PREVIOUS    NEXT 

 BAD GIRLS SMOKE IN HELL

Bette Davis with a cigarette in her mouth, wearing a chinchilla and lounging about her penthouse in the 1950 film, "All About Eve," symbolized the zenith of female power and glamour. Bette Davis glaring through mascara encrusted eyes and the acrid smoke billowing from a cigarette clenched between withered lips a decade later in, "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane," symbolized only ruin. Cigarette smoking, as an emblem, has changed momentously, and not at all, over the past 80 years. In any case, it doesn't look good on me anymore.

When I began smoking, at the age of 13, the general public had already been informed that cigarettes caused an assortment of gruesome diseases that led to premature, painful death. But it didn't stop me from thinking that lighting up was going to give me some kind of teenage panache that clean living could never provide. To smoke gave face to my defiance of adult regulations, my longing to be seen as mature, and my unstated belief that I was indestructible and could quit any time I wanted. At least I thought so at the time. All were flawed assumptions, but it would take many years to comprehend the error of those notions and the lamentable choices they led me to make.

To say my peers influenced me to smoke would be a simplistic explanation. Yes, all my friends in high school smoked cigarettes, at least the ones who were obviously "cool". My mother smoked. My sister smoked. My brother smoked. All but my brother had been lured by the belief that being a modern woman who had "come a long way, baby," was somehow connected with inhaling noxious fumes on an hourly basis.

We knew about the cancer and emphysema. We knew about the oxygen tanks. Still, the public portrayal of the powerful woman was still primarily that of a shoulder-padded gal who's voice crackled with smoky raspiness as she barked orders to her staff. I am woman, hear me cough, she pronounced, demanding our attention. Tennis player, Billie Jean King's, run as a champion was sponsored by Virginia Slims. Somehow even the authentic competence inherent in athletic competition had been appropriated by tobacco. Besides, everyone knew smoking helped you to lose weight, and there was little any woman I knew would not do to stay thin.

In those days, women who smoked fell into two categories: smart and complicated, or cheap and bad. I imagined I was in the former category. I modeled myself after the aforementioned Miss Davis, and pictured the woman I would one day become. I would be wise-cracking and self-possessed, sitting at a typewriter grinding out successful novels — with full ashtray ever present. I'd wear black turtlenecks and go to cocktail parties given by the avant garde set, slinging bon mots and gesticulating seductively with a lit Marlboro. While, I might approximate a bad girl to my guidance counselor or the guy at 7-11 who sold me tobacco with that conspiratorial wink, the difference between those other teenagers and myself was palpable to me.

Those other girls hiding with me in the bathroom between classes, smoking in the stalls, were mostly of the "bad" variety. I liked to imagine that I could pass for one of them, yet still hold myself aloof. I was not doing poorly in school. I was not crying over teenage abortions. I was not going out with hoods. I might superficially resemble those girls, but I was different. I was inherently "good" -- and I could quit any time.

By my early 20s I was up to two packs per day, and since one could still smoke in the workplace and non-smokers had not yet formed militant alliances, I had no impetus to cut down. I knew I'd have to quit some day, but that date remained distant. Besides given my regular amphetamine use — ultimately superior at keeping down the weight, though bristling with its own side effects — it was impractical for me to quit.

I continued into my 20s, borderline anorexic, puffing and popping pills, until I discovered I wasn't enjoying the fruits of my behavior anymore, nor was I particularly successful or powerful despite the look I'd tried to cultivate. I quit the drugs first. Somehow it was easier to relinquish amphetamines and cocaine, which had conferred a disturbing edge to my personality, than it was for me to put down the cigarettes. After all, despite the ubiquity of drugs in the workplace during the 1980s, they were still illegal, while cigarettes were not. Smoking, I'd realized over the years, was the perfect drug. It calmed a litany of ill feelings from anger and boredom to anxiety, and you could do it anywhere.

I limped along with only the cigarettes and my, still unrealized, high school dreams of becoming a publishing phenomenon. It was easier than I thought. I found new friends and activities. Yet, as I approached the end of my second decade, I discovered I was still personally disturbed, though now I was sober and had no external substance on which to blame my idiosyncrasies.

Like many of my generation, I next sauntered off to a 12-step meeting to discover the roots of my internal malady. Attending the meetings introduced another new set of friends. Those new associates, while conferring legitimacy to my inner quest, also conversely infected me with the first sense of shame I had felt about my one lingering chemical addiction. Unlike Alcoholic Anonymous meetings, which are famed for unfettered tobacco replacement behaviors among the members, Alanon, the sister group which I attended, was both teetotaling and relatively tobacco-free.

It was 1988 and, in California where I lived, non-smokers had begun demanding the right to exist without the oppression of someone else's air pollution. Alanon members, who were learning to assert themselves for the first time in their lives, were not a group given to flexibility about bad habits that infringed on personal rights. In every other respect but my smoking I fit into the group mold, and I resolved to change the one thing keeping me from fully integrating. I knew I wasn't a bad girl any more than I had ever been. But until I dropped my symbolic torch of anti-establishment behavior, I could never reap the benefits of a group that would always judge me deficient from this act.

In January of 1989 I went to an acupuncturist for treatment and quit. I was 28. I had been a smoker for 15 years, more than half my life at that point. During the first few days I spiraled through a morass of nicotine withdrawal hallucinations. By the fourth day I was clear-headed and determined to live differently.

I did not smoke for seven years. I survived tragic break-ups, job losses, cross-country moves, earthquakes and illness. I discovered that nicotine had not only repressed feelings of anger, boredom and sadness. It has also kept me from experiencing thirst, hunger and fatigue. After 15 years, I was hungry for my authentic feelings and did not seek to push them away.

The years passed and I came to a larger emotional bump-in-the-road than I could surmount and somehow lost my personal resolve. At that time most of my social group smoked, so it seemed almost natural to begin again. Initially it was just one or two cigarettes borrowed from a friend. Soon I was buying packs. But despite a certain enjoyment taken from the act, I felt guilty and, more importantly, like a failure with each puff. Every day I vowed to quit. I could, after all, quit any time I wanted. That was four years ago. Four years of self-loathing interspersed with the odd moment of agreeable, quiet reflection with a cigarette in my hand and the sun on my face.

Recently I have returned to California, and smoking, like the rest of my life has come full circle. As a youth I hid in school restrooms, surreptitiously sucking down 100 millimeters and accepting the disdain of those whom I found superfluous while basking in the approval of those I wanted to dazzle. Now I feel only humiliation when standing in front of office buildings with groups of fellow smokers, watching the non-smoking majority hustle past with their unconcealed looks of contempt. I prefer to smoke in the back alleys, alone. I no longer want to be associated with the negative perceptions with which society vies this habit and its practitioners. I am not like those other people.

Smoking is not a mark of success for women or men. It is now merely a symbol of a failure of character. In films and on TV it is still both the bad girls and the complicated, smart girls who are depicted as smokers. But rarely anymore are cigarettes used as the kind of shorthand they once were for the portrayal of powerful women, except in circumstances where the character is neurotic or about to do something detestable. Even so, unless she is thoroughly trashy, this modern woman is never unrepentant about her habit -- she is always trying to quit. Even women's tennis has dropped its association with tobacco, and from all indications, Venus Williams will not be taking up with Joe Camel any time soon.

I peer into the mirror each morning and notice the smoker's wrinkles, which have formed around my mouth and eyes, much like those on Bette Davis' face the last time I watched her as a guest on a talk show. By then doctors had removed most of her cancer-riddled organs, yet she still had a cigarette clamped between her teeth. "What's the point of quitting now?" she asked.

For Bette Davis there may have been no incentive to quit smoking on the eve of her immanent death. I have many reasons to quit. I want to get rid of the smell of tar and nicotine left on my skin, hair and wardrobe. I want to kiss my lover and not feel chagrined by the look on her face that tells me I taste like the La Brea tar pits. I want my skin to regain a healthy glow and my extremities to regain circulation. I want to clear my throat without having to dislodge a phlegm obstruction. Mainly, I want to add a few years to my lifespan, since I may need longer than I once thought to complete that novel.

When I quit smoking in 2002, I will, once again, have the distinction of being able to say I have smoked for almost half my life. I know that the choice I made at 13 to light my first cigarette has led to a lifetime of addiction and probable ill health as yet unexperienced. I am still not a successful novelist, and in fact, wrote more without the distraction of cigarettes at hand than I have since. I smoked for years to be cool, more years to suppress my feelings, and a few more because it is just plain hard to quit.

Finally, what I understand after 25 years of fighting this habit, is that smoking was never "cool." It was always the easy way out — to look successful rather than be successful — much like most of the choices I have made in life. Smoking, it turns out, looked like something only bad girls did, because bad girls generally made bad choices. Good girls make bad choices, too. But perception, in many ways dictates reality. At 41, I finally don't want to look like a bad girl anymore. Moreover, I don't want to act like one.

Fasten your seatbelts, quitting is going to be a bumpy ride.

January 1 , 2002 © Suzanne Rush 2004

OWLCAT ARCHIVE -CURRENT-2-3-4-5-6-7 8-9-10-11-12

Copyright© 2000-2008, Suzanne Rush, Boy, are my arms tired.com! All Rights Reserved. E-Mail the Editor.