Posted by:
donbagley
(
)
Date: August 28, 2016 05:22PM
My father, the son of a son of a polygamist, would say of any non-Mormon who died, “smoker.” That’s how common smoking was in 1969, the year I smoked my first cigarette. I can’t recall if it was from one of the packs of Fatima cigarettes that my brothers and I won at a carnival game, or if it was a cig given to me by Noel Baker, Mormon bad boy, or if it was a half cigarette I’d picked up off the gravel shoulder of the highway to Reading. But I was smoking cigarettes off and on at the age of twelve. I’d given up on Mormon superstitions and was smoking with abandon like my gentile grandmother. She was my mother’s mother; Dad’s side of the family had been Mormon for four or five generations, which is plenty of time to eliminate any kind of individuality from the bloodline. Dad was a slavishly observant Mormon. His interests included church, money, church apologetics, Nixonian politics and church attendance. For a hobby he beat his sons. My brothers and I smoked in fields and behind buildings.
We moved from Pottstown, PA, to La Grande, OR, before I turned fourteen. In La Grande I met a boy named Randy, whose truck driving father had dropped out of Mormonism, taking his grateful family with him. Randy had a preference for the long cigarettes. His favorite was Benson and Hedges one hundreds. Those were long smokes. I was just a puffer until I met Randy. He showed me how to inhale, and it made me dizzy. I had noticed my grandmother inhaling, and I thought that she was swallowing the smoke the way she swallowed Coors from the can. Once I started inhaling, the hook was in. I was like a caught Marlin. The cigarettes might let me roam for a bit, but they would always reel me in at some point. On occasion I found it necessary to sneak off and have a smoke. I’d become an addict.
Throughout my teens I smoked compulsively. Cigarettes were with me at parties, drive in movies, trips to the mall, dirt bike runs, creek walks, rock concerts and even while hiking in the woods. The cancer sticks were ubiquitous. It became necessary to maintain a stash of cigs and a lighter or matches. A pack with only two cigarettes left in it triggered anxiety. Where would I get my next pack? What hours would the store be open? Did I forget my cigarettes when I got into the car? What if I woke up in the morning to an empty pack? The damn things were no fun anymore. So I quit cold turkey. My father was delighted. I even went to church a few times, but I found it no less boring than when I’d sat through the meetings waiting for a chance to smoke. Abstinence does nothing to improve Mormonism. Some things are best left behind.