My Relationship with Tobacco (with thanks to Rudyard Kipling for “The Betrothed")

Open the old cigar-box, get me a Cuba stout,

For things are running crossways, and Maggie and I are out.

We quarreled about Havanas—we fought o’er a good cheroot,

And I know she is exacting, and she says I am a brute.

Open the old cigar-box—let me consider a space;

In the soft blue veil of vapor musing on Maggie’s face.

Maggie is pretty to look at—Maggie’s a loving lass,

But the prettiest cheeks must wrinkle, the truest of loves must pass.

I was in a small Kentucky town hanging out with the other kids from my not quite nice neighborhood. 9th grade? Maybe 14? I don’t think 13, but certainly before 15. Smoking was an initiation rite, required for membership in the crew that sat on the high curb across from school during lunch breaks. Though we called them cancer sticks even then, no one condemned it or even scolded us. My mother, a smoker wasn’t happy about it, but she hated worse the idea of being a hypocrite.

Cigarettes were about 40 cents a pack. I smoked unfiltered Pall Malls. I quit once for about 6 weeks to try out for the basketball team [note: my athletic ability is noteworthy for the wrong reasons, but basketball was the only extra-curricular activity, the town school was that small]. I went right back to smoking when I failed to make the cut.

There’s peace in a Laranaga, there’s calm in a Henry Clay,

But the best cigar in an hour is finished and thrown away—

Thrown away for another as perfect and ripe and brown—

But I could not throw away Maggie for fear o’ the talk o’ the town.

Maggie, my wife at fifty—gray and dour and old—

With never another Maggie to purchase for love or gold!

Smoking was somewhat frowned on at the next school I went to. I was living with my father. He smoked. Oddly his “roommate” did not. At school the smokers congregated on some steps on a wooded pathway down below the school building. It was a varied crew because of changing schedules. One was a girl who had a car. She asked me to go to a French movie with her.

That year was ragged. My father was out of work, had always been a troubled man, and I am sure the parenting of a 16 year old was beyond him. Nor was it in the wheelhouse of his “roommate.” Fortunately they had friends, most of them school teachers, who provided help and counsel. One sheltered me during a difficult night and when I woke the next day offered me a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

And the light of Days that have Been the Dark of the Days that Are,

And Love’s torch stinking and stale, like the butt of a dead cigar—

The butt of a dead cigar you are bound to keep in your pocket—

With never a new one to light tho’ it’s charred and black to the socket.

In Boston for my senior year my father took me to Erlich’s for my birthday at the beginning of the school year. A pipe would be better for me he said. I went. Seemed like a neat idea. He bought me a pipe called a “Canadian” or “Lumber Jack.” It was a design with a cylindrical bowl and a long briar stem with only a short black rubber bit. The length of briar supposedly cooled the smoke. It was a bit of a bitch to clean and prone to break as I found out. He also gave me a couple of pipes from his father.

My grandfather, a doctor, had smoked a pipe all his life. He had even taught his nurses how to fill them so that when he had smoked a bowl he would set that pipe down in the ashtray and pick up and light the one that was waiting. I’m told that the only time he smoked cigarettes was when he was in formal wear that didn’t have the necessary pockets for the various supplies and implements pipe smoking requires. Then he tucked a bag of Bull Durham in his cummerbund and had the art of rolling a cigarette in one hand while managing a cocktail in the other. Maybe it is apocryphal but it is a neat story and image.

Open the old cigar-box—let me consider awhile—

Here is a mild Manila—there is a wifely smile.

Which is the better portion—bondage bought with a ring,

Or a harem of dusky beauties fifty tied in a string?

Counsellors cunning and silent—comforters true and tried,

And never one of the fifty to sneer at a rival bride.

Thought in the early morning, solace in time of woes,

Peace in the hush of Twilight, balm ere my eyelids close.

I smoked a pipe for a number of years after that, smoking cigarettes as a convenience. From time to time I’d smoke a cigar but I was never an aficionado. Alas, pipes were an early target of smoking restrictions because they could pretty seriously smog up a small space. They were a definite no-no on airplanes and quickly so in restaurants. Sort of a shame because there was nothing quite so satisfying as a contemplative bowl after dinner. So I tended toward smoking cigarettes more and more, though I would still smoke the pipe when I could. I had maybe a half dozen that had broken in well and were very enjoyable.

When I transferred to our local prestigious U and entered a fairly exclusive concentration (major) the first meeting of the group was at the headmaster’s residence in one of the houses. Sherry was served and the “gentlemen” were offered cigars. How thoroughly sexist!

Smoking was ubiquitous during the next few years before the campaigns to raise awareness began in earnest. I think cigarettes were a couple of bucks a pack. My wife smoked. We used to buy them by the carton at a discount store I passed on the way to grad school. In my MBA class of 20 guys it became a custom to light up cigars during our Friday afternoon policy class and turn the air blue. It was still okay to smoke in offices, restaurants, classrooms, even elevators! We were relegated to the back of airplanes, which has to be something that is recreated in hell as punishment for smokers and non-smokers alike. I must have reeked for weeks. By then some of my non-smoking friends were prodding me about quitting.

  

This will the fifty give me, asking naught in return,

With only a Suttee’s passion—to do their duty and burn.

This will the fifty give me, when they are spent and dead,

Five times other fifties shall be my servants instead.

The furrows of far off Java, the isles of the Spanish Main,

When they hear my harem is empty, will send me my brides again.

I will take no head to their raiment, nor food for their mouths withal,

So long as the gulls are nesting, so long as the showers fall.

I will scent ‘em with best Vanilla, with tea I will temper their hides,

And the Moor and the Mormon shall envy who read of the tale of my brides.

By this time the pipe was an occasional thing. You can’t smoke a pipe on a smoking break, and as noted carrying all that stuff was a pain—pipe, tobacco pouch, tamper, wooden matches or a fairly serious lighter, pipe cleaners. So I was channeled into cigarettes at certain times of the day, which is when they began to become time markers for me.

My smoking survived three serious relationships with non-smokers. I had stopped smoking in the house or apartment. I didn’t smoke in the car when someone else was in it. That gave way eventually to not smoking in the car, which felt at the time like a major sacrifice. Now with a four year-old car that has never been smoked in, I have come to appreciate it.

For Maggie has written a letter that gives me my choice between

The wee little whimpering Love and the great god Nick o’ Teen.

And I have been a servant of Love for barely a twelve-month clear,

But I have been a Priest of Partagas a matter of seven year;

And the gloom of my bachelor days is flecked with the cheery light

Of stumps that I burned to Friendship and Pleasure and Work and Fight.

I made attempts at quitting, some fairly serious. I did Smoke Enders while I was working in the most stressful place I ever worked, failed in the last week and was scolded by the substitute teacher who was covering the last session for “lack of willpower.” Those of you who don’t, especially those who never have, sometimes make it about will. It is and it isn’t, not solely.

Nicotine gum worked a bit but I had a tendency to be chomping away all the time and that didn’t work at work. I am not a pretty gum chewer anyway. Besides it is pretty pricey. Handy for long flights though.

And I turn my eyes to the future that Maggie and I must prove,

But the only light on the marshes is the Will-o’-the-Wisp of Love.

Will it see me safe through my journey or leave me bogged in the mire?

Since a puff of tobacco can cloud it, shall I follow the fitful fire?

Two docs really pushed me. My internist made the case that it was the single most important thing I could do for my health, and my urologist really got on me after a scare from a scan that suggest a bladder cancer. It wasn’t but he had seen me lighting up in the COSTCO parking lot a couple of weeks earlier and took the moment of the scare to have a chat about the connection with bladder cancer. More recently an eye doc enlightened me about the connection with macular degeneration.

All stuff a smart guy should know, and of course I did. But cigarettes in particular are intensely addictive. They had become for me a major instrument of self-soothing. Stressed? Struggling with a problem? Go have a smoke. It was even enough when one of the people I ended up with in the smoking area in my last job, who shared my nickname, was diagnosed and died within weeks of lung cancer. With classic denial I had a host of reasons that I would escape.

Open the old cigar-box—let me consider anew—

Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon you?

A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;

And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a Smoke.

Light me another Cuba—I hold to my first-sworn vows,

If Maggie will have no rival, I’ll have no Maggie for spouse!

I don’t know if Kipling gave up tobacco. I’ll bet he gave up at least some of his cigar habit. Me? A few years ago a new drug came on the market—Chantix. It doesn’t contain nicotine but it blocks the nicotine receptors. My internist suggested I try it.

The regime is to take pills twice daily for three months. It’s not cheap, but with cigarettes in this state at $8 or $9 a pack, it is cheaper than smoking by about 60% for a pack a day smoker. It has an odd side effect—very vivid dreams. For me they were kind of fun. My wife didn’t much like hearing about them though.

It has taken about four tries. I would take the Chantix and be off the weeds for five or six months and then think I could have just one. Or in the last major fall from the wagon I got laid off and was really upset because I was pretty sure full time work was no longer in the picture. I did a course again about 14 or 15 months ago having smoked for a month or two after over half a year without. Late this summer I did the just one thing and immediately called my doc to get a new scrip, and did the 3 month course. What that means is that I have had fewer than a couple dozen smokes in the last two and half years, and probably less than half that in the last year

The drug helps a lot, and it does take some willpower to stay the course. When cigarettes have been part of your self-soothing regime and part of the way you mark time for decades, willpower alone won’t break the habit. But it takes willpower to set aside the occasional thought that I’d really like to have a cigarette right now.

I think I have got this now. I enjoy not smelling it on me and I find myself annoyed rather than attracted when I smell a smoker in the street. It’s too hard to keep quitting so I think I can make it stick. I doubt I will ever be a non-smoker, but I can be an ex-smoker. Good enough for me, and my “Maggie” likes it.

Homeless

Homeless seems to be showing up a lot lately. This week there was a headline about the possibility of YouthCare having to close its Orion Center because of a lost grant. Then another a couple of days later, there was a story that the city was going to take up the slack. Today’s paper had a piece by Danny Westneat about “Real Change” starting operations on the eastside. And then there was Dylan’s release of the first “official” video of “Like a Rolling Stone,” essentially about the experience of being homeless.

I’m not homeless. Never have been. But I have been close at times and probably would have been in today’s economic regime. In my early teens my mother moved three children to different towns in Kentucky, running up debts she could never pay because she got no child support and kept losing her hospital jobs because she stole drugs to self-medicate the pain from an undiagnosed tumor that eventually killed her. That is the absolutely shortest version of that that I can tell. You can fill in between the lines. One could play the float in those days and charging something wasn’t putting it on a card, so she was able by crook to keep us with a roof over our heads.

She wasn’t the right-wing notion of a lazy welfare cheat—we never got public assistance and she basically worked herself to death 13 days out of 14 and on call the 14^th—just a woman in desperate straits who didn’t know where to turn.

The three of us kids were alone in the house we were renting in a new town when she didn’t come home. She had blacked out at her job and been rushed to the nearest big city for surgery. It took three days for someone to wonder about what was happening to us, and we didn’t think to cause trouble by raising an alarm. A minister’s family took me in. Relatives came to get my brother and sister.

The closest I came after that was when I left the apartment where I lived with my father the year I graduated from high school. I’d gotten a menial job running calculations at an insurance company—stuff all done by computers now—and packed a bag and found a room for rent for what amounted to about 1/6^th of my paycheck. The minimum wage at the time was around $1.15 or $1.25. I can’t imagine doing it today when the minimum wage has lagged inflation significantly. That room might be half of my pay now, if I could find one at all.

The roofs in my life progressed from apartments with roommates, then ones with lovers, then ones with a spouse—usually quite small—to a rented house, then our first one with a mortgage after a brief sojourn in a commune. That first house was tiny and very old with minimal amenities that we worked on slowly. It was what we could afford on two state government salaries. One more stop in a rental house during a year as a lecturer at the local U, then we bought something fairly decent; which I gave to her when we split. And I started the progression again. But I was never without shelter. Broke, hungry, not sure where the next meal was coming from, but I always had a roof.

A couple of things from the first paragraph.

“Real Change” is a newspaper. It got started in Seattle in the mid 90s. The idea was that people who were homeless good get copies from the distribution center and sell them on street corners, getting to keep $1.40 of the $2 price: “a hand up, not a handout.” It’s grown quite successfully in these harder economic times and it is estimated to have put $1 million directly into the pockets of the poor. Its expansion to the “eastside,” Bellevue, Seattle’s “tony” burb, is significant because we pretty much think that Bellevue folk think homelessness is a Seattle problem.

YouthCare is a nonprofit organization that has undertaken what I think of as a Herculean task: helping homeless youth, aka “street kids.” They provide drop in facilities, emergency housing, counseling, career help, transitional housing for youth who are about to be able to provide for themselves but need a bit of help, and a host of other care and services for kids on the street. I’ll admit to bias here. I’ve done some work for YouthCare under the aegis of 501Commons, the successor to the Executive Service Corps, and was very impressed at the challenge they have accepted. It made me think about how close I came to needing something like that.

So I’m thankful that despite feeling about one paycheck from disaster at different times in my life, that I have never (yet, knock on wood) been homeless. And it would be so much harder today despite the existence of so-called safety nets and private sources of help.

Imagine for just a moment. You are able to find work for $9.50 an hour, but only part-time, so you end up getting about $220 a week. The old rule of thumb used to be that your housing should cost about ¼ of your budget. Probably pretty tough to find housing for one week’s pay, possible, but not easy: say one room in a place with 3 or 4 others, but more likely you pay more like $350 or $400. You need to use the bus to get around because you aren’t buying a car (think about the cost of insuring it, and fueling it, not to mention parking it) so that’s at least $20-30 a week, let’s say $100 a month.

You need to eat. You can get one meal a day out of your job, but unless you’re on a Top Ramen diet it’s going to cost you at least $5-7 a day and probably more like $10. Let’s make that $250 a month. Alternatively you could stand in lines to make use of food pantries. You probably can get some assistance like food stamps if the yahoos haven’t wiped out the program. We haven’t even talked about keeping your ratty clothes clean or the other routine expenses of daily life, and you are basically one mugging or layoff from the street. And the layoff can happen if the bus breaks down and you are late for your shift.

These are the people living in the hammock of indolence imagined by the ?Christian? right. Always on the edge of crisis, holding things together by dint of will and the blessing of whatever gods there are; and guaranteed to have things fail or break down or disappear, or to be preyed on by someone equally desperate with less of a conscience.

I’m going to be sending something to YouthCare this year, but there are other places—“Wellspring” that very successfully works to keep people from becoming homeless, “Treehouse” that helps foster kids, “Solid Ground” that supports the food distribution network—pick one. Pick one where you are. Give it as nice a gift as you can manage. As Phil Ochs wrote: “There But for Fortune….”