Cigarettes and Secrets: PART 2

The story of smoking in my life

me smoking a Marlboro Ultralight

I met Jon the first day of 10th grade. He was crossing the street from where he had parked his blue sports car, one hand tucked into tight blue jeans, the other pushing back the sides of long, blonde hair. He didn’t see me. I stared, watching him climb the stairs to school. I knew- the same way I knew the sky was blue, and I was fifteen- that we would be important to each other. At lunch, I made sure to talk to a mutual friend, and when Jon looked at me, I saw him feel it- that connection, the insistence of intimacy, the desire to be naked and alone together. By the time I turned 16, months later, we had sex, boyfriend and girlfriend. We were madly in love. Years later, writing this as a grown woman, I know that we had trauma bonded deeply and instantly, and I accept that as part of our story- but not our story. We were also in love, and our sex life -for young people who knew almost nothing about sex- was explosive magic, a purely dirty bubble I wanted to curl up and live in, where I felt transported into another world that was only love and pleasure and pleasure and love, body and body, breath and breath. This laid the path for all my sexual desires afterward: to be deeply loved, adored, safe, while doing dirty and subversive acts with our bodies. This meeting of opposites was my idea of heaven. And in between, smoking.

Jon smoked more than anyone I would ever know. He smoked the way a traumatized baby nurses- around the clock, desperately, already thinking about the next cigarette as the first one burnt his fingers. The only things he stopped smoking for were sex, sleep, and for a few hours, school. His bed was the ubiquitous twin mattress on the floor, with a low table next to the bed that contained a lamp, cigarettes, and an ashtray. Before his eyes were all the way open, he’d reach for a pack of Reds and a lighter, and sit up, hair in his face, hunched over, smoking. Even his beloved guitar couldn’t stop the wave of crumpled tabacco, smoke curling up into his eyes as he clenched a Marlboro Red between his teeth, grinding out a Metallica, Megadeath, GNR song. He played beautifully, passionately, constantly. He played absently while we talked on the phone, he played as groups of us hung out in his room, he played after sex. And while he played, he smoked. He was a beautiful, talented boy with a perfect ass and a pure heart, and I wanted to be with him every second of every day. We were both barely surviving our childhoods, we were both deeply sensitive and anxious people who felt alone and adrift in our miserable families.

Although we didn’t recognize it at the time, our lives as creative people bonded us deeply, in a group of kids who could care less about artistic expression, we silently understood and valued this part of each other- his music, my writing. He played me all his new songs; I read him all my new poems. And Jon drew- he sketched and spray-painted; my letters from him during those years are full of naked fairies often drawn in my likeness, mushrooms, demons, and with a nod to me, unicorns and pegasus.

Soon we became widely known at our high school as a couple. I often spent the night at his house on weekends, and he’d come pick me up Monday morning, both of us wearing his Levi’s, both of us wearing one of his concert T’s, both of us with long, blonde hair- our friend Marni called us ‘the twins’. (We would have made a perfect Jamie and Cercei Lannister for Halloween.) He drove a blue small sports car, and we’d drive, cigarettes hanging from our mouths, Slayer blasting -or sometimes, when I insisted, Tori Amos or The Cure- to park near the smoker’s corner, where we’d park, make out, and then walk into school with our hands in each other’s pockets. At lunch, we’d go back to his house and eat and smoke or have sex and smoke or hang with friends and smoke. And, smoke.

My cigarettes, which at that point were primarily purchased by Jon, were Marlboro Reds. When nervous, I could reach into my purse and fondle their fat firm white bodies, tucked into their box in satisfying order, letting a delicious, smooth sigh when pulled from each other.

We spent our weekends alone in his room punctuated by hangouts with our friends, most of whom smoked. We smoked in pool houses, bowling alleys, deserted parks, with or without alcohol, with or without drugs, we smoked two inches from each other’s faces or displaced by our parents’ rules, we smoked silently sitting outside watching the rain, we smoked while skinny dipping in his pool, we smoked while camping in the desert, we smoked on dirt bike trips, we smoked blowing into each other’s mouths, we smoked while screaming Bad Religion in his car, we smoked after Jon went into his mother’s bedroom to ask her for money for the movies, and she lay in her bed, oxygen tank still on, a cigarette burning in the ashtray next her lifeless body.

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PART THREE COMING SOON