INSIDE/OUT

David Silva

I don’t know about the rest of you, but over these past few weeks I’ve

been dying for a cigarette. I’ll watch the news of the bombings and the

anthrax scares, and catch myself subconsciously patting my pockets down

in search of a pack of smokes.

But each time that happens, I’ll remember the words I told myself five

months ago, and I’ll force myself to abstain:

Life is too short.

I had my first cigarette when I was 6, having stolen one out of my

father’s pack and snuck outside with it and a book of matches. I crouched

behind a bush against the side of the house and lit up, and was just

turning green from my third puff when the voice of my Aunt Valia rang out

from across the fence: “Dolores, look at what Davey’s doing!”

My mother came rushing out and demanded to know what I was doing with

matches and a lit cigarette in my hand and smoke still coming out of my

mouth. “Nothing,” I assured her.

Her response to that was to keep me nicotine-free for years afterward,

since it took me that long to get over associating cigarettes with sharp

pains in my butt.

I always felt my mother’s insistence that I not smoke a bit

hypocritical, since she herself seemed to be making a career out of it.

Some of my earliest memories of my mother involve her lying in bed with

an ashtray on her stomach, a cloud of smoke hovering over her head like a

fog bank. She smoked constantly, and almost every day would send me to

the corner store with a note that read: “Please sell my son Davey 1 pack

of Salem 100s.”

I hated her smoking, would often tell her that if she didn’t stop she

would turn into one of those evil, costumed beasts I’d see in school

antismoking plays. The plays always involved some cute animal named

“Buster the Billy Goat Who Didn’t Smoke” or “Patty the Pink-lunged Piggy”

who were constantly being threatened by the sinister “Cancer Carl the

Smoking Crocodile” or some similar carnivore.

Such propaganda helped keep me off cigarettes throughout most of my

youth. It wasn’t until I joined the National Guard and was in boot camp

that lighting up began to seem like an avenue worth exploring. Smoking

was used by my drill sergeants as a reward -- if we did a job well they’d

give us a five- or 10-minute break to “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!”

At the time I would have taken up macrame if it meant getting a chance

to sit down for five minutes, so I immediately bummed a cigarette off one

of my buddies. It was the start of what would ultimately be a 16-year

smoking habit.

As it turned out, I couldn’t have chosen a worse time to start

smoking. Prior to the 1980s, you could smoke just about everywhere -- in

bars, at work, in a kindergarten class if you could find an ashtray. But

right around the time I picked up the habit, the first big no-smoking

rules were just coming down the pipe. I was rather put out by this,

having been conditioned since childhood to believe smoking was a

fundamental civil right. And I was determined to exercise this right,

even if it killed me.

In 1990, my mother had a radical hysterectomy and spent four days in a

hospital room with a view overlooking a cemetery. When she was released,

she went home, threw away her cigarettes and lighters and became one of

the most militant nonsmokers God ever put on this Earth. She was on me

constantly afterward for my cigarettes, would link my smoking to every

bad thing that ever happened to me since taking up the habit, including

the breakup of my marriage. When I told her that my ex smoked, too, she

replied, “That’s what I’m saying! It was an unhealthy environment for

both of you!”

But I refused to quit, telling myself it was my last remaining act of

social rebellion since having given up heavy metal and black leather

jackets. My habit grew steadily worse, and had pushed past two packs a

day by the new millennium. Smoking became my biggest expense next to

rent, more expensive than my car payments. By 2001, I was easily spending

more than $225 a month on tobacco.

One day about six months ago, I got a call from my mother telling me

my brother-in-law was dying in a hospital in Orange County. I barely

recognized him when I went to visit. His liver had shut down from

hepatitis, and the rest of his organs were following. He had wasted away

to less than 100 pounds and his skin had turned bright yellow.

I sat and talked to him for awhile, then left to go outside to smoke.

The hospital had recently banned smoking anywhere on the hospital

grounds, so I had to walk about 50 yards to the street corner to light

up. Standing next to me with a pencil-thin Capri cigarette in her hand

was an elderly woman in a wheelchair, a portable IV attached to her

wrist. She and I stood there and smoked in silence, watching as cars sped

by with the occupants staring at us and shaking their heads.

I finished my cigarette and went back inside to watch my

brother-in-law gasp for every breath.

The next day, my nephew called to tell me my brother-in-law had just

passed away. We discussed funeral arrangements for awhile, and I noticed

that my nephew kept referring to his father in the present tense, as if

he were still around to join us at family picnics and holidays, as if he

might beep in on the other line at at any moment. And more than all the

surgeon general’s warnings, more than all the money I’d spent on tobacco,

more than the dry, hacking coughs that would hit me right in the middle

of editorial meetings, the thought of my nephew still struggling to

accept his father’s death reached me.

“Life is too short,” I said to myself when I hung up the phone.

So I quit smoking, or haven’t smoked for five months, anyway. The

first four months were tough, of course, but nothing compared to the past

few weeks. There’s nothing like a war to make you want to revisit those

bad habits.

But I’ve stayed off the cigarettes so far, primarily for two reasons.

The first is I refuse to give the terrorists the satisfaction.

And the second is that if recent events have shown me anything, it’s

that life is too short.

DAVID SILVA is the News-Press city editor. His columns run on

Wednesdays. Reach him at 637-3233; or by e-mail at

david.silva@latimes.com.