It's
just About Getting Better . . . Don't want your money. Don't want your soul.
Cigarettes
- The First Cigarette
Like
most kids, my friends and I tried smoking cigarettes before
we reached our teens. Just like the sips of alcohol
I’d taken, I didn’t like the cigarettes much.
I didn’t inhale the smoke, so I didn’t see the
point. Two years after my first drink, I found reason to try
them again. This time I inhaled and kept inhaling for thirty
years. This is how it happened:
It was June, 1971 and I was about to begin my senior year
in college. It turned out to be my first of two senior years.
After attending West Georgia College for two years, I transferred
to the University of Georgia in Athens. My discovery of alcohol
helped my party life, but my generalized anxiety and social
life didn’t improve. I wasn’t ready to drink daily
yet to deal with the anxiety. The move to Athens was an attempt
at a geographical cure. When that didn’t help, I decided
to move again. All alcoholics know the definition of insanity
is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different
results. I fit the definition nicely. This time I volunteered
for the Teacher Corps, a federal program similar to Vista
or the Peace Corps. College students worked in economically
depressed schools and went to class at the same time. I was
assigned to an inner city school in Atlanta.Jack Kirk had
been the station manager at WLBB in Carrollton when I worked
there. He had changed jobs and was now living in Atlanta as
a sales representative for Procter and Gamble. I moved in
with Jack in his two-bedroom townhouse which was located directly
under the approach path for Atlanta Airport’s runway
9-Right. At the same time, I was moving into Jack’s
apartment, my former youth minister, Walton Peabody, moved
back to Atlanta from Denver. Walton and I had become friends
and reconnected now that we were both in Atlanta. Walton introduced
me to Arch.
Diane Archer was close to Walton’s Age. I was a few
months shy of 21. She was thirty, or close to that. She captivated
me. She had been a teacher in Denver and worked with Walton’s
wife, Jackie there. Arch had been accepted to the humanistic
education doctoral program at the University of Massachusetts
in Amherst. She came to Atlanta with Walton and Jackie to
spend the summer before beginning her program in the fall.
She was a handsome woman – not delicate. She was the
quintessential free spirited, independent, earth mother woman
of the hippie era.
The
Summer of '72
That summer is the special summer in my life because of Arch.
I’ve had a lot of summers in my life and bits and pieces
of them float through my memory. That summer is different.
I remember it all in crystal clear high definition –
stuff like driving on Atlanta’s Interstate 20 in my
Volkswagen van to see Arch. It’s raining, and to make
it perfect, the Doors’ Riders in the Storm playing on
the radio. Just the anticipation of being with her is delicious.
Arch taught me to revel in the moment, to pay attention to
sunsets and storms, to take delight in finding out all about
the life of the hitchhikers we picked up. There has never
been a person in my life that has come close to being as amazed
by living life as Arch was. And that was contagious. I’d
been a person riddled with anxiety all my life. Bouts of depression
were common. Arch’s clarity of thought was astonishing.
After that summer, in the fall, and after she’d been
gone for a while, my funk returned. I was depressed. I was
telling her that on the telephone and she asked, “What
are you reading?” I hadn’t said anything about
reading anything, but told her I was half way through Albert’s
Camus’s The Stranger. “Stop reading that,”
she said. Camus was an existentialist who spent much time
unsuccessfully searching for meaning in life. “No wonder
you’re depressed,” Arch said. I put the book away
and got better. Arch was a master at going to the nub of things
and being right about it.
Arch wanted to live life in its natural state. Everybody I
knew during that time drank alcohol. While I didn’t
do drugs, they were a huge part of the culture as well. Arch
wanted no part of any of that. Once I began spending time
with Arch, my alcohol drinking ended. Back then, I could do
that.
Arch did have a vice, though. She smoked Winston menthol 100s.
Jack, my housemate, smoked, too. I was surrounded by cigarettes.
During that summer, Arch and I decided that although we weren’t
fat, we could stand to lose some weight to get in the best
shape we could. So, we dieted together. It worked. Toward
the end of the summer, I decided I wanted Arch to quit smoking.
With the success of the joint dieting in mind, it occurred
to me that if I was a smoker, we could quit together, which
would be good for Arch.
And, of course, I was lying to myself when I developed that
idiotic plan. The reality is that I was enamored with Arch
and wanted to be like her. Looking back on it now, I think
I was in love with her in much the same way we have crushes
on teachers. Being a male and all, I thought about sex stuff,
but never mentioned that to her during that summer. Seven
years later she came to visit us after our oldest child was
born. When I met her at the airport, my initial hug and kiss
weren’t sisterly and she expressed surprise. My reaction
to seeing her had been spontaneous – no thought involved
– but I felt dumb anyway. Three days later, on the way
to the airport, she asked about the kiss. We talked. She said
you want to try it? Sure. We stopped and kissed. I broke it
off. It just didn’t feel right. She smiled knowingly
and said, “We better get to the airport.” She
knew what she was doing, as she always did.
Yeah, I wanted to be like Arch and smoke cigarettes, but I
needed some good, noble motive to do that so I came up with
the losing weight plan. Dumb.
Learning
to Smoke
It’s not easy to learn how to smoke cigarettes. Nobody
accidentally becomes a smoker. That’s impossible. You
have to work at it. When I set out to do it, I sat on my bed
and tried to inhale the smoke. My body rebelled with fits
of coughing that was saying, “Don’t do this thing
to me!” But, I persevered and eventually began to be
able to get the smoke into my lungs. Once that happened, my
body surrendered. Nicotine is a massively addictive drug and,
as with alcohol, I was immediately hooked
Arch wasn’t happy with the development. She didn’t
want me to smoke. But, it was too late. I never mentioned
my plan of jointly quitting to her. I didn’t want to
quit. I looked forward to the nicotine hits too much for that.
Just like with the alcohol, I went from being a non-smoker
to a heavy smoker quickly. Within a month, I was smoking two
packs a day. A year later, when I was back at the radio station,
I’d go through four packs of Kools in a four hour shift.
My chest would hurt at the end of each shift, but the next
day I’d do it again. That’s what addiction is
all about.
At the end of the summer, Arch left for Massachusetts and
I moved out of Jack’s place into an apartment in midtown
Atlanta. Left to my own devices again, the alcohol returned
quickly. Now, I spent my afternoons after teaching school
at the back tables of a strip club near my apartment, drinking,
smoking, and writing poetry on bar napkins.
