Cigarette Smoke

A piece of creative non-fiction about me and my relation to cigarettes.

        I understand that when most people smell cigarette smoke it is not a pleasant smell, much in the same way that I understand that most women fall in love with men, even though I don't. To most people, cigarette smoke does not smell like home. It just smells like cigarettes. And to most people, standing downwind of people smoking cigarettes is not a pleasant prospect. When you're looking at me odd, watching me try to take deep breaths inconspicuously while standing near a group of people smoking, consider these points.

        My father has smoked for decades, long before I was born, and although I am sure that my mom wouldn't let him light up around me when I was a baby, cigarette smoke lingers. It lingers in clothing, in hair, in skin, and that's why I'm sure I began associating cigarettes with my father when he held me as an infant, and when he hugged me as a little girl bouncing down the stairs when Daddy came home from work. And when your father drives you to ballet class, when you are five, and buys you packs of Bazooka Joe gum, and he lights up a cigarette in the car and rolls down the window, and schools have not started pounding anti-cigarette messages into your head--

        Well, it's difficult to associate the smell of cigarettes with anything bad.

        When your best friend since you both were five has smoked since you were ten and he was eleven, and he keeps cartons of American Spirits instead of cartons of ice cream in his freezer, a cigarette doesn't smell like tobacco and additives, burning into the air like toxic incense. It smells like driving around town with no particular destination. It smells like going into his place of work, and you have forgotten your shoes back at his house, so they let you wander around barefoot because it's after closing. It smells like graduation parties and playing Guitar Hero late into the night, and fighting zombies even later into the night. It smells like New Years Eve, when your best friend's roommate puts “We are the champions” by Queen onto the sound system and you impulsively grab a lighter and start waving it back and forth like they do at concerts, and everyone else grabs their lighter and joins in, and the fire alarm goes off, and everyone just laughs because you're all so drunk that everything is funny. And when you're sober? It's still funny.

        When I take a drag off a cigarette, the ache in my lungs doesn't feel like cancer waiting to strike. It tastes like my first alcholic drink, provided by my best friend of 13 years, after a theatre final where I had to kiss a boy I hated, repeatedly, and I needed something to get the taste out of my mouth. It tastes like my first cigarette, right before my Japanese 2 final, on the outdoor walkway outside the 3^rd floor of Pikes Peak community college. It tastes like the only man I've ever loved, in his long leather trench coat and steel-toed boots and steel-toed, sarcastic, loving heart. It tastes like my first party, where I kissed the aforementioned boy and got drunk the first time, and slept on my friend's couch, and discovered that I felt fine after 4 hours of sleep and a glass of water.

        And when I came home after my first semester at college away from home in a nonsmoking dorm, and I became aware of how my entire house smelled like cigarettes, it wasn't a realization that was a cause for joy. It was a moment of panic, because I'd never been able to smell it before. And that realization feels like a personal tragedy.

        Every anti-smoking ad has the face of my past on it. With the phrase “Quit doing it” spray-painted onto the sidewalk, my friend Hank is there, his long fingered hands holding a cigarette in one and a can of spray paint in the other, writing “F**k you” underneath where the anti-smokers have written. Underneath the banner with the same message written on it is Mike in his trenchcoat, balancing a hackysack on his steeltoed boot. In the pamphlets they pass out, with statistics like ovre 80 percent of college students are non smokers, I see my dad, waiting at home with the record player on full blast, ashtray by his side. And behind the posters telling me that social smoking is just as dangerous as being a full time smoker, there's an image of me and Talon, at the top of Palmer Park in his Saturn Ion, cigarettes in each of our hands, singing along with Meatloaf's “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and wishing we could find that paradise ourselves.

        And when all my favorite memories have smoke as their primary scent-

        Can you really blame me for wanting to stand downwind of the smokers, if just for a couple of seconds?

 

 

Reviews

[Enthusiast]

Wow, what a great story! I love how you describe the experiences that the smell of cigarette smoke conjure. Human associations aren't necessarily rational.

It's somewhat of a taboo subject nowadays, but so many of us grew up immersed in a smoking world. Even if one's parents were non-smokers and frowned upon the habit, we as teenagers in school picked up the habit more often than not. The act, for us, was fun and radical, yet innocent.

A great piece of writing, Jia. Keep up the good work!

[Wunderlich]

Great ending. Very interesting and well composed piece. Good job.

[Mr_Macbeth]

very poetic ending. It reminds me of my smoking days and how I associated absolutely everything with my smoking. In one sense it's like one long excuse we can make in order to justify our smoking as well. I still remember Bazooka Joe. it was a fun read. keep writing.
Mac