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One Sunday morning, I awoke terribly hungover and out of cigarettes. My head was stuffy, and it felt like there was a ten-pound weight pressing on my chest (I smoked more than a pack the night before). Even to a smoker, which I’d been for four years, that’s alarming. Feeling utterly beat-up and pathetic, I decided it was as good a time as any to quit cigs cold turkey. And to help make that happen, I would cut out drinking and junk food, too.
Why stop drinking? If you’re wondering that, you’ve obviously never been a smoker. Booze, cigarettes and I are perhaps the only threesome I’ll ever be a part of—once you start fooling around with one, you can’t get off without the other. So I won’t go to bars…Fine, I thought. If I could take a childhood without video games, cable or pillows (I was convinced pillows were only for adults until I saw one on a friend’s bed in fourth grade), I could take anything.
And part of the reason I started smoking in college anyway was boredom. Cooking a healthy dinner every night would give me something to keep my mind off of smokes.
After a dinner of soup, salad and lemon chicken on my first night of being a quitter, I Googled tips quit smoking. Following a suggestion from Quit.org, I stashed away the things that reminded me of smoking, which, for me, is everything worthwhile: my lighters and ashtrays, yes, but also the pictures of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards on my wall, my Carver and Cheever books, any pre-1970 DVD or anything featuring Jack Nicholson. I couldn’t even listen to Tom Waits to calm me down. This was stupid.
Other sites offered more doable tips. WhyQuit.com suggested drinking large amounts of cranberry juice (the high acidity is supposed to quell cravings), and QuitLine.com advised squeezing a ball to release stress and give you something to do with your hands. I headed to the store for supplies and quickly adopted a routine of walking in circles while downing juice and squeezing a ball. I looked like an idiot but it was slightly effective.
But some tips were, for lack of a better word, lame. The idea of writing in a journal about my quitting experience made me laugh, and getting social support from friends (both tips were from 4QuitSmokingHelp.com) wasn’t going to happen; most of them are smokers, and all of them, to some extent, are assholes.
Take my friend and coworker Jake. A nice guy. A stand-up guy. Yet when I was having lunch with him and complained about how hard quitting was, here’s how he supported me: He stood up mid-conversation, pulled a pack from his jeans, put a cigarette to his lips (we’re inside an office, mind you), muttered, “I’m going outside,” and left.
It was my fifth day without a smoke, and I was losing it. At work that morning I interviewed someone for a story and forgot what we were talking about. (The interviewee could’ve said, “Craig Ferguson…now that’s a comedian,” and I would’ve agreed.) I also bitched out my brother on the phone over some minor fact he got wrong about a band. On the El after work I was convinced everyone on the train was expendable. I’d become a monster.
But, my health be damned, I wasn’t a jerk for long. Before Thanksgiving break, I went to a bar with my coworkers to commiserate over a rough week. I had a drink—and another, and another—and on my way home I buckled and picked up a pack. I’m still puffing away. (To be fair, though, I’m eating healthily. Impressed? No? Me neither.)
I’ve always hated when people refer to smoking as a habit. A habit is picking your nose, biting your fingernails—things that are gross but not that emotionally profound. Smoking is something different. It’s a confidant, a stress reliever, someone you can turn to when your heart breaks or upon realizing you’re broke. Quitting smoking, to quote a college buddy, “is like losing a friend.”
And at least for the moment, it’s nice to see my friend again.
