Camels and cowboys

I'll always be a smoker, even when I quit.

By Tate Gunnerson

Feb 8, 2000 | When I write fiction, 90 percent of my characters smoke. I reserve the most descriptive words for passages of my creations alone with their cigarettes.

When I doodle, cigarettes hang from the lower lip of my stick figures. Sexy, smoky lines drift up to obscure their faces. I envy my characters incredibly. Oh, I'm still a smoker (I always will be), but I'm nonpracticing today. I'm back on the wagon. I know I'll always want a cigarette on some level. I'll always feel a tinge of envy when I pass a group of smokers in front of my favorite coffeehouse. But my family and friends, my instinct for survival, finally got the better of me.

I'd been saying I'd quit again since the moment I picked up a cigarette six months ago. My longtime friends knew I'd live up to my word -- they've seen me quit before, several times. The longer somebody has known me, the more times they have seen me give up smoking. My friend Liz (a nonsmoker) can't fathom my ability to seemingly start and stop at will. And it's true, I don't have any trouble quitting the deadly addiction. I just can't quit starting again.

I don't really know why I started smoking again. I saw a full pack of Marlboro Lights lying on the ground outside my neighbor's apartment, and I just helped myself to one. I suppose I was lonely at the time, and the thought of one last rendezvous with an old friend held some appeal. I didn't smoke it immediately, but I kept it with me as I drove to the gym. I rolled it around in my fingers and put it in my mouth, pretending to smoke it. The thought of smoking a cigarette after so many months gave me a sexy, bad-boy feeling -- almost like spying on the next-door neighbor, but it remained in my car, carefully placed in the glove compartment. It wasn't until a few days later that I came across it again and said, "What the hell?"

The euphoria was amazing. My body thanked me for the sensation it had so obviously missed. The world looked beautiful around me, and I thought about how much I loved my life and all my wonderful friends. Even my parents took on a sheen in my thoughts as the nicotine painted my glasses a pleasant shade of rose. That cigarette took me a long time to finish. That's the thing about smoking -- the pleasant inhalation of the smoke, the almost spiritual quality of the early experience quickly gives way to a ravenous sucking to get as much nicotine in your body as possible. But that first cigarette was like a solemn prayer.

I waited anxiously for the addiction to kick in and, after a few days, I began to believe that perhaps it wasn't going to happen this time. By golly, I had kicked it, I realized as I incessantly thought about the sensation of that one glorious cigarette during the course of the next two weeks. I would never need to fear the compulsion again. I even told my friends about my newfound strength. "I can smoke," I exclaimed to their doubtful and disappointed faces, "and not be addicted."

The next month at work, overjoyed and confident in my ability to resist addiction, I bummed a cigarette from my co-worker, Lisa. The day was stressful, and I couldn't resist having just one -- one more, that is. She had a concerned (or pleased?) look on her face when she realized another person had fallen from grace, but I assured her I was capable of having just one. Within the span of two days, my one and only cigarette had become two, then three and four.

Over the course of the next month, I began to join Lisa and Roger and the rest of the smokers regularly. Roger and I talked about his wife and kids, his former jobs, his career trajectory. We were close for the first time since we began to work together. Of course, my bumming was irritating and it made it difficult for the others in the club to take me very seriously, so I began to buy my own -- only for work, only for the club. But like the pack left over from the college party, I began to smoke them, gradually incorporating them into my daily habits: two for the drive to work, one midmorning, one before and one after lunch, two in the afternoon and two for the drive home. Those were only the official ones. Eventually, the club embraced me, and I became a smoker again. And that was that. I knew the cycle had begun again; I would smoke for as long as I needed to or until I couldn't handle it anymore and then I'd quit.

Next Page: Now that I've quit, I think about sex constantly

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