I

In 1964, my sister and her ninth grade friends smoked in our basement.

I was in fourth grade and they were like grown women to me

with breasts and mascara and so damn confident. I’d let them brush my hair,

paint my nails, anything to stay in that circle of warm hands and cool chatter.

“Look! He doesn’t cough,” Chrissy’d say and hand me a Marlboro.

And I’d inhale, hold it in, and play my part as my lungs tightened,

smoke scraping my throat, my head reeling from euphoria

and lack of oxygen, my eyes watering, but I was not going to cough

until I’d blow it out, swallow hard and shrug. “Yeah, been smoking for years.”

II

I was 13 when my grandmother got caught giving me cigarettes,

sharing her Salems that I smoked with Andy Dolph in the woods

behind his house. My parents were pissed. “How could you?” my mother asked,

but Nanny only cried. I kept saying, “It’s my fault,” but no one listened.

My mother began to cry. My father got quiet and still.

Outside the dogwoods sprouted little white blossoms.

The pale afternoon sky slid to evening. I was grounded for two weeks

and sent to fume in my room. Where did all that anger come from?

I once dreamed of saying, “Bond… James Bond”

before pulling a smoke out of my silver cigarette case.

III

But by seventh grade I was all Cool Hand Luke, taking a drag and saying,

“Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.” In 1967, 40% of adults smoked.

I could buy a pack of Lucky Strikes for 35 cents from the machine

in the back of the Chinese restaurant across from St. Catherine’s.

JFK smoked. LBJ smoked. The Beatles smoked.

The Pope smoked. Well, maybe not the Pope, but every teen

wanted to be James Dean and every girl wanted to be Audrey Hepburn

waving her cigarette as she flirted in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

IV

And what a great way to meet girls, moving from “You want a smoke?”

to “Want a drag?” to sometimes when the clouds aligned, sharing a puff.

No shit! I sat in my room dreaming of Megan Slater and how

she was probably sitting at the Wall smoking with Tommy Murphy.

How when she tried to teach me to blow smoke rings,

her puckered lips wrapped around a Marlboro, forming an O of red

to launch circles of smoke so perfect I poked a finger through them

and pretended to hand them back. She gave me the butt and I inhaled,

watched the head ignite and blew thin wobbly ovals that wavered,

collapsed and vanished into the breeze behind Riverside School.

Megan’s blue eyes squinted, she laughed, took a drag, leaned in,

pressed her open lips into mine and blew into my mouth.

My throat opened, my chest rose, my fingers reached for the blond curls

on the back of her neck and she taught me to kiss like teaching me to dance.

If it wasn’t love, it was as close as I’d ever been.

V

It all started with a Marlboro – out of a red and white box

we’d tap three times to pack tight before opening, tall black letters

a red and gold crest framed by two thoroughbreds on hind legs,

the gold strip pulled with a flick to unwrap the cellophane.

I sat in my room and steamed, dreamed of being older,

of smoking in the living room, flicking my ashes into Dad’s ashtray

with the St. Michael’s seal – right next to his own gray clump of pipe tobacco,

or driving a Mustang with the top down, lit Marlboro dangling from my lips

as I squint one eye and nod to the girls hanging out on Sound Beach Avenue.

It was spring for god’s sake! I couldn’t just sit there and watch my life go by.

VI

On the second Saturday of my grounding, I snuck out at 2:00 am

to meet Megan and Dave Oldham and Maura Dolan at the swings

behind the elementary school and we played drop the ash,

and kissed and told each other secrets. I snuck back in

as the birds stirred and the light shifted from purple to a pale blue

and my dad snorted and rolled onto his back.

Later I hunched into the open bathroom window

and inhaled and dreamed of Megan’s lips. The smoke rose from lungs

to eyes to brain like warm water filling a beaker. My head grew light

and I sighed, exhaled through the screen and repeated until I squeezed

the last rush out of the speckled filter and flushed, sprayed the air

and washed my hands and was shocked when I came downstairs

and my mother told me to stop smoking in the bathroom.

VII

It wasn’t just about women. It was Bob Dylan and the Marlboro Man

and Mick Jagger and Frank Sinatra. By ninth grade, I was already saying,

“Quittin’s easy. I’ve done it hundreds of times.” But who wanted to quit?

How else to spice up a dull day if I wasn’t meeting Nicky Zaccarolla,

the wildest kid in Eastern Junior High, in the second floor bathroom

and standing on the toilet and blowing smoke out the window?

Smoking became a ritual, how I made new friends, moved girl friend

to girlfriend, and announced to the world I wasn’t some doofus

afraid of his dad’s shadow. I had my daily rites – that first cigarette

that woke my brain, that post school cigarette that said I was free,

that post dinner cigarette that settled my stomach, that before bed cigarette

that told my body, “Relax, close your eyes and dream.”

Quitting was like leaving a cult: the lonely nights, the smoker friends

reeling you back in with a wink or a pack left behind in my car.

Or losing a lover: the aches, the doubts, the dizziness, the old haunts avoided.

VIII

I quit for a year in high school when I couldn’t run a mile without wheezing

and coughing up brown phlegm and for six months in college,

because we bet the rent, but I always slid back – mooching Camels in bars

to chase my chaser, bumming smokes at rest stops to kill time while driving,

sharing smokes in discos with girls I hoped would take me home.

Quitting meant quitting Megan, and Nanny, who after we got caught said,

“I can’t give you cigarettes,” pointed to the drawer in her dresser,

and added, “But you know where they are.” And Chrissy’s sexy friends

in the basement. And Nicky. If I wasn’t a smoker, who was I?

IX

It took a gun to make me stop, a shotgun blast

when I wandered too far forward and a quail flushed sideways,

followed out of the dense vines by a spray of birdshot from Dan’s gun,

spinning me to one knee thinking I’d shot my own gun

and it had recoiled into my ribs. I peeled up my sweatshirt

to see forty red pellet wounds, threw up later when I tried to smoke,

pissed blood. X-Rays showed a constellation of white pellets across my chest

and my CAT scan was a storyboard of bright BBs in my liver and kidney

and elbow and ribs. By the time I was out, I hadn’t smoked in two weeks.

And those red drops of blood leaking out of my gut had done their job,

along with the PSAs of blackened lungs and Nanny’s boyfriend Zeke

inhaling through the hole where his larynx used to be.

X

When the smoke cleared, the gunshot washed away all the anger,

the wishing for a different life, the pushing against my parents,

the balancing on the razor’s edge of adrenaline and stupidity

– all was gone. Leaving an acute awareness of my good fortune.

Still, on a fall day, when smoke wafts from some rebel’s cigarette,

I follow it, inhaling, closing my eyes, feeling the sweet lightness in my brain

and it all comes back: Megan’s kiss, the pride in Chrissy’s eyes,

the Boy’s Room door opening and Mr. Loughran calling, “Who’s in there?”