Physical health and vices

Alcohol

Which thought brings me to drinking. My father’s side of the family has a long history with drinking. As I mention elsewhere, my father’s brother became an alcoholic and committed suicide at the age of 48. My father drank all of his life, in his last years going through the better part of a fifth of Jim Beam every day. The amazing thing is that he never appeared drunk and he never had any problems with driving. He never got into arguments are fights. He could simply absorb his liquor. About all I remember is a tendency to go to sleep. He succumbed at 87 not to drink, nor to the emphysema caused by a lifetime’s smoking, but a medical error. They punctured his gut during a colonoscopy, and he was too weak to recover.

Smoking

I can remember is a kid being seriously curious about smoking. It seemed like an unnatural act. Animals didn’t smoke, and it didn’t seem to serve any natural human need. Yet, so many of the adults did it, it was widely advertised and accepted our society. It seemed to me to be one of those things like the power of speech and upright locomotion that separated men from the lower animals. My fascination was such that I had to try it.

I started smoking by filching a couple of packs of my mother’s mentholated Salem cigarettes and walking around the neighborhood at night practicing. Smoking is a hard place to acquire. They taste vile and they make you cough. It takes a real man to start smoking. I fancied myself a real man and I worked at it until I mastered it.
Once I got good at it I gave up the menthol cigarettes and switched to something even more manly, Camels. They were unfiltered and they had a much better taste as far as I was concerned due to their advertised “rich blend of Turkish and domestic tobaccos.” The most powerful advertising image at that time was the cowboy shilling for Philip Morris’ Marlboros, but those were filter cigarettes and I thought that filters were for sissies.
At any rate, I became pretty good at smoking. There are a lot of things smokers can do. You can French inhale. That means taking a mouthful of smoke, and then letting it slowly come out of your mouth as you inhale through your nostrils. You can blow smoke rings. With the pipe you can gesture and look intellectual. Smoking always gives your hands something to do when you’re talking, so there’s never an awkward question of how do you pose as you are talking to somebody new and trying to make a good impression. There are some skills of the smoker develops. You learn how to light a match in a high wind, cupping your hands through flame doesn’t go out. You learn how to carry kitchen matches in the watch pocket of your Levis, take them out and strike them on the bottom of your pants and light a cigarette. I learned that I could put out a cigarette butt by mashing it with my bare feet. I learned that I could put one out by dropping it into the cellophane of the pack and quickly sealing off the oxygen before it burned through the cellophane. Oh, the skills I acquired!
I was smoking by the second half of my junior year of high school, when I started attending classes at Cal Berkeley. I would ride to Cal on the back of Jim McCoullough’s motor scooter. The moment we were away from the school I would light up. I don’t recall that smoking was allowed in class, but on campus it was routine. The high school itself had made a truce with smokers. Since it was legal for kids of 18 to smoke, and some students were of age, they set up a smoking zone across the street from the school. They never policed it to ensure that we were of age. Local storeowners would sell me cigarettes. I prided myself that I looked as mature as 18, and one time attempted a mature conversation with the owner. He was perfectly aware what was what, and shooed me out of his store before I got him in trouble.
I began to regret the decision to smoke shortly after I got to college. It was expensive. I could offset the expense by learning how to roll my own cigarettes – another essential life skill, especially after marijuana came into fashion. I could smoke a pipe, where the tobacco was cheap. Still, the cost was a bit of a burden on a starving student. I was in college on a scholarship and received my spending money from my parents. I felt their sacrifice intensely and I wanted to minimize the burden on them. I therefore asked for less money that I would have needed to maintain a standard of living on a par with my fellow students.
Soon I noticed other drawbacks with smoking. My hands were perpetually yellow. My teeth were yellow. My clothes smelled. When I finally had a car, I found that the windows of the car were perpetually covered with the yellow film. It was ugly.
People hated it, not as strongly in that benighted era, but they did find that smoking was unbecoming. I don’t remember any girl ever refusing to kiss me because I smoked, but I think this may be simply due to a faulty memory. Since I have quit smoking, I find that the experience of kissing a girl whose smokes is pretty disgusting. Either there were some strong stomachs among the women, or I was being refused and too dense to recognize it.
I tried to quit several times in college. Like Twain said, it’s very easy to quit smoking. He had done it dozens of times.
I finally quit for good, cold turkey, on my 21^st birthday. I remember very clearly going to The Monkey Inn, smoking up until midnight, putting the last one out and saying that was it. I was working for the California Division of Highways at the time. I went through a rather difficult couple of weeks. My body was so infused with oxygen that I was like in a perpetual daze. I had nothing to do with my hands. My mouth really craved something to do, so I sucked on tart Sour Lime candies until my tongue was raw. I didn’t sleep very well. But I quit, and I resolved never to take another drag on a cigarette. That was half a century ago, and I have not.

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