I remember the short, black marks that covered the surface of the night table next to my father’s side of the bed. They were cigarette burns from when he fell asleep, a lit butt dropping softly out of the ashtray onto the table where it scarred the wood before burning out. My dad smoked Pall Malls—and for period of time, More, those long, thin, dark brown cigarettes that were advertised to women. He smoked a couple of packs a day for decades. His aunts and uncles had smoked more than that, and for those of us of a certain generation, our childhood was filled with cigarette smoke (you’ll find ashtrays on living room tables and backyard decks in our family photo albums). I recall the haze of the smoking car on commuter trains, and it wasn’t uncommon to see someone brazen enough to smoke in a subway car, never mind airplanes, movie theaters, and sports arenas.
I wasn't especially interested in smoking myself—a first attempt in second grade convinced me there wasn't anything so special about it—but when I saw my svelte uncle from Belgium roll his own, I was fascinated with the ceremony of cigarettes. There was something about the whole affair that made you more of a grown up.
Almost every cartoon character I doodled had a cigarette dangling from his or her lips—like Lucky Luke, one of Belgium's most popular comics of the time. Once I got a little older, the idea of cigarette case—even if you kept gum in there like Michael Keaton did in Johnny Dangerously—proved an irresistible affectation.
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It wasn't until my freshman year of college that I started smoking in earnest, and I was never a true smoker. Yeah, I worked through at least a pack a day until I was in my late 20s, but since I quit I've never had so much as a drag on a cigarette since. Real smokers don't give up that easily.
Even with the advent of e-cigarettes and vapor pens, it’s sometimes hard to imagine a world dominated by cigarettes—at least here in the States. For a glimpse into what it was like, we present “Our Friend the Cigarette,” a 2004 essay written by one of my favorite writers, Luc Sante—whose highly-anticipated book, The Other Paris will be published later this month. This piece originally appeared in Sante's wonderful collection, Kill All Your Darlings, and it appears here with the author's permission.
—Alex Belth
Not very long ago, the whole world smoked, no room was truly furnished unless it contained an ashtray, and all of waking life was measured out in cigarettes. Doctors smoked in their consultation rooms. Chefs smoked in restaurant kitchens. Mothers smoked while dandling their babies. Mechanics smoked in oil-flecked garages. Athletes smoked on the sidelines. Teachers smoked in classrooms. Patients smoked in hospital solariums. Television presenters smoked on camera. Shoppers smoked in the produce aisle at the supermarket. We smoked in the rear halves of airliners, in the balcony at movie theaters, between courses at formal dinners, on crowded dance floors while gyrating, on elevators despite the signs, on the subway if the hour was late enough. We smoked in the office and at the beach, in the waiting room and at the hair salon, in the art gallery and at the stadium. We smoked in bed: just after waking and just before sleep, after making love and sometimes during it. We often smoked without being aware we were smoking.
Here, have a light. Yes, if you're going to be a connoisseur about it you should hold the flame a couple of centimeters under the end without touching, so that you avoid the rush of carbon—although actually I don't know anyone who has ever observed that rule besides cigar bores. So after inhaling you wait one beat and then release the smoke through your nostrils, do you? That's one way to do it, although it tends to communicate impatience. They make you look like a dragon, those twin jets rushing forth downward from your nose. It's the sort of exhale you might employ while negotiating with someone over whom you have an advantage, or when arguing with a lover. In a calmer or more tender moment you are better off letting the smoke out through your mouth, in little puffs, like clouds for cherubim to ride upon. Yes, little puffs—a long stream of smoke is another matter altogether. It can often indicate hostility, especially if you aim it at someone's eyes. By contrast, moments of poetic idleness are best conveyed with smoke rings. You curl your tongue like this. Yes, I know it's not easy. Learning that skill cost me many hours that might otherwise have been spent studying ancient languages or higher mathematics. But who impresses friends with their erudition anymore? The smoke ring, on the other hand, is always a surefire crowd-pleaser. It establishes you as a sport, a flâneur, someone with a large share of that most precious of commodities—time. And finally there is the fabled “French” exhale, in which you expel the smoke from your mouth only to immediately take it in again through your nose. Yes, it's difficult, too—although you will probably find yourself doing it accidentally from time to time. Is it worth the hours of application? It is if you spend a great deal of your time mingling with minor hoodlums. It will have an impact on the sort of people who value the ability to crack one's knuckles or whistle through one's teeth. They will note you as someone not to trifle with. No one else will care.
I notice you're holding the cigarette in what used to be called the “American” manner, pinched between the forked index and medius of your right hand. That has become as universal as Marlboros, but there was a time when in most of the world cigarettes were poised between thumb and index. Your style was initially associated with American movie actors, who naturally gave it tremendous cachet, since everyone in Split or Macao or Port-Bou wanted to be just like Tom Mix or whomever. The thumb-index version, which Americans in turn considered effete, is really, when you think about it, the most obvious and intuitive approach. When you pick up a pencil or a coin, isn't that how you do it? Interestingly, people who employ the index-medius grip to hold their tobacco cigarettes usually persist in using the thumb-index method for their marijuana sticks. The American fashion, for all its he-man mystique, is really the more affected of the two.
So how did the Americans arrive at their manner? Perhaps by its resemblance to a forked stick, used to pick up a burning coal to light a brazier. Or maybe it was simply a desire for differentiation. You would not, after all, deploy a cigarette holder in that way, so maybe the fork was therefore intended as a symbol of common-man solidarity. The cigarette holder, very dramatic when properly flourished, came to be associated with lounge lizards and poules de luxe—people who needed an extension to keep cigarettes from fuming up the stones on their many rings. And so, if you were a rugged individual who had started out with nothing and now controlled the world's supply of sorghum, you would naturally want to dispel any suspicions that you might be some mere remittance man: you would wear your ten-gallon Stetson at the Court of St. James and hold your cigarette like a farmhand. Conversely, since the thumb-index grip allows one to smoke the cigarette all the way down to the end—to the last, red-hot quarter-inch—the fork grip is a sign that one is above such miserly practices. The fork method makes it necessary to jettison the butt at barely less than an inch. Since cigarettes cost almost nothing in America for the better part of the 20th century, even the most bootless Yankee tramp could afford to squander tobacco, a luxury not available to Chinese tailors or Senegalese traffic cops.
The thumb-index method is also handy for concealing the glowing end or even the entire cigarette if need be, so that the main exception to the fork rule among Americans was soldiers in wartime, who would want to keep the enemy from detecting their position by even the merest hint of red in the night. But then all across the land—all across the world—you could observe gas-station attendants, iron-lung mechanics, zeppelin inflators, sawdust packers, boarding-school students, church sacristans, whatever, all apparently biting their thumbnails as they cupped their cigarettes in their palms, happily oblivious to the odor detectable to everyone else.
Another matter to consider is pacing, which varies according to the individual and also according to the mood, the circumstances, the time of day, the weather, and so forth. We're all familiar—that is, we were once all familiar—with the sort of smoker who takes two puffs, possibly three, and then hastily or angrily stubs the thing out. Frequently these were older women, whose butts could be identified not only by their length but also by the generous smear of lipstick on each. Eventually this practice died out, because it cost a fortune (it could effortlessly consume five packs a day)—or was it because the practitioners' impatience finished them off. The other extreme, that of sucking the thing down to its burning end, or its filter, was inevitably associated with deprivation, and scorned in polite company as a symptom of the blurred line between hunger and greed. Then there was the distinction between the sort of smoker whose butts spent most of their brief existences burning down in the ashtray runnel and those who never seemed to take the things out of their mouths. You remember what Raymond Chandler said about “the boys who eat and talk and spit without ever disturbing the cigarettes that live in their faces.” That was a very mid-century thing in America, the petty-hoodlum custom of parking the cigarette in a corner of the mouth and employing the other corner for all other business; by the '60s you hardly ever saw it except at the racetrack. In Europe and especially in France, however, you had the art of gluing the cigarette paper to the lower lip with saliva and allowing the butt to perform a merry little dance every time its owner got to talking. Everyone thinks of Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, but look at this picture of Blaise Cendrars and note the squint, caused by smoke incessantly blowing into the smoker's eye, also the lopsided grin, probably also the skin as gnarled and crinkled as an ancient shoe. You saw faces like that all over Europe; I had an uncle who might have been his twin. The mystery there is the fact that these smokers' mégots were never more than an inch long. Did they buy them secondhand?
Between the negligent smokers who ignored their butts and the indulgent ones who kept theirs as pets was a larger group composed of those who liked to have something in their hands at all times. In between inhalations they enjoyed employing their cigarettes as props. They could gesture and wag and stab the air and draw curlicues with their smoking sticks. They could hold the cigarette between two fingers of an upraised hand flipped back, achieving different effects whether they did this while sitting—the gesture looked imperial, as if a benediction was being considered—or in motion, when the gesture became a component of a sashay, like the flying foxtail of an Edwardian wrap. The former effect was patented by Diana Vreeland, although she did not invent it; the latter reached apotheosis among the young women of the early '60s, who accessorized with headscarves, white men's shirts knotted at the midriff, and toreador pants, also sometimes a small transistor radio held to the ear with the other hand. In most hands the cigarette was a magical implement; in even the most graceless it could be a ceremonial dagger, not necessarily intended to stab but meant as a caution, as an ornamental emblem of power and a symbolic protection. The cigarette could be a conductor's baton, a colonial officer's swagger stick, a conjurer's wand. It functioned as an extension of the body, an exoskeletal limb with potential menace at its glowing tip. To give someone a cigarette was to confer power.
In Europe—actually in most parts of the world other than the United States—everyone was perpetually offering everyone else a smoke. Sit down at a table with three people and instantly out come four packs, an expertly gradated trio of ends poking out of a corner of each, and of course you have to take one, even if it's a brand you abhor, just as they must take yours. To refuse would be an act of aggressively bad manners, like spurning the proffered tea in an Arab country or the bread and salt in Russia. In America, by contrast, prison-yard customs prevailed: the pack was kept in a shirt or jacket pocket and one pill was drawn out at a time and inserted into the owner's mouth. This was not viewed as a breach of etiquette since, it was reasoned, everyone you encountered would already have his or her own pack. Keeping your pack to yourself was a sterling example of the American ethos, like fencing your land and shooting trespassers and believing that basic societal benefits belong to those who can afford them. The extreme of this behavior was exemplified by a mannerism briefly in vogue in my long-ago youth: opening the pack from the bottom. We saw older hipsters doing it and had to follow suit. It actually did derive from the mores of the prison yard, where no one would think of prevailing upon a fellow inmate to break open a fresh pack. An unbroken seal would preserve a pack to the end, although the owner's shirt pocket would fill up with tobacco crumbs. Yes, in those palmy, distant days, the very summit of impeccable, unmatchable, glacial suavity was represented by a pack of filterless Kools, opened from the bottom, accompanied by Ohio Blue Tip matches, the original kind you could strike on the wall, on your shoe, or on your stubble.
I picture a tableau from some secondary Last Judgment, when all the cigarettes I have smoked shall be made whole again, all of them piled up like cordwood in a space the size of a hangar. Let's see, thirty years approximately, an average of two packs a day, that would be four hundred thirty-eight thousand, give or take a few thousand. Nearly half a million, filtered and unfiltered, more than half of them hand-rolled, all but a handful white-papered. All of them passed through my mouth, my throat, my lungs. Smoked in every possible circumstance and setting. All of them utterly eradicated by fire. But now they have returned, in their original form, with their biographies appended: This Marlboro consumed outside the head shop in 1967 and immediately followed by a breath mint—I was barely adolescent. This Gauloise with filter of tightly-rolled paper smoked while waiting to buy a ticket to 2001: A Space Odyssey, on its original release. This Newport bummed from a friend, sucked down in despair after the collapse of a crush that then seemed mountainous. This hand-rolled Samson, wobbly and uncylindrical, representing an effort to learn to roll made in response to Scandinavian cigarette prices—so bumped up by taxes even thirty years ago that they cost four times what they did in America. This nameless evil-smelling thing made by rolling up the contents of butts harvested from ashtrays the day after a wild party. This Merit offered by a well-meaning friend but almost immediately stubbed out in horrified disgust—it tasted like burning fiberglass insulation. This American Spirit, the last bit of recidivism after quitting.
The lives of cigarettes are seldom very interesting, besides perhaps that of the one placed between the lips of the blindfolded man facing the firing squad. Cigarettes, like factory-farmed chickens, are born to die. They are anonymous, regarded collectively, appreciated fleetingly and impersonally, forgotten immediately. The exceptions, if any, are like those of the hero of Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno, who, when he resolved to quit, wrote on the front page of a dictionary: “2 February 1886. Today I finish my law studies and take up chemistry. Last cigarette!” Soon, however, he has entered such dates in the fly-leaves of all his books and has covered the wallpaper in his room with more. A cigarette can attain selfhood only when it is the last, but membership in a throng erases the individual. Nevertheless, cigarettes, like zoological parasites, are the secret sharers of countless lives, of moments of impenetrable intimacy. They have witnessed romance, rage, epiphany, confusion, elation, despair, serenity, chaos. Significantly, cigarettes were not just present in those moments, but according to their consumers they played an active role, either in enhancing the sensation or in attempting to assuage it. And yet, for all their heroism, like frontline infantry their fate is to be expended, to be knocked off immediately and replaced by an identical copy.
Those who spend their time waiting have the deepest connection with cigarettes: prison inmates, nightwatchmen, loading-dock foremen, movie actors, undertakers' assistants, understudies, writers, anyone who works in a booth-ticket vendors, token vendors, concierges. A cigarette is a friend that helps pass the time, sharpens memory and concentration, channels inchoate emotion, sands down rough edges, blurs things when need be. Cigarettes occupy the hands, occupy the mouth, segment passages of time like ritual observations, fill the room with a screen of smoke on which anything can be projected. If a cigarette is a stalwart companion in solitude, in company it is an ally. As if you could supply your own soundtrack or interlinear commentary, cigarettes color or intensify or counterpoint the message conveyed by your words, face, and body. Simmering anger is immeasurably more effective when accompanied by wreaths of smoke that seem to emerge from the smoker's ears, hair, eyes. The transit of hand to mouth and out again, repeated metronomically, can under the right circumstances ratchet up the tension in a room to a point of explosion. The cigarette that is held no more than an inch from the face even when it is removed from the mouth can act as a mask, a veil, or a fan. Dangling a cigarette head down in nerveless fingers at the end of a dropped arm conveys world-weary languor better than any composition ever written for violin. The already eloquent Mediterranean vocabulary of gestures becomes italicized when it is supplemented with contrails of smoke from between two fricative digits.
Obviously, the cigarette is a powerful erotic metonym. Almost as soon as cigarettes were invented there were collectors willing to pay money for photographs of women smoking; les fumeuses became a standard trope, illustrated for example by Jacques-Henri Lartigue's series from the '30s, for which he recruited women from Parisian brothels to pose, one by one, in head-shots, smoking. Although you might at first think that cigarette smoking connotes fellatio, the range of sexual suggestion is far broader (cigars, on the other hand, have a much more limited symbology and can connote little other than fellatio). Consider the cigarette held between bared teeth, like a rose by a flamenco dancer or a cutlass by a buccaneer, which telegraphs passion and menace and glee and danger and dash all at once. Think of how a cigarette disposed in a hand suspended right next to a mouth conveys an ambiguous invitation: You are welcome into my cave, but first you must negotiate with my dragon. Note the effect of a thin downward exhale in combination with heavy-lidded eyes—Marlene Dietrich comes to mind—which sings hello while throwing down a gauntlet. Picture the defiant swagger of a cigarette pointed upward by lips curled in a snarl, and ponder the mechanics of how a gesture of nominal exclusion and self-sufficiency can turn into the friendliest of challenges.
And bear in mind the fact that the erotics of the cigarette were for many years so clearly understood that the mere presence of a white cylinder somewhere in a portrait was enough to charge the subject—the whole composition—with a nonspecific potential for arousal. The unlit cigarette was a tease, the cigarette held near a flame was a provocation, the cigarette tucked behind an ear was a promissory note, the cigarette held aloft was a sheathed knife, the cigarette held laterally was a broken arrow, the cigarette stubbed out was an ultimatum. It was like the language of flowers, or of postage stamps, in which every nuance is pregnant with significance, and there is no possible communication that does not entrain a string of secondary and tertiary meanings. It all resided in the beholder—and the beheld, of course. Your grocer's cigarette meant nothing however it was held or employed, but your object of desire equipped with a cigarette was incapable of innocence. A cigarette added to the image of your crush, your lover, or your favorite film star, squared or cubed its intensity. Just below in the unconscious lay an impossible image: you and your love object connected by a single cigarette, smoking each other.
There were other things you could smoke, too, of course. Cigars were once the common coin and the exclusive province of men. Plutocrats in evening dress smoked panatelas five feet long, and ordinary flatfooted joes smoked horrible cheroots that smelled like burning rope. Cigars were made for guys to retire to the billiard room with after dinner while the women ate cake and gossiped. They were made for the dog track, the police precinct, the bus garage, the rooming-house parlor, the pari-mutuel office, the boxing-ring rubdown room, the burlesque theater, the barbershop, the pulqueria with the urinal gutter running right underneath the bar. Cigarillos, those slim brown objects, have a certain panache to them, like cigarettes on holiday; they are a part of café culture, and look good at the old-line beach resorts—they are keen, knifelike. Cigars, on the other hand, are blunt instruments. They look best in the mouths of young women, although they generally spend their lives consorting with ward heelers, dog wardens, skip tracers, rack jobbers, claim jumpers, lawn jockeys, bounty hunters, bailbondsmen, exterminators, repo auctioneers, and persons who aspire to like status. In butt form, with the assistance of a toothpick, they belong to bindlestiffs. They can command high prices, and require an army of props and supplies, but the untutored nose will have no luck trying to distinguish between a fifty-dollar Monte Cristo and a drugstore White Owl with plastic tip.
The pipe has virtually disappeared. At one time it was taken up by men the minute gray started appearing at their temples. Your grandfather smoked one, and so did Inspector Maigret, and Sherlock Holmes, and four out of five fly fishermen, and artists who sported plaid shirts and Van Dyke beards, and Bing Crosby, and anybody nicknamed “Pop,” but all of those gentlemen are now dead. College freshmen once took up the pipe in an effort to look more mature, but nobody today would make the connection; if you employ the word “pipe” in conversation people will assume you are referring to an instrument for smoking crack. In a way this is too bad, since the pipe lent gravity and an air of wisdom to numerous men whose intellectual and emotional progress had stalled barely into adolescence.
Anyway, you can't smoke anymore. You can't smoke anything—not low tar, not Sher Bidis, not all-natural additive-free tobacco in unbleached paper. It's not yet illegal to possess the materials and implements for smoking nor to consume them in the privacy of your own home, but it is increasingly difficult to smoke in public places, even outdoors, even in Europe. It's true that a certain dark anti-glamour lingers outside the restaurant doorway, as you and people you will never meet again enjoy the rough comradeship of exile, puffing away in your thin jackets in February as if you were doing something heroic. It's true that in a few Western settings—student life, for example, or among fashion models—smoking remains almost normative. It's true that if you produce a pack of cigarettes in the right place and at the right time entire roomfuls of confirmed quitters will line up to bum one. And of course everyone knows at least one defiant and unapologetic smoker, frequently someone with sufficient force of personality that allowances are made and ashtrays exhumed in even some of the most fastidious households. In general, though, and especially in prosperous suburbs, you can expect passers-by to glare at you with undisguised contempt however discreetly you light up, whether in a far corner of a parking lot or outside the exit ramp of the bus depot.
Smoking went from universal to proscribed with incredible speed. It first became necessary to step out onto the balcony at certain private homes in the '80s. The majority of Americans who smoked in 1990 seemingly had quit by 1995. California was the first place in the world to ban smoking in bars, in 1998. You would think that bars would be the last redoubt, short of prison—but many prisons now ban smoking as well, which does seem like a case of unnecessarily cruel punishment. A few decades ago, the traveler who fetched up in Salt Lake City, ignorant of the state's prevalent mores, and found herself unable to find a place short of the street where she could enjoy a cigarette and a cup of coffee simultaneously, could hardly have realized that this state of affairs would soon prevail in cities of very different character. Nor could the right-thinking but blemished soul who made the mistake of trying to light up in one of Berkeley, California's more politically sensitive coffeehouses at the beginning of the '80s have imagined that of all the causes on display in such a setting the one that would carry the day would be the crusade against tobacco. Mormons and the ultraleft make strange bedfellows, but then cigarettes are curiously bipartisan. Puritans of all persuasions were the first to take up arms against them.
Nowadays no one will really defend smoking, even the most unregenerate addicts being inclined now and then to sermonize against their filthy habit. Hardly anyone wishes to dignify the appalling cynicism of the tobacco cartels and their decades of suppressing facts and falsifying statistics. When you see a tract issued by a smokers' rights group, you can be sure that it originated either in the public-relations department of a cigarette manufacturer or else somewhere on the coldly literal-minded fringe of the libertarian movement. There is no argument: Cigarettes are bad for you, and smoking will kill you, sooner or later, and there is a strong probability that the offloaded fumes from your smoking will eventually kill non-smoking bystanders as well. Smoking shortens your breath, makes you cough and wheeze and eventually produce that weird whistling in the back of your throat, carbonizes your lungs and ravages your larynx and esophagus, visits indignities upon various other internal organs, discolors your teeth, makes you smell bad (although, oddly, one wasn't conscious of a bad smell back when everybody smoked). But then nicotine remains the most elusive and protean of drugs: it sharpens memory, aids concentration, keeps weight down, levels out emotional swings, perhaps helps prevent Parkinson's disease…
Maybe there are ex-smokers out there who feel uncomplicated relief at having quit. I doubt there are very many though. Your cigarette was a friend—the sort of friend parents and teachers warned you against, who would lead you down dark alleys and leave you holding the bag when things went wrong—but a friend nevertheless. It’s terribly sad that you can’t enjoy a smoke now and again without tumbling into the whirlpool of perdition, the way you can take a glass of spirits on the weekend with no danger that by Monday you will end up filtering the shoe polish after exhausting the cooking sherry. But just as an alcoholic remains an alcoholic even after decades of abstinence, so a smoker is a sinner forever after. You have breathed fire. You have experienced one of the deepest satisfactions of life: the first cigarette of the day in tandem with the first cup of coffee. You have felt that knee-trembling rush upon taking the first drag after suffering an enforced separation from cigarettes—after a trip to the moon, for example. Your friend has come running to your side in the worst moments, and has been there to cheer you on in the best. You have tasted of the fruit of good and evil. Now that you have chosen the path of righteousness, can it be that the decision is fixed and irrevocable? Is it possible that smoking will be legislated or taxed out of existence? Is it possible that the earth will be wiped so clean of tobacco that, like opium, it will be difficult to find without undertaking hazardous journeys in troubled regions? Is it possible that you will never again be able to enjoy the comfort of knowing that you have traded five minutes of life for five minutes of serenity? We may all have stopped smoking, but we continue to burn.
