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2001-06-02 - 11:29 a.m.

The first cigarette I ever smoked was during my summer before ninth grade, 1993. My slightly rebellious friend Robin had found an unopened pack of Merit Ultra Lights on the beach at her mom's camp and wanted to share it with me. We opened all the windows of her bedroom at her dad's house-in Guilderland. We sat on her bed holding these burning things- they burned so quickly- blowing out quick little puffs, neither of us knowing we weren't actually inhaling. I felt awesome, like Kim Gordon in her sunglasses and striped dress sharing drags with Thruston and Kurt C. in the Year Punk Broke, which I was watching almost every day and made me beg for several pairs of Converse All-Stars.

At home I stole a pack of my mother's Merit Ultra LIghts (oddly) from the kitchen cabinet and hid it in the hollow of my acoustic guitar. Sometimes when nobody was home I'd "smoke" in a chaise lounge in the backyard, lightheaded not from nicotine but with worry that neighbors could see me. My mom found the pack a couple of weeks later, leaving a post-it-note with the word "surprise!" on my guitar. I still wonder what she was doing looking in there.

Ashamed, I didn't pick up another cigarette until tenth grade, with my first boyfriend and his greaserly friends. I'd snuck out to go bowling with them (my score was 27, I remember. 27! This would be the only thing I'd ever do to warrant grounding. At the time I thought it was the funnest day of my life. I mean, all these boys! Public-school seniors! BAD kids! Right now I could thwack myself on the head with a frying pan in hopes it would resonate to my fifteen-year-old self.) It was then I realized I was doing it wrong. The greaserly friends taught me to inhale properly.

There was a park behind my high school where some kids, my younger friends, would go to incite low levels of debauchery on certain afternoons. I took to smoking one cigarette a day, plucked from someone's pack of Marb Reds. My fingernail was turning yellow, but my parents never caught on. We'd spend Friday nights at a downtown cafe, our-ha- bohemian mecca and salvation of sorts, to drink cinnamon hazelnut coffee, listen to local pompous musicians, and smoke. Always other people's cigarettes. Hand-rolled Drum tobacco from a cannister. A Virgina Slim, once, unexplicably from a cute scary boy I kissed in an alley outside.

My personal clique, my best friends, were athletes and never considered smoking. They weren't part of the whole park/cafe circut and found all its loose members and trappings to be pretentious and exclusive. So it really eludes me why, on my 18th birthday, it was their idea that I buy a pack of cigarettes for us to share. In the dark in my backyard. Behind trees. In parks, after eating McDonald's cheeseburgers, because that's when it "tasted the best". Ok, Jenny never actually smoked, but she.. approved. And supervised.

Laura got addicted, hard-core, her mother blanching with discovery that her daughter smoked Marlboros, "man cigarettes". I went to college in Manhattan and split Newports with my roommate, then went on to Benson and Hedges, Capris, Parliaments, Marb lights, Kamel Reds in Boston.

Smoking was the ultimate freedom. Home for weekends, Laura and I would drive around aimlessly, windows down, music blaring, to Clifton Park and Saratoga. We were depressed. We were chain-smokers. Take that, oppressive forces! We have lighters!

College introduced alcohol, absent (for some reason, because other substances weren't) which only enhanced the visceral pleasures of a cigarette. Beers and smokes in New Rochelle bars, cigs and vodka punch in Aurora. A personal blow was felt when Danielle quit.

Laura quit a year or so later, which I took hard because we were roommates at the time. I was proud of her, but felt slightly betrayed. Smoking for us was powerful, it was an offensive gesture to the world, it was a bonding experience, it was.. an art form. Smoking alone at the kitchen table felt awful. So I quit, too.

Not smoking is easy when you're not really around anyone who smokes. After awhile it's a reason for self-righteousness. I'd see coworkers sneak outside on breaks and want to stick my nose in the air. Ha, I'd think, you're chained to a deadly substance, and I'm not.

Quitting was easy until I went back to school after a semester hiatus and took theater classes. Drama kids. They smoke. Oh, do they smoke. Play-rehearsal breaks would get so boring, not smoking, that I eventually gave in and started bumming, then buying again. That spring entirely consisted of gay bars, amaretto sours, and marb lights. I quit again during the summer, but when I did a show again, the exact same thing happened.

Now, I feel like I can take or leave smoking. I know I'm addicted still, to a degree, because while I don't buy packs I find myself bumming my boyfriend's Camels or feeling a full-body craving when I have a beer (or, for that matter, a McDonald's cheeseburger). It feels, though, like the addiction is more.. emotional than physical. Smoking has been rebellion, socialization, leisure, fun, freedom. It's hard to disconnect the two.

I haven't seen Robin for years now. I wonder if she ever learned to inhale properly.

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