Smoking

I recently came upon a cigarette lighter among some junk in my mother’s basement, and it put me in a nostalgic way.

It was a Zippo-styled square with the tiny, notched wheel you had to spin to ignite the fluid inside. Though dormant for thirty years, this particular lighter retained that unique fluid smell. My wife caught me sniffing it and assumed I was copping a buzz.

“The butane smell,” I began, half-dreamily. “It really takes me back. It was a smell I used to love for the first eighth of a second.”

My wife took a sniff but didn’t get nostalgic. She hadn’t grown up around cigarettes.

When I was young, every adult smoked—teachers, coaches, talk-show hosts, other kids’ moms—and they smoked everywhere. It’s possible they even smoked during mass. I think Vatican II permitted puffing up to the gospel reading, if you wished to receive communion.

My childhood home was lousy with smokers. A conversation there held more interruptions than a Charlie Rose interview does today: “Pass me that ash tray” and “Pass this ash tray on down, willya?” and “Can one of you kids empty this damn ash tray?” and “Who’s got a match?” and “I got a match: my butt and your face,” and so on.

My wife couldn’t remember the last time she even saw an ash tray.

Those days, ash trays were scattered all over the place, the way remote controls are today—and many were as difficult to figure out. The typical ash trays in the early 1970s looked like aquarium decorations. My brother Joe called them “Michael Sarrazin ash trays,” and I knew exactly what he was driving at. They were marble-based, poly-colored dugouts with smooth recesses that were much too wide and slick for the cigarettes to stay in place. These Sarrazin ash receptacles were too heavy for kids to fetch. Around our house, that’s why they were trumped by beer cans and pop bottles.

My wife asked what brand my dad had smoked.

“Luckys, then Camels, then at the end something less loaded.”

She asked about a brother. “Larks,” I said. She asked about an in-law. “Tareytons and nothing but.” She asked about a cousin. “Virginia Slims. But he was always a little flamboyant.”

She asked if I ever smoked.

I might have, I told her, except a friend in high school was under the impression that cigarettes were cool. If he found something to be cool, then it most certainly was not. The anti-tobacco ads would have been wise to feature this guy blowing smoke from his nostrils instead of showing Brooke Shields sticking cigarettes in hers.

My friend also took to calling cigarettes “toasts,” perhaps hoping the term would rival such classics as “smokes,” “fags,” and “cancer sticks.” A pack of cigarettes was a “loaf of toasts.”

This fellow didn’t get invited to very many parties.

But to answer her original question, I said I’d smoked maybe a few dozen toasts in my teens, but thankfully I never got the hang of it.

She began laughing.

“I’m picturing you as a smoker, trying to get out of the driveway in the morning,” she said. “You always come back inside for something you’ve forgotten—your keys, your badge, your phone, your iced tea, your acid reducers. If you were to become responsible for cigarettes and a lighter, you might finally go mad.”

Now there’s another idea for an anti-smoking commercial.