Smoking

I saw a really pretty girl smoking a cigarette today. Probably about 50% of campus smokes—I see attractive girls smoking every day, but today it was different somehow. Conventionally pretty, she had sandy blond hair, and blue eyes. Thin, but not skinny, dressed smartly, with a nice white smile. She was walking with a group of guys, and she had a cigarette in her mouth. And suddenly I saw way into her future. I saw jaundiced teeth and nails, and wrinkles around her eyes, and carvings of creases where laugh lines should be. I saw in her a sort of desperation that shines in near middle aged women who want to look younger than they are; she still wore make-up of course, and kept her hair long, and dressed in floral print tops and dark-wash jeans that camouflaged any celluloid lurking on her thighs. But her face didn’t match her trendy Junior Miss turns Mommy clothes and her Orange County suburban hair. It was ancient and tired, and you could hear that her voice had lost its melody, and you didn’t want to be there for too long because it made you sad. Watching her 40-year-old self her light up a smoke outside the office, in the car, at her daughter’s soccer game. She holds her cigarette the same way she did in college.

When does it change? At what point do we look around and start feeling disdain for the people who stand outside in 10-degree weather just so they can smoke a square? The rough glamour of smoking—the James Deansian quality of it disappears once the nicotine makes its mark on your face, on your body. It’s a phase, smoking is, from age 15-29—but once you hit 30 you better kick the habit, or you’re just a sad-sack addict who smells bad and can’t be counted on for anything. You’re that mother, the one who gives her kids second-hand smoke for Christmas. You’re that father, leaving the ballet recital because you can’t make it through without a quick cig. You’re that annoyance on the street, the target of glares and heavy sighs of the pious non-smokers, irritated at you for blowing your chemicals in their vicinity. Adults who smoke suck.

But before that. Before you get there, smoking looks cool. It really, really does. The purse of the lips, the kiss on the tip of the slender white cylinder, the quick deep sucks, and the puckering ‘O’ of the mouth as you blow the cool grey smoke out. The way your fingers delicately flick the end of it, orange burning ash scattering to the ground. It’s sexy. It’s mature, and adult, and rebellious.  It’s artsy, it’s tortured, it’s a roll of the eyes and a sigh and a, “God, I need a cigarette.” It’s so nonchalantly dangerous.

Contrast that with the way a forty-three year old woman looks smoking. The wrinkled mouth wraps around a stained white cigarette, the desperate, gasping gulps, and the involuntary “Ah” that escapes through yellowed teeth, as her head tilts toward the sky, her face a picture of pathetic ecstasy. Her fingers tap the end, and once it’s done she lets it fall to the ground, the butt still weakly smoking but not smoldering. The exchange between cigarette and smoker is strangely sad, like stale marital sex. Habitual routine conquers risky excitement. 

I guess it’s just the shit I keep thinking about when I stand on the porch watching my 18 year old childhood friend and my mother smoke cigarettes on Christmas Eve in below freezing weather.