It starts with your uncle thumping a butt in the yard. While your father bitches at him about thumping his butts in our yard, you sneak out to the rising smoke to see what this cigarette smoking is all about. You take that last couple of drags. You cough. You catch a little buzz. You feel grown-up and autonomous, though you don't know what either grown-upness or autonomy really entail. Then you stomp it out and forget about it, until the next time one goes flying out into the yard.

At the young age of 14, I could walk up the road, through the elementary school parking lot, to the Citgo on the main drag, and buy the pack of my choice for $1.50, no questions asked. Then you turn 16, you get a driver's license and a car. You are suddenly able to be away from your family for extended periods of time. You start buying packs here and there not just to be "cool", but to get that little buzz going. The next thing you know, you smoke a pack a day. You are a smoker. You've fallen into the trap. And you don't even get the buzz anymore, just the intense cravings. Your trying to get away with smoking in the bathroom at school. You're hooked. Then one day you are 29, been smoking for over 15 years, and are now paying $7.00 a day in NYC to support your habit. I could be a heroin addict for cheaper!

I have done every drug you have ever heard of, and probably many that you have not heard of, but none of them have ever caught me. I can drink 300 pound Irishmen under the table, and then go months without a drink. I am not an alcoholic or a drug addict though I have a lot of both in my life. But I wish I had never smoked that first cigarette. It is a powerful force over me. Cigarettes, in many important ways, control my life. It begins and ends everything I do. You always have to consider when you'll be able to have your next one. You use them to measure time, to fill time, and to pass time.

In the year 2005, no one does not know that smoking is bad for you. It is the single worst thing you can actively do to your health. The death of Peter Jennings may raise "awareness"...but not really. People are already aware. We've all seen the pictures of charcoal lungs, of people on respirators, of the woman with the whole in her throat--who still smokes, through the hole. Smokers, myself included, know the bad effects of smoking. All of this speaks to the power of the addiction -- but not the nature of addiction.

I think addiction boils down to a matter of higher order desires. I hear people defend their smoking, saying they enjoy it and why should they give it up? "I could quit if I wanted to," they say, "but I don't want to." But I think these people are just being dishonest with themselves. They may want to smoke, but they don't want to want to smoke. I, for one, wish I didn't want to smoke. The hierarchy of desire goes on up and up and up ... but it's always the desire to smoke that wins out over the desire not to smoke. It's tough.

I have the patches ready for use. I keep telling myself that I'm waiting for a good time to start using them -- but there's never a good time. This semester I have to write a thesis and I imagine the sheer torture of all that reading and writing without a delicious cigarette in between. After I'm done with my master's, I'm sure I'll pick another stressor that prevents me from quitting "right now". I know all of this is going on within me psychologically. I just can't get a grasp over it. I can always hear the devil on my right shoulder, no matter how loud the angel on the other shoulder tries to shout him down.

I feel the effects of smoking on my health. I get short of breath, I have some light aching in my lungs and chest in the morning, my house reaks of smoke (as my roommate smokes too), and I have perpetual fatigue. I also look at my brother and his constant heavy breathing and I worry. But I still smoke.

K suggests that we go get hypnotized. He has a friend who has been quit for months after being hypnotized, and he was a heavy smoker before. I don't know, though, if it would work for me. I flatter myself by thinking that I'm too sly to be hypnotized. I don't know, maybe I'll try it. Smoking is more than just a craving for nicotine. It is the ritual, the method, the habit. If I am going to quit smoking, I'd also have to quit everything else I enjoy from coffee to sex--everything that makes you crave a stogie. I wish there was a magic solution to the problem of being a smoker.