L.S./M.F.T.

When I was about ten years old my friend Arthur and I would go behind his dad’s garage to smoke cigarettes. We didn’t smoke fresh cigarettes out of a nice clean pack. No, we would pick up half smoked butts that were lying on the ground back behind his dad’s garage and smoke those. I never could figure out why so many half smoked butts were lying around back there, but there were a lot of them.

I was fifteen When I started serious smoking. This was because I could buy them out of the machine at the pizza place I worked at, and my boss didn’t care that a fifteen year old boy was smoking while preparing food for his customers. At that time a pack of ‘Lucky Strikes’ set me back thirty five cents.

Smoking at our high school happened at the ‘Smokers Corner’, a point northwest of our school, immediately over the school property boundary. As long as we weren’t on school property, nobody seemed to mind us smoking. If during the school day you really needed a smoke and couldn’t get out to ‘Smokers Corner’, you could walk past the teachers lounge and wait for the door to open. The cloud that would come wafting out would be loaded with enough nicotine to get you through another class. In 1984, I was thirty four and the price of a pack of ‘Marlboro Lights’ in Chicago went up to a dollar and fifty cents. I had tried to quit smoking a few times and managed to quit for only a few months before the delicious aroma of a freshly lit cigarette would lure me back. This time, however, it was the last straw and I swore I wouldn’t pay that much for something so unhealthy. I finally quit for good, only because I tend to be a cheap bastard.

Now, twenty four years later, I still don’t smoke but I do get a craving for a cigarette when somebody lights one up near me. Which is why I’m really glad that most places have been made no smoking areas, including our bowling alley. Also I save more money because I don’t have to use as much shampoo to wash the disgusting smell of other people’s smoke out of my hair.