In Praise Of Cigarettes

I am currently 2/3rds of the way through what I imagine will be the only pack of cigarettes I will ever buy, and I must say I’m mildly disappointed. I expected something that would tempt me towards the gritty life.  Instead, I have discovered a mild laxative that has the side effect of eventual death.  They are Marlboro Menthols, and they have no perceptible relaxing or inspiring effect on me.  The best I can say is that they remind me fondly of numbers I’ve smoked, numbers someone else has rolled.  Twice, once in the company of each of the friends I will tell you about, I thought maybe I felt something akin to the tobacco buzz they ride.  Looking back, what I felt was surely the self-congratulation of doing something nasty for a change.  The excitement of trying something new from the ever-dwindling pile.  Hope on the wing. 

I don’t imagine that anyone has written a pro-cigarette article in fifty years.  I’m going to do my best to change that, even considering my crushing failure to be tempted.  It goes without saying that I’m not encouraging anyone to pick up a bad habit.  Likewise, it should also go without saying that people who go looking for bad habits on the internet ought not to do so, and perhaps deserve whatever they get. 

It is undeniable that cigarettes are indeed cool.  They’re still cool.  The worse we know they are, the cooler it is to be seen with on one.  That’s the whole point. It’s not necessarily cool to be dead, but it’s cool to casually tease death as if life was both infinite and worthless. A cigarette is a little, precisely measured few inches of life.  Going, going, gone.  Shall we smoke another?

Find a picture of Steve McQueen with a cigarette.  Sure, he’s dead.  But look at the defiance that lives there still, in any photo you might have found.  Look at that little burning wick, some of it drifting off into the ether, some of it coursing down into the lungs or forced out perversely through the nostrils – no need to get it all, no need to rush. You can never catch it all.  It’s not like when you see some guy eating a tuna sandwich on his lunch break, and he’s got his hand cupped around its ass to make sure he doesn’t lose any tuna out the back end.  Hell, half the smoke in a cigarette floats up to the dead homies while the smoker contemplates the state of things. 

That’s one thing cigarette smokers have going for them:  They’re forced to often just do the one thing and nothing else.

“Hold on a second, let me finish my cigarette while I stare at some cars.”

Often times, a cigarette smoker is doing nothing else but smoking a cigarette.  He may be dead, but he was cool.  And sometimes we’d rather be cool than alive, because being cool means you don’t care either way – or at least it means looking like you don’t, which is just about the same thing, as far as you care.  And anyway, how you're remembered looking is finally who you are.  

I’ve made a friend this year.  She’s a fabulous, tall, beautiful, young woman with what I can only be assumed is referred to in low places as fuck-me hair.  I asked her what she wanted me to call her in this article, since many smoke in secret, and she replied, “I don’t care.  Surprise me.”  See what I mean?  You couldn’t resist this girl either.

She’s never heard of Greta Garbo, or at least has never seen a Garbo movie, so she has come by her Garboesque qualities honestly, like monkeys happening upon Hamlet.  But there she is, the Swedish Sphinx, reborn in Los Angeles in 2015, and she smokes.  She’s not a smoker.  You wouldn’t call her that.  

She often tells me, somewhat begrudgingly, that she has “bought another pack” and did I want one?  Help her bear this burden.  The first few times, I told her I didn’t and never had smoked, but would instead surely be happy to stand in parking lots and watch her smoke and shift her hair from the Hollywood Hills to Catalina Island and back again. 

“You’ve never smoked when I’ve offered you?” the Sphinx would ask.  She couldn’t recall, or didn’t.

“Nope.”

She didn’t even notice who else was smoking in her immediate company.  She smokes in her own dimension.  Eventually, I decided that if I were ever going to give into peer pressure, it would be this peer and that pressure, which was no pressure at all.

“You make the rules for you,” she would say, and then a errant thatch of her hair would drop into place as if managed by unseen stagehands.  Eventually, I took one.  She didn’t notice that either. 

When I see the Sphinx, which is often but not often enough for my taste, we usually end with ten minutes of standing around, each smoking a cigarette, while I wait for the Uber.  She often forgets to offer me a light, and I stand there like an asshole.  I suppose ten more minutes with The Sphinx is worth ten less minutes of my life right at the end, which is what they say a cigarette will take from you, and I figure it’s just the final ten minutes of screaming fear or crying I stand to lose, anyway.  They say the same thing about an egg yolk. But nobody looks cool sucking an egg yolk. People don’t scarf down six or eight egg yolks in the afterglow. If they did, they would start screwing again, and sometimes it's enough already.

If she wanted instead to walk up and down the street keying expensive cars, I would surely join her.  But instead we smoke. 

“You make the rules for you,” she says.

You would do well to be a cigarette smoked by The Sphinx.  She puffs, looks off into the middle distance, takes the cigarette out and starts to smile, then changes her mind and puts the cig back in.  I have no defense against pretty women, never have, even when the best I usually get to do is stand there and admire them, a stone commission of some forgotten do-gooder.  

She won’t smoke forever.  Her smoking is her way of displaying her age, like a spread of feathers.  The meter hasn’t even started ticking yet on her mortality.  When she decides it is time, she will put the cigarettes away, and her body will begin to regrow itself in any places she ruined it.  Her lungs will regenerate, pink and perfect.  She will be married and have kids, and I will see a pretty woman smoking a cigarette and think of The Sphinx. 

I’ve got an old friend.  We’ll call him Raoul, specifically because I’ve never known anyone with that name and imagine I never will, and I think he'd like it.  He has chain-smoked as long as I’ve known him, which is more than twenty years.  I don’t recall ever seeing him without a cigarette, unless circumstance actively forbade it.  You can’t smoke at Disneyland.  But you can play with the box in your pocket and finger the next one. 

He’s a good sort, with a bit of sad Oscar Levant charm to him.  He knows the cigarettes will eventually kill him.  He hopes so.  I’m not sure he has quite pictured what it will be like to carry his spent yellow lungs in a paper bag, connected to his chest by a grey tube, but he will surely bear that fate with as much dignity as it possible to do when one is spitting out green little chunks of yourself all day. 

Spurred into curiosity by the undeniable style of The Sphinx’s ten minutes, I ask Raoul about the habit. 

“You love cigarettes, right?  Tell me, what is the effect?”

“I don’t recommend them,” he said, with seriousness.

“What are you talking about?  You love cigarettes!  You’re always smoking a cigarette!  You don’t like them?”

“I’m addicted to them.  It’s awful.  I get the shakes, I get the shits.  They’re expensive.  It’s awful.”

Raoul knows the name on the bullet is lung cancer.  Or he may be one of those guys who gets to smoke cigarettes until he’s 90 and then die of something else.  All things being equal, do what you want.  All things being equal, you make the rules for you.

Raoul and I drive around Los Angeles in his little car, finally old enough to talk about the old days and mean it, shaking our heads at the wildly flat nature of real life.  We are too young to do this, but we have only our own lives to draw any scale against. One day, if we're lucky, these will be the good old days.

I love The Sphinx.  I love Raoul.  There’s nothing I can do to save them.  I can no more stop them from smoking cigarettes than I can keep them from messing with the dark things of the universe, or keep the dark things of the universe from messing with them them.  The cherry end of their cigarettes will wink in the dark, flare when they suck, fizzle when they’re done. 

No single human being has any fucking idea what’s really going on.  Some have hunches that they obsess over.  Some have given up obsessing and are hoping for at least one more plate of Mexican food before they have to meet their ultimate fate, when they know their personalities will be wiped clean, their essence returned to the greater essence of God, and that glass they’ve been striving to see though, darkly, will clear like another sunny day  - but it will not be them seeing it.  The stuff mucking up that glass is them.  The stuff mucking up the glass is me. 

In the light of the void that yawns before us all, it seems like we should let our cigarette smokers smoke.  I know we’ve all known people who we’ve lost to that habit, but if there’s any such freedom in life, it’s in being a fool, in making the rules for you, in taking the wrong way home, in chain smoking until your body dies. Your loved ones are not yours.  It’s wonderful to know them as we pass, but too much attachment is clearly a bad idea.  Nature’s lesson all around us reiterates, again and again, that going up slowly in smoke, drifting lazily up towards somewhere that is probably nowhere, is the meaning of life.  Or if not the meaning, the mechanism.  It's how we move from here to there.

Next up:  Comedy.