THE KICKER:Something in the design of the box caught my eye, and within minutes I was smoking someone else's Parliament Light in the lobby while part two of 'Starlight Express' began without me
IN HIS LATEST collection of essays, the American humorist David Sedaris fondly recalls his career as a smoker, and relates how he had to travel to a foreign country in order to break his domestic dependence on cigarettes. In his attempts to place the prefix "ex" in front of smoker for once and for all, he travels all the way to Japan; a move he refers to as the $35,000 cessation technique.
At least it succeeded. It has been nearly two years since my last cigarette (a Parliament Light, for the record), but every time I go away, I feel the return of a primal urge to put something lit between my lips. On at least one occasion in every 10, the curl of smoke from a passing stranger's cigarette smells fresh, exotic and deeply desirable to me. I haven't yet fallen off the wagon, but I certainly don't feel like I am in the clear, because in my adolescence I drew an unfortunate connection between being on holidays and smoking cigarettes.
For me, it began on a school excursion to a West End show, at the interval to which a Turkish man with a mullet and pleated satin trousers left behind his cigarettes. Something in the design of the box caught my eye, I lingered, and within minutes I was smoking someone else's Parliament Light in the lobby while part two of Starlight Express began without me.
Afterwards, I transferred my attention to Kools, a brand I recognised from SE Hinton's The Outsiders, which I smoked by the municipal swimming pools in France on an exchange trip, thinking I was the snake's hips. I had dabbled before, stealing single B&H from my mum's stash, but that pack of Kools was the first box that I could call my own. I had it in my pocket for a full week and recall taking it out on the bus to gaze at fondly.
It's hard to argue that cigarette company marketing (the Marlboro accessories and the cartoon Camel, in particular) lure children to take up smoking, but in my childhood it seemed that we were finding our own way to donate money to cigarette manufacturers in exchange for tokens of reckless adulthood. I knew a kid who tacked every different kind of cigarette box he could find on his wall, which has to be every tobacco executive's dream scenario. These strange aspirations were common enough, though. Long before I ever tasted Jack Daniel's whiskey, I owned a Jack Daniel's T-shirt.
In France it was Kools and then Lucky Strike, in Spain it was Fortuna, and when the holiday stash ran out - yet the desire lingered, it became John Player Blue. They were favoured by barmen who clutched the filter so tightly between thumb and forefinger that you could burn your tongue with one stolen drag. Thanks to the power of suggestive advertising, my own weak will and a taste for exotica, holidays had little to do with it. I became a smoker, cupping my bitter new friend protectively.
When I got a part-time job in a printing press in town, the guy with whom I worked smoked Major - impossibly strong, stubby little rockets. I couldn't believe it when I smoked my first one. They tasted so strongly of chemicals, and yet I loved them. After my Major period came a brief flirtation with Marlboro reds, after which I must have acquired some inkling of mortality and dropped gears, down to the "yuppie scum" brand of choice - Marlboro Lights. It was here that I began attempting to quit: throwing away a pack in the morning, ransacking the bin in the afternoon. At some point, someone told me non-chemical alternatives were the healthiest, and I began to roll my own.
On my first trip to America, this non-chemical argument acquired even more traction in my mind and I began to favour the organic brand of American Spirit. Each pack bore a profile view of a Native American in a headdress, and because they were organic, it took at least an hour to smoke one, at the end of which your cheeks hurt and you were ready to light another. They tasted like feet and it began to dawn on me that perhaps I enjoyed smoking chemicals as much as I enjoyed tobacco.
I then transferred to my final brand, which had also been my first - Parliament Lights. So packed with additives, agents and sinister chemicals were these cigarettes that when you exhaled, a plume of algebraic formulae floated into the air. A Parliament Light could be smoked in a minute and had a recessed tip. The tiny chamber for the drawn smoke to be caught, right at the top of the filter, was little more than another advertising gimmick but I bought it.
I'm all right now, but apart from foreign holidays, there are dangerous reminders for every ex-smoker - you only have to turn on your television. AMC's superb series about Madison Avenue advertising executives begins its second season soon, and the smoker in me refuses point blank to leave the room whenever I am watching Mad Men. He remains right there on my shoulder, as in nearly every scene someone ardently devours a Lucky Strike, and devours it with such panache that I find myself missing a period in history at which I wasn't present.
I struggle to remind myself that unlike in real life, no one in Mad Men draws so hard on their smoke that an angry red cone of hot ash forms at the end. No one in Mad Men hacks indecorously into a sink upon waking each morning. And most of all, no one in Mad Men has to pay €7 for a pack of 20. For my own health, I try to bear that in mind and focus instead upon the three-martini lunches.