Have I Finally Quit Smoking - After 50 Years?

It's coming up on a month and it's looking good so far

I haven’t written in awhile because I’ve been focusing my energy on job-hunting, and also on down-sizing as I expect I could be on the bench for several months. Aside from moving to a much cheaper (and smaller) apartment further away from Austin, one of the other big expenses in my life is cigarettes. In Texas they’re around $10 a pack. I smoke at least one pack a day, sometimes more. That means $300-$400 a month on cigarettes, which ain’t so bad when you’re making what I was making, but ain’t so great when you ain’t makin’ nothin’.

I never intended to be a smoker, yet somehow I ended up as one, and I’ve been smoking for at least 50 years. My dad was a smoker. At some point, he switched from cigarettes to cigars and pipes - but he still inhaled. He had a nice collection of pipes that I think he was proud of. After he got emphysema and had to stop smoking, my mom would yell at him to sell the pipes; he refused. One day I said to him, “I know why you’re not selling them. You’re going to wait until it’s too late and then you’re going to start smoking again, aren’t you?” He said I was right. That’s how strong a smoking addiction is.

I can’t recall when I smoked my first cigarette. I was 13 when I smoked my first joint - but it was many years later that I turned to cigarettes. In high school I had a corn cob pipe; I smoked this brand called Borkum Riff (which is still around today). I also used to hand roll cigarettes from that. Sometimes when my parents were out I’d pour a little of my dad’s whiskey into the tobacco. I suppose I thought I could get a buzz from that.

I didn’t become a habitual cigarette smoker until my senior year of college. I was 20 years old, at Emerson College in Boston, living in a dorm at the corner of Beacon and Berkeley Streets. I remember exactly what happened.

One night I walked into a party in someone else’s room in the dorm. I walked in and this giant stood up and started walking towards me - dark black skin and dreadlocks on someone the size and shape of an NFL linebacker. The way he was walking towards me, the look in his eyes, I thought I was a dead man. I started crying, “What did I do? I didn’t do nothing!” When he reached me, he grabbed me, hugged me, said, “It’s been a long time! How the fuck are you man?”

He said he knew me because we both used to hang out with David Peel, the crazy (in a good way) street musician who recorded a few notable albums in the late 60s and early 70s for Elektra and became friends with John Lennon. I had hung out with Peel when I was at NYU. I’d met him when he was playing in Washington Square Park, I’d brought him up to WNYU-FM to be interviewed, and he liked my photos.

(MOJO magazine ran my photo with Peel’s obituary in 2017.)

I really didn’t remember Mickey at all, but “we both used to hang with David Peel” was too specific a thing for someone to make up, right? Many years later I asked Harold Black, who was an original member of David Peel and the Lower East Side, if he had any recollection of Mickey as part of our group of friends at the time. He did not remember him at all.

Anyway, Mickey was now a part of my life and for a brief period, we were inseparable. His name was Mickey Jackson and god help you if you called him Michael. He slept on the floor of my dorm room a lot - because I was in a co-ed dorm and we partied every night - not only did that cost him $0, he did very well with the women in my dorm. (Mickey had a huge black Great Dane named Shaft. We’d get on the Boston T with the dog, he’d say, as loudly as possible, “Shaft, sit!”, people would scatter, we’d always get seats.)

Micky is the one who got me hooked on cigarettes.

How did he do that? Like I said, he was a big guy, and looked scary as fuck if you didn’t know him. He was the kind of guy who would go up to someone on the street and ask for a cigarette. That person would look at him and say, “Yeah, sure, hey, take the whole pack!” and run off. He’d smoke one, then toss the rest of the pack at me, “I don’t like this one, you can have the rest.”

So there I was, studying for finals, trying not to smoke so much weed, trying not to drink so much, trying just to focus on getting good grades in my final semester. There were stacks of cigarettes on my desk. Before I knew it, I was addicted. Mickey disappeared from my life before the end of the year but cigarettes stayed with me.

Once I no longer was getting them for free - thanks to Mickey - I was smoking fancy European cigarettes - stuff like Gauloises and Players Navy Cut - but eventually went to the more readily available (and cheaper) non-filter Camels.

At some point I was also smoking bidis - mostly because they kind of looked like joints and I also just liked saying “bidi’.

Around 1977 or 78, I was sailing on a supertanker from Philadelphia to Portland (Maine), working on a documentary for Shell. There we were, sitting on top of 50,000 gallons of something very flammable, and everyone was smoking. The ship’s crew all looked at me with my non-filter Camels and told me that I would kill myself that way, and they got me to switch to low tar smokes, variations of which stayed with me to the present day.

My father’s brother died from emphysema in 1979. My father died in 1992. His emphysema was pretty bad towards the end and he never was able to resume smoking as much as he’d fantasized about it. And me, seeing what had happened to them, I was unable to quit.

Through the years, I tried them all. Hypnosis. Acupuncture. Allen Carr Easy Way. Champix. Vaping. Wellbutrin. Cold turkey. Hypnosis worked the best - I went six months without smoking. But it seemed as if nothing was going to work “forever”.

The thing was, I really liked smoking. And I continued to like it even after 14-hour trans-Pacific flights became non-smoking, hotels around the world became non-smoking (last year, me in Beijing going outside every hour when it was 0 degrees C), the streets in BGC and other parts of Metro Manila became non-smoking.

In fact, I credited smoking with my successful IT career. Back in the early 90s, in my first suit-and-tie IT job, I was a database analyst at Barclays Bank in New York. Every floor had a smoking room. I was the only person on my team who smoked. So I was the only person on my team who everyone else in the office knew - and that meant when it came time to staff up the next bleeding edge (for its time) project, everyone knew me so I was chosen for the project team - and suddenly spending most of my time in London rather than New York.

At any rate, that was then, this is now.

A month ago I was feeling like shit. I had this pain in my gut (gall stones more than likely), I was exhausted and sleeping 15+ hours a day, I was so short of breath that my asthma puffer wasn’t helping - I needed to use it every hour instead of just once a day. I’d go out on the patio and light a cigarette and start coughing so much that I’d put it out after just 3 or 4 puffs. Yeah, I knew some of this was stress. Being out of work at this time of year, at my age, with my expenses, of course that’s going to stress me the fuck out. But I also knew that it wasn’t stress, it was something else.

I went to the hospital. X-rays, EKG, sonogram, all sorts of blood tests - they said maybe gall stones and maybe bronchitis. I got a fistful of pills, went home, and that night I stopped smoking. It was just too painful.

A couple of days later, the pills were doing what they were supposed to be doing but I still wasn’t smoking. I looked at the carton of cigarettes on the table and thought to myself, “Well, I’ve made it this far, maybe I should try to keep it going.” I ordered some stuff from Amazon - some herbal vape things, some metal straw things so that I could still go through the smoking motions - but I actually haven’t needed any of that so far.

Now I finish a meal and I don’t know what to do. Normally I’d go sit outside and have a smoke. I’d get home from going to the supermarket and I don’t know what to do. Normally I’d put the bags down and go outside for a smoke. I’m a little bit lost as to what to do with all of the extra time I’m getting back.

I barely need my asthma inhaler now. Before, I couldn’t go more than a few hours without it. Now I can go a couple of days. I’m not spending $70-$100 a week on cigarettes, and that’s really nice.

Most importantly, my wife, who does not smoke. finally told me that for all of these years, every night in bed she could smell the cigarettes … and now that smell has gone away. That’s a pretty powerful reason for me to not go back to smoking again.

I’m so confident that this is really “it” that I’m about to move to an apartment complex that does not allow smoking anywhere - not on the balcony, not anywhere on the grounds.

(For some reason I’m fixated on this Lenny Bruce quote - “I loved that, when he got arrested, he was a dope fiend, Bela Lugosi, I almost shit. The Monster. He was the worst advertisement for rehabilitation, he was a dope fiend for seventy years, he cleaned up and dropped dead.” That’s not going to be me, is it?)

I’ll try to do some more posts - favorite films and tv of the year, etc. - but given my track record over the past year, well, for those of you who stuck around this far, thank you.