Stop smoking!

Why, oh why, would anyone smoke these days? The Complete and Total Loser can understand it if you're over 40, but surely anyone younger than that grew up in an age when smoking was so restricted and expensive that they didn't get thoroughly hooked on it.  
Or not. The Loser has a friend who is 36 and smokes heavily, even now, just under a year after his mother died of lung cancer at the age of 58. 

A woman smokes a cigarette outside Philadelphia's 30th Street Train Station.

Lung Cancer

A coworker of the Complete and Total Loser learned recently that his mother has lung cancer. About 75 percent of lung cancer victims are dead in two years. Is his coworker upset? Sure. Has he quit smoking? Nope. Has the Loser said, "You really should quit smoking"? 
No. He's proud of himself for not saying that.
But he should.

Eric Lawson died Jan. 10 at his California home. The cause was respiratory failure due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. The ruggedly handsome Lawson portrayed the smoking cowboy in Marlboro print ads from 1978 to 1981. He also had bit parts in such TV shows as Baretta and Charlie's Angels before injuries sustained on the set of a Western film ended his acting career. A smoker since age 14, Lawson later appeared in an anti-smoking commercial that parodied the Marlboro Man and an Entertainment Tonight segment to discuss the negative effects of smoking. (People Magazine)

Nature

A Philadelphia suburb, fall, 1975. The Complete and Total Loser and his classmates are on a college campus across the street from his high school. There's a small pond there, home to some fish, other unknown water dwellers and a jumble of ducks of varying sizes and colors. On one side of the pond is mowed grass. On another an acre or so of ungroomed woods.
The Loser and two other ninth graders, all boys (the school is single sex), are working on a biology class project assigned by a progressive teacher who has severe diabetes and has the distinction of being one of the longest surviving people to receive dialysis. He will die by the end of the academic year and is seldom well enough to teach his class now. This gives the Loser and others permission to go off campus, where they smoke pot and cigarettes and swear at full volume. Boys with bumpy skin wearing sport coats and neckties, sitting on rotting logs smoking Marlboros.

These many years later, though, it's the assigned work the Loser remembers. Each group picked a square meter of ground and examined it in detail. They dug a foot deep, took plant samples, and swept a net repeatedly back and forth over the site, grazing the grass and other fauna, to collect whatever insects lived on it.
The Loser doesn't remember the exact number, but it was in the double digits. Dozens of species, living together even as they competed on land that was not remarkably fertile.
Human beings are the only species on earth that could voluntarily, peacefully, bring about their own end. Imagine what a beautiful planet this would be in just a few centuries if we did. The seas, teeming with life. The land rich under clear skies.

The Loser Sees Diana

It had been 40 years. They were childhood playmates, next door neighbors in the suburbs. She is less than a year younger than the Complete and Total Loser, he thinks.
She was the youngest of three, as was the Loser. Italian. When the Loser visited their house different aromas filled the air. The house had more wood and smelled of ironing. A grandmother who spoke no English eyed him warily.
Diana's father was a carpenter, bald, muscular. He wore undershirts and work pants when working around the house or outside while the Loser's dad wore short-sleeved shirts and Bermuda shorts. Her mother hung clothes out to dry. Other mothers had dryers and used them exclusively.
These superficial differences in style may have reflected slight class differences, but the Loser's family and Diana's got along well. Never once did one neighbor complain about the other.
Diana and the Loser learned to ride tricycles together. When the older children tired of their skateboards—then lethal, small toys with steel wheels that slipped out from underneath their riders on turns—they would lie on them and ride down the slope of their street, dragging the toes of their PF Flyers to keep their speed low.
The two were friends. "Wanna play a game?" one would ask. "Yeah!" the other would say. "Let's ride tricycles!" The youngest of the neighborhood kids, they couldn't run fast enough or throw far enough or do anything well enough to play kickball, kick the can, tag or have snowball fights with everyone else.
They played in what they called the woods—a never tamed half acre of the Loser's back yard. At the time kids could still find turtles and garden snakes in back yards. Once, after catching a turtle, the Loser, then seven, teased Diana by holding his hand in front of it, blocking her view. The turtle extended his head and bit the Loser's palm. He shrieked, letting go, yet the turtle held on firmly until shaken off. An early lesson about teasing others.
They never played doctor. Do all kids? The Loser had no interest in girls' bodies at the time. Having any would have had little practical use. He does remember one day in the woods, when Diana had to urinate. She pulled down her pants and squatted. This was a new and different thing to the Loser.
As happens with children the Loser made friends with Stevie, whose house was within walking distance. He saw less of Diana.
A summer day, the Loser straddles his bicycle, which he has recently learned to ride. He is eight now. He's on the street. Diana is standing near him. "Wanna play a game?" he says. "Yeah!" she answers. "Run away from Diana!"
A blank, wounded look. She reaches out and pushes him. He falls, tangled with the two wheeler. He's unhurt but now, when he thinks of this, he wishes he had been and had visible scars to match those etched by guilt.
When he was ten the family moved to a larger house. They didn't need one and the one they moved to was only a mile and a half away. That was too far, however, to walk or even bike, and they never saw each other again until today.
She wrote the Loser a letter when he was home from college for summer asking to get together to "see how we turned out." The Loser, bad with women, bad with the past, considered it until too much time had gone by to respond.
Now she manages a convenience store. A large one, constantly busy. She has a teenage son. They live in a nice house half a mile from that of her birth. She is doing better than the Loser. He saw her today behind the cash wrap, putting cigarettes up while the cashier rang him up. He'd known of her employment there for years. She wore a name tag. He liked that. The boss, but egalitarian enough to do manual labor and follow rules she enforces on others.
The Loser also works in retail, but at a lower level than Diana. Lower level, but a classier place, which is defined in this case as selling things no one needs.
Diana looks good for 50. Shortish hair, a good weight. The same Mediterranean complexion she had as a child. Black eyes. She edges nearer the cashier, a high school girl, who's asking the Loser if he'd like to contribute a dollar to charity with his purchase of half-and-half.
"Not today, thanks," he tells her, looking at Diana.
Their eyes meet. Time has not been kind to the Loser and there's no spark of recognition from her. He doubts that even if she'd seen his deformity, which is below the waist, she'd place him. It has been too long.

Updike is Dead

A pack of Marlboro cigarettes.

The Complete and Total Loser read John Cheever which gave him no room for John Updike so the Complete and Total Loser didn't read him. And now he's dead of lung cancer.
Smoking will do that to you. Hard to believe a guy that smart would smoke himself to death.
The Loser learned to smoke at 13 from a summer friend named Richard.
“Take a small drag,” Richard said. "When you get used to that, take bigger ones.” One night, girls present, the Loser took bigger drags than he was ready for, blowing out impressive clouds. Later, as he and Richard headed for the small sailboat Richard's family owned to sleep, he vomited.
Many stop forever at that point. By summer's end, the Loser was addicted. He found he could buy cigarettes from most stores and that vending machines were unsupervised. Only once in his teens was the Loser refused a pack of cigarettes. You had to be 16. He'd get 50 cents daily to take the bus home from school and then hitchhike, saving the money for cigarettes.

John Updike, smoking.

 The Loser's mother smoked. There’s nothing a teenage smoker likes more than a smoking parent. It covers the smell and provides a source of free cigarettes. If you knew how to roll a joint, you could get butts from a parent's ashtrays and use the leftover tobacco to roll your own. She smoked L&M’s, an awful brand. The package used to have graphics like Marlboro’s, but not as bold. In the 70s they went for a hip look—a photo of a couple, smoking of course, surrounded by trees in full autumn color.
Marlboro was the preferred brand. They came in crushproof boxes, which meant you could put the pack in your blue jeans pocket and still have unbroken cigarettes after a day of bicycling and running around.
The Loser's older brother took up smoking at boarding school. “You’re not a real smoker,” he said, “unless having a cigarette’s the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night.” Smoking in bed was hugely pleasurable. There are times even now, decades after quitting, that the Loser wakes up from a dream in which he was smoking and searches the sheets for a burning ember.
He quit in high school, an all-boys school where he was unpopular. Not going to parties meant few opportunities to impress girls. Even though his tobacco use was withering on its own, it still required a conscious effort to quit.
He went to college in rural Ohio, miles from any city. The isolation was good. The only TVs were in lounges, there were no VCRs, the campus had one computer in the physics department.
The winter of 1977-78, his freshman year, broke records with its snowfall and cold. Even though the campus was small and neatly contained, lying along a level spine-like path less than a mile long, classes were canceled during the worst of the storms that season. From women's dorm rooms came popcorn, cookie dough, hot chocolate, decks of cards and board games.
One reason people start smoking is for a feeling of social togetherness. That winter, as the Loser played backgammon and hearts, he began to borrow cigarettes from friends, first as a joke, with mocking cool. He was soon hooked again and bought packs for those he’d borrowed from. Eventually he skipped that step and bought his own. Winstons.
The late 70s were a smoker’s paradise. You could smoke almost anywhere; dining halls, hospital waiting rooms, libraries, airplanes. Cigarettes cost about 75 cents a pack. In big cities, young people on street corners promoted new brands by giving packs to passersby. You could smoke anywhere. Only once in four years of college did anyone ask the Loser not to smoke while they ate. There were fold-to-assemble ashtrays made of coated paper, a dull aluminum, at library desks and study carrels throughout the campus. Even parties at the jock frats were thick with smoke.
The Loser majored in art. Much of art involves waiting. For gesso to dry, for film to develop, for plates to etch, for ideas to form. A cigarette, held and smoked the right way, was an indispensable part of being an art major.
The Loser didn't quit till he was out of college for three years. At age 25 he knew that, being a loser, he would never be able to quit at age 40 and that he would be the type to get lung cancer or heart disease by 50 if he didn't. It took several attempts but the final one took and now he lives smoke free. When he thinks of how he could simply walk into a store and buy a pack at any time, the idea surprises him a little. He sees smokers standing outside in the cold, the heat, the rain and pities them.