COMMENTARY | It was a warm Saturday in September, 1980. Sifting through an ashtray on my coffee table I found an old Kools butt that had a drag or two left in it. I was out of smokes. I needed to light up. I took it, lit it and smoked the last of it. I thought, “That’s it. I’ve got to quit this crap. I feel like a junkie needing a freaking fix!” As I exhaled, I began to think of all the negatives there are in smoking. I thought of the stained index and middle fingers I had developed. I thought of using a handkerchief to wipe my mustache. The brown tobacco stains never to come out, ruining another hanky. I was getting depressed.
I started smoking in senior year of high school. My best friend, John McGrann, another pal nicknamed Moose and I actually smoked our first butt in the senior lounge. It seemed like a cool thing to do at the time. We felt like we were adults. We turned 18 the summer of ’72. We started to hang out at the Rainbow tavern on 4th Ave. and 59th Street in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. We dumped lots of quarters into the cigarette machine there. So I had been smoking for eight years. Two packs a day for at least three years.
I thought about how the addiction of cigarettes latches onto some other stimuli like cigarettes and booze at night, cigarettes with morning coffee, a cigarette after a meal, etc. I was determined to get this monkey off of my back. Besides, they cost over a dollar for a pack and my two packs a day habit was making me broke. I wrote on a piece of paper from a yellow legal pad “Midnight 12/31/80 last cigarette.” I took that paper into our bedroom. I taped it onto the mirror on top of my bureau. My wife noticed it and laughed. “You can’t quit. You tried so many times, you have too many excuses.” She also smoked. But she rarely bought a pack. She’d always take one from me when she needed. It used to drive me crazy.
Every day as I dressed for work or school I looked at that note. September, October, November passed. It was now the middle of December and when I looked at that note I caught myself thinking of excuses. “I really just need to cut back. I don’t have to completely quit.” But then the letters on the note would seem to get bigger and bolder “Midnight 12/31/80 last cigarette.” The note silently blared in my head.
It was December 31 and I was having a smoke with my lime-twisted rum and coke. We stayed home that year. We had Hans and Jasmine, our neighbors, over to watch Dick Clark’s New Year’s Eve show with us. I carefully smoked my last cigarette with one minute left on the countdown. “Five, four, three, two, one,” I slowly exhaled. I put out the butt. I was fine. The next two weeks were tough. It was that connection thing I talked about earlier. I really missed a cigarette with my morning coffee. I also missed the guys at work during our smoke break. But most of all, my wife was driving me nuts smoking Parliaments at our dinner table. Finally, at the three-week mark, I spoke about it.
“How can you be so mean to me?”
She looked me square in the eye and said, “You’re really serious this time aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am trying so hard,” I pleaded.
“I’ll tell you what, I’ll quit with you.” Saying that, she took her pack of Parliament, squeezed it and tossed it into the trash.
It’s been 31 years, four kids and about 40 pounds since that night. I can honestly say we never looked back. I saved that piece of yellow legal pad. I have it stuffed in our Bible. In November 1981 I ran in the New York marathon with my dad. It is a great memory. I know that it never would have happened if I still smoked.