TOWNSHEND — I've always been fascinated by smokers. There is a ritualistic quality to the whole thing: the way they tamp the pack, the way they hold the cigarette, or the way they flick ashes away with a quick snap of the thumb.
Then there is the smoke itself, the way it forms moving Rorschach blots in the air, gray dragons that float toward the ceiling.
Smokers have their own tribal identity. When I went to high school, the smokers all hung out together. They would run out between classes and gather near the parking lot to smoke. Since they all smoked, they all had something in common. If you didn't smoke, you weren't part of their group.
A friend of mine who smoked then was trying to quit. “It's harder than trying to stop drinking. Harder then quitting heroin,” she said, blowing out a long column of blue smoke into the winter air.
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When I went to vocational school, most of the teachers smoked. One of them would light up every time he used the band saw. “I need a cigarette to think,” he'd say.
He left lit, mostly unsmoked cigarettes all over the wood shop. It's a wonder he didn't burn the place down. But this was back in the 1980s, when you could get away with a lot more.
It used to be easier to be a smoker. You could get cigarettes out of a machine, no questions asked, and they cost 75 cents a pack.
Now smokers are ostracized, literally pushed out into the cold. They have become a minority.
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I gather it's not that way in Poland. I worked for a Polish family for several months, and they seemed shocked at the idea of a nonsmoker.
“So, you quit?” they would ask when I declined a cigarette.
“No, I never smoked,” I said.
“Really? Never? Wow. I only knew one person in Poland who didn't smoke,” Wojciech said, as if he were describing an encounter with an albino midget. He, and all his family members, smoked like chimneys. It must be hard to get a nonsmokers' hotel room in Warsaw.
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Like test pilots or stunt performers, most smokers have ways of dealing with the risks.
“Smoked meat lasts longer,” one smoker told me. “So I figure I'll live longer if I smoke.”
Others have a more fatalistic attitude.
“I wanna die young and make a good looking corpse,” one smoker told me. This guy had a face that looked like an old football that had been left outside for too long.
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I used to work with several hardcore smokers. One of them came from a whole family that smoked.
“Yeah, my dad and my uncles all chain-smoked Lucky Strikes,” he said, looking thoughtful.
“One time, when I was a kid, we were driving along a dirt road, and they saw a deer standing in a field. It wasn't deer season, but my uncle got out and shot that deer. They put the deer in the back with me,” he continued.
“My uncle put a hat on the deer's head and put a cigarette in its mouth,” my coworker said. “You know, that was probably the last cigarette that deer smoked.”