The Long Goodbye - to Cigarettes
I made a New Year's resolution in college to start smoking. While everyone else swore them off, I swore them on.
I had quit the previous year, and after several months of not smoking, I didn’t see enough upside. I suppose my clothes smelled better—my breath, too—but other than that, it was all downside
So, I picked up where I left off and didn’t regret it for a second. I bought a pack of Marlboros, a BIC lighter, and I was feeling like a million bucks after the first drag.
I have a nefarious love affair with tobacco – I always have. As a kid, I was obsessed with the Marlboro Man. In fact, I’d carefully tear out the commercials from magazines and hang them on my bedroom walls. If a kid tried that these days, his parents would be arrested for child endangerment. But in the 80s, just about everyone smoked – including my elementary school teachers.
The teachers had their own place where they could get a smoke in during recess. All the kids knew it, but it wasn’t a big deal. My dad smoked, so the fact that teachers did too was how the world worked in my grade school mind.
Back to my New Year's resolution. I used to smoke half a pack a day. On weekends, at least a pack. And on game days, especially if we had a late kickoff, two packs; though, admittedly, I felt awful in the morning. Even if I washed my hands, which I didn’t, my fingernails reeked of cigarettes. And my throat had a coat of tar on it. Eventually, I wised up and switched to cigars.
When I was an undergrad at the University of Georgia, it was socially acceptable to smoke a cigar while walking around campus. Hell, you could smoke them in fraternity houses. No one cared because no one gave a shit about their health, and we were all the better for it.
By midnight, every bar in Athens had a twelve-inch cloud of smoke near the ceiling. In fact, on the rare occasion that I visit one of those bars today, they smell exactly the same as they did decades ago. I actually like the smell. And that’s what brought me to writing this.
I smoked a cigar this evening – the first one since I got to Texas two weeks ago. I had tacos for dinner from a gas station food truck where the gals behind the counter didn’t speak a word of English, which is code for DEE-LISH-US. It’s becoming my go-to place for supper.
Afterward, I fired up a cigar and sat in ninety-degree heat while the sun started to set in Austin. Being from Atlanta, where the humidity is punitive, I thought the high today was in the mid-seventies. The old saying about the southwest, “But it’s a dry heat,” is true. I’d take it any day over a soupy Atlanta summer.
When it was over, I realized something peculiar: my mustache, which is longer than Faulkner’s, but shorter than Hemingway’s, had absorbed the stench of burning tobacco – and, you guessed it, I loved it.
Some of the oddest smells, the ones most consider to be nauseating, are comforting to me, including the nasty old smell that’s stuck in the walls of every college bar, or the smell of fish eggs on a hook, and especially, burning tobacco. They’re akin to the smell of a firecracker after it explodes, or my father's bottle of Old Spice that we gave him every year for Christmas.
And when I laid down this evening to watch Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye and saw him lighting a cigarette in every scene, I sat back and inhaled the smell of tobacco on my mustache, and it brought me joy.
My initial reaction was to brush my teeth and wash my face, but I chose not to. I chose to enjoy the tobacco that was rising off my upper lip. It was nostalgic. That may sound strange, but it was.
As I watched Elliott firing up one cigarette after another, I thought about a few things:
1st – I want to pick up smoking cigarettes again. If it was a good New Year’s resolution in my twenties, why not in my forties?
2nd – I may want to become a private investigator, but only if number three is in play.
3rd – I want his apartment in the Hollywood Hills. Talk about hitting the rental jackpot.
If I could land that exact apartment, the one with the elevator tower, I may leave Texas for California, get my PI license, and DEFINITELY start smoking again.
But those are pipe dreams. I have too many responsibilities and I can’t move willy-nilly to LA (for many reasons, chief of which is it has burned to the ground). And I probably shouldn’t pick up another cigarette for the rest of my life.
At least I have cigars, and my pipe, and the occasional chew of Red Man. This self-destructive part of my character is as alive today as it was in college, but it negotiates these days. Vices are no longer a zero-sum game – unfortunately. Life was a hell of a lot more fun when they were.
*Composed, Edited, and Published in Austin, TX
