—,i ■ here were cigarettes everywhere; falling out of ashtrays onto tables, ground down into the rugs, burned down to thefilter on the mantle and the bathroom sinks. We had causedfires. A lot o f littlefires. \Ne were standing in the living room at the time, a dozen or so people were loitering. “What would you do if there was a fire?” I was about to answer (the correct answer), “Call the Fire Department,” when Larry Pascal, my brother’s best friend, answered for me in his usual sarcastic tone. .. "Call the Fire Department!” The cop turned and slugged him. “That could have been me,” I thought. And then I tried to guess the right answer—If there is a fire you call... the police? The YMCA? The Red Cross? Later, after the cops left, everyone else who had been in the living room said that they would have given Larry’s answer too. So why was Larry slugged? Had we all missed something? Yes. In our teenage naivete, we didn’t realize that with our beer and cigarettes we were all potential fire hazards running'willy nilly like a swarm of fireflies around the house. It had been a simple routine question. Larry just hadn’t answered it with the proper seriousness. The next morning we awoke to the reality. There were cigarettes everywhere; in ashtrays, falling out of ashtrays onto tables, on the record cabinet, ground down into the rugs, burned down to the filter on the mantle and the bathroom sinks. As it turned out, we had caused fires. A lot of little fires. After my parents returned from their pleasant weekend in the city it was the burn holes in the drapes and living room carpet that got me grounded for three months. Not to mention the butts we couldn’t fish out of the swimming pool because they had dissolved and looked like little amber-colored guppies swimming around in the water. We would have had to drain the whole pool to get the tobacco out. And then there was the butt my mother found in one of her highheeled shoes in her closet where I had hidden four people during the second raid. In college I switched to Kents, the intelligent coed’s choice. I really enjoyed smoking in college. It was as if I’d always been searching for just the right place to smoke, the place where smoking would look relevant, important, even necessary. For my habit it was like coming home. How I relished burning the candle at both ends while I studied all night, smoked and popped No Doze. There were some classes where the teacher would let us smoke while he lectured. Especially if he smoked. I felt so grown up. I felt like I was a young Simone De Beauvoir at the Sorbonne. After college I tried to quit many times—never lasting more than a few days. It became routine for me to do this once every few months. Happy Birthday To Me J.t was vanity, the basest motivation, that finally got me to think seriously about quitting. The day I turned thirty five I looked into the bathroom mirror and was shocked. Who was this hag? Had I reached life’s decline overnight? I was collapsing, fading on the vine as fast as the portrait of Dorian Gray. My eyelids were drooping, my mouth looked like a prune with little wrinkles above the lips and I had purple blotches under my eyes. What is this? You mean smoking affects my looks too? A pathetic three-year drama, culminating in the macabre, ensued. At first I thought it might be a temporary depression over turning thirty five, but it refused to go away. Soon my chest started to hurt. So I joined a health club. But weight lifting made my heart work even harder. So I became a strict vegetarian. I drank fresh carrot juice every morning. Cooked tofu and brown rice for dinner. All my vegetables were organic. My cheese was rennetless. Pastries, when I ate them, were made from whole wheat flour and honey. I was still smoking up to twenty cigarettes a day, operating under the premise that if cancer should take hold all this good food would attack it. The question was, could food prevent a heart attack? "Well, beets might help,” I told myself. This was a shoddy compromise akin to setting a broken arm in jello. When my chest began hurting so much I knew I could no longer lift weights and smoke, I quit the health club. It was at that point I realized the awful truth. I would rather commit suicide than quit smoking. Get It Right The First Time Late one evening my daughter climbed up the ladder to my loft and scooted onto my bed. I was resting against three pillows reading and, of course, smoking. “Mom, you smoke too much lately,” she said, as if she had come up In order to express this to me. “I know,” I said. “You should quit.” “I know.” “What if you get cancer. Michelle’s mother has a friend who has lung cancer. Her hair is falling out and she has to wear a wig.” “That’s too bad.” “Billy’s uncle has to wear a voice box because he’s got lung cancer. Whenever he talks, he sounds like a robot. Do you want to sound like a robot, Mom?” “ I’d kill myself first.” Whoops. Did I say that out loud? What was I doing, bringing out the beast? “How?” ' “How what?” “How would you kill yourself?” “Pill, ha ha,” said the soul of brevity. The cigarette burning between my fingers felt like a lizard dangling there. “But what if I come home from school and find you before the pills kill you?” • I wanted to say, “Just pretend you don’t see me and go and visit a friend for an hour.” But I didn’t. I didn’t say anything. And she didn’t stop. “I’d have to call an ambulance if I found you like that, Morn: And you’d have to get your stomach pumped. Who knows, maybe they’ll put a tube in your throat after you get out of the hospital—/? you get out of the hospital. And if and when you do, everybody will be watching you all the time to make sure you don’t try it again and they’ll feel sorry for you. Or worse. They’ll laugh at you and say, ‘There goes the lady who tried to commit suicide! I wonder if she feels like committing suicide today? Maybe we should follow her so we can stop her if she tries it again!”’ I found myself thinking, “Well. I’ll just have to get it right the first time/ “How? How are you going to get it right the first time?” she was saying. It was beginning to sound like a game. So I took two things out of the corner. “ I’ll use a gun and I’ll put a bullet through my head.” “But what if you miss? What if you shoot off half your face and you’re still alive? Then you’ll have to walk around with only half a face for the rest of your life. The doctors could never put the whole thing back together again.” She sang “Humpty Dumpty” to me. Then, “For the rest of your life when they see you coming down the street they’ll say, ‘Here come’s the lady with only half a face because she tried to kill herself ha ha!” ’ Up until now I had been thinking of my possible suicide as the result of human weakness. I was thinking people would feel sorry for me. But she saw it as the action of an idiot. “Mom! Ha ha, hey Mom! Listen! You might just take off your nose! Then you’ll have to walk around for the rest of your life with a pair of those nose glasses on. You know, the ones they sell in Wool- Worths with the black mustaches!” She was rolling around the bed now, holding her stomach and laughing. I asked myself, “Would this be her reaction if I did it?” What a way to go down in your kid’s memory—”We won’t talk about your dead grandmother, kids. She was an idiot!” “Poor Mom. A great big hole where your nose should be!” “All right Sybil! That’s enough!” After she went to bed I found I couldn’t light another cigarette. My hands refused to pick up the pack. For the first time in a decade I went to sleep without smoking my before-going-to-bed-cigarette. The Throat Monster J. had irrational mood swings. I said unpredictable things—such as the day I was sitting at Caffe Pergolesi when this guy on the other bench lit up a Camel. “ Excuse me,” I said, “ I used to smoke, too.” Then I proceeded to tell him that he would feel much better about life if he quit smoking. I found myself telling him that I was going to start a therapy group for people who want to quit. My mouth was obviously taking revenge on me because I was not giving it a cigarette to puff on. Hastily, before I said something I might never be able to live down, I went inside the Caffe and sat at a table. Only to find myself getting annoyed at the guy next to me who was rattling his newspaper. Irritated by the dishes clacking noisily behind the counter. Angry because people were talking too loud to one another. Paranoid, thinking the whole world was conspiring in chorus to stop me from quitting. I would have done just about anything to keep from going home. Home where it would be just me and the Throat Monster. Not until you quit smoking do you realize the Throat Monster lives inside you. A sleeping dormant thing while I had remained true to my cigarette was now wide awake and, uncoiled, nagging me like a fisherman’s wjfe. “I Want a cigarette.” “Boy, I sure could use a cigarette right now!” “O.K.l Time for a cigarette!” Once a friendly pal who was there to remind me when it would be nice to smoke a cigarette while reading, writing, talking, after eating or while drinking a cup of coffee, he was now torturing me. A one-time buddy who could now, at any moment, turn into a raving maniac screaming, “Give me a bloody cigarette or I’ll make the rest of your life miserable!” Being very intelligent, or should I say exactly as intelligent as I am, the Throat Monster knew just what to say to tempt me. It knew me as well as I knew myself and even used my own voice to speak to me with. If deduction didn’t work, it used induction. If induction didn’t work, it used threats, guilt, poetry, promises, philosophy, history, paranoia. Paranoia was its best device. It knew my weaknesses even better than I since its life depended on them. Here are some of the things the Throat Monster said to me: “Tobacco is organic! It’s a plant! God wouldn’t have made it if he didn’t want me to smoke it.” The Throat Monster always used the personal pronoun “me” to fool the real me into thinking we were one and the same. This was just another gimmick, like: “Indians smoked tobacco.” “ I can have just one. What’s that going to hurt?” “The world is probably going to end soon anyway so what’s the big deal? Go ahead.. .light one up!” The torture wasn’t just audio, it was visual. The moon, as it rose outside my window, would look like the burning tip of a cigarette. The stars as they came out one by one each looked liked smaller burning tips of cigarettes. The Throat Monster would say, “It would be so nice to sit and look at the stars and smoke a cigarette right now.” After I ate dinner I would want to smoke a cigarette. As I watched TV, as I read, my hands kept reaching for the pack. Cigarettes! Cigarettes! Cigarettes! All the world’s a cigarette and each cigarette plays its part. Everything that happened and some things that didn’t happen became the Throat Monster’s opportunity. Perhaps the phone would ring and it would be a wrong number. The Throat Monster would pounce saying, “Someone is harassing me! I need a cigarette!” Or the phone wouldn’t ring. Nobody called. This also became the Throat Monster’s opportunity by turning it into a tragedy. He proceeded to list many other disappointments in my life and within the hour it would be that nobody had ever loved me or would ever love me, so what the hell? Why not smoke a cigarette? The Land Of The Living During the course of the flu I’d hardly eaten more than a cup of soup every twenty four hours. The day I stuck my big toe back in the world again, I felt as weak and holy as a saint coming off the desert of a two week fast. I was detoxified! And pleasantly surprised to find myself less angry at the world in general. My body felt joyous, exhilarated. My body felt like it had found a buried treasure. I remembered the anti-smoking ads I’d seen on television in the sixties of people jumping up and down and clicking their heels. 24 Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1987
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