On Smoking; or The Scent of Donna and Bob’s Cigarettes

“Look up at the trees,” he said, and we lit our cigarettes. Djarum Black, cloves. A heaviness overtook our bodies as we lay back on the grass. The trees were different. Every leaf stood out green and perfect as it blew in the wind against the cloudless summer sky. This was the first time I had ever smoked a cigarette—a full cigarette—and I liked it. I was eighteen, about to go off to college. The world was fresh and open; the smoke curled and was carried off in the breeze. I look at trees now, cigarette in hand, and recall the memory of that July afternoon at Rec Park.

Nobody in my family is a smoker; rather, I guess I should say: growing up, nobody in my family smoked around me. I’d been told so many countless, innumerate times that smoking kills. There’s a smoking unit in health class every year from third grade on. We were given pigs’ lungs to pump full of air. The fresh and healthy pink flesh stood out against the blue of our sterile latex gloves as they swelled and held the breath strong, then exhaled. Mrs. Gilmartin, our teacher, would pull out the black lungs: tar-ridden, stiff, full of holes. These were failed lungs. A meager intake of air filled the lobes to capacity. They were hard. The black, we were told, is tar; the same stuff roads are paved with. The tar hardens in a smoker’s lungs and pops his alveoli, the small, delicate sacs where oxygen and carbon dioxide are swapped, and he slowly suffocates.

As a kid, smokers repulsed me. In middle school, I would be the one to audibly gag when a smoker walked by; and I wouldn’t talk to Jay Kelly for a week when I found out he had tried a cigarette. But something changed somewhere between childhood and now. Maybe it was when I went off to college, and my parents felt okay with letting me make my own mistakes; or maybe it was when I came back from college, and my parents felt okay with letting me see them make their own mistakes. I’m not that kid anymore. I don’t gag at smokers, unless I swallow smoke. I don’t beg my friends to quit. Instead, on a night out, we’ll all step to the curb to get some fresh air. More often than not, there’s already a group of smokers out there. Pleasantries will be exchanged: names, feelings about the current bar (that 80s cover band we all bash, but secretly love every song they play). There’s instantly a bond between two groups of strangers. Why—because we’re all outside killing ourselves? We’re the ones taking the fast lane? Maybe it’s because we’re the small sect who’s broken away from the larger mass; we feel like we belong together.

In the house I grew up in, there’s a cold, barely finished back hallway that leads to the cellar, the back yard, or up a narrow set of stairs. It’s usually full of junk: old sports equipment, a collection of beer bottles that we always say we’re going to turn in next summer (but never do), my mom’s beekeeping suit and tools. Back when it was a two-family home, the Coopers lived above us—Donna and Bob. I must’ve been five when the Coopers moved out, but I can still remember my brothers and I running upstairs to lay claim to the rooms we each wanted for our own—we’d been sharing up until then. In all the years that Donna and Bob Cooper lived above us, since before my time or my brothers’ times, they smoked; rarely in the house, and almost always on the back deck that was above that cluttered hallway. Being a relatively old house, and not yet renovated, it got drafty; smoke would seep into the house and settle into that back hall. In the winters, when the cracks yawn and the wood shrinks, and all the old air seeps out, the scent of Donna and Bob’s cigarettes hangs in the air; though, not like an old musty rug, or like how a back hall should smell—but the way your dad’s friend Kurt might smell stepping back in to the party after smoking on New Year’s Eve, the kind that falls off a barn jacket with the dense air.

The scent of cigarettes is so nostalgic I want to stay in that back hall. I want the cold air to hang there forever. They say scent is the sense most tied to memory—that specific perfume my old girlfriend used to wear; or how old folks remind me just how Auntie Meg and Uncle Bill’s house smelled before they moved off to Florida, and then realizing that’s decay; or the feelings I get when I smell cold smoke, and think of Donna and Bob.

I wonder sometimes when it was that it all changed, although, I don’t think a change like this can be pinpointed and tied to a single event. What started it was a curiosity, a push-back against the authority of parents, of school administrators. What I want to say is this: everybody in high school should try smoking! It will free you. But I know that the statistical majority would become addicted. So, what I really should say is: everyone in high school should do something you’ve been told you shouldn’t do. Bend a rule so far it snaps; get curious. Curiosity brings around discoveries; like in the winters when I found that I didn’t have to go outside for a smoke, that despite all the years of being warned about how swiftly addiction can ensnare even the most casual of smokers I was exempt, able to reap the reward with little risk. I am a part of, but not bound to, that small sect that stands away from the crowd.

It becomes a family dinner, a breaking of the bread with complete strangers all on common ground. I noticed this at an Irish Pub in the middle of Somerville last weekend: there’s a strange sense of competition inside the bar—between the men, at least. They seem to have their guards up. Ask another guy, a stranger, to buy you a drink, and he might start a fight with you. But outside, on the patio, it’s an entirely different scene. Forty-or-so people crammed themselves into a just-big-enough corral of a patio section. Arms and legs that once belonged to one person became twisted and tangled, became part of the collective. I asked the two men to my left if it wasn’t too much trouble to spare me a cigarette; their faces lit up as they both reached for their packs, happy to oblige me. I was brought up to share the things I’ve got, and it seems like the rest of this community learned the same lessons.

Whenever I visit home, it’s customary to take a trip down to The Pub with whoever’s still around town. Being the townie spot, I’ll often see Donna and Bob at the bar, Miller High Life in their hands, occasionally stepping outside for a smoke. I don’t remind them of who I am. I don’t want them to see me smoking. To them, I’m a five-year-old kid; to them, smoking will kill me. Instead, I remain anonymous—just another body outside The Pub smoking cigarettes with his buddies. I hang around in the cold for a few more minutes, reeling in the nostalgia, chumming with the smokers before returning to the warmth of the crowd inside, thinking about a tree on some summer day in the past.