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I started smoking when I was 12 years old. A friend of mine had dissected the cigarette butts from his mother's ashtray, then rolled up the tobacco in papers he had purchased from the corner gas station. Had I known then that I was beginning an addiction that would last for more than 25 years, cost me thousands of dollars, and give me the social standing of a serial nudist with crotch rot, I never would have inhaled the first drag of that homemade cigarette.
The problem was that I had no idea I was trying tobacco. My buddy had lied to me and said we were smoking pot. As I was enjoying my first nicotine head-rush, giggling about how stoned I was, my buddy confessed that we were smoking standard tobacco. I was disappointed, but the letdown was overshadowed by pure smoking pleasure. Instantly hooked, I left my friends at the creek and returned home, determined to teach myself how to smoke real cigarettes by sundown. Later that evening, I found myself hacking violently on the non-filtered Lucky Strikes that I stole from my father. There I was, laying in the fetal position on the concrete basement floor, holding my crotch, gagging and dry-heaving so hard that I convinced myself I ruptured a testicle. Still, I remained true to my word. Next time we all gathered at the creek, I whipped out a genuine cigarette and became king of the aspiring delinquents.
For the next two decades, I had no regrets. I loved smoking. I loved the boost, the way it tasted, the way it complimented a biblical beer bender. Until several years ago, when things began to change. For starters, smoking was getting expensive. By the year 2000, a single
pack was costing me more than a carton did in 1985. By 2008, if I was
going to buy both cigarettes and gasoline, I was either going to have
to start selling street pharmaceuticals, or put up one of my children
on eBay.
Smoking was also getting inconvenient. When I first took up the vice, people smoked in grocery stores, while getting haircuts, in the bleachers during sporting events, while pumping gas, and while giving birth in the maternity ward. As a kid, I visited the Detroit Zoo, where an employee once entertained us by tricking a seagull into swallowing a lit cigarette butt.
Then there was the shift in social status. When I started smoking, we were mavericks and rebels. Smoking was part of our mystique, and it drew people to us. This lasted until the mid-1990s. Then I began noticing that my non-smoking friends would put some distance between us whenever I lit up. By 2008, I couldn't pull out a cigarette without getting looks of disgust as if I had just picked my nose and buried the booty in one of my eyebrows. In the end though, it was my children who pounded the last nail into my habit's coffin. Every time they saw me pull out a cigarette, they would act like I was preparing to commit suicide. Eventually I caught myself sneaking out of the house to choke down a cigarette in record time before getting caught, having come full circle to the exact smoking routine I had when I was twelve years old. Coupled with the incessant nagging of my wife, who is herself a reformed smoker and possesses a zealotry that can only be found in a convert, the last vestiges of fun had been sucked out of my vice. I was ready to quit.
Over the next several months, I tried rationing, cutting down, schedule changes, nicotine supplements, and quitting cold turkey, but no technique allowed me to "stay quit" for any more than three days. Then my doctor turned me on to a drug publicized for both its dazzling success rate, as well as the wide array of side effects that came with it. The drug was Chantix, and I bit on it right away. Though I doubted it would work, after reading the warnings I figured the worst that could happen is that I would find myself experiencing the debilitating hallucinatory paranoia that I once paid good money for during a Pink Floyd show. As an added bonus, I could do it legally, without failing any drug tests ... and it would be covered by my company's health plan! Unable to find a downside, I filled my Chantix prescription and embarked upon a quest for better living through experimental chemistry. But things got weird ... really weird. | ||||||||||||||
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