Daddy took one last draw on his cigarette and threw it into the slop bucket . He didn’t see me toddle over to it, pick the Lucky Strike off a cabbage leaf and put it to my lips. When Daddy looked down to see what I was doing, he came over to me.
“Where did you get that, Son?” he asked.
“Out of the slop bucket, Daddy.”
“That’s where it belongs. I want you to put it back for me.“
I did so.
“Good boy,” he said, “The slop bucket is nasty. That old cigarette is too.”
I didn’t understand why the cigarette was nasty. Daddy didn’t act like it was nasty when he was blowing smoke rings and smiling.
But I was almost as tall as Daddy before I smoked again. Walking out in the country near T.J.’s house, we saw some plants growing along the roadside. They had stalks about 18 inches tall, with narrow leaves, silvery on the top side and brown on the back. I asked T.J. if he knew what they were.
“Rabbit tobacco,” he said. “Cured and shredded… right on the stalk. Look. ” He stripped off some of the leaves.
“Can you smoke this stuff?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, ” T.J. smiled, “Oh, yes.”
Back at his house, we found Blue Horse notebook paper and Three Torches matches to take back to the roadside, where we harvested our tobacco, rolled it up in the notebook paper, and lit up. It took a lot of matches to keep rabbit lit, but it made real smoke. Smoking made an 11 year-old feel so grown up, so independent, so cool. Like the man I watched in Wadesboro a few months later.
It was mid-winter and cold. Waiting in the car, I saw a 20-year-old, leaning up against wall of the Thrift Loan Company. He never took his hands out of his jacket pocket, except to light up with the kitchen match he struck against his shoe. Hands back in place, he put one foot against the wall and leaned back. As he smoked —hands-free — I watched the ash on the Marlboro grow longer and longer, and wondered how he would keep it from falling on his jacket.
Then at the last minute, he thumped the filter with his tongue, kicking the ash away. You couldn’t do that with a notebook paper weed. It was time to leave rabbit tobacco behind.
Not long after that, another buddy, Van Camp, located a source to provide cigarettes at a penny apiece. When Camp got two cents, he brought two Stratfords so we could go hide and smoke. Stratfords stayed lit, and you could thump off the ash with your tongue just like the smoking master of Lower Street.
Pretty soon I had a $15 a week job, so I could finance my own habit. I knew my parents did not approve, so I NEVER smoked in front of them. But being cool was more important than doing what was right, and being cool was what I wanted. Nevertheless, over the years I made some half-hearted attempts to quit.
In college, I went without a daytime cigarette for over a week. But I carried a pack with me to my night-shift job. I was just playing records over the campus radio station, so the minute my hands had nothing to do, my quitting went… well you know.
“I’ll smoke just one,” I told myself — but before my three-hour shift was over, I had smoked 19 more. Pretty soon I gave up all attempts to quit.
That is, until about six years later, when I noticed a pain between my shoulder blades. It came all at once, but it was constant — all day every day. My GP could find no reason for the pain, and neither could a specialist, who said I had probably pulled a muscle in my back and would get over it in a few weeks. I didn’t. I began to wonder— and to worry.
Activated charcoal filters did not stop the pain. Neither did cutting down on the number of smokes. Neither did sporadic half-hearted attempts to quit. That pain was from smoking; it had to be, and I needed to quit it — once and for all. But needing to quit is not at all the same as wanting to.
I loved to smoke. I Ioved the taste, I loved to see the smoke coming out in rings. I loved the Lower Street coolness of the ritual, and the calmness it brought until I needed another one. The very process was satisfying: to pull a weed from the pack, to light up with a cigarette lighter, to smoke, then to watch the smoke flow and the ash grow. The process proved I see immediate results to my actions. Not only was smoking a reason for existence, it proved my existence: “I smoke therefore I am.” To say I needed to quit was true. To say I wanted to, was…blowing smoke. But instead of giving up one bad habit, I adopted another: telling myself, “I’ll quit after this pack.”
I did not have the willpower to quit, because I did not have the want-power to do so. But one day, with 10 smokes left in a pack of Tareyton’s, it came to me that right then: before I smoked one cigarette more, I had to quit.
“I would be wasting 10 smokes if I quit now,” I argued.
But what if one more cigarette was the one that made me sick? Really sick? For a brief moment, I wanted to quit. So I took a deep breath, looked around for a slop bucket… but settled for a trash can.
I went the rest of the day without a cigarette. After that half-day without a smoke, I wanted to see if I could go a whole day, then two days. When I had gone three days without a cigarette, the idea came that it would be a shame to start back now. Then, after the pain in my back decreased, then went away, I wanted to stay quit — really stay quit. I was learning that making a decision — that I wanted to make — strengthened my will. And that when my want to smoke came, I could use my will to talk myself out of a bad decision. Kicking a habit is a matter of want.
Leon Smith, a resident of Wingate who grew up in Polkton, believes the truth in stories and that his native Anson County is very near the center of the universe.
