In 2015, I talked about how I quit smoking. Unfortunately, in 2017, I resumed smoking for approximately eight months. How exactly did that happen?

In his memoir of addiction, The Night of the Gun, David Carr talked about starting to drink after years of sobriety. Carr had been a crack addict and alcoholic but he had gone to rehab and meetings and had been sober for years. He had raised his twin daughters (born while both he and their mother were high on crack), gotten remarried, re-established his career, and settled in Montclair, NJ to a perfectly pleasant existence.

He was cleaning up after a party and for no real reason he took a glass of alcohol – and it was just that, the dregs of a bunch of different drinks that should have been poured down the drain – and drank it. Just like that. And that’s how he started drinking again.

I quit smoking on August 22nd, 2014. A recent medical procedure provided consistent motivation. I read The Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Allen Carr book (no relation). I counted the months and soon enough, I was a bona fide non-smoker. I mean, I would look at people lighting up and pity them and think, “What are you doing that for?”

My casual smoker friends would still smoke around me. They’d offer me one or ask me to come outside with them but I never accepted. I knew that if I had one, I’d be fine but then I’d want another in a few days, then I’d want another in a day, then I’d buy a pack so I wouldn’t have to bum so much and then I’d finish that pack so I wouldn’t waste money, and eventually end up right back where I started.

In retrospect, it’s sort of comforting that I know myself so well.

In March of last year, I was in a short play. The character I was playing smoked. I did that pretentious actor thing where I imagined his wardrobe and the kind of smokes he liked. I thought this is the kind of guy who smokes Marlboro Reds, soft pack, so he can shake one loose. I went to Kmart to buy a Dickies work shirt and I searched around town for a soft pack of Marlboros, which are very difficult to find, by the way. It’s all boxes these days.

Now I wasn’t smoking on stage. I couldn’t light the cigarettes inside the theater. But I had my costume and props on me for weeks, including the pack of smokes. But it wasn’t a big deal, I didn’t even like smoking anymore.

There was one wrinkle, though. Two days before the play, I got dumped over the phone by my girlfriend of nearly four years.

Blaming the break up is easy and a little cowardly. It shifts the blame for a choice that I made to something external. A breakup cannot put a cigarette in my mouth, light it, and drag on it. Those were all my choices. But it’s also plain dumb not to consider the timing of my first cigarette in two and a half years. It wasn’t sadness, though, or even anger that made me do it. It was more like I had a little voice inside that saying hey, man, you’re on your own now, if you had one smoke, just one, no one would even be disappointed in you.

Here’s how it went down. After the play, we went to a bar to celebrate. The whole night had gone really well and we all had the beers to prove it. Before heading home, I had a shot of Jameson with another guy from the play. I was feeling good as I walked to the Q. I got to Herald Square and before I entered the subway, in a manner not unlike Carr’s return to drinking, I put my costume bag down, I fished for my soft pack of reds, I shook one loose from the pack and I lit it. Just like that. Two and a half years down the drain.

It burned the back of my throat and the nicotine hit my bloodstream like I was in the first act of The Basketball Diaries. I had another one on my walk home from the subway.

I felt horrible the next morning. But once you break that seal, well, why not have another a few days later? And then bum a few the weekend after that? And, hey, didn’t I just get dumped? I deserve to be a little reckless, I’m in pain!

I went through the entire courtship with smoking again but on fast forward this time. I went through the initial stage where inhaling hurt the back of my throat but I remembered, don’t sweat that part, just smoke right through that and your throat will toughen up no problem. Then I got to the good part, where smoking is awesome. And make no mistake, smoking is awesome. The buzz is awesome. The contemplative breaks are awesome. Having a cigarette as you leave work on the way to the subway is awesome. Taking a long walk and having a cigarette is awesome.

This is not an accident. Tobacco is America’s oldest cash crop that has been perfected by scientists to deliver a perfect high. You know those annoying Truth ads? (And even though they’re right, they are annoying. They’re so sanctimonious, I want to buy a carton and hand out packs to eleven year olds out of spite.) They say that cigarettes are engineered to deliver nicotine. You are goddamned right they are and the engineering is effective as hell. Watch The Insider, these people know what they’re doing. It’s capitalism at its finest. It is also one of our few socially acceptable narcotics. You can abuse it on the way to the subway. You can take a break from your job to abuse it. And cigarettes are everywhere, available at every corner, bright shiny boxes of 20 breaks. And it’s wonderful.

Until it isn’t.

Soon I stopped wanting to smoke but I felt compelled to. That’s the scary part. The cigarettes in my pocket became a time bomb. When would I reach for one? I wouldn’t reach for one because I wanted to – the buzz was starting to feel like anxiety – I would reach for one simply because I could and, therefore, I should. It had become compulsive. So, you might ask, why not just not carry cigarettes on you? Oh, you naive sap! If I left the house without cigarettes, I would panic that I didn’t have cigarettes on me – the cigarettes that I didn’t want to smoke but I knew that I would feel compelled to smoke later – so, at some point, I would buy another pack. Then, like the beginning of some carcinogenic Sorcerer’s Apprentice, I’d have two packs including the pack waiting for me at home.

As I said last time, you have to want to quit. That’s the part that was eluding me. I couldn’t find that will to push through to the place where I didn’t want to do it anymore. I didn’t know if I could get it back and that was scary. What the hell was I doing?

As Carr said of his own return to drinking, he felt as though he had, “some venal, long-brewing urge to take a sledgehammer to things [he] adore[d].” Things were going so well for him, so, he needed to just fuck things up for some reason.

Now, I didn’t need to invite chaos into my life. Quite frankly, things weren’t going well enough for that. I’ve thought about this a lot and I think I’ve realized why I started again. It’s not hard to explain but it makes very little logical or, for that matter, grammatical sense.

I was smoking because Fuck It.

It’s not elegant but it’s honest. Fuck It is cocktail of anger, nihilism, and privilege. I got dumped. Fuck it. I don’t have a job. Fuck it. My creative pursuits are leading nowhere. Fuck it. I’m forty years old and I’m heading to the corner store at 11:30 to buy another pack of Camel Lights? Are you serious? Eh, Fuck It.

Months passed. I told myself, “Okay, it’s April, that’s just one month. If I quit after one month, that’s not bad, just a blip… Okay, it’s May, that’s only two months… Okay, it’s September, so, I smoked over the summer… Um, it’s Halloween, and that box of Nicorette is basically untouched…”

In November, two things happened. First, I went out for drinks with an old friend who was in town for the weekend. It was like old times except we started earlier and ended earlier. When I woke up the next morning, I thought, the last thing I need right now is a cigarette. And I felt the same way the next day and the next. The second thing that happened was that, at the suggestion of my therapist, I tried a meditation app. I can’t say for sure if this helped but the panic of not having smokes or whether I should smoke while just walking down the street started to fade. I think I just started becoming comfortable with plain moments and I didn’t need to distract myself with a cigarette.

Usually I don’t write about something until I’m done with it (though when is a story ever over?) but this time I can’t say that I’m out of the woods. I’ve slipped up about three times since November. I can only hope that those prove to be rare exceptions.

I remember drinking in a bar with my friend Prince one night in college. As usual we were in a bar called The Palms, drinking Old Mils, peeling the labels from the sweaty bottles, and smoking Camels (inside the bar, kids, it was the nineties). I wasn’t calling myself a smoker, so, I bummed constantly from him. A guy came up to us and asked Prince for a smoke. He dutifully handed one over. The guy said, “Damn, I haven’t had one in a month. I was doing so well, too.” Prince said something that I’ve repeated myself many times, “You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.”