When You Are Engulfed in Flames

by David Sedaris

  It was in a little store a block from our hotel that I bought my first pack of cigarettes. The ones I’d smoked earlier had been Ronnie’s — Pall Malls, I think — and though they tasted no better or worse than I thought they would, I felt that in the name of individuality I should find my own brand, something separate. Something me. Carltons, Kents, Alpines: it was like choosing a religion, for weren’t Vantage people fundamentally different from those who’d taken to Larks or Newports? What I didn’t realize was that you could convert, that you were allowed to. The Kent person could, with very little effort, become a Vantage person, though it was harder to go from menthol to regular, or from regular-sized to ultralong. All rules had their exceptions, but the way I came to see things, they generally went like this: Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren’t. One should never loan money to a Marlboro menthol smoker, though you could usually count on a regular Marlboro person to pay you back. The eventual subclasses of milds, lights, and ultralights would not only throw a wrench into the works, but make it nearly impossible for anyone to keep your brand straight, but that all came later, along with warning labels and American Spirits.

  The pack I bought that day in Vancouver were Viceroys. I’d often noticed them in the shirt pockets of gas station attendants, and no doubt thought that they made me appear masculine, or at least as masculine as one could look in a beret and a pair of gabardine pants that buttoned at the ankle. Throw in Ronnie’s white silk scarf, and I needed all the Viceroy I could get, especially in the neighborhood where this residence hotel was.

  It was odd. I’d always heard how clean Canada was, how peaceful, but perhaps people had been talking about a different part, the middle maybe, or those rocky islands off the eastern coast. Here it was just one creepy drunk after another. The ones who were passed out I didn’t mind so much, but those on their way to passing out — those who could still totter and flail their arms — made me afraid for my life.

  Take this guy who approached me after I left the store, this guy with a long black braid. It wasn’t the gentle, ropy kind you’d have if you played the flute, but something more akin to a bullwhip: a prison braid, I told myself. A month earlier I might have simply cowered, but now I put a cigarette in my mouth, the way one might if he were about to be executed. This man was going to rob me, then lash me with his braid and set me on fire — but no. “Give me one of those,” he said, and he pointed to the pack I was holding. I handed him a Viceroy, and when he thanked me, I smiled and thanked him back.

  It was, I later thought, as if I’d been carrying a bouquet, and he’d asked me for a single daisy. He loved flowers, I loved flowers, and wasn’t it beautiful that our mutual appreciation could transcend our various differences and somehow bring us together? I must have thought too that had the situation been reversed, he’d have been happy to give me a cigarette, though my theory was never tested. I may have been a Boy Scout for only two years, but the motto stuck with me forever: Be Prepared. This does not mean “Be Prepared to Ask People for Shit,” but “Think Ahead, and Plan Accordingly, Especially in Regard to Your Vices.”

  Two

  When I was in the fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the American Tobacco plant in nearby Durham. There we witnessed the making of cigarettes and were given free packs to take home to our parents. I tell people this, and they ask me how old I am, thinking, I guess, that I went to the world’s first elementary school, one where we wrote on cave walls and hunted our lunch with clubs. I date myself again when I mention the smoking lounge at my high school. It was outdoors, but still, you’d never find anything like that now, not even if the school was in a prison.

  I recall seeing ashtrays in movie theaters and grocery stores, but they didn’t make me want to smoke. In fact, it was just the opposite. Once I drove an embroidery needle into my mother’s carton of Winstons, over and over, as if it were a voodoo doll. She then beat me for twenty seconds, at which point she ran out of breath and stood there panting, “That’s . . . not . . . funny.”

  A few years later, while sitting around the breakfast table, she invited me to take a puff. I did. Then I ran to the kitchen and drained a carton of orange juice, drinking so furiously that half of it ran down my chin and onto my shirt. How could she, could anyone, really, make a habit of something so fundamentally unpleasant? When my sister Lisa started smoking, I forbade her to enter my bedroom with a lit cigarette. She could talk to me, but only from the other side of the threshold, and she had to avert her head when she exhaled. I did the same when my sister Gretchen started.

  It wasn’t the smoke but the smell of it that bothered me. In later years I wouldn’t care so much, but at the time I found it depressing: the scent of neglect is how I thought of it. It wasn’t so noticeable in the rest of the house, but then again, the rest of the house was neglected. My room was clean and orderly, and if I’d had my way it would have smelled like an album jacket the moment you removed the plastic. That is to say, it would have smelled like anticipation.

  Three

  At the age of fourteen I accompanied a classmate to a Raleigh park. There we met with some friends of his and smoked a joint by the light of the moon. I don’t recall being high, but I do recall pretending to be high. My behavior was modeled on the whacked-out hippies I’d seen in movies and on TV, so basically I just laughed a lot, regardless of whether anything was funny. When I got home I woke my sisters and had them sniff my fingers. “Smell that?” I said. “It’s marijuana, or ‘grass,’ as we sometimes call it.”

  I was proud to be the first in my family to smoke a joint, but once I had claimed the title, I became vehemently antidrug and remained that way until my freshman year of college. Throughout the first semester, I railed against my dorm mates: Pot was for losers. It pickled your brain and forced you into crummy state universities like this one.

  I’d later think of how satisfying it must have been to them — how biblical, almost — to witness my complete turnaround. The reverend mother becomes the town slut, the prohibitionist a drunkard, and me a total pothead, and so quickly! It was just like you’d see in a made-for-TV movie:

  FRIENDLY FELLOW FROM DOWN THE HALl: Oh, come on. One puff’s not going to hurt you.

  ME: The heck it won’t! I’ve got some studying to do.

  HANDSOME ROOMMATE OF THE FRIENDLY FELLOW DOWN THE HALL: Just let me give you a shotgun.

  ME: A shotgun? What’s that?

  AGAIN THE HANDSOME ROOMMATE: You lie back while I blow smoke into your mouth.

  ME: Where do you want me to lie?

  I remember returning to my room that night and covering my lamp with a silk scarf. The desk, the bed, the heavy, misshapen pottery projects: nothing was new, but everything was different; fresh somehow and worthy of interest. Grant a blind person the ability to see, and he might have behaved the way I did, slowly advancing across the room and marveling at everything before me: a folded shirt, a stack of books, a piece of corn bread wrapped in foil. “Amazing.” The tour ended with the mirror, and me standing in front of it with a turban on my head. Well, hello there, you, I thought.

  I let a college kid give me a shotgun, and for the next twenty-three years my life revolved around getting high. It was pot, in fact, that led me to smoking tobacco. Ronnie and I were by the side of the highway, making our way to Canada, and I was whining about having no marijuana. The sameness of everything was getting on my nerves, and I asked if cigarettes made you feel any different.

  Ronnie lit one and thought for a minute. “I guess they leave you sort of light-headed,” she told me.

  “You mean, like, nauseous?”

  “A little,” she said. And I decided that was good enough for me.

  Four

  As with pot, it was astonishing how quickly
I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life was a play, and the prop mistress had finally shown up. Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill and then empty. My hands were at one with their labor, the way a cook’s might be, or a knitter’s.

  “Well, that’s a hell of a reason to poison yourself,” my father said.

  My mother, however, looked at the bright side. “Now I’ll know what to put in your Christmas stocking!” She put them in my Easter basket as well, entire cartons. Today it might seem trashy to see a young man accepting a light from his mom, but smoking didn’t always mean something. A cigarette wasn’t always a statement. Back when I started, you could still smoke at work, even if you worked in a hospital where kids with no legs were hooked up to machines. If a character smoked on a TV show, it did not necessarily mean that he was weak or evil. It was like seeing someone who wore a striped tie or parted his hair on the left — a detail, but not a telling one.

  I didn’t much notice my fellow smokers until the mid-eighties, when we began to be cordoned off. Now there were separate sections in waiting rooms and restaurants, and I’d often look around and evaluate what I’d come to think of as “my team.” At first they seemed normal enough — regular people, but with cigarettes in their hands. Then the campaign began in earnest, and it seemed that if there were ten adults on my side of the room, at least one of them was smoking through a hole in his throat.

  “Still think it’s so cool?” the other side said. But coolness, for most of us, had nothing to do with it. It’s popular to believe that every smoker was brainwashed, sucked in by product placements and subliminal print ads. This argument comes in handy when you want to assign blame, but it discounts the fact that smoking is often wonderful. For people like me, people who twitched and jerked and cried out in tiny voices, cigarettes were a godsend. Not only that, but they tasted good, especially that first one in the morning, and the seven or eight that immediately followed it. By late afternoon, after I’d finished a pack or so, I’d generally feel a heaviness in my lungs, especially in the 1980s, when I worked with hazardous chemicals. I should have worn a respirator, but it interfered with my smoking, and so I set it aside.

  I once admitted this to a forensic pathologist. We were in the autopsy suite of a medical examiner’s office, and he responded by handing me a lung. It had belonged to an obese, light-skinned black man, an obvious heavy smoker who was lying on a table not three feet away. His sternum had been sawed through, and the way his chest cavity was opened, the unearthed fat like so much sour cream, made me think of a baked potato. “So,” the pathologist said. “What do you say to this?”

  He’d obviously hoped to create a moment, the kind that leads you to change your life, but it didn’t quite work. If you are a doctor and someone hands you a diseased lung, you might very well examine it and consequently make some very radical changes. If, on the other hand, you are not a doctor, you’re liable to do what I did, which was to stand there thinking, Damn, this lung is heavy.

  Five

  When New York banned smoking in restaurants, I stopped eating out. When they banned it in the workplace I quit working, and when they raised the price of cigarettes to seven dollars a pack, I gathered all my stuff together and went to France. It was hard to find my brand there, but no matter. At least twice a year I returned to the United States. Duty-free cartons were only twenty dollars each, and I’d buy fifteen of them before boarding the plane back to Paris. Added to these were the cigarettes brought by visiting friends, who acted as mules, and the ones I continued to receive for Christmas and Easter, even after my mom died. Ever prepared for the possibility of fire or theft, at my peak I had thirty-four cartons stockpiled in three different locations. “My inventory,” I called it, as in, “The only thing standing between me and a complete nervous breakdown is my inventory.”

  It is here that I’ll identify myself as a Kool Mild smoker. This, to some, is like reading the confessions of a wine enthusiast and discovering midway through that his drink of choice is Lancers, but so be it. It was my sister Gretchen who introduced me to menthol cigarettes. She’d worked at a cafeteria throughout high school and had gotten on to Kools by way of a line cook named Dewberry. I never met the guy, but in those first few years, whenever I found myself short of breath, I’d think of him and wonder what my life would be like had he smoked Tareytons.

  People were saying that Kools had fiberglass in them, but surely that was just a rumor, started, most likely, by the Salem or Newport people. I’d heard too that menthols were worse for you than regular cigarettes, but that also seemed suspect. Just after she started chemotherapy, my mom sent me three cartons of Kool Milds. “They were on sale,” she croaked. Dying or not, she should have known that I smoked Filter Kings, but then I looked at them and thought, Well, they are free.

  For people who don’t smoke, a mild or light cigarette is like a regular one with a pinhole in it. With Kools it’s the difference between being kicked by a donkey and being kicked by a donkey that has socks on. It took some getting used to, but by the time my mother was cremated, I’d converted.

  Six

  Over the years, I’ve had quite a few essays reprinted in textbooks. When the students are high schoolers or younger, the editors will sometimes ask if they can replace or eliminate a certain filthy word or phrase, which makes sense, I suppose. What didn’t make sense, at least to me, was a similar request to eliminate a cigarette, to essentially blank it out. The same is done with photographs now, and the effect is disconcerting. Here is Marlene Dietrich in repose, her fingers spread apart for no reason, her eyes staring at the burning tip of nothing.

  This particular textbook was for tenth graders. Horizons, it was called, or maybe Perspectives. The line that the editors wanted to erase did not glamorize smoking. In fact it was just the opposite. The cigarette in question belonged to my mother and was referred to as an irritant, something invasive that had given me a headache. I suppose I could have replaced the irritating Winston with an irritating Roman candle, but the story was supposed to be true, and my mother never sat around with fireworks in her mouth. The point I argued is that certain people smoke. It’s part of what makes them who they are, and though you certainly don’t have to like it, altering someone’s character seems a bit harsh, especially when that someone is your mother, and picturing her without a cigarette is unimaginable. “It’s like she was a windup toy and that was her key,” I said.

  It seems crazy to cut smoking mothers out of textbooks, but within a few years they won’t be allowed in movies either. A woman can throw her newborn child from the roof of a high-rise building. She can then retrieve the body and stomp on it while shooting into the windows of a day care center, but to celebrate these murders by lighting a cigarette is to send a harmful message. There are, after all, young people watching, and we wouldn’t want them to get the wrong idea.

  We’re forever being warned about secondhand smoke, but if it’s really as dangerous as they claim it is, I’d have been dead before my first birthday. My brother and sisters would be dead as well, or maybe we’d never have lived to begin with, our mother having been snuffed out by her own parents’ cigarettes.

  My grandparents on my father’s side didn’t smoke, but as owners of a newsstand and tobacco shop, they profited from other people doing it. My dad started smoking when he went to college, but he quit when my older sister and I were still young. “It’s a filthy, stinking habit.” He said this fifty times a day, not that it did any good. Even before the warnings were printed, anyone could see that smoking was bad for you. My mother’s sister, Joyce, was married to a surgeon, and every time I stayed at their house I was awoken at dawn by my uncle’s hacking, which was mucky and painful-sounding and suggested imminent death. Later, at the breakfast table I’d see him with a cigarette in his mouth and think, Well, he’s the doctor.

  Uncle Dick died of lung cancer, and a few years later my mother developed a nearly identical cough. You’d think that being a woman,
hers would be softer, a delicate lady’s hack, but no. I remember lying in bed and thinking with shame, My mom coughs like a man.

  By the time my embarrassment ripened to concern, I knew there was no point in lecturing her. I had become a smoker myself, so what could I say, really? Eventually she dropped her Winstons in favor of something light and then ultralight. “It’s like sucking on a straw,” she’d complain. “Give me one of yours, why don’t you?”

  My mother visited twice when I lived in Chicago. The first time was when I graduated from college, and the second was a few years later. She had just turned sixty, and I remember having to slow down when walking with her. Climbing to the elevated train meant stopping every fifth step or so while she wheezed and sputtered and pounded her chest with her fist. Come on, I remember thinking. Hurry it up.

  Toward the end of her life, she managed two weeks without a cigarette. “That’s half a month, practically,” she said to me on the phone. “Can you believe it?”

  I was in New York at the time and tried to imagine her going about her business: driving to the bank, putting in a load of laundry, watching the portable TV in the kitchen, nothing in her mouth besides her tongue and her teeth. At that time in her life, my mother had a part-time job at a consignment shop. Easy Elegance, the place was called, and she was quick to remind me that they didn’t take just anything. “It has to be classy.”

  The owner didn’t allow smoking, so once every hour my mother would step out the back door. I think it was there, standing on gravel in the hot parking lot, that she came to think of smoking as unsophisticated. I’d never heard her talk about quitting, but when she called after two weeks without a cigarette, I could hear a tone of accomplishment in her voice. “It’s hardest in the mornings,” she said. “And then, of course, later on, when you’re having your drink.”