It All Went Up in Smoke

By ART CULLEN

First chance I got following a tooth-pulling the Monday before Thanksgiving, I spat out that chunk of gauze and fired up a smoke.

Then I checked instructions for post-extraction care:

DO NOT SMOKE, BOZO!

The throb of dry socket drifted in the plume. They say it is awful.

Okay. That really should be it. No smoking for 48 hours. Every time you get the urge, think of that pain around Tooth #31, bottom right near the back where you chew, amplified by 10 times.

I did it in an emergency. No small feat. I have been smoking for 55 years. Started by stealing Marlboros from my dad, who had a carton at home up near the bottle of Black Velvet, and another carton in his office desk, and a carton under the seat of the car.

Smoking was daring and cool. All the GI heroes in the movies had a fag hanging from their lips. Humphrey Bogart out there in the African Queen with Katherine Hepburn, sweating and smoking. When Clint Eastwood lit up you knew something was about to blow up.

Smoke em if you got em, so we did, me and Guy Colvin down by the lake.

Fast forward and here I am courting fate. Soon I will be a gummer. In searching around my prostate they found an aortic aneurysm. And macular degeneration, which can lead to blindness. The dominant factor for each problem is smoking. I knew that. We all did, even before the surgeon general posted warnings that were read and ignored by the carton.

Eventually we were driven out of the all-night diner and office, and finally the bar, to huddle by the dumpster and hotbox one before you froze. Still, we smoked. We’re an exclusive fraternity, something like 10% of the population smokes.

Most of my friends smoked like chimneys at one time or another. I was up to a pack a day, 20 cigarettes, more if I were driving. You smoke with coffee, when you drink, after you eat, after you-know-what, after you go to the bathroom, when you are fishing, when you are bored, while you are typing. After typing, you reward yourself with another smoke.

Actually, you are rewarding RJ Reynolds at $10 a pack.

I’m often broke but I always could scrounge up enough spare change for smokes.

I love smoking. I love the smell. I love the taste. I like blowing rings. My clothes stunk and so did my breath but that was me, as I fashioned it. An elegant form of suicide, Kurt Vonnegut said.

I’m having a jones for it as we speak.

After all, Donald Trump’s designee as FBI director, once he fires the current director he appointed, said he would launch criminal prosecutions against journalists. Smoking seems a gratifying way to beat prison or the nursing home when current affairs drive me to dementia. Lord, the thought of it makes we want a puff. Just a puff while you watch America’s founding values blow away in the gales of our manufactured discontent.

It’s pathetic, I know. A friend told me how she dried cigs in the microwave after her children poured water on them.

Just a flick of the Bic, if you please, while the band plays one final tune.

Derangement syndrome, they call it. It’s where I’m at. Liberty or death! No more cable bills. No more complaining phone calls. No more internet trolls telling me I am a civic cancer. Screw it. Might as well go out with an aortic explosion.

It’s a noble thought until death knocks or sharp pain presents itself.

I had been cutting back, from a pack down to 10 a day, and then down to five. Confronted with the certainty of immediate pain, I was forced to stand down. I am trying to be a better, less morally flawed person who doesn’t excuse himself from boring company after supper to go hang out with the good fellas by the dumpster.

They aren’t going to let me smoke for the stent insertion into my aorta. They won’t let me burn one while they treat my prostate cancer in the hospital. So it goes, and so do I, sometimes one hour, one minute, at a time. Just to let me hang on long enough to comment on the Armageddon.

Art Cullen is publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2025

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