Smoker’s Fantasies Light Up His World

As a smoker, I have a fantasy.

In the small hours I sneak into the nonsmoking Clinton White House, a sackful of cigarettes slung over my shoulder. Like a Santa Claus from an evil parallel universe, I nimbly evade all security measures and leave a pack of smokes on the desk of each staffer--two packs for those under threat of investigation. In a fit of generosity, I give Bill and Hillary a carton each.

My seditious deed soon bears fruit. After discovering their gifts, everybody decides to try just one, even the First Couple, who figure they don’t have much to lose. Bill inhales--and likes it. Within a week Hillary is up to three packs of unfiltered coffin nails a day.

The staff follows suit, and carcinogens speedily befoul the once-pure White House air. Of course, the press chomps itself into a feeding frenzy over the sinister emergence of nicotine fiends in the control room of the world’s greatest cigarette-bashing democracy.

But the furor soon subsides. Why? Because for the first time in years, the people in the White House can think straight.

The First Lady proposes a brilliant solution to the health-care reform deadlock. Faster than you can say Whitewater, the President quickly resolves the crises in Cuba and Haiti, erases the federal deficit, crafts an effective foreign policy, and earns the respect of Bob Dole and Paula Jones. Soon, anyone who matters in Washington is a smoker and a genius. True, death rates from lung disease skyrocket inside the Beltway, but the rest of the country is more than willing to pay the price.

OK, I know this scenario is a millimeter or two far-fetched. Yet it illustrates why, despite this summer’s escalation of the war on smoking, I continue to smoke. Namely, and I don’t care what the shrinks are saying this week on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” there are moments when nothing beats a cigarette. In times of stress, loneliness, fear and anger, its calming, focusing power is only a lighter click away. It is good, cheap, albeit widely condemned, therapy.

I discovered some time ago that firing up a smoke forces me to think more rationally and cope better, if only briefly, with insults to my pride, my wallet, my temper, not to mention my life.

One of the great things about living in Los Angeles is that the city of O.J. and Heidi gives me plenty of excuses to smoke the noxious weed.

I smoked a lot during the 1992 riots, especially on the freeways, where I worried about other people’s driving as well as about chances that a random bullet might forever plug my urge to have another cigarette. As I smoked, I lived, I decided in irrefutable smokers’ logic. (Note: Sudden, random danger remains a terrific justification for smoking in Los Angeles.)

January’s earthquake was good for a few days of nonstop puffing too. After the shaking had stopped, with my family unharmed, I remember thinking I had two choices: I could go back to sleep, which was pretty tempting, or I could get up and have a cigarette after I cleaned up the broken glass from a fallen picture. I chose the latter. And I still remember that cigarette. My wife and daughter and I had survived yet another California cataclysm, I thought as I reverently lit up. What a great smoke.

On a lesser scale, I deal with everyday aggravations with dollops of nicotine. Earlier this year, for instance, a literary agent rejected my manuscript partly because some of its characters smoked too much. Even in the Nyet ‘90s I was shocked by this critique. After a couple of cigarettes, though, I had overcome my baser instincts and returned to my usual amiable, non-serial killer self. Eight months later, I still haven’t written the agent an angry letter, and I’m proud of my restraint. Meanwhile, the characters are still tucked in their pages, chain-smoking while they await resurrection in a better, more tolerant world.

I am not the only subscriber to smoking as a palliative against danger and disappointment, by the way. I recently read letters a doctor wrote from a Rwandan field hospital. He reported that he and other staffers were ripping through as many as four packs a day while working in appalling conditions that included threats from machete-wielding thugs. I understand completely.

I read that relatives sometimes place burning cigarettes on the graves of Balkan war casualties, a centuries-old custom, as remembrances of what the dead enjoyed in life. The account said a mother and her daughter-in-law lit up after placing the cigarettes on the grave of their son and husband.

Frankly, my empathy for them was less than for the doctor. But it does show that people actually enjoy smoking, impossible as this may seem to some in California.

In my case, mornings are tobacco heaven. As I sit on my patio fumbling with the newspaper, I have a few glugs of coffee and think, “Is it time to light up yet?” The question is important because I want to be alert enough to savor those first puffs. If I start too soon, the perfect coffee-cigarette balance will be ruined. Instead of being wafted into wakefulness by carefully administered doses of caffeine and nicotine, I will be catapulted rudely into the day, like a Metro Rail train slamming into yet another car.

Ah, I can already hear the tut-tutting and fulminating over the poor tobacco addict. In fact, I left last night for six months in a remote country with lousy phones and worse mail service to dodge the calls and letters that surely will come my way. If there’s one thing I don’t need, it’s more sanctimony from health totalitarians.

Over the years, smokers have accepted a lot from nonsmokers. With our habit banned from the workplace, public buildings and airplanes, we have quelled our cravings until we could stumble to a designated area and apply a shaky flame to the business end of a cigarette. I suspect that many of us are grateful for this segregation, at least at work. It allows us to get up from our desks and go outside while our nonsmoking co-workers continue to slave away at their computers, running God knows what risk of repetitive stress injuries.

One of the minor reasons I persist in smoking stems from the smugness of the clean-lung crusaders. I hate being told what to do by the self-righteous. Many anti-smoking zealots strike me as pompous twits. Nothing is easier or safer than railing against tobacco, now vilified in language once reserved for cocaine and heroin. As far as I know, the number of gunned-down anti-smoking activists remains quite small.

Of course, that could soon change. Recently, demonstrators in Kentucky burned an effigy of Hillary Rodham Clinton in protest of the federal government’s campaign against the brown leaf. It was a futile gesture, but it indicates that a few folks in the tobacco-growing belt are feeling militant.

They are, of course, destined for defeat. Sooner or later, I think tobacco will be outlawed. And that would not necessarily be bad. After 25 years of smoking, I think about quitting a lot. Day by day I find my romance with cigarettes fading. I have promised my wife and daughter that I will quit and it is getting harder to put it off.

Every smoker, I think, experiences moments of dreadful recognition like the one described below. The passage is taken from “Dead Meat” (Mysterious Press), Philip Kerr’s recent novel about organized crime and chain-smoking in Russia:

Grushko’s eyes noted how the fingernails on Kornilov’s right hand were so badly stained with nicotine they looked as if they were made of wood. . . .

Kornilov lit one of the Boyars he liked to smoke. Grushko watched the incriminating smoke curl around Kornilov’s fingertips. Not wood, he thought, but smoked fish. Kornilov was kippering his own fingers. He wondered what the man’s lungs looked like. For that matter, what did his own lungs look like?

Good question.