Smoking (Not) Hot

So, February 9, I decided to (finally) quit smoking.  I put out a cigarette and began walking, Pavlovian style, to the bodega to buy another pack.  Since I was already on Chantix (more on that in a moment), I decided not to buy the next pack of cigarettes and instead see how long I could go without them.  Today is July 15, more than five months later.  So, it appears I can go at least that long without them.  Actually, I can tell you I will never smoke again.

I remember my first cigarette.  In the woods behind Andrew Gade's house...my best friend.  We were about 14 playing pool at the billiards place nearby his house.  We carefully planned in advance how we would buy the cigarettes from the vending machine (we split the cost...which was around $2)...I would stand around on watch, Andrew would put the money in the machine.  We'd casually leave, get back on our bikes, go to Andrew's backyard (while his parents were still gone) and smoke at least one a piece.  That marked the beginning of a horrible life choice of mine...something I was still dealing with nearly TWENTY years later.

When you're 14...nothing seems long-term because nothing has been thus far.  To us, it was rebellious and cool...not self-defeating and stupid.  I remember it took me a while to get the hang of smoking...it took nearly 2-3 years encompassing various attempts to properly take a drag and not cough it up.  There are few things in my life that make me feel more stupid and pathetic than actively trying to get my body used to smoking...even as it consistently rejected it.  Finally, I won!  I smoked!  Congrats to me!!!  Every morning and afternoon, I smoked in the car with my friend Jay, who was one year-older, cool, good looking, and drove me back and forth to school everyday. 

Soon, I was hiding cigarettes in the headboard of my bed.  I suppose on some level, my parents knew I smoked.  I probably smelled of it sometimes.  I am sure they figured out the headboard of my bed had porn and smokes in it.  On a few occassions, my Mom found a pack of cigarettes in the pockets of my clothes (correction from before:  this may have been my stupidest move), which I promptly blamed on my friends. "Andrew asked me to hold them for him!"...hoping to God my Mom would be brain-dead enough to believe that.  She wasn't.  She was smart enough to know that there was little she could do about it and that she was herself a smoker and it was hypocritical to criticize me (she quit around that time and never smoked again).

By the time I left for college, going a few waking hours without smoking was perilous for me.  My Freshman year at Boston University was not an easy one (LONG story and I'm not getting into it)...which perpetuated my smoking.  I smoked literally nonstop for nearly 15 years after that. Long after college.  Long after New York (and many other states) banned smoking from bars, clubs, restaurants, etc.  I savored them.  Made people wait for me to smoke them.  Walked into the freezing cold to have them.  Spent an increasing amount of my money on them (they were once under $2...currently almost at $14).  I loved them.

About two years ago, I had a case of "walking Pneumonia"...a milder form of the full-on illness.  Had I waited one day longer to get checked out, my Doctor informed me that I would have been in the hospital.  When he took x-rays of my lungs, I remember panicking in the office.  What if it wasn't fluid (pneumonia) he saw in my lungs?  What if it was a tumor (lung cancer)?  That fear stuck with me...but wasn't strong enough.  I was still smoking...for a year and a half more until I finally had enough and a doctor friend of mine prescribed me Chantix.

You are supposed to smoke the first two weeks on Chantix, which works by blocking your brain from receiving pleasure from the cigarettes.  Once the pleasure is gone, you are supposed to kick the habit altogether.  Not for me.   Six weeks later, I was still on Chantix, still smoking.  I would walk to the back of Duane Reade and get my prescription for Chantix ($200) and then walk to the front to get my Marlboro Ultra Lights ($12.75).  $212.75 for medication to quit something I was purposefully perpetuating (correction from before:  THIS might be my dumbest move).   On February 9, I decided not to go to the front of the store again. 

Eventually, I dropped the Chantix, which made me nauseous, irritable  and provided some of the most lively, and realistic nightmares I have ever had.  "Warning!" it should say on the box, "Freddy Krueger is, now, real."

In the beginning, I was simply amazed I was actually doing it (I still am).  "Oh my God!!" I would think..."Two days...NO CIGARETTES!"  Sad to say, that was the longest I had gone without them, even in prior attempts to quit where I wouldn't buy them at a bodega but instead would pay someone $2 for one and convince myself I was weaning myself off of them.  But this time, I didn't do that.  And as time passed...1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 month....5 MONTHS...it became abundantly clear that I meant business. 

That's the hardest part of quitting I found...convincing yourself you really mean it this time.  When you make so many promises to yourself and others that you're qutting - only to either break them or never really mean them in the first place - it's hard to believe yourself.  You become the boy who cried wolf...and you're crying wolf to yourself.

Weird stuff began happening.  Bad one...chewing plastic knives at my desk at work so frequently there are people who still are afraid of me.  Good one....a strange yet thrilling tingling sensation in my legs that apparently is the result of increased circulation from not smoking.  Not smelling like smoke.  Knowing I've cut out thousands and thousands of cigarettes that I would have smoked.  Saving over $2,000 so far.  The mental benefits that come from overcoming a seemingly insurmountable obstacle.  I am not a slave to it.  All this is good...but I still think about my old friends.

At the Fire Island Pines (where I always have an amazing time) I often savor time alone, which is rare in my life.  Without getting too cheesy or poetic, somtimes I leave low tea a little bit early and go back to the house.  I swim.  I listen to my iPod.  I sit out on the deck chairs and look out into the bay (I don't blame you for feeling nauseous but I am about to make a point).  Last year, I would have had about 1/2 pack of cigarettes in this time.  It was difficult to be without them...especially when a cigarette at sunset by the water, alone with my thoughts, was always one of life's simple pleasures. 

A simple pleasure of life that can end it.  A simple pleasure that puts my life at risk.  A simple pleasure that makes me smell of smoke, cough and spend thousands of dollars.  It's all true.  And it sucks that I have to keep reminding myself of it...even after nearly 1/2 year without them. 

My partner-in-crime, Andrew Gade, suffered a minor stroke last year due to a genetic heart defect he knew nothing about until it caused the stroke itself.   THANKFULLY he is fine.  He quit smoking from that day on, just a few months before I did.  20 years...for both of us.  It goes by in a blink.

I'm almost done with this post...but want to add one more thing.

That same weekend in Fire Island...about six weeks ago...I was out late at the bars and most of my friends had gone back to their respective houses to hang out, hook up, swim, sit in the hot tub, etc.  I was about to join them and met a cute guy named Nick so I stayed a while longer. At one point, Nick went out for a smoke and, realizing that it was pretty empty at that point and nobody I knew was around for the moment, I asked if I could take a drag.  I was literally and figuratively playing with fire.  For the first time in months, a cigarette was between my fingers.  I took one long drag and coughed it up.  Nick said, "Oh, have you never had a cigarette before?"  LOL.  If only that were my story.

The next morning I got up and got myself a glass of water.  As if God him/herself left it there to test me...there was a cigarette with a pack of matches next to it on the coffee table (more likely left from the late  partying the night before).  All were asleep.  I could have gone outside, sat on a deck chair, looked out on the bay and....smoked the hell out of that cigarette.  Nobody would have been the wiser.  But I didn't.

That's when I knew I quit.