Track Mangoes

I had my first cigarette when I was 16 years old. My father had a party at his apartment in Portland the night prior and the next morning I found a pack of Camel wides underneath the sofa while I was looking for my cell phone. I remember feeling the utmost sense of intrigue. I didn't quite know what to do with them. I couldn't smoke them, that would be an obscene breech of parental trust. Would he be able to smell it? What was even the correct way to smoke a cigarette? I hadn't the slightest clue.

We didn't have any matches in the house, but my father lit incense every morning as part of a religious ritual with a wind resistant barbecue lighter. So I stuffed that in my jacket pocket and headed outside. I rounded the block and lit up on a corner with the miniature blow torch. Does anyone inhale their first cigarette? I did. I think. The only reason I believe I inhaled my first time, not for lack of wanting to sound like a pubescent pariah, of course, but I believe this because I got sick. Collapsing on my sofa when I returned home I thought I would never smoke again. I wondered why anyone started. I felt alone and weak and full of poison.

One might think that such an unpleasant experience would exist in my mind as the stuff of nightmares. But I've been smoking ever since, and I can only recall the memory with the utmost fondness. Unlike the heroin addict, who is constantly trying to recreate her first high (a time she will, unfortunately, never manifest), the smoker remembers their first cigarette as the beginning of a great era of ill famed joy.
The interesting thing about cigarettes is that they don't actually give you pleasure until you've become completely addicted to them. Every smoker must go through and initial period of disgust before the fun starts. People report nausea, vomiting, dizziness, uncomfortable rise in heartbeat, etc. So this beckons the question, why would one start? Why would anyone subject themselves to the rigorous task of becoming an addict? It isn't pleasant. It isn't fun.

The simple answer (given by anyone who has never smoked before) is that smoking looks "cool." It enhances your image. Makes you look more mature. Non smokers, with their do-good chicanery, chastise smokers for adhering to, or perhaps buying into an image. The non-smoking soccer mommy (inside her SUV, bleached hair held back in a furious pony tail sticking out of the back of a Nike cap, her hands clad in leather gloves clenched tightly to the steering wheel, her Pearline teeth grinding when the man in the Volvo cuts her off) accuses the smoker for selling out!

There have been countless attempts by anti smoking campaigns to counteract the "cool" image smoking supposedly provides; and yet, teenagers continue smoking in ever increasing numbers. What about maturity? As long as kids have a reason to believe that they aren't respected as adults (read, eternity) then they will, I suppose, continue to smoke. But these justifications are far too simple. For sticking that dollar bill in that bucket isn't really about wanting to help people in Haiti, is it?

What is more, every day there are constant real-life reminders for kids of how closely tied to class smoking is. The chef standing out back during his smoke break or the janitor having his morning cigarette is a far more powerful and persuasive image than a smoking camel, despite what paranoid cultural theorists would have you believe. The child, on his way to school, is more intrigued by the the bus driver. The waiter. The college student. These are things children are far more likely to see and deeply internalize as parts of their cultural milieu. Not Audrey Hepburn with her ivory cigarette holder. Not Sherlock Holmes with his Kabash pipe. Not stuffy old men in humidors. No. It is the malcontent working classes and angry youth subcultures that convince children to buy a pack.

But what is it about these classed images that is so persuasive to children? What do they see in these people that makes them want to forgo that initial period of disgust? Why do kids start smoking? What is so intriguing that they will temporarily suspend regard for their own health in order to experience something they can't yet understand?

These adults on their smoke breaks or the hipsters outside the concert hall represent a human experiencing a particular state of being, a particular sensitivity to an alternate perception of time movement. When the child spots his father at his desk toiling away, buried by paper work, she sees a man oppressed by chronology. But when she sees her school teacher furtively sneaking out for a cigarette she sees a woman reveling in occasion. For the primary purpose of a cigarette is to deliver a single dose of pleasant nicotine.

What is it about the state of being addicted to something that is so desirable? Forget the image. What does addiction bring to a kid's life that isn't already there? Is it that there is some desire for addiction itself operating here?

I have often joked to friends that when I quit smoking I will do it cold turkey, with the exception of my cigarette after after sex, during European films, long baths, inside of diners in Wisconsin, when angry, when drinking, when around other smokers, and in pensive solitude. (I suppose you can be celibate over and over, but you can only be a virgin once.) Everyone has their preferred moment for smoking. Sure, you can step outside and take a moment to yourself, but to punctuate that moment with a pleasurable indulgence of one's addiction causes the mind to forge an association with celebration in the midst of a grueling day.

Just like prisoners who tick away the days on the walls of their cells with chalk, each cigarette serves to stratify day's hours. Wake up. Have a cigarette. Eat lunch. Have a cigarette. Go home. Have a cigarette. Make dinner. Have a cigarette. Watch a movie. Have a cigarette. Go to bed. Dream of cigarettes. By chopping the hours into perceptible units of chronometry the days move faster and less oppressively. Indeed, it is not the cigarettes themselves that bring happiness but the way in which they change a person's perception of time, which is perhaps why it is said that quitting smoking is tougher that quitting heroin.

This is why the patch is simultaneously the most and least effective way to quit smoking. On the one hand it delivers a massive dose of nicotine that is spread out through the day in a continuous stream. On the other hand, it robs the smoker of rhythm. For it is that rhythm, the tick of addiction's clock, that is most appealing to a smoker, not the pleasure of nicotine itself.

Anyone who is trying to quit (myself at present) will tell you that the days drag on without cigarettes. The ex-smoker begins to gain weight and feel fat. Smoking causes a shortness of breath that gives a rush of blood, causing a smoker to talk rapidly and with urgency. A quitter, then, reports feeling stupid and slow. The unsympathetic non-smoker will say "Get over it." But if the non-smoker felt fat and stupid they too would sulk around the house in a bored stupor. The smoker's fundamental perception of how time moves is essentially less boring and more fun. The ex-smoker can only remember such a happiness. A non-smoker will never really understand that. So, if a smoker has ever told you that she doesn't want to quit because cigarettes make her happy it's because They Do. When a child sees a smoker, she sees a person indulging in a truly happy moment. What is more persuasive than that? It's a miracle more kids aren't smoking! Perhaps the solution is never to start.

So, the question as posed in the title still remains open. How do we get kids to stop smoking? Making cigarettes look cheap, immature, and ugly simply won't work. We must ask Why, child, do you feel a need to change your time perception as such? What is so terrible about your existence? Unfortunately we cannot ask this because the child's response will not matter to us. The ubermensch is so because he chooses not to listen to the morality of slaves. He tramples over the meek just as adults write off the sorrows of children as immaturity, teenage angst and moroseness. But to the youth, it never feels so abstract. As adults we cannot remember the rawness that immobilizes the teenager to a mopey mess. As adults we tell children to enjoy their childhood while it lasts, just as "professionals" tell college students. But how can they when their existence is characterized primarily by suffocation?

The child feels the need parse out the hours of the day because, to him, time is tyrannical. He is imprisoned in school, at home, by his bubbling hormones and the intensity at which he experiences the world. Life moves for the child as it does for the inmate: slowly, grueling, never ending. The adult smoker smokes because he must, because otherwise he might off himself. For smokers, life without cigarettes would be unmanageable. For ex-smokers the life they live is not life at all, simply a dull progression towards death, not the hurdling existence they once knew. Non-smokers then seem to be the lucky few who were born too dumb to need cigarettes, too deaf to hear the violence of their surroundings, to blind to see the reality of the world they're living in.

So, in order to get the child to quit smoking we must eradicate his desire to smoke and in order to do that we must make his life worth living. And that is an impossible feat, to be sure.