Smokin'

Me, smoking at 15 (Self-portrait, 2023)

I started smoking around the age of 12. I say around that age because in the summer of 1982 my mom found a plastic Kool-Aid cup hidden in the bathroom cupboard that I used for an ashtray when sneaking a ciggy. But before the age of 12, I was lighting my mom's cigarettes on the stove if she happened to be caught up in something that kept her from doing it herself, like lying on the floor stoned in front of the stereo, headphones on, jack plugged in, and the new Commodores or Kansas album spinning on the turntable. There were a couple of times when I singed my bangs and eyelashes over the burner. I eventually realized that if I reached in with my hand, rather than with puckered lips, and held the tip of the cigarette over the gas-generated flame, I could retract my hand and safely puff on the filtered end to fully ignite the tip. I got pretty good at it and I became my mom's best cigarette lighter. 

But, before I was lighting cigarettes on the stove, I was bumming cigarettes for my mom from various neighbors. It was the mid-1970s and we lived in Whitehall for a short time. My mom's second marriage and middle-class lifestyle had come to its end. She was 23, unemployed with two small children (technically three, but she had relinquished custody of my sister to our paternal grandparents), depressed, and out of cigarettes (and toilet tissue). She sent me out regularly to bum two smokes and the periodic roll of shit paper between the family next door and the family across the street. Eventually, their charity ran dry and I was informed in a terse tone by the neighbor next door that my mother needed to buy her own cigarettes. My mom sat crouched on the edge of the couch, lighter ready, when I walked into the house. 

"Cigarettes?" She asked, ready to fire one up.

"No. You have to get your own and stop sending me over to beg." 

Mom sat still, staring at me hard and spinning the lighter between her fingers. "Is that what she said?"

"Yes, mommy."

"Bitch." She slammed the lighter on the coffee table and stretched herself across the length of the couch, turning her face from me and toward the back cushions. 

I didn't know how to make it better for my mom and I somehow felt guilty - responsible - that she hadn't any smokes. Cigarettes where everywhere and everyone had them, it wasn't like there was a scarcity of tobacco. Crisp, cellophaned soft-packs of Chesterfield, Salem, Winston, and Marlboro lay on every coffee table and stacked in perfect columns of single packs and cartons for sale at every grocery store and gas station checkout across America. Why did mom have to go without her smokes? 

Behind our residential plat was a Seven-Eleven convenience store on East Main Street. They knew me there. I'd find empty pop bottles in the field behind our house and turn them in for candy money. That day I didn't find any bottles in the field, but I entered the Seven-Eleven with a quarter I found on the street. Next to the magazines on a white metal rack facing the store window were dozens of shining packs of cigarettes. I slipped one down my tube sock under my brown corduroys, walked to the next isle for a Marathon bar, paid for it with the quarter at the counter, and ran out the door. 

I ran like hell across the field, across our street, across our yard, and into our house. Out of breath and right there in the living-room with my mom still stretched across the couch, I yanked up my pant leg, whipped out a pack of Marlboro 100s and set them next to her lighter on the coffee table.

"Here!" I was so excited.

Mom turned her head from the back of the couch and fixed her gaze on the cigarettes, but she didn't reach for them right away. "Where'd you get these?"

"The Seven-Eleven," I said, still out of breath.

She moved her gaze to me from the pack on the table, "Thank you. You can go to your room for stealing." 

Shorty after, my mom acquired a mechanical cigarette roller (used to crank out perfectly rolled joints in fruit-flavored double-wide JOBs) and a swanky new boyfriend named Chips, who paraded her around in his fancy white Cadillac and kept her stocked in smokes of all varieties. 

By late-adolescence, my mom was handing me a buck in change and a handwritten note of consent for the gas station attendant to sell me, an 11-year-old, her cigarettes. My mom wasn't the exception here - it was commonplace for parents to send their kids to the convenience store or the gas station to buy their smokes (and sometimes their alcohol). A year later, at 12-years-old, I no longer needed a parental note to purchase cigarettes. The attendant knew my face well.

"Marlboro 100s?"

"Yep," I'd say and pocket the pack until out of view. I'd then peel off the cellophane tape, tear away the foil paper fold carefully, extract a fresh cigarette and fire it up on the way home. I had my own money, I babysat neighbor kids, and bought my own smokes. Hell, I had one babysitting gig where the parent gave me money for pizza, my going sitting rate, and a pack of smokes every time I watched her kids. Smokes were cheap (I paid $.79 for a pack of Marlboro or Salem, my favorites) and loose change was everywhere - on streets, in alleys, the bottom of purses, under couch cushions, behind car seats, etc. If I wasn't babysitting, I could easily scrounge up loose change and by a pack of cigarettes.

In the summer of 1982, when my mom found the plastic Kool-Aid cup I used for an ashtray, she wasn't upset when she confronted me. She knew I smoked. And, she didn't seem too concerned that I had extinguished lit cigarettes in a plastic cup. Oddly, she asked me if I was addicted to smoking. What sort of question was that? I had no fucking idea if I was addicted to nicotine (I'm not even sure if I knew what addiction meant at that age). It's not like I ever thought not to smoke. Everyone smoked in my world. Cigarettes were everywhere. Open packs left on tables, dashboards, and kitchen counters. There were cigarette accessories, beautiful leather and embroidered cases with lighter pockets, and engraved Zippos. Smoking was grown and glamorous, and there was no adult who took my smokes away, no parent who forbade me to smoke, and no authority who stopped me from buying cigarettes. Of course, I told my mom no, I wasn't addicted. 

"You're not allowed to smoke in your room," she said. "Use an ashtray." And that was that. She took my melted plastic cup and left me wondering if I was now allowed to smoke in the living room with the adults.  

All through middle and high schools I was never questioned, carded, or punished for smoking. I smoked on school grounds, in the restrooms, in the locker rooms, and during gym on the tennis courts or sitting on the bleachers. Were we allowed to smoke at school? No. But a group of eight-graders sharing a cigarette at the end of the field during lunch period was the least of the teachers' and principal's concerns. I went to inner-city public schools and the school administrators were too busy dealing with gang fights, dope dealers, and student delinquency. Who cared about a kid who smoked? In high school, I had two periods of art in the morning. When the third period bell rang between classes, I'd haul-ass down the back stairwell from the third floor to the first, zip through the wood shop room where Mr. Savage, the wood shop teacher, held the back door open for me with his propped foot, and we'd smoke our cigarettes. I had three minutes for a few quick inhales before I had to charge back upstairs to beat the fourth period bell. I was never late. During lunch, I'd sometimes walk down to the corner gas station from the school and buy myself a Pepsi and a pack of smokes, then me and a group of my friends would sit out in front of the school shootin'-the-shit and smoking before next period. 

Again, I worked, I bought my own cigarettes. When I entered high school as a Freshman I worked in the lunchroom doing dishes and the office making dittos (on a mimeograph). I cleared $23.00 every Friday and that was more than enough to purchase my 2-pack a week habit and daily can pop. In the summer before my Sophomore year, I lied about my age and was hired at Leeward's in Great Western shopping center (an old strip mall off West Broad Street). Let me digress for a sentence or two. You may be wondering, "Why did Angie have to lie about her age, and how could she lie? Didn't she have to provide some sort of identification upon employment?" In the state of Ohio, if you were under the age of sixteen, you couldn't work more than three hours a day and twelve hours a week. I was 15-years-old, sick of wearing Charity Newsies and worn-out hand-me-down shit-clothes from my cousins and I needed money. Fashionable clothing far exceeded my pay from the high school. As for identification, only a social security card was required, and I had it. Nobody cared that I worked full-time at fifteen and nobody cared I bought smokes at twelve. Nobody cared...

...until the summer of 1988, the year I graduated from high school. Before catching a bus to work, I walked to the corner gas station where I'd bought my cigarettes for years. I asked the usual clerk for my usual brand, and he said, "Can I see your ID?" 

"Why?" I was incredulous, and I just stood there staring at him, blinking.

"We have to start carding people now," he said.

"I've been buying smokes here for years, you know me!"

"Still need your ID."

"Fuck." I didn't have my driver's license on me. He sheepishly shrugged and said "Sorry", but I was out the door, headed to the drug store a block up the street. They knew me there.

"I need to see your ID," said the gum-cracking cashier behind the counter.

"Isn't my face ID enough? I've bought smokes from you more than once!" I was pissed. 

"No ID, no sale." Period. Done. Cut-throat. No Mercy. Bitch. 

I was definitely addicted to nicotine. And, I damn near missed my bus to work. It was the longest goddamned ride down Broad Street from the Hilltop to Whitehall, and I hated the world. But all wasn't lost. When I arrived at work, several co-workers were in the break room smoking. I bummed a cigarette and told them I'd been IDed. Ohhhh, the shared commiseration expressed in that break room as we all smoked our cigarettes and bitched about government overreach, it was glorious! One of my coworkers ran out on her lunch and bough me a pack.

"Can't do without these," she said, tossing them my way. 

I quit smoking-smoking at thirty-one. It was hard. No one else quit. My family and friends were still smoking, still lighting their cigarettes after dinner and at morning coffee. Still smoking and reading on the toilet, smoking after sex, smoking when stressed, smoking over a cold beer after work, and sharing a smoke with a friend. I've thought to myself that if there was a cancer-and-heart-disease-free way to fire-up a Marlboro and rekindle that old nasty habit day in and day out, I might. 

Of course, this deceptive nostalgia about a rotting addiction doesn't jive with the reality of why I quit. I felt like shit and I was scared. Worse, my girls continually suffered from chronic upper respiratory issues that landed one or the other in the hospital regularly. The sick irony of their suffering was that they weren't smokers. If I had ever discovered then that either daughter smoked as minors under my legal parentalship (***now is a good time for you to steel yourself for some Generation X shit-posting verbal violence***), all Hell would have broken loose, I would have been in jail, and child protective services would have been on the scene. I would have beat their asses. 

I asked my mom years ago why she let me smoke. She said I would've done it anyway. I find her reasoning dangerously fatalistic and reckless. She opened the nicotine addiction gateway and primed me as a child to smoke by way of these initiation-like acts of begging for cigarettes, lighting cigarettes, and buying cigarettes for her before I possessed the cognitive ability to discern how morally reprehensible her actions were. Fuck, I was a child. My mom was Hell in blue jeans, a scrapper, irreverent, and never kowtowed to anyone. No one fucked with her, everyone was afraid of her, I was afraid of her. In the summer of 1982, when mom discovered my Kool-Aid cup ashtray in the bathroom cupboard, my fear of her, my fear of her temper, far exceeded my desire and will to continue my adolescent smoking habit. The encounter between me and mom that day should have been more like this:

"I found this in the cupboard. Why the hell are you putting cigarettes out in a plastic cup? You trying to catch the goddamn house on fire? There's a fucking toilet and a sink you can flick ashes in."

"I'm sorry!" (*cries*)

"Not as sorry as you'd be if we were all dead. You're not allowed to smoke. You don't even have the fucking sense to use a proper ashtray (*shoves melted plastic Kool-aid cup in my face*). I should have known you'd try to burn the goddamn house down ages ago! You couldn't even light a cigarette without fucking singing-off your bangs and eyelashes."

"But mom, I was lighting your cigarettes for you!" 

"I don't give a shit if you were lighting cigarettes for Christ, if I find out you're smokin', I'm beating your ass. Don't think you can sneak and do it, people will tell me. Angela, do you understand me?" 

"Yes." 

"I'll beat your ass."

"I know!"

"Give me your cigarettes and shit, then take your ass to your room." 

I wouldn't have argued, I would have done as she said, because she'd actually beat my ass. There was no one who'd risk their ass for me - no relative, no friend, no neighbor. I had no ally or accomplice who'd dare to aid and abet my smoking habit. No one wanted to go up against my mom. No one. She'd beat their asses, too. 

You know, every once in a great while, I'll smoke a cigarette. I'll bum one from a particular friend of mine who still smokes and we'll enjoy a cigarette together and shoot-the-shit over a cup of coffee. Afterwards, I'll smell like an ashtray and suppress anxieties about dying of lung cancer and disappointing my girls, who I've historically threatened with ass-beatings if I ever discovered they smoked.  

I asked my mom years ago if she'd ever quit smoking. She said no, she'll quit when she's dead. At 70-years-old, I hear she's still smoking her Marlboro 100s...