Julia Hansen first lit up at nineteen. Twenty years later, she was editing books about health — and smoking a pack or two a day. She denied her son fast food, but smoked in the house and car; curtailed his video games, but lit up at his soccer matches. Despite repeated attempts to quit, she always crawled back to her beloved menthol lights. Smoking had become a metaphorical chain around her neck, shackling her to an early death.
Haunted by a nightmarish vision of her future — her son at her deathbed, begging her not to leave him — Hansen devised a drastic quit method. She bought a 72-foot length of chain that was "unwieldy as a corpse" and locked herself to a radiator in her dining room. What followed: seven days of cold-turkey misery, comic absurdity, and revelation as Hansen stepped from behind her wall of smoke to face her addiction to nicotine — and some painful truths.
Clanking around her house like Marley's ghost, white-knuckling cravings, and struggling to understand tobacco's unyielding grip on her, Hansen confronted her life in smoke: fractured relationships, lifelong battles with alcohol and depression, and a profound sense of emptiness. On day 1, the chain was her addiction to nicotine, each link a story about cigarettes and self-loathing. By day 7, it had revealed its ringing, rattling truth — that every smoker has a story, and it always centers on clinging to a comfort that can kill you. In the end, Hansen's story was painfully simple: She smoked to survive her life. And then, to save it, she quit.
Fierce and funny, honest and utterly absorbing, A Life in Smoke is Julia Hansen's evocative and inspiring account of the extreme measures she took to quit smoking — decidedly not recommended by the medical profession.
Julia Hansen first lit up at nineteen. Twenty years later, she was editing books about health — and smoking a pack or two a day. She denied her son fast food, but smoked in the house and car; curtailed his video games, but lit up at his soccer matches. Despite repeated attempts to quit, she always crawled back to her beloved menthol lights. Smoking had become a metaphorical chain around her neck, shackling her to an early death.
Haunted by a nightmarish vision of her future — her son at her deathbed, begging her not to leave him — Hansen devised a drastic quit method. She bought a 72-foot length of chain that was "unwieldy as a corpse" and locked herself to a radiator in her dining room. What followed: seven days of cold-turkey misery, comic absurdity, and revelation as Hansen stepped from behind her wall of smoke to face her addiction to nicotine — and some painful truths.
Clanking around her house like Marley's ghost, white-knuckling cravings, and struggling to understand tobacco's unyielding grip on her, Hansen confronted her life in smoke: fractured relationships, lifelong battles with alcohol and depression, and a profound sense of emptiness. On day 1, the chain was her addiction to nicotine, each link a story about cigarettes and self-loathing. By day 7, it had revealed its ringing, rattling truth — that every smoker has a story, and it always centers on clinging to a comfort that can kill you. In the end, Hansen's story was painfully simple: She smoked to survive her life. And then, to save it, she quit.
Fierce and funny, honest and utterly absorbing, A Life in Smoke is Julia Hansen's evocative and inspiring account of the extreme measures she took to quit smoking — decidedly not recommended by the medical profession.
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Overview
Julia Hansen first lit up at nineteen. Twenty years later, she was editing books about health — and smoking a pack or two a day. She denied her son fast food, but smoked in the house and car; curtailed his video games, but lit up at his soccer matches. Despite repeated attempts to quit, she always crawled back to her beloved menthol lights. Smoking had become a metaphorical chain around her neck, shackling her to an early death.
Haunted by a nightmarish vision of her future — her son at her deathbed, begging her not to leave him — Hansen devised a drastic quit method. She bought a 72-foot length of chain that was "unwieldy as a corpse" and locked herself to a radiator in her dining room. What followed: seven days of cold-turkey misery, comic absurdity, and revelation as Hansen stepped from behind her wall of smoke to face her addiction to nicotine — and some painful truths.
Clanking around her house like Marley's ghost, white-knuckling cravings, and struggling to understand tobacco's unyielding grip on her, Hansen confronted her life in smoke: fractured relationships, lifelong battles with alcohol and depression, and a profound sense of emptiness. On day 1, the chain was her addiction to nicotine, each link a story about cigarettes and self-loathing. By day 7, it had revealed its ringing, rattling truth — that every smoker has a story, and it always centers on clinging to a comfort that can kill you. In the end, Hansen's story was painfully simple: She smoked to survive her life. And then, to save it, she quit.
Fierce and funny, honest and utterly absorbing, A Life in Smoke is Julia Hansen's evocative and inspiring account of the extreme measures she took to quit smoking — decidedly not recommended by the medical profession.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780743289597 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Free Press |
| Publication date: | 05/19/2008 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Life in Smoke
A MemoirBy Julia Hansen
Free Press
Copyright © 2006 Julia HansenAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0743289587
Chapter One: Day 1
6:33 A.M.
The end is quick -- one defiant hiss as I pass the lit end under the tap. It dies like any other I've held under faucets, dropped into toilets, and inserted into half-empty cans of flat Diet Pepsi. After the murder there is the ritual disposal of the ashtray -- this one the orphan saucer to a cracked teacup -- and the sigh of relief and regret. The deed done, I head into the living room to watch CNN. The last cigarette has soured my stomach, but sweetened my mood. When John comes downstairs, showered and shaved, I can smile. Pausing at the couch for a kiss, he ambles into the kitchen, with me at his heels.
I take a seat and watch him work. Opening the refrigerator, he roots for a moment, then shuts the door with his elbow, cradling the carton of eggs, the butter and bacon, a wedge of Cheddar. John cooks breakfast every morning; he is Pennsylvania Dutch and needs his eggs and bacon. He's a big man -- 5 feet 10, 240 pounds -- and before we started dating he'd lost one hundred pounds, twice. He still struggles with his weight, and loves his bread and potatoes as much as I love my smokes.
As he cracks eggs into a bowl, I say, "Don't make me any. I'm not hungry. I had coffee and a cigarette." (Not a cigarette. The cigarette. The last one.)
He ignores me, keeps cracking. "Hon. You have toeat." He whisks the eggs into froth, pours them, hissing, into our cast-iron frying pan, then drops bread into the toaster. "You want bacon?"
"Sure." I sigh. He will nurture me into a size fourteen.
We eat in the living room in front of the TV news, as we do every morning. I wolf my food, as usual, but John eats the way his people do everything: slowly.
Finally, he lays down his fork and looks at me. "Ready?"
The chain lies in the corner in glinting disarray, one end already locked around the dining-room radiator. Gathering an armful, John drags it to the couch and searches for the free end, letting each heavy coil drop upon the last. Spooked by its clatter, my eleven-year-old cat, Frankie, crawls out from under the coffee table and skitters into the kitchen. I'm inclined to follow him.
John pats the coffee table. I sit and extend my left leg, a maid of honor accepting a garter. He kneels at my feet and, with the other lock, attaches the chain to my ankle with a firm quiet click. Suddenly, I am a chain gang of one. Where are my prison stripes? John is right: I am demented. But this is the only way.
John tugs gently on the chain, then sets me free again. "You better wear socks. This" -- he rattles the chain -- "will hurt in a few hours." I head upstairs, returning in socks but still wearing my bathrobe. I see no reason to get dressed.
John reshackles me, then checks the time on the VCR: 7:24. "I've got to go." John maintains and repairs machinery in a plant that makes car seats and high chairs, and has an hour's drive ahead of him. Stepping over the puddle of chain, he gathers his gym bag and keys and picks up the bag of trash I've placed at the door.
I lower my head, blinking back tears. It's my first day of kindergarten and my mother has just walked out the door. How will I survive this day, my life, without cigarettes? Without my trusty pack I don't exist, like that falling tree in the forest that no one hears.
I clank to the front door with him. We murmur the usual endearments, kiss, and then he's down the front steps. At the Jetta, he turns.
"You're okay with this? You're sure?"
"Yes, yes, I'll be fine. Go." What else can I say? My husband has chained me inside my house, because I've asked him to, and now he's got to go.
"I'll call you later." He gets in, pulls away from the curb, and is gone.
I shut the door gently, rattle back to the couch, and wait to go crazy.
For the first three years of my life, it was my mother and grandmother and me. We lived in my grandmother's little brick house on New Pear Street in Vineland, a small city in southern New Jersey populated by the working-class Italians and blacks who worked in its many factories. On the outskirts of the city was farm country. In August, tomatoes and corn burst from the fertile earth; peaches, swollen with juice, dropped from the trees.
My grandmother's woodsy backyard abuts a house with stables. The horses press against her split-rail fence; she lifts me high, my legs dangling, my dress riding up, so I can pat their velvety muzzles. It is late spring; I love the heavy clusters of lilacs, with their dew-silvered leaves and distinctive scent of honey and rain. I close my eyes and inhale.
There was Elisa, my mother; Julia, my grandmother,
the woman for whom I was named; and me. My father, Nicholas, was just gone. Both eighteen, they'd met waiting tables at a Chinese restaurant in Atlantic City, and he had gotten her pregnant under the boardwalk. Weeping, my mother confessed to my grandmother, who promptly flew at her daughter, slapping and screaming: Her putana of a daughter carried a bastard in her belly. Her brother -- my uncle Art, four years older than my mother -- cornered Nick, held both fists under his nose, and suggested that he marry her. Art had been my mother's protector since kindergarten; small, pencil-wristed boys in his elementary school had paid him to act as their bodyguard. He fought anyone, anytime, for a buck or for free. And so, in November 1962, a justice of the peace in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, performed a quick, quiet ceremony attended only by Art.
My mother didn't want to be married any more than Nick did, however, and they divorced several months before I was born. No real harm done; everyone eventually got what they wanted. My grandmother's pride was restored: I had a last name. Nick got his freedom back. My mother got me, a shining bowl into which she could pour all her inchoate yearnings.
I got something, too: a ghost. Nick's ghost -- short, wiry, with black hair and olive skin, like mine, and small, delicate hands. It shadowed me everywhere. As a child, I could not understand the pain his desertion caused me; as an adolescent, I denied it. In time, it would consume me like a slow-growing cancer.
But that came later. When I was two, my mother enrolled in community college as an English major. During the day, she attended classes while my grandmother, a talented seamstress and a supervisor in a factory that made coats and uniforms for the army, terrorized the women who worked under her. Her next-door neighbor, Irma, watched me while they were gone. In 1965, this was day care. Each day, fat, kind Irma, in her faded housedresses and sturdy shoes, took me for walks and sang to me in lilting Italian. In the late afternoon, I played on her kitchen floor while she prepared dinner for her equally gentle husband, Jules. When my mother returned from her classes, we'd head outside to the swing set in our backyard, or I'd color in the kitchen as she cooked. Dinner, bath, my mother's crooning in the dark, eventually, her warm body next to mine in our shared bed. We lived in a world without men, and were content.
~
All that changed when my mother met my stepfather.
He was tall, this Kurt Hansen, with a high forehead and pale blue eyes. Looking at photos of him during their courtship, I see what she must have seen: strength. Wide shoulders, the shoulders of a man who would make everything all right. He courted me along with my mother, but there was no way I would let him be my father, as my mother sometimes hinted. Perhaps, at three, I was dimly aware that I already had a father, and believed he would return to me one day. What would he think if he knocked on my door, bearing love and gifts, only to find me living with another man?
But my mother married Kurt anyway. Their union was a huge wave that deposited me, gasping, on an unfamiliar shore. My mother and I moved out of my grandmother's house and into the furnished trailer he had purchased to accommodate his new family.
I was enraged as only a three-year-old can be. This man had taken me from my grandmother, the horses, my lilac tree, my beloved Irma. He had stolen my mother. As angry as I was with him, however, I reserved my fury for her. One morning soon after their marriage, she kissed him good-bye at the door of our trailer before he left for work. Suddenly, she screeched and clutched her lower leg, kicked blindly against the pain. There I was on the floor, scuttling away like a scorpion. I'd bitten her calf.
My brother was born a year later and named after his father. I can't say I welcomed his arrival. Perceiving the three of them as a family, myself as an intruder, I was too proud to step inside their shimmering ring of love. I was also confused. On the one hand, I resented my stepfather for displacing me in my mother's heart, or so I thought. On the other, he was my father, the only one I knew, and I had begun to crave his love and approval. I feared I would never win it and scratched at this anxiety constantly, as if at an infected mosquito bite. Nick's ghost whispered in my ear: Who could ever love you?
I had to admit, he had a point. My stepfather had to love my brother; my brother was his. But I was my mother's, so she had to love me. Didn't she? Or would she decide she didn't need me after all?
Looking at family pictures from around that time, I have the sense I was caught in the act of disappearing. In a photo taken just after he was born, my brother and I sit in our trailer on our couch. My mother has put him in my lap, but I refuse to hold him. My arms are under his swaddled body, stiff like a doll's, and he lies sideways across my lap, his eyes puffed, his face stamped with that wizened expression newborns have. I stare into the camera, my eyes blank as pennies. In another picture, I sit in the backseat of my stepfather's old red VW Bug, wearing a pink dress. My brother is strapped into his car seat next to me. This time, there's murder in my eyes. I can only imagine what I was feeling -- betrayal, perhaps, an aching furious betrayal.
That's why I refused them all. Why I would not smile and take my stepfather's hand if he offered it. Why I pinched my baby brother. Why I lagged behind on family walks, kicking rocks and humming as if I didn't have a care in the world. We picnicked on the beach in Ocean City, fed peanuts to the elephants at the Philadelphia Zoo, but I was like the wobbly leg of a kitchen table, always the cause of upsets. My sullenness frustrated my mother and irritated my stepfather -- he was trying, wasn't he? My mother assured me of his love, threw us together, forced him to kiss me good night. The harder she tried to draw me into the family circle, however, the more I withdrew.
I wanted to hurt my mother and drive a wedge between her and her new husband. If I could not share in their love, then I would sabotage it. But there was another motive for my self-exile: survival, pure and simple.
My mother's love for me knew no bounds. She believed we shared the same heart and that she could see her every thought and feeling reflected in my eyes. If she was blue or anxious, then so was I. If she believed that it was the two of us against my father -- as she did more fervently with each passing year -- who was I to dissuade her? I don't know when I made my first primitive attempt at deductive reasoning: My mother is life; I am alive; therefore I am my mother. All I knew is that when I looked inside myself, I saw my mother's face. More confusion. Who was I? Who was she? Was she a part of me, and if she ceased to exist, would I? I couldn't be sure. I yearned to merge with her; I felt engulfed by her. Her oppressiveness terrified me; so did my fear of her abandonment.
~
My mother was beautiful -- an Italian Marilyn Monroe, all light and perfume and curves. She claimed the drawers in our bathroom for her zippered bags of cosmetics, and her dresser held stacks of neatly folded clingy sweaters in the bright colors she favored, orange and turquoise and pink. (My mother also wore tube tops. Oh, the shame of meeting a classmate and her mother in the aisles of the local department store.) Men beamed when they saw her; their wives tightened their mouths. She was like Mardi Gras: loud and colorful, all jingling bracelets and clicking stiletto heels, and disconcerting to certain temperaments. She laughed too loud in front of strangers. Profanities tumbled from her soft mouth like dice from a Yahtzee cup. And every morning after her shower, she smoked one cigarette -- a Camel Light -- as she applied her makeup. The bathroom was right next to my bedroom. Each day I woke to the fragrance of one of her overpowering perfumes, all with the same top note: smoke. When this suffocating yet comforting scent settled in my throat, I knew it was my turn in the bathroom.
If my mother's fingers smelled of nicotine, her heart was as soft as the marshmallow chicks she tucked into our Easter baskets. For most of my childhood, she worked with abused and neglected kids. When she couldn't place children with a foster family for the night, she brought them home, and they slept in our spare bedroom. This was against the rules, but she couldn't stand the thought of them spending a long, lonely night in a detention center. She read to my brother and me, made up her own fantastic stories about shy violets that talked, smothered our stomachs with lipsticky raspberries. She painted our faces, and her own, with chocolate pudding. And she threw the best birthday parties. Every year, beginning in first grade, she invited my whole class into our small backyard, popular kids and nose pickers alike, no one ever left out. There were games and lovely chaos and her beautiful smiling face above a thickly frosted birthday cake.
I learned kindness and compassion from her. When I was around seven, our next-door neighbors allowed my brother and me on their children's swing set, but not the kids who lived on the other side of them. I was outraged; I knew those kids had nothing. They were scented with that musky smell of poverty, and their father was often in jail. I told my mother.
"Those goddamned sons of bitches," she said. "Get in the car."
My brother and I clambered into the backseat of our banged-up Bug, now pocked with rust on the driver's-side panel. The car often stalled when we sped down the highway, which always froze my heart, but we made it to a local department store without incident. My mother raced through the electronic doors, my brother and I hurrying behind her, excited, a little scared -- what was she going to do?
She bought a swing set on credit. My father assembled it when he got home from work. Something about the way he dug the holes for the swing set's legs, and the way my mother shook the frame to make sure it was securely rooted in the ground, made me feel, for once, like a part of them.
The next day, my mother invited the neighbor kids to swing. She pushed them first, and then my brother and me. I swung high, higher. Her palms against the small of my back afforded me a rare moment of peace. Happy, I showed my heels to the sky.
But for all my mother's zany energy and fierce maternal love, she was often engulfed by her own demons. At those times, I sensed something struggling inside her, like a sack of kittens destined for the river.
My mother grew up invisible, neglected by her parents, who worked long hours. My grandfather, a carpenter, loved his little girl, but it was his sons -- one a high-school football hero, the other in medical school -- who would bring honor to his name. My grandmother -- primitive, simple as bread or a cup of water -- didn't need or give love. All she needed was food on the table and shoes on her feet.
Need ran through my mother like a fault line. Fat, bullied by the other kids, she talked compulsively in class; her teachers sat her in the hall outside her classrooms. Each day after being savaged at school, my nine-year-old mother trudged home to an empty house, packed the hole inside her with food, and cleaned. Cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. She mopped the gray linoleum of my grandmother's kitchen floor, scrubbed the toilet and the tub, ironed her father's and brothers' shirts, cooked the family meal. At fourteen she turned exquisite, but the fat, lonely girl she had been was locked in her heart forever.
By the age of eight, I believed it my job to protect her and ensure her happiness. My father certainly wasn't doing it. She and my father raged in the night. I listened to their fights with a fistful of blanket in my mouth, my eyes wide and dry, silently chanting stopitstopitstopitstopit. He would thunder back for a while, then storm from the house.
When he's gone, the house is quiet. I can hear her wandering from room to room, keening. After a while, the hall light flicks on; a slice of it slides under my door. Seconds later, she opens my door gently, switching on the lamp with the purple flower inside the glass -- she is always buying pretty things for my room, frilly curtains, fluffy bedspreads -- and sits on the edge of my bed.
"Sweetie," she whispers. "Are you awake?"
I peer up at her from under the bedcovers. In the light of the hall, I can see the tear tracks on her cheeks.
"I came in to see if you were okay. I'm sorry if your father and I scared you. Are you okay?"
I nod, because she needs me to.
"Are you sure?"
Another nod. She cups her palm to my cheek and drops down, down, down into me, like a miner into a tunnel. "Come here," she says, gathering me in her arms. I smell cigarette smoke.
When she and my father fought, she smoked in the house -- in the family room, his room -- to spite him. Sometimes I stayed up with her while she waited for him to come home. She'd switch off the lamps and lower the volume on the TV to an almost inaudible level; the murmuring voices and muffled laugh track could have been the drone of bees. The room seemed to grow smaller then, as cozy as a cave, but scary, too, as if we'd never find our way out, never see daylight again. In the flickering glow of the television, her smoke appeared blue. I stayed very still, my mind drifting like her smoke, my eyes open against her chest.
"Your father and I...honey, we just don't get along. He's a rotten sonofabitch -- he doesn't care about this family. And I know he treats you differently from Kurt -- he's so much harder on you. He's just a selfish, selfish man. I should leave him -- take you and Kurt and just leave. We could go live with Mom-Mom again and everything would be like it was before your dad. Do you remember when we used to go to the beach, just you and me? I don't want you to worry, honey, but we might have to get a divorce. What would you think if we did? Tell me the truth, sweetie. I really want to know. You can tell me. You can tell me anything."
I'm not sure what she wants me to say. Does she really want to know if I am okay? Or should I stay still and quiet, as I am? And what is this about my father treating me differently? I'd always suspected it, but having it confirmed so directly deflates me. My awkward position on her lap is making my back ache, and my stomach clenches at the possibility of divorce, every child's worst nightmare. I feel small and utterly overwhelmed.
Eventually, she gently pulls away and examines me, holding me at arm's length. In the light of the hall, her eyes glow soft and bright. "I love you more than anything in the world, honey. I love Kurtie, too, but I can't talk to him the way I can to you. He's too little. I don't know what I'd do without you. Are you okay? Are you sure? Because you can tell me if you're not."
No, I can't. It is my job to eat her pain, piece by piece, as dutifully as I eat my broccoli at dinner. So I nod solemnly against her chest: Yes, I am okay.
"Okay then, sweetie-pie -- back to sleep. You have school in the morning. Sweet dreams."
She tucks me back in bed, lingers in the doorway for a second, her silhouette shimmering against the hall light, and shuts the door. After she leaves, her scent lingers -- faded perfume and cigarette smoke, the smell of comfort and of need.
10 A.M.
I huddle in the fake-fur tiger-striped blanket my mother made me for Christmas three years ago, the chain curled at my feet like a faithful dog. Half of me watches a talk show -- a guilty pleasure, the only kind I allow myself. The other half wonders why I'm not craving a smoke. I've never quit cold turkey, and imagined sweats, shakes, agony -- Frankie Machine's withdrawal scene in The Man with the Golden Arm, only with cigarettes. I didn't expect to feel so spacey, so profoundly alone. The couch is an unmapped island, and I am marooned.
During commercials for technical schools and slip-and-fall attorneys, I look around my living room, my universe for the week ahead. Dust blankets every surface. A pile of books, Daniel's school papers, and unpaid bills spill from the desk in the computer room, off the living room. Acceptable under normal circumstances, the disarray disturbs me today; my defenses are down. If my mother were here, she'd offer to clean. Insist on it, in fact. She'd scrub my bathrooms and the kitchen, strip the sheets from our beds, and declutter closets, occasionally crying out over such wanton filthiness. I finally had to tell her to stop bringing her rubber gloves, bucket, and scrub brushes when she came to visit. She honored my request -- reluctantly -- but still offers advice. "Don't waste your money on those expensive cleaners. There's nothing better than bleach. It kills everything."
Pushing past coats and shoes and rolls of Christmas wrapping paper, I drag out my vacuum cleaner. Redemption smells like bleach and lemon oil. If I can't smoke, I will clean -- purge my house of cobwebs and dirt as I purge my cells of nicotine.
I vacuum the living room -- ignoring behind the couch and under the coffee table -- and picture my mother shaking her head, her mouth puckered in disapproval. When I'm through, I stand there for a moment -- this small effort has drained me -- then clank back to the couch, abandoning the vacuum in the middle of the room.
But still I see through my mother's eyes. The living room walls are painted a cheery yellow, but cobwebs lace the ceiling. Though expensive, the wool rug in soft greens and browns, patterned in flowering vines, is too small to cover the scratched wood floor. The knotty-pine entertainment center, from a naked-furniture outlet, is still naked. (We'd planned to stain it cranberry, but never did.) This very couch is my mother's castoff, as is the love seat across from it. I've covered both with pseudo-suede slipcovers in a shade of red she calls cayenne. Her hope is that, someday, I will buy a new dining-room set. Or a couch -- at least a couch. When we talk on the phone, she pleads, "Break down and buy yourself some new furniture, Julia, will you? And don't be cheap. Spend a few bucks and get something nice. You'll have it forever."
Usually, I roll my eyes. Not today. Nothing matches: there's no color scheme, no theme. My house is wrong, pathetic, ugly. My mother has a flair for the decorative arts; she loves bright colors, wills beauty into her life. I grew up in rooms painted pumpkin and periwinkle, filled with lush potted plants, thick carpets of wine and teal, furniture and dishes that matched. A stranger would be seduced by the comfort she'd created, believing that nothing could go wrong in her house. Plenty has gone wrong in mine.
I have lugged around my mother's castoffs for twenty years -- chairs, couches, lamps, end tables, sheets, curtains. But the photographs on the painted wooden mantel above the fireplace are mine, scenes from my own life: John blows out his candles on his thirty-ninth birthday. Daniel perches on John's shoulders outside our house. The three of us, a new family, pose bashfully in front of our crooked tree last Christmas morning.
I rattle over to the mantel and take down a photo. Through a film of dust, my son sits on John's broad shoulders, his button-brown eyes and mouth wide in mock panic. I see a gap, and smile; I keep his baby teeth with my jewelry.
He is why I am here, locked up like a chimp in the zoo. Both our lives are at stake and I won't let him down, even though I hear my Last Cigarette, giggling like Satan. Like dogs hear high frequency humans cannot, smokers hear cigarettes. They can sound like distant music, white noise, the crooning of a mother to her infant. Sometimes all you hear is the whisper of burning paper or the pop of tobacco. But you hear them. You hear them and you heed their call.
Like the moon circles the Earth, my father orbited the vast unknown planet of his family, trapped by its powerful pull.
My father was the director of a not-for-profit workshop that employed the physically and mentally handicapped. His job was to land business and government contracts that put them to work. His employees -- of all ages and levels of disability -- did things like sort ball bearings and assemble Val-U-Paks, small boxes of samples that companies mailed to people to entice them to buy the full-size products. For filling and sealing the boxes they were paid a small wage. When my father landed the Val-U-Pak contract, we had these little boxes of mouthwash, moisturizers, and shampoos all over the house, in every closet.
The gods visited a terrible fate upon my father. They made him an artist with a day job and a family to support. He defied them, however, escaping his life -- us -- through his art. He spent most of his weekends in the basement, transforming logs or slabs of wood into the visions in his head: twenty-foot-long plaques of wild, waving sunflowers, naked women with pendulous breasts and bulging eyes, gargoylesque figures with bared teeth and wings. He always carried a dog-eared sketchbook, and drew his figures in pencil before he put chisel to wood. When I snuck into his workshop and looked through it, touched his chisels and rasps, I saw the inside of my father's intelligent, twisted mind.
Back then, my father was a cold man, as distant from us as the stars. "Oh," he would say on Christmas mornings, holding up our gifts -- the Old Spice from me, the sweater from my mother and brother. But he always drew out that stingy syllable and tipped it down at the end, so it sounded more like "Aw." He gave us brief, awkward thank-you hugs, explaining that he didn't want to catch our colds. We always seemed to have colds on Christmas Day -- all winter, in fact -- and for months he'd keep his distance, as if we were contaminated.
Our table manners were a constant source of irritation to him. If my brother or I put our elbows on the table, he'd jab his fork into the tender flesh of our forearms. One night -- perhaps my brother was eating too fast, or I was smacking my lips -- he snapped. "Jesus Christ," he snarled. "You kids are pigs. Look -- this is you." He picked up a gob of whatever was on his plate -- spaghetti? -- and ground it against his mouth. I must have been ten or eleven. My brother stopped laughing in a hurry; he saw that my father wasn't joking. Ashamed, I lowered my eyes to my plate.
More than once, it occurred to me that my father came home every night not because he loved us, but because we belonged to him, and it was a man's duty to care for his property. Maybe his coldness stemmed from the fact that he was dyslexic. Could it have been that reading people's feelings and motives was as difficult for him as reading words on a page? But he read anyway, because the world captivated him. His nightstand was piled with books about ancient Greece and prehistoric art and how to make beer.
I was shy around him. We would sit in the living room, watching some sitcom, him in his avocado-colored vinyl recliner and me on the couch, and he was as out of my reach as a diamond ring down the drain. Convinced that I disappointed him in some profound way, I vowed to develop some singular talent to prove to him that I was worthy of his love.
It couldn't be art. I loved to draw, but my efforts looked pitiful next to his. So I took up the guitar and judo, only to quit them both because I could not bear to perform in front of him and risk his ridicule. Why in the world would he want to listen to me plink out "Red River Valley," stupidly tapping my foot to keep the beat, as my teacher insisted I do? And the thought of him watching me in judo class made me sweat. He often picked up my brother and me from our Saturday morning classes, and each week I prayed he would arrive late enough to miss my clumsy kicks and rolls.
I thought I had to earn love from him as I earned my allowance, and was furious that my brother did not understand this. Kurt didn't seem to care what our father thought of him. He didn't seem to care about anything, or at least the things that bothered me -- our mother's unhappiness, our father's indifference, their constant fighting. He accepted the way things were in our house with the composure of a cow in the rain. My brother was a charmer, with red-brown eyes and freckles and hair the color of an old penny. I hated him for the way he came and went, with easy confidence and a ready smile, collecting friends as I collected resentments.
11:17 A.M.
The coffee is almost five hours old, as bitter as a department-store Santa. Yet here I am at the pot, pouring my fourth cup. This is pure stubbornness. A cup of coffee without a cigarette is like Vegas without Wayne Newton, pizza without cheese: just not right. But caffeine is the only drug I have left. I will not give it up. In fact, I drink even more coffee than usual when I quit, and take it black hoping that its bitterness will drive the lust for nicotine from my brain.
It never does. Coffee and cigarettes -- a more life-affirming duo does not exist. The Turks knew it, even coining a proverb in homage: Coffee and tobacco are complete repose. On summer Saturdays, when lawn mowers droned to life at seven A.M., or January snowstorms tucked me into my house for the day, I'd sit at my kitchen table with a pack of cigarettes and a fresh pot of coffee and live one perfect hour.
Having collected vices like men's phone numbers in my youth, I now cling to one: caffeine. How humiliating. Obviously, I am a pussy, as afraid to live as to die. Smokers are risk-takers, rebels, iconoclasts, artists. They foment revolution and walk on the grass. I am an old woman who frets about her bowels. My only consolation is my sure knowledge that I will never quit red meat. I may be able to survive as a nonsmoker, but would never make it as a vegetarian.
On the first day of seventh grade, I sit in Honors English, my last class of the day, trying to decide where to sit on the bus. We've moved to a new town and I am the new girl, even more the outsider than usual, and my decision may well chart the course of my life. When the bell rings at 2:15, my class stampedes toward the door. I merge into the sea of feathered haircuts and jean jackets already in the
Continues...
Excerpted from A Life in Smoke by Julia Hansen Copyright © 2006 by Julia Hansen. Excerpted by permission.
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