34. Goodnight cig
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When I moved to California, I was shocked that seemingly all of my new friends smoked cigarettes.
First I noticed the late night party cigs — the “drunk cigarettes don’t count” variety, the ones that don’t give you cancer. But then I saw the after dinner cigs. Pre-dinner cigs. Cigs at the beach. At the bar. We had a bunch of people over for dinner one night, and once the wine was gone and the dishes were cleared, everyone climbed out onto the porch for a “goodnight cig.”
I worry I sound like I’m ready to push a D.A.R.E. curriculum. But I wasn’t judging anyone’s behavior so much as surprised by the ubiquity of tobacco. Very few people in my previous social circles smoked cigarettes. The anti-smoking campaign that began in the 60s was undoubtedly the most successful public health campaign the U.S. has ever led. And, I, ever the young goody two shoes, fully internalized it. I saw smoking as more illicit than most drugs. I saw it as a non-option. I saw it as future me, dead.
When I worked at a public health research institute, there was a morose joke among some of the faculty members that smokers were great for society: they paid into social programs but died before they could reap the benefits.
Even more than my knowledge of the health costs, my resistance to cigarettes was rooted in my hatred of Big Tobacco. I couldn’t support these profiteering companies that built their empires on the graves of the same people they exploited. For decades tobacco companies have twisted and obscured information, seeded and sold doubt, worked to discredit scientists and public health advocates, made their products more addictive and harder to quit, capitalized on residents of lower-income communities, and pushed menthol cigarettes in Black communities to the point that Black Americans die disproportionately from tobacco-related illnesses.
It wasn’t just that I was scared smoking was going to kill me, or that my parents would be appalled if I ever started. Smoking is antithetical to what I believe in. To know all this and take it up anyway is a dissonance I can’t justify for myself.
And yet, as I witnessed my new friends leaning back on the metal rungs of a fire escape, stepping out of a noisy throng of bodies into the cool California air, lighting up over a lookout from the Berkeley Hills, I wanted in. If not the actual goodnight cig, I wanted the idea of the goodnight cig. The smoke break is the perfect excuse to step away from the action. In the time it takes to smoke down to the cigarette butt, there is a beautiful, brief window of connection. It’s a sharing of space, maybe conversation with other people for a finite period of time. It’s private and insular, dare I say safe.
Much of the time, we rely on excuses to seek connection; it’s too brazen to simply ask to be in another person’s company, but a cigarette can be a buffer. It might bring strangers together for a light. It might bring acquaintances closer for a time-limited conversation. It creates an atmosphere of mutuality, ripe for connection. Even the rhythm of the inhale and exhale produces conversational pauses, room for contemplation and thoughtful response.
I recently asked a couple new friends why they started smoking. One started in high school while hanging out with classmates and listening to music: an occasion to do nothing while doing something. Another friend started in college. Roommates had a “house juul,” and all of a sudden the whole house was all addicted to nicotine. And when my friend went abroad, and cigarettes were the vehicle for nicotine delivery, suddenly she was hooked too.
When I join people for a smoke break but don’t smoke, I feel a little like I shouldn’t be there. My excuse to be there dissipates faster than the wisps curling from the lips of my friends. There is a cachet to cigarettes that joints can’t approximate; weed has become mainstream enough that it retains little of the counterculture that was previously rolled up with the flower. Especially in states where it’s recreationally legal, weed is now part of wellness culture. Cigarettes, on the other hand, deliver a dose of danger. I hate to admit that there’s something deeply appealing about knowing better and doing it anyway.
Recently, someone told my sister that she likes smoking “for the aesthetic.” And it made both Anna and me wonder: what aesthetic, precisely? Tumblr girl? Waif form achieved by suppressing hunger with nicotine? Whatever we call it, evidently, it appeals to me, too. An ex once told me this photo of Jaime King looked like me. I took it as the highest compliment that he thought I could embody this aesthetic. Jaime King, sexy as hell smoking a cigarette. Jaime King, pioneer of heroin chic, the look I’ve always aspired to, whether I’ve admitted to it or not. Jaime King, burning time and tobacco like it means nothing.
On my 22nd birthday in college, I smoked a cigarette on a bench in the Davenport courtyard, one of the campus residence halls. I didn’t really want it or enjoy it, but I was drunk, and when my friend opened the pack and offered me one, accepting made me feel kind of grown up. (“Was anyone ever so young?”) I liked feeling cold on the early December night. Most people were in bed; we should have been in bed. Instead, for a few minutes on a wooden bench, we inhaled something terrible for us and sat in the simple community of doing the same thing at the same time. Wasting minutes and savoring them.
A Marlboro later, I went to kiss my girlfriend. “Ew,” she said, turning away from me. “You smell like a cigarette.” I needed to hear that—it brought me down to earth and reminded me exactly what I had liked about sitting on that bench and what had just been an excuse to have the experience in the first place.
I recently stumbled on The Monday Campaigns’ messaging about all the things one might do with newfound time after quitting smoking.
I’m not the Monday Campaigns’ target audience. Maybe some people who smoke do in fact want to reclaim the disparate minutes spent burning through cigarettes throughout the day and reallocate them, smooshing them together for the purpose of…watching movies. But to me, the appeal of the smoke break is in giving time away.
I can count on one hand the number of cigarettes I’ve smoked. I always hate the taste and remember that it isn’t for me. But I still want to be part of that circle of people leaving the party or the restaurant for a few minutes, pausing life with the flick of a lighter, saying, “Fuck it—I know this is killing me, but so are a million other things, just more slowly.”
Fortnightly Faves
This phenomenal essay on bisexuality and horror and queerbaiting and desire by Carmen Maria Machado for Autostraddle. The rest of Machado’s anthology, It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, comes out on October 4. Get excited!
This essay on the dying art of maintenance. I liked this passage especially:
“Maintenance happens out of sight, mysteriously. Overnight, the frame of a high-rise appears, and before you can even look inside, invisible workers are fitting it with panes of tinted glass. It’s a nuisance when road crews block off sections of highway to fix potholes: an obstruction, not a vital and necessary process.”
Plug for a piece I wrote for The Victory Press on mother runners (and how running was built for cis male bodies). This one felt really important to write.
This critique of how hard it it to get good, affordable therapy, which I appreciated as I’ve been navigating the frustrating process of finding a new therapist since I moved to CA. Nothing that surprising, but all of it well-articulated.
This poem by Jayme Ringleb:
Game He said, let’s play a game Imagine a party, he said, you're drinking, and we share a daughter. I'm worried, I can't find her, he said, and you're too far gone. So we're in love, I said, and he said, No, it doesn't have to be like that. We're in love, I said. And we played the game, and we were.
Cig envy is so sneaky lol. I grew up resenting my parents for smoking like chimneys (even in the house), sending me to school smelling like smoke. Said I’d never smoke, then started going to a lot of raves and traveling internationally in my 20s, where I loosened up about a lot of things + smoking was part of the culture. Now I’ll have a weekly cig or two (unless I’m drinking, then all bets are off) and it feels like treat to unwind with. Maybe your perfect in-between treat will be a spliff, which is ultimately the coolest IMO 😎