The Bitch in Habitual
Friday. n Thirty-seven cigarettes until the moment of reckoning. One on the desk, a newly opened soft pack of Marlboros, and one pack in the pipe: snug down at the bottom of the carton my stepdaughter bought me maybe 10 days ago. Thirty-seven, not counting the stale pack of Pall Malls that Duff snuck me two weeks ago. There are maybe 12 sticks of lung arson in there, and if I smoke them, it will be a sad, dry time. I have 49 cigarettes.
Numbers have augured down to being the only entity between me and my upcoming identity as a nonsmoker, so I'm timing my cigarettes. For when I stop smoking I will cease to be able to tell time?one of the many joys of smoking was the refined body clock it embedded somewhere between my solar plexus and shoulder blades. And when that body clock starts its keening, softly at first, it must be time for a cigarette. It's 1:46:44 p.m. when I reach for the pack, with its little red matching Bic placed squarely on top. It's 1:53:46 when I stub it out, almost down to the quick. That particular cigarette, which was an average pre-lunch midday butt, smoked as I wandered from the office to the kitchen and back again with my cup of cooling, milky coffee, lasted seven minutes and two seconds. Multiplied by the 48 cigarettes I now have left, that gives me 336.96 remaining minutes of active smoking: a little over five and a half hours. I just lit up again, at 2:21:56, 28 minutes and 10 seconds from my last stub-out. Add the 7:02 to 28:10, and you've got 35 minutes and 12 seconds of...what? My average pleasure per cigarette? My average time of mollification? Multiply that by 47 cigarettes now remaining, and I have about 1650.64 minutes, or 27.51 hours. A day and a few spare hours left of stasis.
?
I can't remember how old (or young) I was when I found myself pink-lunged on the sharp gravel by the train tracks for the very first time, studiously retching after every mincing puff of a Lucky straight. But since those first inhales, I have had deeper and deeper-throated affairs with English Ovals, Pall Malls, Merits, Camels, Newports, Drums, Bali Shag, du Mauriers, Sherman's Hint of Mints, gold bricks of UK Benson & Hedges and the unforgiving Marlboro red as my steady. And these were love affairs: every brand a different pretension, a new money pit, a wrinkler, a firewall between me and the void, a grander way to feel bad in the morning. Then, four years ago, the other guy in my apartment went on the patch because of poverty and anorexia. Meanwhile, I was trapped in the yoga service industry and sneaking smokes in the Jivamukti freight corridor. Starting to feel the initial pangs of butt guilt. Behind the front desk, in my soiled, ill-fitting Om pinny, I smelled like a noontime traffic jam in Bombay; my yoga mat was the color and texture of a dugout. The rosy, sandalwood-scented others at the Center treated me with tender, quizzical pity and insisted that prayer to Durga might remove my compulsion to smoke.
Butt bottom approached quickly enough, as I gave my hand a righteous sulfur burn by trying to light a cigarette with a match on a windy night before a dance rehearsal. Dance rehearsal? Not long after that, I was pinched for $50 by an apologetic undercover subway cop for smoking on the Stadium platform. I spasmodically coughed in the face of one of the postmenopausal survivors in the yoga class I taught on Ave. C.
Fuck it. I slapped on the patch and committed myself to another exercise regime of spattering up a decade-plus of stale air. A featureless, optimistic life of problem solving and conflict management ensued, as promised by the transdermal nicotine people. After a few months, I weaned myself off the patch and within a week of being totally nicotine-free, suddenly tired of squeezing that cute heart-shaped 5-pound mound of ex-smoker fat pooched under my belly button, I bought a pack of ultra lights. So there. I started smoking again for no reason except there was a long night of work ahead, I was desperately bored and besides, it was a winter afternoon just like this one. The best way to stay beatific in the face of boredom and fury is to simply light up.
The checkout girl at the King Kullen this evening was fresh from a butt break. Nineteen, haggard, sallow mad and wizened under Jheri ringlets and tangled gold crap jewelry. I writhed when I caught a whiff of her, because she smelled just like one of my briefest high school lust relationships tasted. I was 16 and had a Gleem-fresh virgin mouth. He had a truck and he tasted like a burnt sofa and all things abandoned.
Certainly I don't smell or taste like the checkout girl.
After the groceries were put away I gratefully cracked the very last soft pack in the carton. The Pall Malls are long gone. If they were stale, I didn't notice.
?
Saturday. By the way, my friend Royanne is dying from smoking. Earlier this winter, a bad case of the flu sent Royanne to the doctor, who found a tarry little malignant spot on her lungs. She smoked Marlboro Lights hard pack, with the top ripped off, and feistily holstered in one of those snap-shut buckskin cigarette purses that certain women like to own. There's usually a little pocket on the front of the purse, just big and snug enough for a throwaway lighter. Keeps all the goods in one place.
?
Monday. Sunday was lost to a strange malaise. I think I smoked a few cigarettes, but I'm not certain. I stayed in bed, pleading inertia and motion sickness. I'm better now. In other words, I'm ready to smoke some more. And I have precisely one cigarette left.
Our floors were sanded and lacquered today. The fumes are pretty bad. Worse than a nail salon. Upon leaving, the boy who did the job told me not to smoke or use the oven. "Okay," I said brightly, like this wasn't a big deal. I was, after all, one cigarette away from being a nonsmoker. And I don't use the oven anyway.
After he left I smoked the last Marlboro and then went into town and bought a pack of Trues, which is one of the more prop-like cigarettes. A True looks like a cigarette, it smokes like a cigarette, but it's damn near pleasure-free. Over the course of the evening I smoked three of them, unhappily. Scoured gut, burning cheeks. Perhaps it has something to do with the volatile air quality of the house. Perhaps even the idea of quitting is making me sick.
A midsize epiphany happens later in the afternoon. A friend of mine is dying of lung cancer, and even though she's almost 30 years older than me, I happen to know that, minus the silly leather cigarette purse, I am Royanne. At least I smoke just like her: brusquely, stoutly, listlessly, almost incessantly, with unpainted fingernails of mismatched lengths spidery and beige in the air. She loved candy cigarettes when she was younger. Everyone in her family smoked and it looked classy. No one in her family died of lung cancer. This is my story. Maybe it's because of Royanne, maybe it's because most of my get-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-smoke-while-taking-a-pee kind of girlfriends have already kicked the habit, maybe it's because I don't want to get sick and die because of a habit that manages to be both unexciting and lethal...every time I light up there's a notion that I am intentionally trying to smoke myself to death, and worst of all, it might take me 30+ years to get the job done.
?
Tuesday. Okay. Scratch all that. The Trues aren't too terribly dissatisfying, and that epiphany happily went away. But now I'm smoking my last True and it's nighttime. Nothing's open.
I just stubbed out the True, a little more than halfway smoked. The snipe is saved for later and stowed in the ashtray.
I had a conversation via e-mail with Royanne earlier today; our first exchange of any kind since she discovered she was seriously ill. She had sent me a form letter e-mail earlier in the month, complete with lilac-colored, zany fonts and a teddy bear graphic. ("Hi everybody! I'm doing really okay. I've just finished my second round of chemo and it is going very well! I don't run out of air like I used to but breathing is still not up to speed. Also it's hard for me to talk on the phone much.") The inclusion of the teddy bear, a primordial totem of victimization and optimism in the face of mortal illness, was forgivable only because Royanne is resolutely butch, bristly and painfully divorced. It was impossible, and probably unnecessary, for me to respond to this e-mail. Besides, I have yet to hone my "hi howaya I hear you're struggling to stay alive" conversation chops.
Right before we said goodbye I asked her how many cigarettes she had smoked during our hour-long conversation. There were five dead Trues in my ashtray.
"You don't want to know," she wrote. "The word chain comes to mind." Royanne switched to Marlboro Ultra Lights after she was diagnosed.
"Your doctor is still letting you smoke?"
"What can he do? He's not happy about it, but he said that now was not the time to try quitting because of the stress. The first time I tried to quit I went cold turkey and I damn near lost my mind. I didn't start smoking again until they told me I had cancer of the cervix. I had planned to make quitting be my New Year's resolution and this time I was really ready to make it happen. I didn't know I had cancer then. Thought I had time. Guess what, I didn't. I know I can never quit cold turkey, and that I have to use the patch or the gum. I can't use either now because the drugs and chemo have torn up my skin."
Initially, with her diagnosis of small-cell cancer, a very aggressive form of the disease (which was detected on the lymph nodes of her bronchial tubes and "definitely smoking-related"), she was given an "80 percent chance of 2 to 5 years." Like a weather report, delivered cool and nonchalant. Eighty percent chance of two to five. Today, her odds are better. "The tumor shrunk in half after the first chemo treatment, and my odds for recovery went way up from that first diagnosis," Royanne explained. Apparently the cancer had not yet spread to other organs.
"If you have anything important to ask, ask now," Royanne writes. "I have to go soon." Even pre-diagnosis, she was never a time killer.
"Do you feel your mortality?"
"I'm going to survive this disease and I will do anything I can to get well. There has been a lot of anguish and prayer. But when they tell you that you have lung cancer and give you an 80 percent chance of 2-to-5, you really sense the...shape of your life."
?
Rory tossed my True snipe in the fireplace when I wasn't looking. After panicking in front of the open fridge for an interval, Canadian cigarillos were produced and those were chain-puffed for the remainder of the evening. These cigarillos are called Exotics and they come in a cheap black plastic tomb of a case. It's bad.
Does lung cancer mean smoking in the oxygen tent and saying things readymade for People? That's one reason not to get it. I torch through the last of the Exotics, inhaling now, until there's finally nothing left to smoke.