Memoir by Cigarette

Dedication

I owe this piece to Agustín Cadena, prolific Mexican writer, who posted his own smoking memoir recently, Cinco Cigarillos, inspiring this one. For those who read Spanish, Cinco Cigarillos appeared on Cadena’s Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/agustin.cadena

My translation of it is seeking publication. Gracias y abrazos, Agustín, como siempre.

1

At any gathering of the Keuning family in Queens there’d be coffee and cigarettes, a light haze curling toward the ceiling above the table after dinner where the adults sat forever. I wrinkled my nose. My cousin Charlie and I, excused long ago, raced around the yard or shoved small metal cars across the floor. All adults smoked and all toys were not yet made of plastic.

Mom’s cigarettes

2

In the bathroom in Florida, a distinctive odor of bowel movement and Herbert Tareyton cigarettes told me my mother had been there recently. She kept an ashtray next to the sink and often took her cup of milky coffee in with her. It was one of her few havens of respite from us, from the graveyard shift and the hard business of making money last until the end of the month.

3

I didn’t start smoking until after high school, lived at home while attending the local junior college. My first serious boyfriend had a way of smoking that charmed me, cupping the cigarette toward the palm of his hand, exhaling through his nose with an elegant tilt of his head. The smell was his signature, and the odor I’d disliked became attractive the more I was attracted to him. I went through several brands before settling on Marlboros, closed the door to my room and practiced smoking in front of the mirror. I needed to be sure I looked sophisticated doing it before I’d dare to smoke in front of anyone else.

4

Of course I was found out. My mother looked at my younger brothers and said, “she’s nineteen. O.K., once you’re nineteen, you can smoke.” It hit me like an epiphany, my first awareness of situational ethics, how one might make up rules to fit reality.

5

At the University of Florida, I lived in a dorm and later off campus with roommates. Professors smoked in the classroom and so did we. I had an early Brit Lit class, rolled out of bed in time to pull on jeans and sandals, stop at a soda machine, get through class with my bottle of coke and two or three cigarettes, putting them out under my foot on the floor, as everyone did. Breakfast.

I admired that professor. He strode into the classroom a few minutes before time in suit and tie, snapped open his briefcase, set his notes on the podium, lit his pipe and waited impassively for the clock to strike nine. He never spoke to us, barely seemed to care if we were there or not, was a brilliant lecturer. It was rumored that he’d volunteered with the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. I’d read Hemingway, was enamored of that lost fight, the first of many mostly lost causes I would support over the next decades of my life.

6

Things were changing by the time I was getting divorced. At a Bloomsbury Review party in Denver all who were smoking tumbled onto the cold backyard with our plastic glasses of wine. No more smoking inside. So many of us still indulged, the crowd outside was bigger than that inside. Some non-smokers joined us. The late Gary Schroeder, poet I’d read with on numerous occasions, had become a respiratory therapist. I knew where he stood. “I should quit,” I said. “If it’s not too late,” he replied. I didn’t quit then, but Gary’s words haunted me until I did.

7

In the disintegration of the marriage, I’d gone from a pack to two packs a day, chain-smoked through my ordeal, even while downgrading to Marlboro Lights. After all that ended, I cut back to a pack and then half a pack, then seven cigarettes, then five and three, a process of several years. I finally quit altogether 25 years ago. And now, as when I was five, I wrinkle my nose at the smell.