School and smoking have never had an easy relationship, as far as I can tell. Bathroom smoking was always a covert activity where someone eventually got caught and got into trouble. Kids used to be able to smoke outside of some schools — right on the grounds — but nonsmoking perimeters kept spiralling outward from school buildings. Fortunately, as long as you didn’t live in a big city, there always seemed to be some nearby woods to sneak off into for a smoke.
The principal knew who smoked where at our school. So did the guidance counsellor, Mr. Egan. Heck, all the teachers knew. Lectures had been delivered in hallways more than a few times. Once, the HMMWMT walked out at noon hour to try to convince the smokers that they were ruining their lungs, shortening their lives, and even promoting possible future sexual incapacity. But they wouldn’t listen even to him. And if you couldn’t be persuaded by the HMMWMT, no one was going to change your mind.
But remember, Dave and Heavy Metal had told me I needed some kind of rebellion, and today was my day. I left the Egg Man to dream on about ways to fool the new search engines and I went to the woods to smoke.
They all stared at me at first. Some of the guys laughed but took elbows in the ribs from girls who knew about the death of my mother. Intuitively, they knew why I was there. Bill, a guy I’d known since elementary school, shook a cigarette out of a pack and handed it to one of the girls. I was a little surprised to see Scott Rutledge there. Scott must have arrived by his own alternate, less conspicuous route. That’s because Scott was the one kid in school that everyone admired. Teachers liked him. Girls adored him. He could clown with the hooligans but he was also kind to the geeks.
It was Scott who flipped a cigarette my way. A lighter flared, and I leaned and sucked at my very first tug of smoke. Everyone waited for me to cough, but I did not. Only a wisp of tobacco and nicotine had passed my lips and descended into my lungs. But I exhaled with enthusiasm and took a second drag. People nodded and approved. I felt like I had been accepted into a sacred religious cult.
The girls all tried to look sexy (or were sexy, depending on who it was) and the guys all looked like actors who played the roles of young thugs in made-for-TV movies. I didn’t try too hard to look cool because I knew I couldn’t pull it off.
The conversation was mostly about how ugly all the teachers were and how messed up the school was. There was universal agreement about those two subjects. I offered no opinions but was halfway though my second cigarette when the bell rang. Amazingly, the thugs and chicks (the guys actually got away with calling girls “chicks” in this primordial world of green leaves and ritual smoke) all dropped their butts, ground them into the rich forest soil with heavy heels, and turned towards the school. Scott nodded at me and headed off for his circuitous path back to class.
Somebody slapped me on the back. “Back to the hellhole,” Bill said.
“What it is,” someone else said.
A couple of girls pulled out mirrors and lipstick as they walked. For the first time in my life, I was viewed as being at least semi-cool by the other kids in the cafeteria as I walked back into the school with the smokers. And I felt a kind of pride.
My mother would have been appalled if she could have known. It had been a rapid descent from tofu and brown bread to this tobacco wasteland. My father would simply not have believed I smoked, even if I lit up in the living room and inhaled a pack of Marlboros, puffing smoke in his face with every lungful. The truth is that I didn’t like the smoking part, but I felt pretty good about the camaraderie. I wished that non-smokers could sneak off into the woods to stand around and not smoke and that this would somehow be considered dangerous and even sexy. But the world is a funny place, eh, and things don’t always work out the way you want them to.
And you’ll be disappointed to learn that by the time I got back to math class, where Heavy Metal was tuning up his Fender for geometry, I felt let down that smoking had not made me feel angrier about anything. I knew I was still holding it all back, a great dam against some flood that Dave explained should come some day, a flood I needed to be prepared for. But it wasn’t today. My mother was still gone from the world and I had somehow accepted this fact with only a lingering twinge of self-pity. I was still acting way too normal for my own good.
CHAPTER FOUR
When I told Dave about the smoking, he looked concerned at first but then cleared his throat and said, “I think this is actually a good thing. A few more bad habits and we’ll have you cured.”
I knew that Dave was not like conventional shrinks. He said he tried to come up with creative approaches to problems, approaches that might seem totally whacked to some. But he was confident that he was on the right track with me.
“What exactly is it you’re trying to cure me of,” I asked, “aside from my problem of being so normal, or at least appearing to be normal?”
“Sheesh,” Dave said. “Maybe cure is the wrong word. I’m just trying to help. It has to do with your mother, remember. You must miss her a lot.”
“I do. Every minute of the day.”
“That’s good.”
“It is?”
“You loved her?”
“Of course; she was my mother. Did you love your mother?”
“I still do.”
“She’s alive?”
“Yes. Nearly eighty. She still tells me I need a haircut every time I see her.”
“You do need a haircut. For an old guy, you look a little flaky with that shaggy mop and those sideburns.”
“You think I should look normal?”
“No. Maybe not.”
“Meanwhile, back at the ranch...” he said, which was Dave’s way of trying to get back on subject — this issue of me and the fact I’d been acting so seemingly normal, which seemed to upset everyone so much. “How do you feel about this smoking thing?”
So we did that one long and hard. Maybe I was acting out my anger and my hurt. That was the theory. Dave didn’t have to give me a lecture about the fact that my smoking career should be short. From the start, I knew I couldn’t commit myself to the smoking lifestyle. I was pretty sure it wasn’t worth lung cancer and sexual dysfunction.
My only true commitment to the smoking world was love of the foray into the woods at noon hour and then right after school, a quick couple of puffs with the gang at the designated spot near the bus garage followed by running for the bus with nicotine breath. Sometimes it was me keeping pace with Scott Rutledge, which must have raised a few eyebrows at the mingling of such strange companions.
I gave smoking a full two weeks of my life. It was a five-days-a-week thing. No weekends. What was the point if I was not with my squint-eyed smoky tribe? So it was ten days, four smokes a day. Mostly I bummed cigarettes, but nobody would have put up with that for much longer.
I tried to tell my father that I started smoking. He was watching golf on TV. During golf my father was visible but pretty much comatose. It wasn’t from drinking or anything. It was his own special narcotic state of half sleep/half golf. He didn’t even like golf but he liked the hue of the greens, the hushed crowds, and the well-appointed golfers selecting woods or irons. It was another world for him. My father had no bad habits that I knew of, and the Saturday afternoon TV golf/semi-sleep seemed to be enough to transport him from the real world into a dimension akin to a heroin high. I’m just guessing but I think there’s truth in it.
“I’ve started smoking,” I told him.