To commemorate my first real Father’s Day as a father (I don’t remember last time, we were barely out of the hospital so it doesn’t count), I offer two stories:
During my second summer in college, my sister had a terrible accident while the family was on vacation in Shanghai. When she came out of the ICU, my father, mother, and I moved into her hospital room to keep her company until she was recovered enough to go home.
It was a terrible idea.
We stayed in that room for months. By the end of it, I wanted nothing to do with my sister. She had long since graduated from gratitude to misery. She was bed-ridden and in constant pain from her injuries, with one leg in traction all the time. I didn’t care. I was tired of showering in a tiny bathroom, sleeping on three pushed-together chairs, and gaining over 10 pounds from eating nothing but takeout. I missed my friends and was falling behind in school. On top of all that, I was getting lectured for spending too much time trying to escape through my laptop games.
After an attempt to get my sister to be more appreciative of what everyone was doing for her resulted in her having a panic attack that flooded our room with medical staff, I resorted to taking out my frustrations on my father. After all, it was his decision that we should all entomb ourselves in that sterile Shanghainese hospital with his sick daughter.
As a child, you mostly don’t notice how sometimes your parents are barely holding it together. One time, after I said some particularly cutting shit, he broke down and wept.
"You have no idea how this hurts. I used to treat grandma the same way and now I know how she felt. You cannot know, but when you have children and I’m gone, you will.”
Happy Father’s Day everybody! (and sorry dad!)
***
My thirtieth birthday was coming up and I was lighting a cigarette just outside the front gate of my apartment complex. They had some rule about not smoking on the premises, so there I was, one step outside it, a guest who wasn’t welcome in his own home.
My relationship with cigarettes was a strange one. Unlike most smokers I knew, I didn’t start in high school. I won’t try to ascribe meaning to something I cannot consciously comprehend, but I had my first one the year my sister’s accident happened.
I lived in Montreal then, where they rarely card you for anything. And anyway, I was a pretty good artist in high school who had a side hustle scratching IDs. My student card had my birthday printed in block letters on a white background. Easy peasy. I remember buying my first pack and being surprised at how light they were. The filter was made of styrofoam, and it seemed like the whole cig was, too. I lit it and got a head rush that nearly knocked me out, but that wasn’t why I smoked.
I was tired of being judged by people who had barely seen anything of life, yet accepted the answers society gave them unquestioningly. The ones who thought the rest of us were crazy for embracing eccentricity. The people who could not compute why anyone would smoke cigarettes given their proven health hazards. People like my dad. Having a cigarette let me blow smoke in their faces on multiple levels.
In Montreal, smoking was still common, and bar patios were everywhere. “Restaurants” would put cold unseasoned pasta on your table so they could serve you alcohol even if you didn’t order food. After a few drinks, a hard pack of Marlboros or Parliaments, Benson & Hedges, or Camels would sit out in the center of the table and we’d stay until they were gone. Sometimes we’d pitch in and one of us would go get more. That summer before Shanghai, I bussed in one of those restaurants. I’d run along the Old Port and buy 25-packs for American patrons taking a “when in Rome” attitude to the city. After my shift, I’d walk the hour or so across town to my house, lighting my next cigarette with my previous one, literally chain-smoking. At one point I was a two-pack-a-day smoker.
I was once asked by a politician I was volunteering for in college whether I’d ever considered quitting. I told him that as long as I was done by 26, my lungs would fully recover by my mid-thirties. There were studies on it, I said. Then 26 came and went and I kept going. It was impossible to imagine an identity without cigarettes.
Every human preoccupation that’s been around for a while comes with an entire culture to help legitimize it. Even the blockbusters that aren’t about war are about war. Why do you think all the Avengers work for a secret government paramilitary force? Smoking is no different. It comes with thousands of little fetish objects. Zippos, Ronsons, Bics, each lighter has its distinctive flick and flicker. Then there are the cigarette holders, portable ashtrays, accompanying beverages, and a backlog of propaganda fueled by tobacco (nearly every great artist, writer, and musician of the 19th and 20th centuries smoked).
The squares think it’s stupid, “Every cigarette takes seven minutes off the end of your life, and you’re giving it up just to look cool? That’s sub-moronic.”
“Cool” started with the Jazz musicians and political rebels. It’s an aesthetic of societal detachment. It’s what happens when our rigid political structures lie to us about everything and we don’t know what to believe so we just stop caring. And then we signal that we don’t care by consuming one of the most cynical corporate products ever created. The system has us trapped, so we’re going to lean in.
Smokers aren’t like climate change deniers or flat earthers, we aren’t doing this because we don’t believe it will kill us. We do it because fuck it. And yes, some are doing it because it feels good and the nicotine really does addict them in the way the studies say it will, and I am truly sorry for those souls. But for most, it’s about control. I wanted to control how people saw me, to filter out the people I didn’t want to deal with anymore. I also wanted to control uncomfortable situations, to be able to step away from boring parties or bad dinner dates and join the community huddled by the door lighting up. And I wanted an out when life got really bad. By choosing to snip those seven minutes off the end, I was controlling life’s hold over me.
Smokers get that life is suffering and we wanted you to know that we don’t care. Like protesting monks who are beyond it all, it’s self-immolation lite. Public cutting. Only, we would laugh at the notion of smoking-as-protest because we’re so jaded we don’t even think about that.
That was my little rebellion, that was why I smoked for over 10 years. And then one day I stepped outside for a smoke and it dawned on me that I was turning 30 and I didn’t want anything for my birthday that was actually attainable. I wasn’t going to get a Lambo, or a hot new girlfriend, or early retirement. Perhaps what I should do to mark my 30th birthday instead was get something for the people who raised me.
My mother had been dead for over half a decade at that point, and because I didn’t want anything, I wondered what she would want. The answer came instantly: She would want me to quit smoking.
So I made a promise to her memory and decided then and there that I would smoke my last one on my 30th birthday. I never did. In the days that followed, I became more and more committed to becoming a non-smoker. I didn’t exactly quit cold turkey, but I didn’t follow a weaning schedule, either. I just… stopped caring about whether I had a cigarette or not. It wasn’t even the guilt of knowing that what I was doing to my body would hurt my parents if they knew. I just became engrossed in finding ways to achieve what cigarettes did for me that wouldn’t make my parents sad.
I can’t remember exactly which day it was that I smoked my last cigarette, only that it was before I turned 30. I do know that I never finished it and that I haven’t had one since.
I’m glad I quit. I’m fortunate to have parents for whom the best gift a broke 30-year-old son could give is also the best gift he could give himself.
***
My son just turned one a few weeks ago. He still can’t talk, but if all goes according to plan, dad’s prophesy will come true and he will cause me pain I cannot yet comprehend. I accept this karma. And if I do my job right, he will also learn that the happiest gift a father could ask for is a child who knows how to be happy.
What a heartfelt testimonial. Happy Father's Day!