Finally--the Smoke Clears

Years ago, during a routine physical, my doctor asked me how much I smoked. “About five a day,” I ventured, adding coyly, “I guess.”

Five seemed ladylike. I had read somewhere that even Meryl Streep smoked the odd cigarette. Except I was no Meryl Streep. A pack a day was closer to the truth. Only recently did I calculate what must have approached my true consumption: 20 a day for 28 years, or 204,400 cigarettes--if you don’t count a cigar phase.

Cigarettes . . . cigars . . . for me, smoking was one long continuum of phases.

I started at 16 with my mother’s brand, Parliament. Then I switched to Pall Mall because some racy older girls were handing these out one summer. My last year in high school was marked by an inexplicable fondness for mentholated cigarettes.

By university in the early ‘70s, I was off the special flavorings but was such a promiscuous smoker that I cannot recall all the brands. They included Rothmans, Player’s, Dunhill, Benson & Hedges, Craven A’s and Winston. The only kind of cigarette I didn’t care to investigate was the low-tar variety.

One day, one of the university’s most desirable guys--a tousled, righteous, activist type--came up to me. I fancied him. Until, that is, he said, “You should smoke Now.” “OK,” I said, sneering as I lit up a Kent. I knew Now must be some new low-everything brand but resented unsolicited advice. Nonsmokers, note well: Young smokers hate health advice; they know smoking is bad for them. That’s part of why they do it.

My early 20s were my most weirdly butch. I moved to New York, where I lived in the top floor of an unheated paint factory in Brooklyn, and then in a railroad apartment in Hell’s Kitchen in midtown Manhattan. New York was not full up with Disney stores then. The loft was near where Serpico got shot. One morning in the midtown place, there was a dead body in the hallway.

During this time, I decided that filters were for wimps. I smoked Luckies and Camel non-filters.

With a move to London in the late 1970s, my taste in cigarettes changed yet again. Some film-student friend of my then-husband insisted that blond tobacco was worse for you than the fragrant black stuff favored by the French. Marginally less hellbent by that age, I switched to Gauloises, and then to Gitanes, whose packs I preferred.

There followed intermittent phases, usually when I was broke, during which I rolled my own. The film-student friend also approved of these as healthful. The problem with commercial cigarettes, he insisted, was the saltpeter.

I soon adopted a “when in Rome” approach to smoking: In visits to Budapest, I chose Symphonia, whose fumes left a lingering aroma similar to that of an electrical fire. In Spain, I smoked Ducados. This was my freelance writer, leather jacket, pleated trousers and Fedora phase.

By my 30s, I had moved on to linen skirts and jackets with V-neck Fruit of the Loom T-shirts. The T-shirt, I imagined, signaled that I could still, if I had to, step over a corpse on the way to work. However, there weren’t many of these lying around. I had become a restaurant critic for a fledgling English newspaper. In this capacity, I preferred restaurants with smoking sections but could not bear piped music in dining rooms.

Anti-smoking groups remonstrated, and so did my body. My morning cough was so bad that I worried about disturbing the neighbors. I was, I realized, in the process of turning myself from a woman of the world to a hacking old bag. I finally tried the low and ultra-low cigarettes. I hated them.

By the early 1990s, the conviction that the right cigarette was out there, that I would know it when I found it, was fading. I decided on a new phase. I’d quit.

Except it wasn’t that easy. I tried the nicotine patch but nearly gave myself a heart attack when I forgot I was wearing it and smoked too.

Then there was the weight thing. I would stop for a short time, pile on 10 pounds, start again but not lose the 10 pounds because I was too wheezy from smoking to exercise.

Friends started giving me books with such titles as “The Only Way to Stop Smoking.” Only the only way didn’t work for me. My dentist, a thin South African who dabbled in hypnotism on the side, had another idea. After a teeth cleaning session, he set about mesmerizing me as he stowed away his picks and drills. But after paying the fellow the equivalent of 70 bucks, I went straight out and spent another six on a pack of gaspers.

The joke among my friends when I left London for Los Angeles in summer of 1998 was that it was the most involved bid yet to quit smoking. “Americans are so puritanical!” my British friends would jeer as they puffed away.

Thankfully, I came here for other reasons, because I quit and started smoking as predictably as the tide rises and falls.

Then, last October, I finally stopped. Actually, I should revise that to: So far, so good.

One factor was annoyance. I read an article featuring the new Meryl, Gwyneth Paltrow, which said that though she travels with some trainer-cum-chef to keep fit, she smoked her way through the interview. She reminded me of every affected dipstick, including myself, who ever asked for filtered water and an ashtray in the same breath.

The second reason was that I thought I was dying, at age 43. My timing sucked. I was only just arriving as a fully fledged person and reporter. But I had dull eyes, sallow skin, a constantly aching chest and shooting pains in my arms and legs. Getting wise too late to enjoy it seemed a cruel joke to have played on myself. So I quit in the hope that I hadn’t quite succeeded.

A recent chest X-ray suggests that I’m one of the lucky ones.