Reporter’s Notebook -- June Casagrande

June Casagrande

Three years. Three !%@#% years.

I’d like to report that, since I quit smoking in May 1999, I feel

better, food tastes better, I look better, I have more energy and life is

just rosy. But that would be a big fat fib. Even the parts of it that are

true amount to a big fat fib, because while I do feel healthier and have

better skin, those things are hardly worth it.

Smoking is, perhaps, the single most underrated pleasure. Sure, it’s

stinky, filthy and fatal, as so many nonsmokers are quick to point out.

But surely, oh preachy anti-smokers, there must be some reason smokers

accept this dirty deadliness.

Me, I’d happily pay the $200 to $225 a month to have brown teeth,

black lungs, smelly clothes and weak-shaky short-windedeness -- if it

weren’t for that deadliness part.

I was never the kind of smoker who could curb consumption when social

circumstances rendered it unacceptable -- say, while visiting an elderly

friend in a hospital oxygen tent. Nope. I was the other kind of smoker.

The kind who once bought chewing tobacco to get me through a plane ride

(no kidding), the kind who bought nicotine gum not to kick the habit, but

to endure moments at a new job when I knew I couldn’t run outside to

smoke.

My mother claims my first word was “smoke,” spoken while as an infant

I pointed to the white wisp rising from a lit cigarette.

I smoked from an age younger than I care to admit, and I smoked a

quantity greater than I dare confess.

I said over and over that I would never quit, though I did try several

times while in my 20s. You know those stories you hear about people who

smoke two packs a day and still live until they’re 100? I was going to be

one of them. Just me, George Burns and a couple of surly old French women

proving conventional wisdom wrong by surviving on nothing but bitter

stubbornness.

Reality was for suckers.

But I guess I always knew this wasn’t an outcome I could produce out

of the sheer power of mind over matter. Odds were that I wouldn’t beat

the odds.

On May 19, 1999, I finally faced the music. I figured the only way to

quit was to quit all the way, right away -- right now, in a single

colossal stroke that makes leg waxing seem like a gentle, gradual

process.

The good news is, I haven’t had a cigarette since. The bad news is, I

haven’t had a cigarette since.

Some smokers find it really helpful to use things like nicotine

patches or gum. I find these people to be an alien species. For me, the

very thought of reaching for something like a piece of gum to soothe and

comfort perpetuated the false hope that anything short of a cigarette

could soothe or comfort. Instinctively I was certain that nothing was

going to scratch that itch. I opted for the pain plan. The openly

hostile, sit down and cry,

don’t-look-at-me-funny-or-I-swear-I’ll-hurt-you plan. I was a delight to

everyone around me.

About a year after I quit, a friend told me that her mother, a

lifelong smoker, had also quit, using patches.

“She feels great. She wishes she’d have done it sooner.”

I was skeptical. That was exactly the approach that, for me, would

spell a one-way trip to the tobacconist. Apparently, though, it doesn’t

work the same way for everyone. According to my friend, her mom has been

off the cigarettes and the patches for nearly two years. She feels great,

and she’s thrilled she quit.

I’ve never met this woman, but, man do I hate her.

For me, quitting smoking was like ripping a bandage off an emotional

wound the size of every negative feeling I ever stuffed down with a

cigarette. Every bit of anger, fear, pain, sadness -- everything I had

soothed with decades of smoking -- seemed to be waiting for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of pain. But my method of quitting

smoking, in three words, can best be described as: Feel the pain. And,

whenever possible, take it out on someone nearby.

Now, on the eve of my three-year anniversary of being a nonsmoker,

this is where the happy ending should come in. Where I report that I run

marathons and man carnival kissing booths and swim 10 laps underwater on

a single breath. That I’m repulsed by the smell of smoke and born again

to share my strength with others.

Fat chance.

Today, when someone who just had a cigarette walks past me in the

office, I want to follow him or her just so I can walk in the wake,

smelling and breathing the residual fumes. Overall, it’s much easier than

it was at first, and it continues to get easier all the time. But that

doesn’t mean it’s not a drag.

The stinker about quitting smoking is that the urges constantly change

shape and form, are constantly finding new associations to attach

themselves to, are constantly finding devious, insidious ways to deliver

a debilitating sucker punch. Sometimes it’s as simple as the fact that a

cigarette sounds good. But other times, I just really want something

without even realizing what I want.

Then there are the times, which keep getting fewer and farther

between, when I feel like I’m missing an arm, a leg or a best friend.

Just between me and the 70,000 of you: There are some joys of being

off the butts. But frankly, the gripe-and-moan approach works for me, so

I’m staying with that plan. Just don’t let the “I hate this” attitude

fool you: I won’t be picking up a cigarette any time soon. No !@#&% way

will I ever go through that again.

* June Casagrande covers Newport Beach. She may be reached at (949)

574-4232 or by e-mail at o7 [email protected] .