It's been almost 25 years now since I quit smoking. Can you hear the pride in my words when I say that? It's only there because I'm better than you, if you smoke, at any rate. There's no prude like an old whore, a guy I used to know would say, until that one day when I asked him what his mother had to do with it. My little moue of distaste when I smell that cloud of poison gas you've emitted ten or fifteen feet away from me outside the airport, my aghast astonishment at the guy who lit up inside a restaurant in Lincoln Park (we have a smoking ban here in Chicago) (turned out the guy was from Belgium, or some other part of the developing world, and unaware of our laws and customs) (we beat him to death and posted his head on a pike, cigarette clamped in his dead jaws, as a warning to others), my confidence that I can out you as a nic-fiend from three feet away, purely on the basis of your personal aroma: all are outward signs of an inner grace that you, Smokie McSmokerson, can never hope to grasp, much less equal. Unless you quit, that is, and even then, I will have been purer longer and my lungs will be healthier than your lungs. Except for how I have asthma and live in a big city by a fairly major street, and so breathe car and bus fumes pretty much 24/7/366. (Every year’s a leap-year in Elliot-world.)

            I did not smoke for long, just from my freshman year of college until I was 25, and, indeed, for the first several years of that time, I was pretty much a social smoker, bumming the occasional cig off someone when in a bar or a party. My junior year, I roomed with a guy who chain-smoked unfiltered Camels, lighting his next off the butt-coal of the last; when he was turned down for service in the Air Force because of a spot on his lung, only he was surprised. At the same time I was dating a woman who smoked Gauloises, so I was probably doing half a pack or so a day just off second-hand smoke, not to mention the ones I bummed off the two of them. But after I had graduated and was hanging with an artsy crowd, I started smoking for realsies, quickly working my way up to smoking a pack a day of Camel filters. (I tried the unfiltered, in honor of my not-flying roommate, but the experience was not unlike having a cinder-block dropped on my chest.) You'd have thought my asthma, which was largely untreated at that point, even with a rescue inhaler, would have killed me deader than leisure suits, but no, all that tar and nicotine seemed to have wiped out all the stuff in my bronchii that made me wheeze. The whole time I smoked, I did not have a single asthma attack. Those started again, all bigger and better than before, after I quit.

            If I thought that artsy crowd smoked a lot, my definition of "smokes a lot" underwent a drastic redefinition and expansion when I got to grad school. Everybody I knew in the English department, except for the weird squeaky-clean Jesus-people, smoked a shit-ton. We grad-grinds would gather every Wednesday night at Jimmy's, a University of Chicago institution (it's where Second City got its start in the late '50s) to which ascribing the word "dive" would be to impute a level of luxury not actually to be found there. We would argue about things that we thought made us seem sophisticated and learned and academic (I found out later that academics mostly talk to each other about how much they're making and who's going to get tenure and why the dean of faculty is a toad-licking fuckwit) and of course to drink and smoke. Heavily, the drinking and the smoking. A few years ago, before the Chicago smoking ban took effect at Jimmy's (in its first phase, existing bars were grandfathered out; later the ban applied to them as well), I met a date at Jimmy's. I got there a bit (okay, a lot) early, because of how I'm always neurotically early, and when I left not long after, the date not having gone swimmingly (perhaps we should have met for swimming?), I couldn't believe how intensely my clothes reeked of smoke. Ah, Jimmy's, I thought. When I went back after the ban, the air was clear and clean, and...something, some Jimmy's-ness, was missing. It did still smell like stale beer, though, so that's something.

            Oh, and by the way, just to amaze you youngsters who don't remember the '80s, here’s a short list of some places in which I could smoke back in those halcyon days:  my part-time job in a hospital (!) (to reiterate: !), on planes and in airports, in most restaurants, in the DMV, in police stations, on the subway and the El, on buses, in taxis, and in hotel rooms, even ones that didn’t have purple polyester bedspreads.

            I tried to quit, the first time, while I was still married and living in Married Student Housing, in the apartment we later referred to as La Casa de Cucarachas. (I had to stop writing for a moment so that song could go through my head.) (And again.) (Also: whoever thought of using boric acid as a roach-icide should get a Nobel Prize. A real one like Chemistry, not one of the fake ones like Economics.) Rejecting the cold-turkey method and other then-current quitting methods (the nicotine patch was not yet available commercially, and nicotine gum did nothing for my cravings), I decided on the Deep-Fry Everything method, which, while giving me an extra ten pounds to lose and coating the insides of our windows with congealed grease particles, did not actually stop me smoking. (Luckily, when I started smoking again it took the weight right off; the windows stayed pretty crapped-up though.) My ex-wife can attest that in ten years of a marriage that was a mistake to start with and went downhill from there, this period might have been the darkest of our matrimonial career. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, a total raving bitch, and if I did not foam at the mouth and need to be put down like Old Yeller (I know: sniff) (except I never saw that movie, but I figure I need to do something to get the crazy-ass dog-lovers back on my side) (perhaps I could start by not calling them "crazy-ass?"), it was only because my mouth was too full of deep-fried foods to support frothing.

            The second time I quit, I did the American Lung Association Twenty Days To Freedom From Smoking program, which, if you think that’s a long-ass name, the program itself seemed to last about a thousand years, but this time it took. (It's apparently been shortened to Freedom From Smoking, about which I say, good naming skills, ALA.) Oh, I smoked a cigarette or two in the year after, mostly when drinking with friends, but I never got the habit again. I did dream that I was smoking again, and those were the most sensually vivid dreams of my life, more so than dreams of sex, or eating, or the ones where I was naked and showed up late to a class I hadn’t studied for (actually, I'm not sure those latter ones were dreams). My asthma came back raging, and I took up a twenty-year habit of kissing rescue inhalers six or ten times a day, which only ended when I started taking Advair. (Miracle stuff, that. Give that guy a Nobel too.) (I’m kind of promiscuous with Nobels, aren’t I? I hope scientists will still respect me in the morning.) And the smell of cigarette smoke, which I had never hated even before I smoked, became loathesome to me, not to mention a virtually sure trigger of an asthma attack.

            The effect of five decades of anti-smoking propaganda (and despite the pejorative connotation of that word, propaganda need not be false) has been to make non-smokers feel superior. My kids once described the mother of an acquaintance dismissively by saying, “Oh, she smokes.” Sure, I might have passed on my attitude about smoking to them. (When I was cleaning up Number One Daughter’s room after she moved away to college and found a lighter, I immediately called her about it, concerned; I was greatly relieved when she explained it was just for weed.) But that attitude is also, you should pardon the expression, in the air. Cigarette smoking has become a moral and class issue, rather than a health issue. David Sedaris, in his essay “The Smoking Section,” talks about the anti-smoking signs in Japan, which, in contrast to American anti-smoking propaganda, are all about civility: not smoking while walking, so you don’t burn people, not smoking indoors, because others (yeah, like me) can’t tolerate it. But there’s no moral censure there; as long as you’re civil about it, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Maybe it’s because our culture comes down to us from a bunch of Calvinists, for whom one's worldly position reflected the state of one's soul, but here in the good old United Ss of A, we confuse good health with good, the state of our lungs with the state of our souls, and we're happy to tell you just how much you suck if you're not up to our standards.

            I think this moral censure breeds intransigence in many smokers, a certain “fuck you” attitude directed at the smoking Inquisition. So when someone really does have a need not to breathe smoke (say, just e.g., me) in a situation where it’s allowed (outdoors, let’s say; sorry, smokers, but the smoke doesn’t really dissipate), the smoker will often give the request the fish-eye, at best, and at worst refuse. Civility fails, and why shouldn’t it? Treat me like scum, and I’ll act like scum.

            If I found out I were dying soon, I would, right after purchasing and consuming every yogurt peanut in the state of Illinois, or possibly the Midwest, or perhaps while purchasing and consuming every yogurt peanut in the state of Illinois, or possibly the Midwest, buy myself a pack of Camel filters and see how it went. (And also a pound or so of pot, and few dozen bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.) (And send Tori Amos an email describing my plight and inviting her to play naked Bingo.) (Yes, HGG would be there too.) (I'd insist on it, actually. Hey, I'm dying here.) What can I say? I liked smoking; I just didn't like the fact that it was killing me. I want to think that if someone asked me politely to put out my smoke, though, even if I were dying, I would. Though I would look at him with my big Keane-child eyes and mention how I was, you know, dying, before I sadly complied.

I’m not morally superior. I just act like it a lot.