Pardon My Odor
It’s the smell of foolish choices
By Dan Piraro
Audio produced by Temporary Genius Productions
I admit that I used to stink pretty much all of the time. And I was mostly unaware of it. But I’m happy to report that those days are gone.
Long story short: I used to be a daily smoker of tobacco.
Short story longer: In my first ten years of life—the 1960s—smoking cigarettes was extremely common. It seemed most adults did it, as did many characters in movies and on TV, and even talk show hosts and their guests would puff away on camera as they chuckled over witty anecdotes. Even world-class athletes openly smoked. Well equipped living rooms of the era featured large, decorative ashtrays, and many had an ornamental box full of cigarettes on the coffee table to offer to guests.
My grandfather, my dad, a couple of aunts, and several uncles all smoked. Holidays in my family were celebrated in a cloud of noxious fumes. If you wanted to see who was sitting on the sofa across the living room, you had to walk over there and feel their face to ascertain their identity. It was like spending my childhood in the back room of a film noir pool hall, while criminals planned a heist.
I remember numerous occasions on which I’d be coughing in the back seat of my grandfather’s cavernous Buick, and my grandmother would say, “Is the smoke bothering you, Danny?” My grandfather would apologize and crack his window a couple of inches to give the cancer somewhere else to go.
In those days, before the massive anti-smoking campaigns had begun, smoking was seen as something every adult had the right to do in a free country. Without even asking, people would just light up in a restaurant, in an office, in stores, and even in people’s homes. When buildings began putting no-smoking signs outside of elevators, many people considered it an infringement of rights, creeping socialism, governmental overreach, you name it. Libertarians took to wearing adult diapers to contain their bodies’ involuntary response to these signs. Some folks even considered taking the stairs instead. (Considered. Most did not have the lung capacity to do it.)
The first major health report on the connection between tobacco use and deadly diseases came in 1964, but after that, only baby steps were made to inform the public. Tiny, timid warning labels were added to cigarette packaging in 1966 that said something akin to “Caution: Smoking might not be as healthy as exercise.” (paraphrased)
Perhaps the most mind-blowing fact in this story is that people were allowed to smoke on commercial airliners until 1988—twenty-four years after the first Surgeon General’s report on smoking. But the ban was only on flights of less than two hours. (I guess they thought anyone can control an addiction for a couple of hours, but longer than that might be inviting violence?) Imagine being locked in a windowless hallway with a couple hundred other people for three or four hours, and half of them are smoking. It wasn’t completely banned on all flights until 2000. I can think of no words more appropriate than “Are you f*ing kidding me?”
Back to my smoky childhood: I hated being around smokers anywhere, any time. As a teenager, I sanctimoniously refused to smoke, even though my “cooler” friends recommended it; I was too smart for that form of suicide, I would say. It was the mid-seventies by then and my high school had a “smoke hole”—a designated area between buildings where kids could smoke between classes. The ground was littered with cigarette butts. It was always crowded. I occasionally had to pass through it to get to my next class and would hold my breath and squint my eyes like an arctic explorer who’d lost his goggles in a blizzard. And yet, a few years later, as a fully informed adult, I became a smoker. How did that happen?
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In 1979 when I was twenty, I backpacked and rode trains around Europe for a few months in the process of figuring out who I wanted to be in this life. Noticeably fewer Americans were smoking by then, but there was no such cessation of embers and fumes in Europe. As young adults will do, I was hanging out in bars and dorm rooms, drinking, carousing, and enjoying listening to the alluring accents of exotic foreigners, almost all of whom smoked. Coughing, squinting, and waving your hand in front of your face was not considered sexy by Europe’s young adults at that time, so I suppressed my urges. But it was not easy.
One night in a London pub, an attractive young woman I wanted to impress offered me a cigarette. I took it from her like a pro and leaned into the orange glow as she flicked her lighter. I took small puffs to avoid spraying her with spittle as I had so often done to the back seat of my grandfather’s Buick. I could almost hear my grandmother’s voice…
“Is the smoke bothering you, Danny?”
“Yes, but I don’t want to miss my chance to get laid!”
I did not get laid that night but I did learn to smoke. I finished that first “coffin nail,” and another that she offered me a half-hour later. I can’t say I enjoyed them, exactly, but I noticed that being in a smoky bar did not bother me as much if I was smoking too. (This is the first of many tricks nicotine played on me.) I suspect it was a case of spontaneous imprinting; perhaps I associated that cloud of smoke with the storm of hormones coursing through my sex-addled brain as I flirted.
During my last couple of months in Europe, I smoked whenever I was in bars, but when I returned home, I vowed to quit. I wasn’t physically addicted to nicotine yet, so it was easy to say goodbye to what I knew was a foolish activity before it became a cemented habit.
Shortly thereafter I started dating the woman who would become my first wife. She also had an exotic foreign accent—well, Louisiana Gulf Coast—and she stirred a similar hormone storm within me. And she was a smoker. Oops.
I found her habit noxious, but again, my hormones masked much of the unpleasantness. And again, I began smoking around her so that her cigarettes wouldn’t bother me as much. Shortly thereafter, I realized I was addicted to both her and nicotine. We married and began stinking up our new apartment together.
Another trick nicotine plays on you is that it deadens your senses of taste and smell. Before you know it, you cannot detect the smell of cigarettes on yourself or your possessions. You and everything you own stinks to high heaven, but you’re no longer aware of it. You think you can slip outside and grab a smoke, then chew some gum and no one will know. It’s a form of stupidity nicotine slips into your brain without your knowledge or consent. Not only that, you crave the demon smoke almost constantly. At least, I did.
And it is an unscrupulous drug; you get lightheaded the first couple of times you try it, but soon, it doesn’t make you high, it just makes you feel like shit if you don’t regularly dose yourself. It invades you like a flatulent squatter, and it will not leave without a long and painful eviction process. It also enables you to rationalize any argument against it. (“Did you know that most people who smoke never get cancer?” That’s true, but it’s not the point. Most people who don’t wear seatbelts don’t spend their final moment being catapulted through a windshield, but…)
A brilliant concept from my colleague Wayno.
A few years into our marriage my stinky wife and I had a kid, and I’m deeply ashamed to say we unwittingly stunk her up, too. A few years later, we had another, but by the time the second one was born, my wife and I had endured the (for me, year-long) misery of quitting. We used no aids, just gutted it out cold turkey. I felt horrible for having subjected my daughter to second-hand smoke, and with another one on the way, I found the strength to quit. I was able to do for them what I could not do for myself.
I swore I’d never touch tobacco again. After a brutal education in the agonies of withdrawal, I was once again “too smart for that form of suicide.”
Or so I thought.
Twenty-five smoke-free years and a divorce later, I spent a few months in Costa Rica with my second wife. The local cafes sold delicious Cuban cigars for a fraction of what they would cost back home (they are illegal in the U.S.), and a cool jazz musician I met there got me to try one. (I’d been warned about strangers with candy, but not sax players with Cubans.)
I wasn’t flirting with him and I no longer confused smoking with sex (or sax), but I guess I was still vulnerable to being seen as cool, so I relented, figuring what harm could one cigar do? People often do harmlessly stupid things when they are away from home, like buying locally traditional clothing of indigenous fabrics that they’re sure they’ll wear when they get home but never do. And since cigars are too strong for most mere mortals to inhale, I figured the nicotine wouldn’t get inside my entire body, only my mouth. I couldn’t get addicted if I didn’t inhale, right?
Wrong.
I liked it too much. Back in the States, I allowed myself one cigar per month, then one per week, then one per day. You may think you see where this is going, but you probably don’t expect the next sentence. Within a couple of years, I was virtually chain-smoking cigars. I’d light one while making coffee in the morning and burn eight or ten by bedtime. And they were not the small, kid-sized ones that look like cigarettes wrapped in brown paper, they were big fat ones the size of dildos. And in the U.S., I was not paying Costa Rican prices. I was pouring what should have been my retirement savings into my odorous habit, but my nicotine overlord convinced me I could afford it. (Maybe it intended to kill me before I retired.)
Being addicted to tobacco is like being in a romance with an emotionally unbalanced person. Long after the deficits far outweigh the deposits, you keep plodding forward on the memories of when you found it sexy, fun, and exciting. By the time you realize what you’re up against, you’ve moved in together, put down roots, and arranged your life around it so you can’t just walk away without major consequences. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to you, your friends have decided not to invite you to dinner parties until you break up.
And addiction, just like finding yourself in a romance that has turned dark, can happen to anyone. I thought I was too smart to fall for these common missteps with drugs and relationships, but by the time the consequences of both addictions began punching me in the teeth, I was too far down those roads to escape easily.
A selfie of the happy couple by my third wife Christy Higgins
By the time I was chain-smoking cigars, I had divorced again and was dating my current wife, Christy. She disliked my smoking, so I didn’t do it around her as often as I’d have liked to (constantly!). But when we decided to move in together a couple of years later, she put her foot down. She said I didn’t have to quit, but if we were going to live together, I could not smoke in the house. Wanting to move in with her but not wanting to spend most of my time watching her through the windows, I quit again. It was another year of hell.
Living with an unmitigated asshole while they break a nicotine addiction is almost as unpleasant as living with a smoker, but at least your clothes don’t stink. She endured it, and we’re both glad she did. And this time, rather than contributing to a dangerous addiction, hormones helped me kick the habit. I’m not sure I’d have conquered that second year of hell purely for my own sake, but love is stronger than nicotine. At least it was for me.
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Becoming addicted to drugs that relieve pain—as opiates do—or that enable us to momentarily transcend our reality—like alcohol, heroin, and many others—is not beneficial, but it is understandable. At least there is some payoff to the risk. But becoming addicted to a potentially life-threatening drug that has NO upside is quite another.
I’ve been free of tobacco (this time) for ten years now and have no signs of disease. It is true that most people who smoke never develop cancer or emphysema as a result, and thus far, I am fortunate to have fallen into that category, even if I wasn’t “too smart” to fall for the wicked tendrils of nicotine.
Now if I could just get my addiction to unwarranted arrogance under control.
Audio by Temporary Genius Productions
It is often said that ex-smokers are the most adamant critics of smokers. I can see why, given the hell that some of us experience when we quit. But for the same reason, I am not extremely critical of smokers. I understand how easy it is to start and how hard it is (for some of us) to stop.
Some of us are more prone to addiction than others, and addictive substances of all kinds—foods, drugs, behaviors—affect each of us differently, so we really can’t judge others’ behavior based on our experiences. Some people can smoke occasionally for decades and never get hooked. People like me cannot.
One thing being a cigar smoker taught me is how effective the anti-smoking campaigns of the last 50+ years have been. That’s a good thing; poisonous smoke is something any society can live without.
But the programs have been so persuasive that many Americans consider any exposure to tobacco smoke to be as dangerous as cyanide gas. When I smoked cigars, I would often go for walks around whatever city I was in, and the reactions of some people upon seeing (or smelling) me coming verged on comical.
I can totally understand someone making a face, moving or turning away, covering their nose because they don’t like the smell. Sure, fine, I get it. But I’ve seen people snatch their small children up and jog away as though they’d just heard a news bulletin about an escaped tiger.
I once saw a woman coming toward me on the sidewalk of a shopping district. She was pushing a stroller, and when she saw me, she grimaced as though I were covered in excrement, turned the stroller ninety degrees, and steered it off the sidewalk, between two parked cars, and out into the traffic lane to go around me. True story.
Granted, this was in downtown Berkeley, California, so this level of social signaling is not uncommon, but if you prefer to risk your baby’s life in traffic rather than briskly pass by a lit cigar, you may have misunderstood the level of danger posed by second-hand smoke.
And since we’re being honest, I’ll admit to another reason why I’m not self-righteous toward smokers: I still like the smell of it. Others may push their children out into traffic to escape it, but I sometimes will follow a person who is smoking a cigar, just to get a few whiffs.
Nicotine is a wicked bitch, for sure.
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