Fire Breather

When I was fifteen, I smoked my first cigarette, a short-stubbed and already half-smoked Marlboro Light that my friend and I pulled from my parents’ ashtray and shared between the two of us. Never mind that it was stale and had probably been sitting in the ashtray for three or four days already. It was the act of breathing smoke, the first sensation of a chemically-enhanced tobacco burn on my lungs, that was appealing. This was also the same year that I first tried chewing tobacco. I was well on my way to supporting the state of North Carolina.

At that age I was underdeveloped, skinny as a sea slug and a foot shorter than most kids my age. I’d never been athletic, preferring the lazy dreck of post-school television consumption to spitting out the last few ounces of energy playing outdoors. This wasn’t the best time to start smoking. I wasn’t in any sort of shape for the habit. Not that’s there is a best time for that sort of thing.

The next cigarette, my friend had lifted from his mom. He had a whole pack of Marlboro Reds. “It was easy,” he said. “She buys a carton and never counts how many packs she has left.” His mom, like both of my parents, were heavy smokers, chuffing away at an easy one to two packs a day.

My life, up to that point, had been infused in a haze of cloudy, blue smoke. When I think back on my parents I see them as fire breathers, always smiling, their teeth a nicotine-yellow, and with plumes of smoke rolling from their mouths, noses, and ears.

Eventually, smoking became more than a habit. Everything I did was first measured against how much time it could potentially divorce me from my one true love, the Marlboro Man.

My fingers started to yellow.

I quit smoking when I was twenty-nine, just before I started dating who has since become my wife. It was Julia who got me running. I hated running then. Loathed it. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to lace up and go for a jog for two or three miles in the brisk, morning cold. Why would anyone want to do anything that hurt? But, alas, I had a soon-to-be-wife to impress, just enough self-loathing, and an obsessive-compulsive personality to appease.

This act of self-punishment continued for two years. I ran and every time I sent curses to every ugly-headed child I passed. At the end of a light jog, I was ready to kick my own teeth in. It was all part of the cleansing process. I was healing.

It was sometime in year three that I had a change of heart. I went for a six-mile run. There wasn’t a magic moment of trumpets and fireworks that it all became easier. At the end of the six-mile stretch my muscles still developed lactic acid. I was still a little winded and tired. But I didn’t mind. I simply said, “Eh, that’s not so bad.”

Maybe there’s a moral here. Maybe this is some sort of psychoanalytic parable. My father, the fire breather, was diagnosed with throat cancer last November. When he told me, I wasn’t surprised. He died just more than a month later after he started chemo and radiation. He was fifty-seven.

I’m scared as shit of dying young.