I Quit Smoking 29 Years Ago. I’m Still a Smoker.

Some things you quit. Some things never completely leave you.

I quit smoking on my birthday in July of ‘92. Not cut back. Not one of those quits where I’d sneak a drag every few days and convince myself it didn’t count. I had actually quit.

Five months without a cigarette. And I was miserable.

My wife still smoked. Most of my friends smoked. We still had people over on weekends, grilling, hanging out, doing everything we normally did. When everybody went outside for a cigarette, I stayed behind.

The urge never stopped. I wanted one every day.

Then we had a New Year’s Eve party. Sometime after midnight and five months of not smoking, I asked my buddy for a smoke.

I don’t remember giving it much thought. I didn’t tell myself I could have just one. I smoked it. All of it.

The next morning I rolled out of bed, rode up to the Amoco gas station on the corner, and bought a pack. Five months and the next morning I was right back where I began.

Tobacco Country

I started smoking when I was 12. My best friend, who we’ll call Steve, and I borrowed a cigarette from my dad. He smoked Camel non-filters. That first cigarette nearly made me puke, and yet for some reason I came back for more.

After that, Steve and I started rotating cigs from our parents. My mom smoked Vantage Ultralights, which after Camels and Marlboro Reds just didn’t do it. So we would take a pair of scissors or a razor blade and cut the filter in half.

This was Virginia in the 80s. By God, Virginia. Tobacco country. Cigarettes were everywhere.

One of my earliest memories is probably around six years old. My mom would send me to the convenience store a few blocks from our house with a note saying I had permission to buy her a pack of cigarettes. Nobody seemed to think much of it.

By junior high, we were smoking in the bathrooms, behind the gym, walking down the back wall with a cigarette cuffed in our hand. We got caught a few times and suspended. We’d save our lunch money and go to the gas station on the corner and buy cigarettes. Gone were the days of ice cream.

In seventh grade shop class, I made my mom a ceramic frog ashtray for Mother’s Day. The mold was provided by the school. It had little holders for the cigarettes in its mouth. We fired it in the kiln, painted it green with that glossy ceramic paint, and I brought it home to her.

By our later teens, we were pooling lunch money, allowance, whatever money we had, and buying cigarettes by the carton because it was cheaper.

It sounds ridiculous now.

Back then, it was just normal.

The Smoke Shed

By the time I started working for the grocery store chain in ‘93, smoking was built into pretty much every part of my day.

I’ve always been an early riser, usually up by 5 a.m. Back then I was a chain smoker. I could reach for the cigarettes and lighter and light the first one before I even opened my eyes.

The newspaper was usually delivered around 5:15. I’d make a pot of coffee, smoke a couple cigarettes, grab the paper, then sit down with the coffee and dive in. Between 5 a.m. and getting to the office around 7:30 or 8, I could easily smoke half a pack.

Even the drive had a routine. I always lit my last cigarette at the third traffic light before the office. Most mornings I would take the last drag as I pulled into my parking spot and put it out.

If I got there early and another smoker pulled in, we might stand outside the front door, light another one and shoot the shit before going inside. We had a big old three-foot ashtray sitting there because everybody smoked, from the president and CEO and CFO on down. The CEO in those early days smoked Pall Mall non-filters, which always reminded me of my dad.

Once the office opened, we had the smoke shed.

It was literally about a 12-by-12 shed the company had installed with benches around the inside. Sometimes there would be more than a dozen of us packed in there on break, with more sitting outside because there wasn’t enough room. That sucked when it was raining or freezing cold, but we did it anyway.

Mike was one of my regular smoking buds. We’d grab coffee, head down to the shed and have some really good conversations over a few smokes. My boss, the CFO, smoked too. Sometimes after five I’d catch him in there alone and we could talk without an office full of people around us.

The same thing happened when I visited stores. A lot of my favorite store managers smoked, so we’d go out back on the loading dock with a cup of coffee, smoke one… or two and talk.

Thinking about it, some of my best conversations at work happened while I was smoking.

What I Didn’t Change

The five months in ’92 were different from every quit before them because I actually quit. No sneaking a drag here and there. No cheating. I went five months without touching one.

What I didn’t change was anything else.

My wife still smoked. All of my friends smoked. We still had people over on weekends for barbecues and hanging out. Everybody would eventually go outside to smoke and I just wouldn’t. I stayed inside while they went out and did the thing I still wanted to do.

Not a day went by where I didn’t crave a cigarette.

My mood could change from one minute to the next. I was short-fused and reacted to things I normally wouldn’t react to. I just always felt on edge. Looking back, some of that anxiety was probably there before. I had just been able to calm it with a smoke.

Smoking had become my answer to pretty much everything. If I had a problem, I’d go outside, smoke a cigarette and think about it. If I got stressed, I smoked. If I got mad, I smoked. If I was happy, I smoked.

Now I had to think through a problem without a cigarette. I had to get mad without one. I had to be stressed without one.

That was harder than I expected.

That quit taught me something I wouldn’t really understand until I tried again a few years later.

I had stopped smoking.

Everything around me was still set up for a smoker.

Trying Again

Four years later, sometime in early December of ’96, my wife and I decided we were going to quit together on New Year’s Day.

By then I knew enough from the five months in ’92 to know I was probably going to be miserable and not much fun to be around. So we sat the kids down ahead of time and told them what was coming. I was pretty blunt. We’re quitting smoking. It’s going to be hard. I might be short-tempered, moody and unpredictable for a while. Please don’t take it personally.

I had pretty much the same conversation with my employees at work. What should they expect? The unexpected.

My parents were having a family New Year’s Eve party that year. My sisters were there with their husbands and kids. My mom still smoked. My stepdad smoked. One of my brothers-in-law smoked.

I had a plan.

I was going to smoke myself sick.

And I did.

I chain-smoked all night. One cigarette after another, probably until around two in the morning. I don’t know how many I smoked, but I remember getting to the point where I really didn’t want another one.

Then I lit another one.

Eventually I went to bed.

The next day, my wife and I quit.

From January 1st forward, it was just effing hard.

I had physically quit. Mentally, not so much. I still wanted a one every day, and somewhere around January 17th, my wife and I were both getting close to saying screw it and starting again.

That’s when we decided to try the nicotine patch. I had read somewhere you no longer needed a prescription.

One of my friends told me that if I tapped the patch a few times when I had a craving, it would help get the nicotine into my system faster. He wasn’t a doctor.

So of course, I had to try and took it to an extreme.

I would start slapping the shit out of my arm.

Not a couple light taps. I mean giving my arm the beat down, trying to get that nicotine flowing.

It became a running joke between my wife and me. I’d get a bad craving, start slapping on my arm, and we’d both bust out laughing at how ridiculous I looked.

It was funny.

I also really wanted a cigarette.

Changing Everything Around It

One thing I figured out pretty quickly was that I had to start changing the routines around smoking. I stopped taking the same route to work because of that third traffic light. Every time I pulled up to it, I wanted a one, so I just started going another way. Coffee had to go too. I quit drinking it for about six months because it made me want to smoke. I kept the newspaper, but the coffee was gone.

The first few weeks without cigarettes and coffee at the same time were rough. I’m pretty sure I became a total asshole. My wife was going through the same thing, so I’m sure I got some of it right back.

We stopped going to the small bars where we watched live music, and some of our favorite restaurants were out too. There was just too much smoke around us. And for a while, some of our friends who were heavy smokers had to go too.

Not because we suddenly had a problem with them. We just couldn’t be around that much smoking yet.

My wife and I were doing all of this at the same time. We quit on the same day, started the patch together, and were both dealing with the same cravings and bad moods.

I’m not going to pretend we were some inspirational little support team. We were both miserable at times and probably equally nasty to each other.

But neither of us had to explain what the other one was going through. If I had one of those uncontrollable cravings, she knew exactly what that felt like. If she was having a bad day, I knew too.

Looking back, I think that mattered more than anything else we tried. The patch helped. Changing our routines helped.

But we were both trying to quit the same thing at the same time, and neither one of us wanted to be the first one to give in.

Now Everybody Knew

Around that time I had been talking with our HR Director about quitting. We were close and I used to stop by his office after hours pretty regularly. He had smoked when he was younger, back when he was a police officer, and was very supportive. He was also responsible for the company newsletter, and the two of us came up with the idea of me writing about quitting. We had somewhere around 800 employees, so once that thing went out, everybody knew. That was intentional. My wife and I were already doing the hard part, but publishing it made starting again a whole lot more embarrassing.

Eventually, Life Came Back

Somewhere around July, I started noticing I wasn’t thinking about cigarettes constantly anymore. I still wanted one sometimes, but it wasn’t all day, every day.

Eventually coffee came back. We started going to live music again too, although we changed where we went. Instead of spending as much time in the little smoke-filled bars, we started going to more outdoor venues and festivals. Over time, being around smokers got easier.

Today I can be around someone smoking and it doesn’t make me crave. Most of the time I think it smells disgusting. I hate how the smoke gets into my clothes. Sometimes I’ll come home from working in a restaurant or bar and can still smell it on me even if nobody was actively smoking while I was there.

Today, 99% of the time, cigarette smoke is a huge turn off.

The Other One Percent

But there is that other one percent.

Every once in a while I’ll catch a whiff that takes me right back to being a kid. My dad’s Camels… always lit with a match. There’s something about that mix of tobacco and sulfur that still gets me.

For a minute or two, I want a smoke.

Not in some nostalgic, wouldn’t-that-be-nice kind of way. I mean I actually want one.

When that happens, I try to think about something else. How much I hated being controlled by them. Anything except the fact that, for that moment, it smells beyond good and I want one.

Usually, if I can get through a couple of minutes, it passes.

Maybe that’s why I’ve never completely thought of myself as a nonsmoker.

I feel more like a smoker who doesn’t currently smoke.

And as crazy as that sounds, I believe if I smoked one today, I’d be going to buy a pack.

So I don’t.

CTRL: R

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Thanks for reading.
~ JP

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If this gave you something to think about, stick around.

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CTRL Signals by JP Bristol
Clarity. Tenacity. Reinvention. Legacy