Among the things I’m big-time grateful for in this life are the facts that I was single before AIDS roared out as a scourge upon the land, and that I got to be a smoker while the smokin’ was still easy. The choke chain is squeezing tighter around smokers’ necks, now that their pastime is banned from New York bars, and those who work for Lowe’s are being told they can light one at lunch, but only if they get in their spaceships and leave the planet to do so, and still make it back in an hour.
It’s now obvious to me that I dwelled in the Golden Palace of Puffing during its last days, right before it was closed and boarded up, probably for good, with all future devotees doomed to standing around outside and pursuing their passion in the rain. That’s unless Armageddon occurs, of course, in which case everybody will revert to doing whatever the hell they please as part of the “up” side of civilization’s downfall.
It’s so fun to truly surprise people while you’re talking to them, to elicit the open mouths and the frozen moment of amazed silence, and I’ve achieved that recently just by dropping a few details about the smoking life “back in the day.” We’re not even talking about that far back, but you’d think it was either antiquity, or some out-of-this world future, judging from people’s reactions.
The first bomb of cigarette astonishment I set off was at a little get-together for alums from my college, where the subject of smoking at school came up. Several people who had graduated just a few years after me were standing around drinking wine and reminiscing about how they could smoke only in a certain room in the dining hall, and they couldn’t smoke in the dorms’ common areas, and so on, when I announced, “We could smoke anywhere, even in class.”
They all turned to me with a collective expression of astonishment, their sophisticated, party-chatty smiles momentarily wiped from their faces. It was as if I’d claimed participation in an impossibly ancient pastime like taffy-pulling, or something so fantastically free it could only be part of a futuristic society “without boundaries” like the one Neo telephones the world about in the first Matrix.
That’s the weirdness about what’s been happening with smoking and other restricted stuff in the last couple of decades. It used to be the natural order of things that the older folks would complain to the younger ones about how much stricter everything was when they were growing up, but now in a kind of funhouse reversal, my peers are letting people who aren’t even a whole generation younger know that we were much less constricted. Actually, we’re gloating about it.
Smoking in the dorms? My God, we used to practically smoke the dorms themselves! We lit up in every dorm cranny, from the graffiti-scrawled, subterranean “study” rooms, to the ornate parlors like old-movie stage settings, to the very roofs of the buildings, where you’d get an extra rush from your cig because of the height and the sharp night air.
Additional supplies awaited your mere tug on the knob of a machine with the watery glow of a fish tank hunkered down beneath the stairs, and it only required two quarters to release a pack with a gratifying clunk sure to get your saliva flowing. The last time I visited a dorm at my school, all the squat old cig machines had been replaced with looming, jarringly bright Snapple dispensers.
Once it was as if the whole world was handing you a stocked cigarette box in one hand, and a big ashtray to catch the dissolving tip of your butt in the other.
Put this in your pipe and smoke it: every restaurant table had an ashtray. There were ashtrays built into the backs of cars and the stalls of nicer ladies’ rooms, ashtrays attached to chairs in waiting areas and the seats of airplanes, fancy ashtrays set out like works of art on living room tables. I still have my father’s favorite, shaped and painted to look like a Colt Peacemaker .45, with a molded line of bullets to hold multiple butts.
Because we could smoke cigarettes anywhere, we put our creative efforts into figuring out how to sneak a joint, and as someone who managed to do so in both the college president’s house and Grand Central Station, I’m guessing that even that was easier than burning a plain old cig these days. I overheard some youngsters talking about the contortions they used to go through to catch a smoke in high school, and stunned them by sharing that my Catholic, otherwise-strict-as-hell high school had a smoking lounge. That’s right, young smokers. Read it and weep.
This article appears in Nov 5-11, 2003.
