There’s nothing worse than a dry drunk, they say, except for a reformed smoker. I quit smoking back in May, toward the end of the month. I’d just gotten back from a trip to New Jersey to see my folks. My old man, who’s in a nursing home suffering from progressive dementia, also has emphysema, the result of burning four packs a day for about 40 years. (He probably actually smoked the equivalent of two packs. It wouldn’t have been physically possible to smoke as many as he lit up.) He hasn’t smoked a cigarette in more than 20 years, and he still sounds like a heavy smoker; his lungs are that scarred.
I got home from the trip and went back to work only to discover that a cat I worked with who was undergoing treatment for emphysema had passed away while I was gone. We weren’t really close, but he was a nice fella. My boss told me, “He was just like you before he got sick.”
One day I was at home writing when the health promotion dude from Blue Cross Blue Shield called. One of the services he offered was help to quit smoking, so I spent a half hour listening to his spiel and talking to him about it. A week or so later, a little package of quit-smoking goodies arrived in the mail. After looking over its contents, I put it aside and wound up giving it to my middle daughter. On a recent weekend when I saw all three of my twentysomething kids, I realized that all of them light up about every five minutes. I could hear their breath sounds. It disturbed me. One of the reasons I told the dude I wanted to quit was “to be a better role model for my children.”
It didn’t take long for me to figure out that the easiest way for me to quit smoking was not to think about quitting smoking. Nicotine gum and patches are good for some people, but they always remind me of the line from an old Woody Allen movie: “I used to be a heroin addict, now I’m a methadone addict.” The only time it gets tough is when I’m in a bar. So far I’ve been successful (two cigs in six weeks), and the nicotine cravings have really subsided, although when I’ve had more than a couple of drinks, sometimes the habit pattern takes over. In a smoky bar, that can even seem like a form of self-defense. They say that only 20 percent of the U.S. population smokes now, but among folks I know socially, it feels a whole lot more like 50 or 60 percent.
Back when the Black Dog Tavern was still open, I used to joke that in the future, no one would have to smoke cigarettes: Tad Gaither would just sell customers clothing impregnated with nicotine from his bar. Mornings after my friend Andre runs sound at Lola’s Saloon-Stockyards (where there’s no air circulating around the booth), he sounds like he smoked a carton overnight. At the Chat Room Pub, even an hour on the patio can be an eye-watering experience that leaves you with morning-after chest pains.
Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not advocating a smoking ban in Fort Worth. Visits to New York City since smoking was banned in bars and restaurants there have been kind of surreal. There’s something just not right about not being able to light up in a bar in Manhattan. But as a Cowtown native who spent a few years in Brooklyn points out, the smoking ban has created a new level of socializing among Gothamites. “You’ll go someplace with one group of friends,” he said, “and make a whole other group of friends while you’re out on the sidewalk having a smoke.” When I met the late Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton in person for the first time, we bonded over a smoke outside Emo’s in Austin, where he was performing. “Second-class citizens!” he said.
In the Great Smoking Debate, when it comes to bars, I find both sides to be disingenuous. Even when I was smoking, I found smokers’ attempts to make their tobacco use in public places a “rights issue” to be ludicrous. After all, what gives smokers the “right” to impose their carcinogens on the general populace? Still, the anti-smoking Nazis‘ attempts to impose their values on all of us seem misplaced in this context. After all, does anybody really go to a bar for their health?
Myself, I’ll keep going to bars because that’s where the music I want to hear is and that’s where my 20-percenter friends are. And I’ll do my darnedest to keep from backsliding and bumming one while I’m there. It sure is interesting to be on this side of that particular Great Divide, but I’m glad to be here. — Ken Shimamoto
Contact Last Call at lastcall@fwweekly.com.
