Smoke and Mirrors
As a child, I used to love the special kind of cold where I could see my breath upon exhaling. I could purse my lips and blow as though I had taken a long drag of a cigarette. The people on television who did this always looked so elegant; Cruella de Vil-types with long fur coats and whatever else meant an excess of style. My childhood was in hindsight a golden age for anti-cigarette public service announcements. It was after the ill effects of cigarettes were well known, but before vaping and e-cigs convinced young people there was a healthy way to poison your lungs. Idle in the schoolyard, it’s not like I wanted to take up smoking or to be a smoker. What I wanted was to wear a regal coat, stand on a city street, and breathe deeply.
Most of the smokers I’ve known are dead. That sounds insensitive, so let me add that these are people I loved, or at least liked and respected: a neighborhood friend’s mother, a great uncle, a favorite professor. My aughts-era public school education meant that I was terribly judgmental of their smoking, which I saw as a character flaw. Even when I reached drinking age, I couldn’t imagine that smoking might be as satisfying or might addle the brain as deliciously. Also, smokers smell like smoke. And not in the pleasant, woodsy way of an outdoorsy person the night after a bonfire. More like some infrastructure is burning down.
So I was always against smoking (but for balance, I will cop to a brief few months where I lived in Europe and came to associate bars and long, warm, romantic evenings—good things, in short—with the smell of cigarette smoke).
In college, I lived with Brandon and Nate. I returned to school after one summer to learn Nate had taken up smoking! By now some of the smokers I’d known had died—besides, who wants a housemate that smokes (see above re: infrastructure)—so I was less than enthused. I harassed Nate without end. This habit is disgusting, I said. You are destroying your body, I said. These things will kill you, I said. Brandon, with whom I was in perpetual conflict, always seemed to delight in staking out whatever position was most opposite to mine. It would be unfair to say he encouraged Nate, but Brandon made a point of announcing how very much he supported Nate doing whatever he wanted. That’s what it means to be a friend, Brandon argued. Friends support each other. I laughed at that. Most people in the world don’t give two shits whether you live or die. Surely what distinguishes a friend is that they’re one of the few people who do?
Brandon and I agreed to disagree on this and basically every other point, yet the argument itself was clarifying, a breath of fresh air (something we were not getting in that apartment). Might I be able to summon a more charitable position? In smoking, I have no idea what Nate was chasing. Or running from. I got the sense it was the usual: the “social aspect.” One can disguise all manner of bad behaviour as caring about the “social aspect” of it—this is essentially the definition of peer pressure—but I too have stood awkwardly in the corner at a party, so I’m not unsympathetic. Come to think of it, I can’t confirm that the smokers I knew died of lung diseases. Memory is hazy, not unlike my chain smoking uncle’s living room. My neighborhood friend’s mom was not only a smoker but also a 9/11 first responder. Was it complications from that? My beloved professor had a cancer return, and I don’t think it was lung. Both figures I remember comforting me about something when I needed comfort most. The mom after some college rejections, the professor after some world-altering fallout with friends. Perhaps smokers are more empathetic. Smoking is, after all, an addiction, a drug. I’ve heard quitting is the hardest thing many people ever do, if they do it at all. So maybe smokers are more open to the idea that life doesn’t always go as planned, more graceful about vices and mistakes.
Of course I no longer think smokers are necessarily bad people. But insofar as self-destructive habits lead people to self-destruct, you can blame someone you love for shortening their lifespan with every puff.
My parents never smoked, not once in my presence or, to my knowledge, outside of it. Despite that, my mom still was diagnosed with a terminal pulmonary disease, severe enough that a lung transplant was necessary. For smokers and lung disease patients alike, breathing is as if through a cocktail straw. It’s hard to watch because it’s easy to take for granted that you will always be able to get the oxygen out of the air. But they won’t give you a lung transplant if you’re a smoker. You’re doing this to yourself, that policy argues. If you think that’s unfair, well, the whole thing was unfair.
Even though years of vociferous health classes taught me not to, I confess a muzzled part of me still thinks smoking looks cool. My childhood imaginary cigarettes were just me playing grown up. Grown ups can hold their whole lives in their own hands, and know it. Taking a drag is hitting pause on a conversation. It expands a moment, big enough that it seems like you could maybe live in it forever. You can’t. If I never have my first cigarette, I may never be a sophisticated Cruella de Vil-type. I might always stay a daughter’s neighborhood friend, a great nephew, a precocious student. A mother’s son.
Suraj Uttamchandani, PhD, is proud to have been part of the group that catalyzed Gandy Dancer. Now an assistant professor of learning sciences at Adelphi University, he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, with a minor in creative writing, from SUNY Geneseo (class of 2014). He is grateful for the space the journal has provided, under the guidance of Rachel Hall and the many students who have worked so hard on it, to read, write, learn, and grow together.