I remember the first cigarette I had. I was with a bunch of kids from the neighbourhood and we found a single cigarette, discarded and lying on the footpath. Sam picked it up and turned to us. ‘Hey, do you wanna smoke it?’ I would have been maybe around 11 or 12. Sam snuck home, nicked one of his dad’s lighters and met us at the park. There were about five of us. I had no idea how to light it but Sam knew exactly what to do. His dad would get him to light smokes when they watched the footy together on Saturday afternoons. Once it was lit Sam passed it around the circle and we took turns to have a drag. Sucking, lips pursed and eyes squinting on the increasingly soggy filter. Only Sam could do the proper drawback. On my first drag I tried but the sensation of the thick smoke hitting the back of my throat just made me cough immediately. When I tried it again I just took the smoke into my mouth and blew it straight out.
If I’m honest, the physical sensation of smoking that cigarette was pretty unpleasant. It didn’t matter. What I remember most about it was the heady feeling of doing something recklessly dangerous and forbidden. And I was hooked. It was a few years before I smoked another cigarette but from that time on I knew I’d be a smoker.
At 14 a friend and I started pooling our pocket money and buying shared packets of Ransom Menthol – for around $1.95. In the early days we still couldn’t draw back but, like so many things worth doing, we found that practice made perfect. For a little while we’d just have the one pack on the go between us and we only smoked when we were together. But soon the person who was holding the smokes started to sneak a few in between times. It wasn’t long before we just decided to buy our own packets.
This was long before the days of plain packaging. There were no pictures of diseased lungs on our cigarettes. They did come with some health warnings – and we used to joke that we only liked the ones that threatened to harm your baby – because none of us needed to worry about that!
The packaging was brightly coloured and exhorted you to enjoy the ‘gentle art of smoking.’ And enjoy it we did. I moved on from Ransom to Alpine, Dunhill, Stuyvesant, Peter Jackson Marlboro and Winfield. In between there were St Moritz, Gitanes and Sobranie. Each brand told a story about the smoker. A soft pack of Stuyvesant made you cool, slightly edgy and alternative. Whereas a packet of Winfield Blue classed you a bogan. I confess to having been both in my time.
I loved smoking. There was nothing like the satisfaction of lighting a lighting a cigarette on the phone, with a coffee, with a beer, over a glass of wine, after a meal, at the bus stop, with friends, at a party, when you were miserable, when you were happy…or pretty much any time. It calmed you, it gave you a buzz and, after a while, it just made you feel normal.
I can’t remember the first time I thought about giving up. I think it was more like a slowly dawning realisation that I didn’t want to be a smoker all my life, because that life was likely to be much more challenging and short if I didn’t give up.
So I started to try. It took a few years and many attempts to quit entirely. I tried patches, gum, a course and cutting down. But I always came back to a pack or thereabouts a day. One day, having ripped all my cigarettes into tiny pieces and chucked them in the bin the night before, I went back to the bin and smoked some of the tiny pieces before heading to the shops for a packet. Another time, after lapsing back into smoking, I found myself talking to my cigarette as I smoked it. I told it how much I loved it. I told it how much I hated it. And I asked whether I would always be its slave. The cigarette said nothing.
Finally I became so unwell one year with a cold that I couldn’t drawback without stimulating a coughing fit. My partner encouraged me to ‘take a good look’ at myself. And I was forced to admit the time had really come. It was hard, possibly the most difficult thing I’ve done, and cold turkey. But it took, and I’ve not had so much as a drag for about 19 years.
I started smoking because it had this image of being cool and rebellious. And there was something cool about hanging out at the Black Cat in Brunswick Street drinking endless cups of coffee, eating cheesecake and smoking. But these days you can hardly smoke anywhere. Night clubs (not that I’ve been to one in years), pubs, cafes and restaurants are all no go zones for the smoker. Passing a couple of women my age sitting on the ground in a stairwell, smoking outside my local shopping centre this morning I looked at them and thought ‘How could you have kept that up all this time?’ And I was really pleased that wasn’t me.
