November 23, 2007

Not getting in my eyes

This is a stretch of life for me when just being around for a personal anniversary, no matter the reason for the date of specialness, is something to cheer wildly about.

That must be the reason why my remembering birthdays and the such is one of the teenie handful of things that has improved as I’ve aged.

Back in October I huffed and puffed past another date of demarcation--15 years having quit smoking. It was that long ago when I dumped a partial pack of Salem Lights into the trash, a teeth-gnashing, cringing crossroad.

Only seconds later, I had to fight off an immense craving to retrieve those tobacco-filled tubes of heartbeat heightening and carry on my relationship with them as before. That momentous occasion occured at the end of the working day.

The next morning, I surpassed several speed limits to get to work way early; my prayer was that the night janitor had called in sick and the trash had not been emptied and my packaged puffs of pleasure would still be there.This way, I would not fudge on my pledge to “not buy another pack.”

I did a walk-run to my desk, then executed a near-dive into my waste can. Its contents were landfill-bound, however.

That impetus for my quitting the cigarette habit came from arrival of my son’s first semester college tuition bill. Then, my Salen Lights brand was $3.50 or so a pack, and I was the chimney of lore and legend, inhaling and exhaling nearly four packs a day.This was written off, by me, as a consequence of a high pressure sales managment job...lots of road time alone...and in complete honesty, full enjoyment of the warm, fuzzy and wonderful buzz that smoking issued to every cell of my essence.

Throwing a calculator at what it was costing me to smoke, the numbers rolled off that quitting would go a long way toward offsetting a hefty portion of college costs for the next four years.

My addiction was such that there was a stretch when all I thought about was my son’s graduation date in less than four years and my grand and glorious plans for the moment when I could light up again. It would be good, I schemed, to encourage him to attend every summer school session so I could get back in the cigarette saddle again as soon as possible.

That’s just how common-sense altering having nicotine pumped into you, then having it jerked away, can be.

Although three times before I had walked away from cigarettes, now I’ve made it. That “do without” gauntlet amounts to an approximate aggregate of 5,500 days--lots of them pure agony and slam dunks into hell by the nicotine monster.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by smokers. When I was small, a lot of the men who would come to my grandma’s Kreigh’s house for Christmas smoked. For each and every one of those guys to this day, I could tell you the brand they put their mouth around.

They all also were tall, good at telling a joke, playing cards and always seemed to have money in their pockets, so it was only natural that I wanted to be like them. Cigarettes were bundled in with all those other admirable elements in my impressionable mind.

When he was a young man, my uncle Merle smoked, too, for several years (Lucky Strikes). He finally cast the habit aside, with, I would bet the farm, my aunt Edna’s persistent nagging.

Once when uncle Merle came to our house, as soon as he stepped from the car, I ran to greet him and asked if he had continued to go without smoking. It was one of the abnormal instances when I can recollect Uncle Merle--who could write the manual for being laid back--flashing speckles of irritation. I think my inquiry came at a juncture when he believed he had the habit kicked and my reminder probe made him want to turn around and get back in the car, buy a pack and re-light up in the very worst way.

There were few things in my earlier years that smelled better to me than a lit cigarette. My dad’s cousin Byrl Curry and his wife Ruth smoked Chesterfields and when I quit for the first time, I always made sure I was positioned downwind from them when they exhaled. The tobacco combination in Chesterfields still has to be among the best-smelling cigarette smoke outputs of all time, according to my nose anyway.

The dad of one of my cousins, Warren Ritter, smoked cigars. During a visit to his house in Mishawaka, Warren and I were on an expedition of curiosity in the basement. A “lounge” area with a couple chairs, fake fireplace and small TV had been set up, and there on an end table was an unsmoked, olive green cigar.

Money was tight for our families in those days, so the cylinder of rolled tobacco had to be a stogie in its truest sense--cheap, cheap, cheap. We lit it up, took enough puffs each to eventually deplete the cigar by a third, then quickly squelched it when we thought we heard someone coming downstairs.

Having no idea what I was doing, I inadvertently inhaled one helping; I coughed so hard that smoke squirted out my ears, Warren said. Later that day, my dad observed that “Gary and Warren are awfully quiet” as we sat on the couch near-motionless, both our faces taking on the color of an army jeep that had just finished a two-day mission in the Sahara.

“I noticed a partially-smoked cigar in the basement,” Warren’s dad analyzed, “and it wasn’t me,” his grin widening with every word.

Moving into my teen years, cigarettes were still a magnet, because smoking was a “cool” thing to do; most every movie or TV show had the hero as a smoker. Magazine ads touted brands used by major league ballplayers (even the likes of Mickey Mantle) and one clamored in huge, black type “80 percent of doctors who smoke, smoke Camels!”

Individual doses were called smokes, cancer sticks, ciggy-butts and fags--in another instance of a slang word undergoing a significant meaning change through the years.

In Vietnam during my wartime service there, among the top peasant begging prizes were cigarettes. Almost country wide, I’m told, the South Vietnamese favorite was Salem. Possibly, the menthol in that brand provided them an extra big bloodstream belt alongside their rice, fish and garlic heavy diet. I do know their eyes would light up if the possibility arose of getting Salems as payment or in trade for anything.

The Vietnamese couldn’t pronounce the “S” in Salem by itself...it was more like a soft “SH.” Still I can hear children running toward me and begging for a “Shah-lem,” with emphasis on the second syllable.

Just about all the kid-soldiers I pulled duty with in Vietnam smoked, cigarettes mostly. When we were in base camp, probably a half dozen of them also partook of marijuana, if they had access to it. I figured at some point I would try it, too.

The most-coveted “non-commercial” smoke was what was referred to as a “Thai stick,” which was a product of Thailand and said by my soldiers to be powerful--just a few hits and you were a visitor to Goofyville.

My second day in the field while the platoon was away finishing a mission, our base was subjected to a ground attack. A member of my unit who had time off from a very minor wound had been smoking marijuana in the bunker next door--the odor of burning “weed” was unmistakable.

Shortly after the attack commenced, he burst from the bunker, jumped onto a sandbag wall and with rifle at his hip sprayed a magazine toward the enemy. I reached up, grabbed him by the pants waistline to remove him from complete exposure to the incoming fire when a bullet smashed into his head.

His brains splashed all over my face and shirtless upper chest, a stopper to marijuana having any appeal for me thereafter.

Regrettably, it took a long time for me to also understand that smoking cigarettes can lead to the same kind of ending; it just takes longer in a more painful and horrific kind of Goofyville.

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