New Story: Smoke Screen

I think Jim Jarmusch waxes nostalgic about the kinship of those of us who find ourselves out on a stoop, porch or office park entryway smoking a cigarette. It's in one of his movies. I kind of think it's bullshit. I pick my friends based on a lot more than what bad habits we share. If not, I'd be hanging out with obsessive gum chewers and overtalkers.

The newspaper business probably did the most to advance my smoking, and more importantly for our purposes here, my co-smoking. Journalism was closely linked to smoking and rebellion in general from an early age from me. It was, I suppose, the stress that I conveniently blamed for the oral fixation I satisfied with Camel Lights. However, my one-time best friend and by-then rival had already staked a claim among our friends as the newspaper person, so I ended up advancing my writing and smoking habits in tandem on the staff of the annual and a literary magazine I and some other people stated, probably as an excuse to smoke more.

By college, my smoking habit had become unmoored, relying exclusively less on the stress of succeeding in school than on paying for classes (on time or eventually), and of course, on the sweet, exquisite, slow-motion death of my long distance relationship. Like most freshmen, my drinking doubled weekly and I managed to spend a thousand saved high school dollars in one semester, on gloriously cheap cigarettes (the fabled sub-$2 pack!) and compact disks (my freshman year coincided with the rise of grunge), as well as lots of booze.

Then I discovered coffee and cigarettes had new meaning.

Through college I tested theories of pairing extreme amounts of coffee with cigarettes in as many ways as possible. I would smoke a cigarette at five in the morning walking to my coffee-shop job, and savor the ashy aftertaste as I warmed up the espresso bar. When all four taps were pulling perfect shots, I would wash away the spoiling cigarette flavor with a lukewarm mixture of four-times-two shots of espresso and an equal amount of milk. I was horrible.

I paired this extremely bad habit with working at the school newspaper, and glamorously reeking of cigarette smoke and unwashed flannel while storming around like some kind of newsman. It was, I'm assured, all very unattractive. Except to me, who couldn't believe how awesome it was to be typing and ordering people around and making decisions and smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee all at the same time.

By the time I was working at the newspaper after school, the glamour was completely gone. In the odious, crippling world of weekly community newspapers, the smokers were people like me, and they were 48 year old cut-and-paste artists who lived with their parents, and they were moth-ball smelling hags in horrible pantyhose from accounting. We had nothing in common, nothing to share, and nothing to even tenuously connect us, except a glowing ember on the tip of a cigarette.