Last night I smoked in my dreams.
It was a long white cigarette, like a Marlboro Light 100 or something.
It was a vivid dream; I felt the warm tap on the back of my throat as I took the first pull. I felt a filling and crisp sharpness in my lungs as my bronchi swelled with smoke. My head swam, and I could have floated off as I slowly exhaled.
Of course, I immediately felt guilty; two months, the longest time in seven years I’ve gone without a smoke, squandered.
When I was a boy I pretended to smoke a lot. I had these plastic building toys, called tinker-toys that were small, cylindrical plastic sticks that you could fasten together with connectors to make into shapes. The smallest piece was a short, lime-green one, and it was almost exactly the size and shape of a cigarette, a little stubby though, like an unfiltered Lucky Strike. I would strut around in a shirt and clip-on tie, with a plastic .45 in a kid-size shoulder holster and a bright green cigarette dangling from my lips. I was a detective.
My dad quit smoking when I was one, his brand was Merits. My mom told me it was because one day, she found me stuffing my face with cigarette butts from dad’s ashtray. Mortified, she called poison control, who informed her that I would be okay. She let dad have it though, and he hasn’t smoked since, that was nearly twenty-three years ago. Maybe that’s what got me started.
I remember vividly the first time I smoked: It was my tenth birthday, and all my friends had come over to my family’s small apartment in Issaquah to play Nintendo and eat ice-cream. In the late afternoon, after everyone had gone home, I wandered downstairs to the parking lot to play by myself, something I needed to do to decompress, as an only child, after spending a lot of time with my peers.
As I reached the bottom of the stairs I heard motion and looked to my left, where three teenage boys were leaning against the apartment building smoking. I felt intimidated as they looked at me, and for some odd reason, due to innocence, I felt a sort of alarm as it dawned on me that these boys certainly weren’t old enough to smoke. So I said in a voice half nervous, half sanctimonious,
“Y-you guys aren’t old enough to smoke.”
The boy closest to me had a baseball cap on with the brim pulled down so all I saw was his mouth. He smirked, audibly, making that “hmph” sound. He took a deep pull of his nearly finished cigarette and flicked it down at my feet. The boys all turned around after that and slinked down the hill and around the corner of the building.
The burning butt lay at my feet, blue smoke flowing perfectly smooth and uninterrupted from its smoldering end. I stared at it, taking in every detail; the orange-yellow filter with tiny white speckles all over it, the golden Camel logo just starting to singe as the ember encroached on it, the smell; the intoxicating, nauseating, enticing smell.
That faceless boy might have been the devil himself, now that I think about it. I became aware of the potentiality of the situation.
It was too perfect; there was no one around on that sleepy Sunday afternoon, and I had just gone out, so my parents wouldn’t expect me back for a while. I bent over and picked it up and without hesitation, and, knowing exactly how to do it, I took my first drag. I took two, three, greedy in my curiosity. The burning, smoky flavor made me salivate profusely, and then my head started to swim, I giggled. I felt like a criminal, too. I felt guilty and ashamed, no-one could know.
After that, I didn’t smoke again till I was twelve. My friend Josh had procured a pack of Turkish Royals and we went into the woods to smoke. I had a knock-off Zippo lighter with the famous Ramones logo on it that I had bought from the local record shop and I was itching to use it.* I felt cooler than cool, snapping open that lighter and flicking it to life with my thumb. It made so many satisfying metallic sounds as I operated it. I held it up to the cigarette and listened to it crackle to life as it was engulfed in flame. Still, I was paranoid, my heart was pounding from criminal fear in fact. I immediately ducked down, and held the cigarette high above my head to avoid the second-hand smoke that threatened to give me away with its tell-tale odor.
“God, you looked so cool right up until you did that,” Josh joked.
That was my superstition: that if I held the cigarette far from my body, in my non-dominate right hand, taking care to avoid the visible secondhand as it shifted with the wind, then I would somehow be smell-free when I got home. That is why to this day, although I’m left-handed, I smoke with my right, it’s a comfort thing.
Or smoked with my right, I should say, because it was just a dream. I woke up this morning, still feeling quite guilty. It’s amazing how your dream emotions carry right over with you as you wake up. I was convinced I’d smoked last night and I felt like I had let down everyone I had told about my latest quitting attempt, especially my girlfriend. It was several hours before I realized it had been a dream and I felt an enormous boost of morale, two months still going strong.
I didn’t start smoking daily till I was sixteen. The first pack I ever owned was a soft-pack of Marlboro Reds, purchased by a homeless man of local renown in Issaquah whom I paid to buy them. I gave him a ten-dollar note and he bought the five-dollar pack and spent the change on a large can of Steel Reserve. I was so meticulous and calculating about that first pack. Like a miser, I checked it every day in its hiding place, taking solace in the large number (at the time) of cigarettes that I possessed. I would come home after school, before mom got home, run down into the woods and smoke, savoring every last drag. Afterwards I would run home, my fresh young lungs completely unhindered by accumulated tar and diminished capacity, and vigorously shower and brush my teeth.
By eighteen I had already established brand loyalty, something that industrial psychologists in Virginia and North Carolina undoubtedly labor to achieve. I was a Camel man. Smoking Camels exemplified how sophisticated I was; I was a musician, I was a rebel, and I was goddamned good looking. Camel Filters were my bread and butter, especially in those heady days of five-dollar and ten-cent packs. Sometimes I’d smoke Turkish Golds or Royals. I remember when Turkish Silvers came out, there was a full page ad in Rolling Stone, showing people dressed in roaring-twenties style clothes, rolling up to a theatre premier with spotlights and a big marquee featuring the Camel logo. There were even fancier Camels, before flavored cigarettes were outlawed, that came in flat, square shaped tins; Screwdrivers, Black-Jack Gins, and my favorite; Izmir Stingers.
I smoked and smoked and smoked-half a pack a day or more. The days of greedily hoarding and rationing were long gone, and I smoked openly, free of the shame that accompanied my first, furtive puffs. I did so for years, trying to quit half-heartedly at times, but always buying a pack after a week or two.
It was in my early twenties that I first became aware of being addicted to cigarettes. I smoked habitually, my nicotine receptors numb, feeling less and less as the day wore on. Oh, but that first one of the day, that first, sharp breath with a cup of coffee on a cold morning, started the whole process over again. It was around this time that youth could no longer sustain the effects of constant smoking without starting to show signs of wear and tear; the coughs, the apathy, the irritability. For the first time in four or five years, the guilt came back too. No longer a cocky teenager, I felt guilty when parents with young children looked at me scornfully when I smoked in public. I felt guilty for all the money I spent, especially as tobacco prices continued to rise sharply. Most of all I felt self-conscious, aware of my ailing body and what I was doing to it.
So I would quit and fail and quit and fail and so on, hating myself for my weakness more and more. I could go for a few weeks even, but inevitably a friend would offer one, or I would ask for one. This is all quite recent history I write of at this point.
But this most recent time, I’ve set a personal record. It has been two months and two days since my last cigarette. No, I shouldn’t jinx it by obsessively counting the days, I know what that always leads to. It’s much easier for me to take the more philosophically pragmatic approach of simply identifying myself as a non-smoker; not true in the past but most certainly true at this very moment. Cigarettes offered to me are politely declined not with “I’m trying to quit,” but rather, “I don’t smoke.”
I don’t often have cravings at this point, but the dreams have intensified lately. Although, If I can spend the rest of my life enjoying cigarettes the way I used too, in a vivid, consequence-free dreamscape, maybe that’s the best of both worlds. No, I have to quit in my dreams too. I actually have declined a smoke in one such dream, about a month ago, and I viewed this as a sort of milestone, like having a religious vision. I was convinced that this was of enormous symbolic importance, and that the war was won. I even wrote about this in an editorial article I did for the school paper, thinking that if I made my quitting public, it would be all the more reason to stay strong, since I had now made myself accountable to whoever knew me and had read the piece.
So this latest dream has shaken my confidence a bit, but only in my dream life. Discovering it to be a dream redoubled my zeal in my waking existence.
However I do not think that this transformation will be complete until I quit smoking in my dreams, and so far, it’s been less than a day since my last dream cigarette.
*I feel compelled to mention a bizarre feature of that Ramones lighter; the logo, with the eagle clutching the baseball bat and the olive branch, was surrounded by the names of the group’s final line-up before disbanding; Johnny, Joey, C.J., and Marky. I was twelve at the time, and being ignorant of music trivia, I was very confused as I only thought of the Ramones as Johnny, Joey, DeeDee and Tommy. Indeed, when you see the logo reprinted on most official merchandise, these are the names you always see surrounding the mock-up presidential seal. So I don’t know who made that lighter, but my guess is that it was made in a warehouse far, far away by someone who unwittingly made very esoteric memorabilia for a criminally low wage.