Smoke Gets in His Eyes (and on His Nerves)

Let me tell you about the tyranny of secondhand smoke. I cough every morning for about two hours just to get my lungs open. Lately, I have a constant need to clear my throat and chest, which takes the form of a loud and guttural grunt not unlike the noises heard during war sequences of Kurosawa movies. It can be a social handicap.

I quit smoking (puffing, not inhaling, occasional cigars) in 1980. I had no congestion problem; it just seemed like a smart thing to do. Then, as the decade progressed, I noticed a nagging congestion that worsened, year by year. By 1986, allergy seasons were hellish periods when I would stay awake all night, drinking hot water, breathing steam and coughing up phlegm, just to recover some lung capacity. A doctor diagnosed my condition as “mild asthma” and gave me an inhaler. I threw it away (yes, it was denial) and opted for improving my diet and increasing exercise.

Three years ago, I sniffed out the culprit.

I had always noticed that my 50-year-old apartment building smelled musty. I stupidly attributed this to “old building smell”--that is, until a friend identified the odor as the acrid stench of secondhand cigarettes. No, I didn’t live above a bar, but I might as well have.

My downstairs neighbor, you see, was an elderly woman whose life centered around listening to the Dodgers and sucking on generic-brand cigarettes. She sat in her apartment, all day and often all night, chain smoking. The smoke would accumulate to the point that it would literally pump out of her opened front door, through her windows, and up into my apartment--entering through my door, windows and, most insidiously, through the gas heater vent. I suddenly realized I had spent about 10 years being poisoned.

Good lungs don’t run in my family. My mother, a heavy smoker, died of congestive heart failure. My father was plagued by occasional lung infections and pneumonia. My grandfather, an immigrant coal miner in Ohio, suffered from black lung. You guessed it--I am rather frightened.

My secondhand-smoke allergy has reached a point where the slightest whiff causes congestion, wheezing, chest tightness, discomfort. Prolonged exposure gives me sharp pains, and leaves me short of breath. I have a constant odd sensation in my bronchial tubes--they feel sort of stiff, as if they are made of balsa wood. Many have been the nights when I have awakened at 3 a.m. gasping for breath because my downstairs neighbor had decided to puff away her insomnia. I have begun most days with a sore throat.

My neighbor--call her Mrs. Butts, in honor of the Doonesbury character--and I have always had a cordial relationship. In fact, because she was elderly and alone, I have gone to great lengths to be kind to her. I have shopped for her (sometimes at my own expense), picked up prescriptions for her, bought her pumpkin pies at Thanksgiving, driven her to the bus station and back when she goes to visit relatives, changed her light bulbs, moved her furniture, fitted her toilet with a special seat.

What’s more, I phoned her in the hospital when she had her hip replaced, and after she was struck by a car and left with a broken arm. I gave her many pep talks. I spent hours listening to her prattle, out of pity. I drove her to the hospital and back during several medical emergencies.

On one especially memorable hospital trip, Mrs. Butts lost control of her . . . uh . . . bodily functions . . . in the front seat of my car while we were stuck on the freeway during a heat wave. “Don’t worry,” I advised, “happens to the best of us!”

On the morning of the earthquake, I wrapped her in a blanket, gave her my radio, calmed her down and persuaded her to phone her grandson and leave the crippled building for the day. I once argued against a neighbor who wanted to persuade authorities that the woman was too old to care for herself.

Frankly, I never even liked Mrs. Butts. I was just trying to be a decent guy.

The smoke pouring into my home was so powerful that even my clothes and hair smelled of cigarettes. Move, friends advised. I considered it. But even with rent control, on my glorious income as a free-lance writer I might have afforded a pretty good place Downtown--say, around 2nd and Main. Instead, I bought an air purifier and two smokeless ashtrays for Mrs. Butts (one for her occasionally visiting, chain-smoking son.) It didn’t help.

The short version of this story is that naughty Mrs. Butts fibbed about using the ashtrays, ultimately took to sneering at me, laughing snidely at my claims that her smoke was affecting me (“Oh, how does it get in your apartment!”), and telling cigarette-addicted neighbors things like, “Look out! Oh God, don’t light that cigarette! Here comes Rip!”

My last, and always doggedly polite, written request imploring her to use the smokeless ashtrays--in which I detailed my health problems and suggested that it’s entirely possible that my life has been shortened by her secondhand smoke--elicited no response. Just increased smoke. She and her son seemed to take sport in attempting to smoke me right out of my home.

That was it. She had no apparent respect for my privacy or my health. I opted to follow a similar policy. I changed my lifestyle from being an extremely quiet neighbor to doing pretty much whatever I damned well pleased. This included setting up my drums, which I play very poorly, and practicing about an hour a day.

She complained to the landlord, who gently asked her to use the ashtrays. Her response: “I’ve smoked since I was 17. I’ll never stop! I don’t like those ashtrays! They make noise!” (They contain tiny fans.)

Now when I mentioned the tyranny of smoke, I was also referring to its hold on the smoker. The lady’s humanity was held hostage by the little white tubes.

What’s more, Mrs. Butts is one of those people who takes the attitude that smoking is an act of death-defiance--that smokers are cavalier, philosophical souls who are showing the world they aren’t afraid to die.

I’ve noticed that many media commentators adopt this same attitude--and in a not entirely tongue-in-cheek manner. One recent commentary in this newspaper took that very position--that smokers are to be celebrated for being “the only ones prepared to tell the truth about the inevitability of life and death,” as opposed to those who have, as the commentator put it, replaced holiness with health.

(I submit that this sophomoric and insensitive notion is also inaccurate. Nonsmokers--especially those with lung problems--are so acutely aware of death that they are trying to legislate secondhand smoke out of existence.)

Here’s the point that Mrs. Butts, and all the commentators and the tobacco companies who scoff at nonsmokers battling to breathe smoke-free air either ignore or do not understand: Not everybody has leather lungs like Mrs. Butts, who has lived into her 80s. The smoke that might not bother you might, in fact, send an asthmatic scurrying in mortal terror. The vast increase in asthma in this country has been widely reported. There are a whole lot of people with lung problems, and a whole lot of people who don’t want lung problems. I’ll just bet they constitute a majority.

As for Mrs. Butts, well, she has moved far away. Never thanked me for all the years of watching out for her, the kindness, never said goodby. Left her home of 40-plus years to live with her son in nicotine Nirvana. Presumably, they are now smoking themselves silly.

And as I sit in my apartment, freely breathing that great fresh mixture of combustion-engine particulate matter and oxygen known as Los Angeles air, I have a wish to convey to Mrs. Butts, her son and to the smokers’ rights commentators, and especially to the tobacco industry, which is bitterly campaigning to convince people that the dangers of secondhand smoke are so much hot air.

Here’s my wish:

May you all wind up in that place where the smoke billows thick and strong for all eternity. With nary a lozenge in sight.