Two years ago, Jack Heffron read this personal essay at our Writing It Real conference in Port Townsend. An exercise Jack offered this past conference involved writing a confession about something you haven’t confessed before. His assignment made me remember the entertaining and true-to-human nature essay he’d read to us the year before. Now Jack has given Writing It Real permission to post the essay, which I think you’ll find a charming, entertaining example of the quirkiness, honesty, humility and universality that graces the best of personal writing.

Smoking
by Jack Heffron

The thing about an addiction is that it consumes every aspect of your life. It factors into nearly every decision you make. And smokers know this to be true. Say you’re invited to a dinner party. Your first thought — can I smoke there? Do any of the other people smoke? Are the hosts “smoke Nazis”? Will drifting off to a patio or porch for a quick puff be awkward? When you arrive, you launch a silent recon for other smokers, though odds are you won’t see any. They’re underground, just like you. You’ll meet them later, outside, on the patio or porch or driveway, wherever the smokers find an out-of-the-way place where their collective shame will be least observable. More than likely you’ll talk to them about smoking.

The same is true for colleagues at work. The ones you know best are fellow smokers, because you stand together outside — in rain or snow or sweltering heat, often talking about smoking. You bond. In fact, that’s how I met several women who I dated.

That’s how I met the woman I’ll call Barb (because I can’t stand the name Barb). We were together for nearly six years, until she ended things not long after I lost my job in a mass layoff. The timing, yes, seemed cruel, but she was an addict, and addicts are loyal only to their addictions. With no job, no mate, and dim prospects for the future, I decided it was time to invent a new me — and that guy didn’t smoke. In the next months I adopted a healthy diet, lost fifteen pounds, and exercised every day. I read Web sites about quitting smoking, filled out questionnaires to determine the reasons for my lethal compulsion, I counted each cigarette I smoked and recorded the daily total in a journal. I even wore a nicotine patch now and again. I did everything except actually quit smoking.

I did manage, however, to make it through that challenging year, found a new job, and, after much cajoling from friends, signed up for an online dating service.

But I faced a moral dilemma as I filled out the profile. Do I declare myself a smoker? I was seeking a non-smoker, figuring I was going to quit any day now. Getting involved with a smoker would make quitting that much harder. And many of the women’s profiles on the site stated they were seeking a non-smoker. I couldn’t really make that claim yet, and I didn’t want to be an out and out liar about it. There was an entry for “occasional” smoker, and I clicked that one, figuring, in a way, it was true. I was an occasional smoker who found roughly 15 occasions in the average day to smoke.

A couple of weeks into my online dating career I struck up an email conversation with a smart and sassy woman from Indiana who spent most of her time excoriating the men who contacted her, calling them idiots, even pointing out grammatical errors in their overtures. She didn’t find me stupid, but after we traded several emails she must have reread my profile and noticed with horror my “occasional” smoking. “I wouldn’t think of subjecting my son to your disgusting addiction,” she demurred. I let the thread end there. The charm of her virulent disdain for everyone had begun to fade anyway. I did, however, remove “occasional” from my profile, declaring myself a non-smoker. Several ‘how to quit’ sources advised that to be a non-smoker you must see yourself as a non-smoker. Anyway, that’s how I justified the lie.

 A month or two later I met a wonderful woman named Amy, and we emailed for a while then talked on the phone and then met for a date that went very well. And so we had another date and another and quickly were seeing each other a few times a week, talking every day on the phone. But we never talked about the fact that I smoked. I had joined the dating service with only mild interest and didn’t really expect to find someone interesting and definitely didn’t expect to find one so quickly — while I was still under the thrall of tobacco.

So I was forced to sort of fudge things a bit. Early on, dates were not a problem. Before leaving my house for hers I put on a nicotine patch. But before putting on the patch I would put on an old t-shirt and a coat, step out on my deck, and enjoy one last cigarette, savoring it as if I wouldn’t have another for days. Then I’d take off the coat and t-shirt, brush my teeth again and gargle, spray on deodorant, put on a fresh shirt, slap a patch on my hip, and head off.

But dates soon turned into sleepovers, which added anxiety to the process. Now I would have to go all night and into the next morning without a smoke. And I would need an excuse for leaving right after breakfast — because, well, enough was enough. I enjoyed her company immensely, but how long was I supposed to go cold turkey? And before going to bed I would need to take off the patch and put it somewhere safe — where she wouldn’t discover it and where I could retrieve it easily in the morning, hoping the sliver of adhesive that surrounded the edge of the patch would remain strong enough for reapplication. Those things aren’t really built for multiple uses. Once you peel it off, with a screek and an unpleasant yank of your skin, they don’t adhere well when you try to slap them back on.

Tip for wannabe nonsmokers — heat helps the adhesion. When you press the patch on again, continue the pressure with the full palm of your hand. Your body heat will seal it. Be sure to hold your hand on the patch for at least a few minutes, or it will slide off, exposing you to ridicule for being the poser that you are.

After a date night, usually we would get up in the morning and head to a diner-ish place for breakfast, and then off I’d go. Back on the road in my car, I would pry off the patch, sometimes while I was still on her street, retrieve my hidden pack of cigarettes from under the seat, light up, and puff away, a contented man.

Then only a couple of months into our budding relationship, Amy suggested we take a weekend trip — Easter weekend — to nearby Madison, Indiana, to Clifty Falls State Park, which, according to its Web site, featured “breathtaking waterfalls, deep rocky gorges, and scenic hiking trails.” Though I should have been eager for such a trip, my first thought, of course, was how to get through two whole days without being exposed as a liar and a smoker. (Well, my first thought was that going away on Easter weekend, which fell very early in a cold April, was kind of stupid. But my second thought was about smoking.) How would I manage? And, deep down, did I really want to? Maybe I should just accept my fate and find myself a chain-smoking gal who would join me in suffering the endless health horrors of nicotine addiction.

Before picking up Amy early on Saturday morning, I lingered through the ritual of the final smoke on the deck. Around me the trees were still bare, their dark limbs stabbing the gray sky. Spring had yet to arrive. After the smoke, I got dressed and headed out, shooting a few jolts of Lysol into the car, as I had begun doing, though the car was only a few months old. I’d bought it as another step toward my new life. I’d had my Pontiac for ten years and, according to my friend Meg, it smelled like a smoker’s car. When I told her I planned to start dating again — and only non-smokers — she asked if I would tell them I smoked. When I said I hadn’t decided, she said, “Your car totally outs you, you know that, right?”

I snapped, “Of course I know that.”

Which I didn’t. One of the side effects of smoking is that it kills your olfactory powers — you become hard of smelling. That’s one of the first things I notice when I quit for any length of time. Nonsmokers often crow, in that toe-curlingly unctuous way they have, “When you quit smoking your food will taste so much better.” I never found that to be true. It pretty much tasted the same as before. A smoker simply eats more because there’s no longer the delight of a cigarette after a meal, one of the best ones of the day. Without that treat, the smoker eats because there’s no point in stopping, and the eating becomes a way to delay the moment of disappointment — no cigarette at the end. It makes a meal completely depressing. But during times when I quit, I did notice I could smell better. And this was not a good thing. More things smell bad than smell good. The world is a stinky place, and not just in a metaphorical way.

I took Meg’s advice and bought a new car right after the first of the year. I vowed not to smoke in the car and stuck to that vow for nearly three weeks. But I did open all the windows when I smoked, no matter how cold the day, and refused to use the ashtray. This practice minimized the smell in the car, though it made me a smoker, a liar, and a litterer, qualities that didn’t exactly bolster my budding self-esteem.

Still, I was determined that this would be a year of great changes — new car, new me, a non-smoking me who embraced life in all its glorious wonders, even the stinky parts. And that positive attitude led to meeting Amy, who was wonderful — at least until she insisted that we go away on Easter weekend for a full two days during which I no doubt would think of little else except that I couldn’t smoke. It was just a stupid idea.

And a lot of other people apparently agreed because they didn’t show up at Clifty Falls State Park on that cold and dreary Saturday morning. The place was nearly empty. I, however, was prepared. I had packed several patches and even cut open the packets in advance for quick applications. But I wasn’t at all prepared for Amy’s question during the drive to the park. We were cruising along the Ohio River through rural Indiana, chatting, listening to the radio — a happy couple in the smooth blush of early love off for a carefree, romantic weekend, when, out of the blue she asked, “Have you ever smoked?”
An electric bolt shot through me.

“Pot?” I said. “Sure. Years ago. In college.”

“Cigarettes,” she said.

Did the car smell? It was still new and had been drenched in more Lysol than an intensive-care unit. I paused briefly, threw a glance at the fallow cornfields passing by the windows. I didn’t want to lie.

“I’ve struggled with smoking for a long time,” I said, which I felt was a convincing and yet ambiguous response, declaring that, indeed, I had battled demon weed, while implying that I wasn’t a smoker anymore. Because she wouldn’t want to date a smoker. Not in the new millennium. Sinatra and Bogart and John Wayne could choke like chimneys and be the Ideal Man back in the day. But that day had gone. Today a smoker is a leper, a pariah, the leading cause of the health care crisis and the murderer of innocents everywhere.

I let the subject drop, feigned interest in the road, in the empty fields stubbled with last year’s dead stalks, not yet showing signs of spring.

“But you don’t smoke now,” Amy said.

Another moment of truth — and we weren’t even at the park yet. What should I say? I was here, in a way, on false pretenses. Would a confession end the weekend? Even end the relationship? A confession of smoking would be a confession that on every date I had pretending to be a non-smoker. And so I did what addicts do. I lied.

“Uh, no,” I said. “Not now.” Rationalizing that I wasn’t, in the strictest sense, smoking NOW, as in right at that moment. To nudge the lie a bit closer to truth, I added, “But that kind of thing, it’s never-ending. I’ll probably be tempted for the rest of my life.”

“I’ve never smoked,” she said. But she said it in an off-hand way, as if the subject already was drifting into the chilly air. She moved on to a new subject, which I don’t remember because I wasn’t listening, caught in a trench of guilt for having lied, though buoyed by a certain relief.

After we arrived at the Clifty Inn, the park’s rustic, timbered lodge, we hiked a few trails, which were more muddy than scenic, and gazed at the waterfalls, which were mostly frozen — jagged shards of ice stabbing down over the lip of rock, some dripping a trickle or two, a wet promise of warmer days ahead. But we enjoyed each other’s company, went back to the nearly empty lodge for a fine dinner in the empty dining area, and then headed to our room.

Before long we were naked in each other’s arms. Then we were making love. I’ll spare you the graphic details, but at one point I found myself feeling quite content, kneeling behind Amy who was bent over in the bed. I was lord of the manor, captain of the bobsled, as it were, and lulled by the steady rhythm of our love-making I plopped a contented hand onto my hip — which was when I felt it.

Not the skin of my hip but a rubbery surface. I brushed my hand across it to make sure. Then I glanced down to make doubly sure and saw, horrified, like a moment out of Hitchcock, the patch — its skin-toned surface gleaming like neon in the dimly lit room. Having enjoyed the day and the dinner and Amy so much, I had forgotten I was wearing it.

I did my best to keep the rhythm steady while my brain clawed at ideas. I couldn’t just stop and run off to the bathroom. And if I ripped it off my hip Amy would hear, even if, facing the other way, she didn’t see. The reap-what-you-sow, tangled-web moment had come far too soon and at exactly the wrong time. I wasn’t ready yet to ruin the weekend with a confession.

And so, rather than stop, I quickened the rhythm, feigned a surge of primal ecstasy, gave a loud grunt while shoving Amy’s head into the pillow, a move that surprised and apparently delighted her, setting off her girl triggers. I simultaneously tore the patch off my hip in one fast rip, blinked back the pain, and flipped it behind me like a Frisbee, carefully listening for the sound of it landing on the floor — plip! — so, immediately after we were finished, I could find it in the dark and hide it.

As a long-time addict accustomed to such subterfuge, I pulled off the charade, and Amy was none the wiser — or so I thought. Our relationship survived that weekend and grew stronger. I made my confession a few weeks later. We survived that too. About a year later, for reasons I can’t recall, I told her about the love-making episode. Turns out she had felt the patch earlier in the evening, just as our collective pot had begun to boil, and she thought perhaps I had some sort of heart condition.

And, in a way, I did. The heart of an addict, meaning that no matter how much you care about someone the addiction will come first. And sooner or later that addiction will kill you.

****

You can read more of Jack’s writing at Cincinnati Magazine. And you can meet him and work with him at our upcoming March 1-4, 2012 Writing It Real in AZ conference. I can’t wait to listen to what he reads this year at the conference!