WARNING: CIGARETTES ARE REALLY, REALLY BAD FOR YOU
Anybody got a match?
We’re in search of an antidote. Something to calm our tattered nerves.
We plough through these uncertain days looking for ways to filter the unfiltered nature of events — and we’ve tried it all. We’ve amped up our health regimens, and we’ve dumped our resolutions. We’ve picked up protest signs, and we’ve binged all of TV from the safety of our couch.
We’ve promised to be kinder, and we’ve given humanity the finger — with both hands. I get it! When I get anxious, it helps me to have something to do with my hands, too.
My occupation as a writer is really just an excuse to type; it’s a manual distraction with a hypnotizing CLACK. Aside from being a job that I get paid to do, it has helped me focus my way through many anxious times when I’d otherwise have lost my shit: the deaths of my parents, the pressures of raising four boys, Girl Scout Cookie season.
But desperate times call for (more) desperate measures; these days, writing doesn’t feel all that satisfying. It’s time for us to start smoking again.
“You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”
― Oscar Wilde
When I was in fourth grade, my teacher asked our class what we wanted to be when we grew up. In predictable fashion, she went through the group alphabetically; I had plenty of time to sit there listening to my classmates prattle on about being lawyers and doctors and teachers. By the time she got to the T’s, I’d had enough. I wasn’t interested in making up some dumb answer, and – in an effort to liven things up – I decided to tell the truth.
“When I grow up I want to be a smoker.”
My teacher, who woke up early every morning to curl her Dorothy Hamill-style bangs just so, was horrified. How could she know that smoking gave my mother the bionic power to raise six children and work full time? How could she know that my idol was child actor Tatum O’Neal who wise-cracked and smoked her way through Paper Moon? It was obvious to me that cigarettes gave people special powers. I knew enough to know that I wanted those powers, too.
The cigarette as a tool for human good has long been undervalued. Although I know some of you might clutch your collective pearls at the thought of it, clutch away. I don’t care. I’d rather be subjected to a thick cloud of cigarette smoke than be subjected to tiresome moralizing about the people who smoke them.
Tobacco has been around for centuries. Once used by Native American cultures for ritual and shamanistic purposes, it made its way to Europe by sailors who picked up the habit in the 15th and 16th centuries while doing god-knows-what over here. Tobacco immediately raised nostrils and the usual hand wringing followed: King James I deplored the “stinking fume,” various popes threatened excommunication for snuffers, and the Russian Tsar ordered smokers’ noses cut off. But as it made its way around the world, tobacco also aligned itself with revolutionaries — some might call them “the cool kids” — with astonishing success. Finally, a cultural product had arrived that promised more than just a good time; those smokey curlicues could help you identify like minded rabble rousers. Add a little buzz to that and you have a force for globalized disruption.
Imagine a Bolshevik without a cigarette. Or Emma Goldman without a pipe. Or Che Guevara without a cigar. Not to mention whole generations of revolutionary artists throughout the 20th century who tore down antiquated, orderly ideas about human society, and offered brilliant alternatives — all while famously puffing away: Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Leonard Bernstein, Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou, Earnest Hemingway, Bob Dylan, Dorothy Parker, James Baldwin. Far too many to list.
It’s obvious that a proper anarchist needs what smoking offers: a half-second to collect their thoughts. A meditative inhale and exhale. And a dangerous talisman that warns others: “Don’t fuck with me.”
Case in point: the most glorious smoker of all, Lauren Bacall.
This ravishing black and white photo (above) is a production still from the 1944 movie, To Have and Have Not. Bacall, who had yet to change her name from Betty Joan Perske, was 18 years old when she auditioned for this film, where she starred opposite Humphrey Bogart, a stalwart grump of a movie star who was twice her age. This particular scene is short on dialogue and long on cigarette lighting. Over the course of 20 seconds, she uses this everyday gesture to detonate a character bomb; as soon as the match is lit, she puts the highest paid actor at the time on ice. She commands him to obey her. And he does.
Movie nerds all know what happened next: Bogart and Bacall fell in actual, off-screen love. The stuff of legends. But more importantly, women everywhere said “I’ll have what she’s having.” The allure of the cigarette became the allure of power. With Bacall’s masterful handling, the cigarette had become a weapon. A large-scale transformation took place, much like the ritual originally associated with tobacco, one that initiated women into realms previously unattainable to them. The cigarette became synonymous with independence and strength — two things regularly denied women, even still. Bacall was not only an expert at the dark art of smoking, she could light her own goddamn cigarette. By the time she tosses the matches back to him, she gave Bogart — and all men — a piece of advice: fuck with us at your own peril.
That’s why Lauren Bacall has always been my personal Bolshevik.
When I used to envision my adult life, I pictured ash trays. I pictured driving while holding a cigarette out the window. I thought I would sit at a big desk, typing on my typewriter, in a room filled with smoke, like Gloria Steinem. The only part of this odd childhood reverie that came true is the typing part. And, like I said, it’s mostly sufficient as a way to occupy my anxious mind. But not quite.
As a scratchy-voiced person, I’ve had many people ask me if I smoke. I’m tempted to say yes, but that would be a lie. I know better than anyone the toll that smoking can take; it’s the most painful thing in the world to watch someone you love die of lung cancer. Perhaps the most pernicious problem is that I see value in smoking nonetheless. My parents, who taught me to believe in the power of revolution, also taught me to forgive people. And that includes people who smoke.
For all our sanctimonious musings about health and wellness — and the outsized word count devoted to it in the remaining journalistic outlets — we are nowhere near finding effective ways to calm our tattered nerves. It’s hard to meditate when your brain is on fire. And it would be laughably impractical to deface a Tesla whilst in a head-down dog. Yet it seems radically obvious to me that the thing we occupy ourselves with most of all, our phones, should come with a Surgeon General’s warning: “This device causes irreparable mindrot and will destabilize your life, the lives of those around you, and lead to the ruin of civilization.”
I’m sorry to say that mindfulness has always been out of the question for me. Anarchy, on the other hand, is of great interest. I’d be willing to discuss it at great length with the other rabble rousers on a smoke break. I’ll bring the matches.
*** Does it seem weird to you that weed is culturally acceptable now but nicotine is not? Weigh in! And lmk if you get your hands on the cigs that they use in movies these days. xox ***
Holy smokes. Great piece, Marcy!
I thought I was the only one. I miss smoking the way I'd miss my left arm if somebody took my left arm (which they haven't.)